Your week in film (Monday, January 25 - Sunday, January 31)

MONDAY: "A shootout, right, is a fucking shootout... like a western!" Legend - starring Tom Hardy as both Kray Twins (pictured above) - is out today on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD. In truth, the film is underwhelming but Hardy's extraordinary double performance makes it well worth checking out. The best of the rest include Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon starring in financial crisis drama 99 Homes (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD - trailer below); martial arts masterpiece A Touch Of Zen (Dual Format); 1970s Boston crime thriller The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (Dual Format); and pacifist war drama Tangerines (DVD and Blu-ray). TV-wise, Aria (Sky Arts, 01:40) is an obscure British movie from the 1980s in which a clutch of great directors - including Julien Temple, Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman, Robert Altman and Ken Russell - got to visually reinterpret segments from 10 famous operas. The results are every bit as strange and arresting as you'd hope.

TUESDAY: Ahead of Youth's debut in cinemas on Friday, check out Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's previous film The Great Beauty (Film 4, 23:25). It's a visually stunning and poetic meditation on ageing and a life well lived, but also an unabashed love letter to Rome. Trailer below

WEDNESDAY: Netflix boasts an unusually impressive trio of new releases from today: Oliver Stone's controversial but underrated Natural Born Killers (script by Quentin Tarantino); Sergio Leone's sprawling but brilliant Once Upon A Time In America; and whip-smart comedy Play It Again, Sam (trailer below), in which Woody Allen gets lessons in life and love from Humphrey Bogart (sort of). Claudia Winkleman presents Film 2016 (BBC1, 23:45), aided and abetted by resident critic Danny Leigh. Not only is the show on even later this week, but the objectionable Camilla Long is guest reviewer. Maybe I'll just fast-forward through her bits.

THURSDAY: In The Film Programme (BBC Radio Four, 16:00), Francine Stock talks to veteran actress/muse Anna Karina about her life and work with Jean-Luc Godard. If that puts you in the mood to check out some of the legendary French director's work, why not sign up with MUBI? The subscription-only service is currently showing three of the great man's films: Band Of Outsiders, Joy Of Learning and Weekend. On the subject of all things Gallic, Curzon Home Cinema is screening a season of new French films and I can definitely recommend French Blood, the bruising tale of a Parisian neo-Nazi. Trailer below 

FRIDAY: Spotlight (trailer below) arrives in cinemas today and Mark Ruffalo talks about the Oscar frontrunner on Kermode & Mayo's Film Review (BBC Radio Five, 14:00). If you're staying in, check out Keanu Reeves in face-punching, bone-breaking action flick John Wick (Sky Movies Premiere, 16:15 and 20:00), or stay up late for Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in infamous '80s thriller Fatal Attraction (Channel 4, 00:55). Unlike its stars, I suspect it hasn't aged well.

SATURDAY: It's the usual Saturday night smorgasbord of middling delights, this week featuring middling thriller Now You See Me (Channel 4, 21:00), middling historical serial killer yarn Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (BBC2, 22:20), and middling horror The Hole (Channel 4, 23:15). The Lost World: Jurassic Park (ITV, 22:30) features a T-Rex stomping around night-time San Diego and is therefore in no way middling. That said, your best bet today might just be Ralph Thomas' 1959 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (More4, 11:40). Kenneth Moore is in-over-his-head hero Richard Hannay. Trailer below

SUNDAY: I could write a book about how much I love Pam Grier as the titular lead in Quentin Tarantino's wonderful Jackie Brown (ITV4, 23:00), but I'm just going to recommend you watch it instead. Based on Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, QT altered quite a bit of the original novel for his screenplay, including Jackie's name and race (it was Jackie Burke and she was white). And whilst the director can't help but nod to the Blaxploitation flicks in which Grier made her name, he keeps his usual excesses in check to deliver a gripping crime drama that is really about ageing, last chances and missed opportunities. Not only is it his best film but his most mature, too. Trailer below

UK box office top 10
1. The Revenant
2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
3. Creed R
4. Daddy's Home
5. The Hateful Eight R
6. The Danish Girl
7. Room
8. Snoopy And Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie
9. Joy R
10. The Good Dinosaur

R = Recommended

The Hateful Eight is scuppered by the underwhelming mystery that lies at its heart

PLEASE NOTE: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Hateful Eight
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Kurt Russell, Samuel L Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Running time: 167 mins (digital)/187 mins (70mm)

If you smush the two volumes of Kill Bill together it's just about possible to buy The Hateful Eight as director Tarantino's eighth movie (as the pre-publicity grandly declared). What is somewhat harder to accept, however, is that it is anything like one of his best.

Now, don't get me wrong; there's an awful lot to admire here. The soundtrack (Ennio Morricone's first western score for 34 years) and cinematography (courtesy of Kill Bill/Django Unchained's Robert Richardson) ooze class, while the elongated running time is never an obstacle; these characters are unpleasant to a man/woman but you never tire of them. There are terrific performances all round, too, especially from Jackson and Leigh. The former's exclusion from the Oscars' Best Actor category is one of the most egregious nomination blunders of the lot this year, especially when the likes of Eddie Redmayne and Matt Damon have made it onto a fairly unimpressive short list. 

Set a few years after the end of the American Civil War, in wintry Wyoming, the plot sees bounty-hunter John Ruth (Russell) escorting convicted killer Daisy Domergue (Leigh) to the town of Red Rock where he intends to see her hanged. To get out of the increasingly appalling weather, Ruth's stagecoach heads for Minnie's Haberdashery - an all-purpose convenience store-cum-staging post - and along the way picks up another bounty-hunter, Major Marquis Warren (Jackson channeling Lee Van Cleef), and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a former confederate soldier who claims to be Red Rock's new sheriff. 

Arriving at Minnie's they encounter not the titular owner and her husband as expected but four strangers - hangman Oswaldo Mobray (Roth), taciturn cowpoke Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), the store's Mexican caretaker Bob (Demian Bichir) and former confederate general Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern). With a blizzard raging full tilt outside, the eight hunker down for an evening of racial tension, bitter recrimination and, because Ruth believes one of the men intends to spring Domergue from his custody, escalating paranoia. Suffice to say, it isn't long before matters come to a head and the blood starts spilling. As you'd expect there's rather a lot of blood. And brains. And viscera. 

Unfortunately, the film's biggest shortcoming is the mystery it sets itself up to solve – what is Domergue's plan of escape and which of the ne'er-do-wells gathered in the snowbound haberdashery is in on it with her? If you spend the best part of two hours slowly and meticulously building to that big moment, when it arrives it had better be a doozy, and the one Tarantino spins here really isn't. Instead, it feels like a cheat - an entertaining cheat but a cheat all the same. Unlike the Agatha Christie/Ellery Queen-style 'locked-room' mysteries with which this has been compared, the pay-off lacks ingenuity and invention. Yes, the director employs a bit of misdirection but nothing you wouldn't find in any number of mediocre detective pot-boilers published in this or any other year. You don't jump out of your seat when Tarantino finally reveals his hand, you just sort of shrug and think, 'Oh, okay...'

If that were the only problem with the script it would probably be forgivable, but it isn't. There's also a horribly clunky moment after Tarantino goes to great pains to set up a relationship between Mannix and Smithers. The would-be sheriff is in awe of the much older man, who he considers a hero of the confederacy, and is clearly protective of him. Only, a few minutes later, Warren taunts Smithers with a lewd story about his son's death before killing him. Mannix, a man we'd just been led to believe held Smithers in enormous regard, says or does precisely nothing about this terminal turn of events and Tarantino hastily cuts away to something else. You'd probably throw a shoe at the TV if you saw such sloppiness on a soap opera, let alone in a film by a man lauded with garlands for his abilities as a screenwriter. 

In those moments when Tarantino gets it right, though, his undeniable talent is still clear and unambiguous. The lovably despicable Daisy Domergue is one of the man's finest creations - a wretched ball of racism, profanity and insolence brought to spitting, cussing life by Leigh. I'd much rather watch a movie about her and her gang set before The Hateful Eight than Kill Bill 3 or the horror movie Tarantino has vaguely mentioned doing next. 

For all the beauty of its cinematography (those early scenes of Ruth's stagecoach crawling through the Wyoming snow must be breathtaking in 70mm), The Hateful Eight is an ugly movie featuring ugly people doing ugly things to each other. Of course, that's par for the course with Tarantino, only this time the fallout from the recent Civil War takes that poison to a whole new level and the director revels in it. It's been a very long time since I saw a film in which paranoia, mistrust and mutual loathing were so palpable they were practically characters in their own right. 

And, once the big mystery is out the way, the director rallies to give us a superb final 20 minutes as two former Civil War enemies unite to thwart a common foe and together face certain doom. If it wasn't for the brutal and shocking execution they mete out, or the fact they're slowly bleeding to death and in agony, it might even be quite uplifting.

Rating: WW½
The Hateful Eight is in cinemas now

Ratings
WWWW - Wonderful
WWW - Worthy
WW - Watchable
W - Woeful