Kurt Russell and the thrill of the very wild west
Bone Tomahawk (18) ★★★★★ sounds like a Seventies concept band – and thanks to the long grey hair and the even longer grey beard Kurt Russell sports in the movie, it looks like one, too.
Russell plays the sheriff of a one-horse town in the Wild West. Very wild. When some of the locals are kidnapped, the talk isn’t of ‘Red Injuns’ but of cave-dwelling cannibals. Yuk.
Things get yuckier when the sheriff and his posse (the wonderful Matthew Fox, Patrick Wilson and Richard Jenkins) are caught, caged and cleavered. These scenes are very violent but thankfully, the rest of writer/director S Craig Zahler’s debut is a treat.
With westerns so few and far between these days, it’s easy to forget what a thrill it can be to watch horses race through a wilderness. But the best reason to catch
Bone Tomahawk is its star. Paolo Sorrentino’s last movie, The Great Beauty, played like an homage to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. His new one, Youth (15) ★★★, feels like a rerun of Fellini’s 8½ – but without the comic energy.
Michael Caine is on fine form as a retired classical composer, but Harvey Keitel’s flailing film-maker is flat, and Paul Dano, as a troubled movie star, not even two-dimensional.
If you fancy an Italian arthouse treat, try Antonioni’s enigmatic thriller L’Avventura (15) ★★★★★ on Blu-ray, and with Monica Vitti at her loveliest.
It’s a bad week for comedy. Is the low point Ride Along 2 (12) ★, in which Ice Cube, as a veteran Atlanta cop, is given a new partner in the shape of the terminally unfunny Kevin Hart?
Is it Robert De Niro’s sex-crazed turn as Dirty Grandpa (15) ★, a movie so coarse you could rasp your feet on it? No, it’s Dad’s Army (PG) ★, in which Michael Gambon, Bill Nighy and Toby Jones essay bad impersonations of, respectively, Godfrey, Wilson and Mainwaring. Forget ‘You have been watching’. You have been warned.