MIKE WARD’S SMALL SCREEN
ADRIFT (12)
(Download now, DVD and Blu-ray from Monday) THIS fact-based film makes one thing abundantly clear: the sea can be blooming scary.
And heaven help any poor souls sailing on it, should it be in one of its angrier moods.
Shailene Woodley is Tami Oldham, an adventure-seeking soul who in the autumn of 1983 embarks on a perilous ocean journey with fellow sailor and free-spirit Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin).
This loved-up pair get hired to sail a yacht from Tahiti to California, a 4,000-mile trip which turns out to coincide with the most stupendously terrifying storm the Pacific Ocean has witnessed in, like, forever (excuse the technical jargon), pretty much trashing the vessel and leaving them bobbing about in the middle of nowhere. Can Tami single-handedly navigate what’s left of this yacht to safety?
She’s their only hope, because Richard is in a bad way. “My ribs are broken, my legs are shattered,” he tells her. “I’m dead weight…”
TAG (15)
(Download now, DVD from Monday)
A BUNCH of old school pals continue to connect in middle age by annually resurrecting their old playground game of tag.
A decent cast – among them Ed Helms, Jon Hamm and Jeremy Renner – feels rather wasted in a story which, despite the warmth of the real-life tale it’s loosely based on, rapidly becomes charmless.
Jerry is the one who’s successfully stayed tag-free all these years, but the others feel sure his wedding will see him take his eye off the ball.
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS 2: THE NEXT STEP (U)
(Download, DVD and Blu-ray from Monday) NOW, this is more like it: a beautifully filmed and heartwarming mini-masterpiece from Oscar-winning nature documentary maker Luc Jacquet.
Returning to the Antarctic (the setting for 2005’s precursor to this), he deploys the very latest filming technology to craft a touching tale of an emperor penguin and his newborn son. NANCY (12) THIS rather unsettling psychological thriller has Andrea Riseborough as a woman convinced she was abducted as a child, and who now believes she’s found her real parents.