A noir like no other
CRITIC’S CHOICE Inherent Vice 15 cert, 149 mins þþþþþ Around half an hour into Inherent Vice, you realise that you are going to have to see the film again. Larry “Doc” Sportello, a dishevelled Los Angeles private eye played by Joaquin Phoenix, has been padding round southern California trying to solve three cases at once, but it feels like 17 at least. Paul Thomas Anderson’s seventh film, based on a 2007 Thomas Pynchon novel, is a bamboozling comic noir that lopes around 1970s Los Angeles in a state of heightened, and often hilarious, paranoia. Sportello’s latest raft of cases leads him to a conspiracy that seems to engulf all of the US. As in Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, those classic Seventies noirs, the plot’s loose ends are left to dangle in the breeze. Don’t expect answers, but considering it’s one of the finest American films you’re likely to see this year, you should be able to live without them. Robbie Collin ALSO IN CINEMAS Trash 15 cert, 114 mins þþ Raphael (Rickson Tevez) and Gardo (Eduardo Luis) are scavengers on the slag-heap of society – rubbish-combers, whose lives, along with that of their scrawny friend Rato (Gabriel Weinstein), are upended when they find a wallet containing clues to a treasure hunt. Vast wealth is at the end of this rainbow, but so are dangerous secrets about a dodgy politico. The whole thing feels impossibly compromised, even for a film whose basic pitch is Slumdog Millionaire goes to Rio, and there’s a huge “yeah, right” factor to the film which undoes its philanthropic impulses. Having your heart in the right place isn’t much use, if you’ve forgotten your head somewhere up Sugarloaf Mountain. Tim Robey Big Hero 6 PG cert, 108 mins þþþþ The first film from Disney Animation Studios since Frozen is, as they say, something completely different: an East-meets-West pop culture pick-and-mix adventure that somehow also squeezes in buckets of heart and soul. Hiro Hamada, a young orphan living in the fusion city of San Fransokyo, befriends Baymax, an inflatable robot invented by his brother. See the film for Baymax alone, who’s Disney’s most brilliantly designed character since Aladdin’s genie. RC Kingsman: The Secret Service 15 cert, 129 mins þ In this obnoxious espionage caper, director Matthew Vaughn does for James Bond what Kick-Ass more or less did for Spider-Man. A kind verdict would call his upending of the secret-agent genre uproariously playful. But it’s nasty play, like a brutish sibling forcing rotten fruit down your throat. Colin Firth is a super-spook – part Bond, part George Falconer from A Single Man, part Patrick Macnee from The Avengers – but unfortunately, the role’s such a bespoke no-brainer there’s no friction in watching this particular star play it. The film expends its limited charm in a nanosecond and becomes a needlessly sadistic, tonally deranged spy-movie pastiche with a dire turn from Samuel L Jackson as the lisping villain. TR and it’s taken me a while to work out that, actually, as with fish, the fresher you can get it, the better. All game packs plenty of flavour, and as long as it is cooked carefully, it shouldn’t end up too tough. So, if you come across any pheasants for sale in the next couple of days, my advice would be to grab them while you can. However, if I had to pick a favourite type of game I’d have to plump for venison, which is still in season. Our valley is home to at least four species of wild deer and they are farmed locally as well, mainly in the parkland of stately homes. One local chatelain is so obsessive about his herd he will eat no other kind of meat. It is delicious and healthy and about as ethical as meat gets. Parkland deer live like wild animals but with private health Safe for another year: the pheasant insurance, and rather than being shipped off to abattoirs for dispatch, businessmen pay to shoot them. This brings the cost down, too. Park venison is incredibly good value for what you get, but my absolute favourite variety is totally wild. Muntjac are an invasive species about the size of a sheep. They thump around in the undergrowth here, driving environmentalists mad because they have a particular liking for grazing on endangered species of flora in set-aside land. A neighbour brought one over shortly after we arrived here, skinned it in front of me and told me not to eat it all at once. I’ve been raving about it ever since. I picked up a whole one for £20 this weekend. Which, as I remarked to the gamekeeper as he told me the price on the phone, was not too dear. “No, I’m afraid it’s just the one,” he explained. I chopped it into chunks and threw it on the barbecue. I’d definitely take more if he had them. Delicious!