A New York Winter’s Tale
Joel Schumacher, all is forgiven
Release Date: OUT NOW! 2014 | 12 | 118 minutes | £ 24.99 ( Blu- ray)/£ 19.99 ( DVD) Distributor: Warner Home Video Director: Akiva Goldsman Cast: Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connolly
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman has spent 17 years atoning for Batman & Robin, but now with this first directing gig, he’s managed to make a film that’s even more cataclysmically bad.
Boiled down from Mark Helprin’s lauded literary doorstopper, it’s a hysterically straight- faced romantic fantasy that’s epic in its scope, but also preposterous, incoherent, cloyingly sentimental and sledgehammer subtle.
Colin Farrell is a crook from turn of the century NYC who meets the love of his life, Jessica Brown Findlay’s TB- stricken hottie, while avoiding the devil’s henchman, Pearly Soames ( Russell Crowe). After she dies he’s transported to modern day New York – some reasons to do with destiny and love and stuff – where he meets his beloved’s little sister and has to work out why he’s there.
Trust us, all this makes even less sense on screen. Throw into this already fruity mix a cameo- ing Will Smith as a Jimi Hendrix- t- shirt- clad Lucifer, a flying white horse and a child at death’s door and you’ve got a film that’s a queasy mash- up of Richard Curtis, Audrey Niffenegger and Dennis Wheatley.
Batman & Robin? It’s like The Dark Knight next to this.
Extras: The DVD has a six- minute Making Of. The Blu- ray ( rated) adds a second featurette ( nine minutes) and deleted/ extended scenes ( 12 minutes). Steve O’Brien
In the late ’ 80s, Martin Scorsese was briefly attached to an adaptation of Helprin’s book. Bet it’d have been better than this.