DVD OF THE WEEK
A pensioners’ punch-up that pits a rusty Rocky against a rotund Raging Bull, Grudge
Match is a laugh-free comedy that marks yet another low in the decline of the once great Robert De Niro. But a movie star’s career needn’t end in tears. Until five years ago, nobody would have put money on romcom regular Matthew McConaughey becoming one of the defining actors of his generation. Yet here he is in Dallas Buyers
Club, giving an Oscar-winning turn as Ron Woodroof, a real-life rodeo rider who, in 1985, was informed he was HIV-positive and had maybe a month to live. ‘Just can’t be, Doc,’ says Ron in his Western drawl, meaning that, because he’s a toughtalking, hard-drinking, skirtchasing type of guy, the medics must be wrong. A couple of blackouts and blisters later, though, the truth drip-feeds in. Denied access to his local hospital’s drugs trial, Ron buys his own illicit supply. Soon he’s selling his own primitive yet life-sustaining cocktail to anyone who joins the movie’s titular club. Along the way, he befriends Rayon (Jared Leto on similarly Oscar-winning form), an alarmingly attractive gender-bender with an even fouler – and funnier – mouth than Ron. Indeed, they do their Bob and Bing-style double-act so well that it isn’t until the movie is over that you start wondering whether it skirts every medical ethics question it raises.
Out Of The Furnace should be called Out Of The Corner Of The Mouth. It’s from that narrow opening Woody Harrelson, Christian Bale and Casey Affleck mumble dialogue in this forbidding melodrama about the Iraq War fall-out. It borrows too much from The Deerhunter, but there’s no denying the strength of cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s dour imagery, nor the commitment of Christian Bale’s desperation.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the latest attempt to film Tom Clancy. Alas, for all the hilarious talk of ‘convection chimneys’ and ‘liquidity events in postSoviet markets’, director Ken Branagh knows Jack about thriller-making.