DVD
Uncivil war and an old favourite
I’d be lying if I said Free State Of Jones (15) gives you the lowdown on the American Civil War, but if you want a primer on the row between the Union and the Confederacy, you could do worse than take a look at Gary Ross’s picture.
It starts out in the heart of the action, with limbs shattering and heads turning into smoothies at the crack of a rifle.
Striding through the horror is soldier Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a wounded man in his arms, en route to the medical tent. Once there, he’s told, sorry, but we’re only treating officers.
And so, having decided that the war isn’t being fought by the North against the South but by the poor in aid of the rich, Newton abandons the Confederate cause and sets up what I can only call his band of mixedrace merry men.
In the swamps of Mississippi they take up arms against the local Sheriff of Nottingham, aka Second Lieutenant Will Sumrall (Sean Bridgers).
It sounds fun, and it is. But your pleasure is nicely undermined, too, by the way Ross salts his story with flash-forwards to a Sixties race trial involving a later-generation Knight. Impressive stuff, with a captivating turn from McConaughey. Army
Of One (15) tells the true story of how jobbing builder Gary Faulkner (Nicolas Cage) obeyed an order from God to kill Osama Bin Laden. It’s a great set-up, but if I tell you that Russell Brand plays The Good Lord you’ll have some idea of the movie’s inanity.
Yet more war in the BFI’s Blu-ray reissue of
The Crying Game (18) No matter how many times you’ve seen Neil Jordan’s IRA thriller, it remains dreamily weird. (How much weirder the film might have been is shown in the extras, which include VHS footage of the original ending.)