DVD

The Founder (12A) really ought to have been called ‘The Bounder’. John Lee Hancock’s film tells the story of the success of the McDonald’s empire but that success wasn’t, in fact, down to the guys who perfected the craft of burger-building. Mac and Dick McDonald (John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman) were doing just fine from their one-room operation in San Bernardino, California. But from the moment Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton, pictured) tells them they ought to be franchising the operation, they’re just so much beef waiting to be ground. Keaton is in his element here. As the aptly named Kroc, he chomps and chews his way through anything that gets in his way. Mac and Dick aren’t his only victims. He ditches his wife (Laura Dern) when a younger model (Linda Cardellini) hoves into view – never mind that she’s married to one of the pillars of his empire. Watching The Founder, with Carter Burwell’s uplifting, majorkey score and Ray’s frequent comments about McDonald’s being ‘family’ and ‘the new American church’, you could be forgiven for thinking greed is good all over again. No such problems with Denial (12A) Another true story, it tells of the libel case brought by historian David Irving (Timothy Spall) against US academic Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) – and this time there’s no doubt about whose side you’re on. That’s because Mick Jackson’s film, with its ham-fisted script by David Hare, never rises above the level of a cartoon. We all know that Irving misrepresented, distorted or ignored evidence about the Holocaust. So why does Spall make Irving into an arrogant, mocking, ever-so-slightly camp villain straight out of a Bond picture? Weisz, meanwhile, never gets to grips with Lipstadt’s New York accent and it’s left to Tom Wilkinson to turn in the only vaguely coherent performance as the libel lawyer Richard Rampton. Forty-odd years ago Gold (15A)

was the title of one of the late Roger Moore’s worst movies. Now it’s the title of one of Matthew McConaughey’s worst. He plays Kenny Wells, a real-life US mining executive who decides, pretty much on a whim, to take off to the Indonesian jungle in search of precious metal. What he finds, alas, is a hole where the script should be and a film that doesn’t know when to stop digging. Avoid.