DVD OF THE WEEK
Detour (15) the title of one of the greatest Forties noir films. Now it’s the title of a pretty good modern noir. Tye Sheridan plays Harper, a college kid who’s turned to the booze. What’s the matter? asks fellow drinker Johnny (Emory Cohen). Harper tells him his mum’s had an accident and is in a coma – and that he thinks his stepdad arranged things that way. So why don’t I blow him away? suggests Johnny. Actually, that’s a polite way of summarising Detour’s set-up. Slick and sleek though Christopher Smith’s movie is, it’s also gratuitously violent and foul-mouthed. But it’s worth sticking with because you’ll never guess where it’s headed. That’s partly down to Smith’s use of that old chestnut: the split-screen. At several points in the story we see events from multiple angles in different areas of the screen – the one image casting doubt on the verity of the others. Cohen is perversely intense as the psycho control freak. Sheridan is blankly ambiguous. And there’s a nicely spunky turn from Benidorm star Bel Powley as the girl who turns out to be more than just token. Treat of the week is Diane Kurys’s coming-of-age saga Peppermint Soda (12)HHHHH. Paris, 1963, and teenage sisters Anne (Eléonore Klarwein) and Frédérique (Odile Michel) return to school after summering with their estranged father in Normandy. And that’s it. Then we spend a year at school with the girls and watch them grow up. And it’s utterly fascinating. At times it’s as if Kurys has just set her camera down and let her players get on with it. Not that the movie was really made like that. Peppermint Soda is as tight and pressurised as a grenade, but it has that luscious laxness that can result when a director has faith in her actors. Woody Allen once said that if he had his life over again he’d do everything the same – except ‘watch The Magus (12) A Michael Caine clunker (adapted from John Fowles’s novel), it’s now out after 50 years on luminous Blu-ray. But no matter how beautiful a pre-tourist Majorca looks, Woody was definitely on the money.