DVD
Mindhorn (15) ★★★★ sounds like the title of a psycho-porn flick but turns out to be one of the most enjoyable comedies in years. Julian (Mighty Boosh) Barratt plays Richard Thorncroft, a balding, belly-thickening actor who’s had little work since the demise of Eighties TV cop show Mindhorn. As the movie opens, he’s even lost his gig advertising flight compression socks to, as he puts it, ‘John Nettles??? !!!! ???’. But then his agent (Harriet Walter) takes a call from the police. A deranged killer is haunting the Isle of Man – and says he’s willing to come in if he can meet Detective Mindhorn. Debut director Sean Foley’s film has an easy charm, and cameos from Kenneth Branagh (as a hard-nosed luvvie), Simon Callow (as an actor who knows how to keep his employers sweet) and Steve Coogan (as a co-star whose career took off post-Mindhorn) keep the movie light on its feet. Not so Mindhorn himself. With his herniainducing kung-fu kicks and his redundant pirouettes over car boots, Barratt finds a hundred different ways of being inelegant and ungainly. It’s a sparkling turn in a
rare jewel of a comedy. The Hunter’s Prayer (15) ★ is that rather more commonplace phenomenon, the brain-dead thriller. Sam Worthington plays a hired gun who, for no reason other than getting the plot in motion, decides not to blow away his latest target (teenager Ella, Odeya Rush) but to save her instead. As an ITV threeparter, Jonathan Mostow’s movie might have passed muster. Unluckily it’s being released the same week as a glitzy Blu-ray of assassination masterclass The Day Of The
Jackal (15) ★★★★, and looks woefully thin by comparison. It’s a good week for oldies. Top treat is Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (12) ★★★★. Adapted from John le Carré’s debut novel, it stars James Mason as an MI5 man tasked with hushing up the suicide of a top British Foreign Office bod. Soon enough, political intrigue is meshing with private torment. Despite Mason’s occasional flights into ham, Lumet does a wonderful job of honouring the complexity of le Carré’s story. With delicious turns from Roy Kinnear, Harry Andrews, Simone Signoret and – best of all – a very young Lynn Redgrave, this is a movie to savour. Finally, Tout Va Bien (18) ★★★ – the politics of Jean-Luc Godard’s Brechtian strike drama are infantile, and Jane Fonda and Yves Montand’s acquiescence in them more childish still. But just because he gets you thinking, Godard must always be cherished.