DVD

Casts don’t come classier than that of

The Party (15A) ★★★. There’s Emily Mortimer and Cillian Murphy, inset, as the youth contingent, Patricia Clarkson for Hollywood glitz, and Bruno Ganz spicing things up European-style.

To top it all there’s silver screen royalty in the shape of Timothy Spall and Kristin Scott Thomas. They play highflying couple Janet and Bill. He’s a classics don and she’s just made it to the shadow Cabinet. What, you think as the doorbell dongs and their guests assemble, could possibly go wrong? Only everything – from coke-snorting to cuckolding, with a little gunplay thrown in for good measure.

If that sounds unreal, you’ve got the movie’s measure. The director, Sally Potter, is an art-house old-stager but she seems out of her depth in this black comedy-of-manners. When you’ve got Tim and Kristin going gently ballistic, it’s best just to plonk your camera down and watch what happens, but Potter’s camera wobbles like a drunk in search of the bathroom. Though The

Party is only 71 minutes long, you might find yourself wishing you’d left early.

In The Glass Castle (12A) ★★★ Woody Harrelson looks like Worzel Gummidge with a migraine but plays Rex Walls, a talented boffin who’s also a violent drunk. Adapted from Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir of growing up in a chaotic family, writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s movie slaloms uneasily between high-romantic guff and sentimental soap-operatics. While Harrelson never finds a way of modulating Rex’s mood swings, Naomi Watts (as Rex’s arty wife) and Brie Larson (as Jeannette) come off better. Overall, though, the John Irving thematics play uneasily against the Raging Bull theatrics.