ALSO SHOWING
Widows (15)
A tense character-driven heist thriller very much in the mould of Heat, the latest film from 12 Years a Slave director Steve Mcqueen smartly upends the macho conventions of the genre by casting Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki as the wives of a crew of career criminals (led by Liam Neeson) who decide to pull off a daring robbery after their husbands’ deaths on a job gone spectacularly wrong leaves them on the hook for their respective debts. Mcqueen sets the tone with a blistering opening sequence and plays around with genre tropes to give his starry ensemble – which includes Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall and Daniel Kaluuya – plenty of meaty character work to play with. But in adapting Lynda La Plante’s 1980s miniseries of the same name, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn’s tightly plotted script and Davis’s multi-layered performance allows Mcqueen to weave in trenchant political commentary about race, gender and power without losing control of the labyrinthine story.
Outlaw King (18)
Getting a limited release in cinemas to coincide with its launch on Netflix, David Mackenzie’s muddy, bloody action film about Robert the Bruce should benefit from being shown on a big screen where the full scale of Scotland’s biggest home-grown blockbuster can be appreciated. Not that it necessarily embraces all the epic movie tropes beloved of these types of emotive historical action movies. It may have glorious camera work, revenge-filled plot twists, lots of speechifying and an English villain with a hipster bowl cut, but Mackenzie seems very conscious of the way these kinds of stories can be turned into simplistic myths. Damping down the potential jingoism of Robert’s ascension to the throne and his journey towards reclaiming Scotland from the occupying forces of Edward I, he makes his violent political awakening the driving force of the film, with Chris Pine playing him with the same kind of gruff, almost passive machismo that worked so well for him in Mackenzie’s previous film,
Hell or High Water.
Overlord (18)
A group of American GIS parachuted into German-occupied France on the eve of the D-day landings stumble across a village in which Nazi doctors have been experimenting on locals to create an immortal army capable of defending Hitler’s proposed 1,000year Reich. Produced by JJ Abrams, written by Billy Ray and directed by up-and-coming Australian filmmaker Julius Avery, this illconceived blockbuster is a futile exercise: a zombie-nazi splatter-flick that’s had more millions thrown at it than its schlocky premise either requires or benefits from.
Wildlife (15)
Actor Paul Dano – working with writing partner Zoe Kazan – makes a solid directorial debut with this adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1960s-set novel. Dano takes a standard-seeming coming-of-age story about teenager’s fracturing family life and turns it into a fantastic showcase for Carey Mulligan as a young mother daring her son to view her and her emotionally inarticulate husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) as the flawed human beings they really are. ■