It is still fairly unorthodox for a major blockbuster's online release to precede its arrival on DVD. If you're going to try it out, however, it may as well be on a film aimed at an audience that probably ranks DVDs just below 7in singles on the quaintness scale. Most post-teen viewers are unlikely to feel the full, scowling impact of Divergent (eOne, 12), the latest would-be franchise to spring from a hit series of young adult novels, which is available to download on Monday, and on DVD in mid-August.
The film, with its elaborately constructed metaphor for pressured adolescent self-identification, and its earnestly humourless take on same, is set in a dystopian future. Humanity is divided into tribes named things such as Amity and Abnegation, the members of which are not expected to boast more than their allocated virtue. Naturally, our multi-hued heroine Tris (Shailene Woodley) fits into no such convenient box and is reassigned to the outlying Divergent caste, whereupon her quest begins, for what we never quite find out, since this lengthy film is all sequel-building setup and no payoff.
What it lacks is the sense of immediate social peril that makes the Hunger Games films engaging; what it has is Woodley, an increasingly sparky and committed actress who seems divergent from the film itself.
There's ample abnegation of a more hessian-clad variety in Darren Aronofsky's Noah (Paramount, 12), an impressive misfire that recasts the biblical ark-builder as a severe environmentalist of indistinct faith and potentially destructive allegiance to his higher calling. There's a crazed intelligence to its theological questioning; ditto Russell Crowe's concentrated bottling of Noah's manifold ambiguities in brutish, buzz-cut form. Where it falters, unexpectedly for an Aronofsky film, is in the visual execution. Bar one extraordinary animated time-lapse sequence that daringly fuses evolutionist and creationist theory, the film is a menagerie of murk, burying the production designer's grandest gestures beneath sooty cinematography and uneven effects; Noah's lunkish quarry of Transformers-like fallen angels seems a particular failure of vision.
Not challenging himself nearly as much as Aronofsky, and narrowly getting away with it, is Roman Polanski, whose marginal stage-based chamber comedy Venus in Fur (Artificial Eye, 15) is more fun than Carnage, thanks mostly to the fearless efforts of his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, as a power-hungry actress possessing her director (not Polanski this time, but Mathieu Amalric) via the mother of all auditions. The role was originated on Broadway by a far younger actress, Nina Arianda, making this a case of productive miscasting: Seigner's age gives the slight play's sadomasochistic dalliances greater urgency.
File it in the inessential curiosities folder, alongside Lee Sang-il's Unforgiven (Warner, 15), a faithful, gracefully shot reimagination of Clint Eastwood's swansong western as a Meiji-era samurai drama. The robes fit surprisingly well, and the action rattles along nicely, but Eastwood's film was made by its elegiac, self-addressing sense of directorial purpose. This is just a handsome distraction. Plenty of those in Chris Mason Johnson's well-meaning Test (Peccadillo, 15), an early-Aids-crisis flashback centred on Bronski Beat-listening dancers in San Francisco. The dancing is arresting, the period detail oddly ersatz.
One for the inessential on all counts folder is A Long Way Down, an excruciatingly tone-deaf adaptation of Nick Hornby's already iffy novel about suicide-club bonding, and already a formidable candidate for the year's most objectionable film. Awkwardly meshing black comedy with sitcom-style hugging and healing, it squanders Toni Collette's best efforts and actively revels in Imogen Poots's worst.
After that, the week's standout release comes as all the more welcome a tonic. Lukas Moodysson's knowingly titled We Are the Best! (Metrodome, 15) is a return to humane, heart-swelling form for the Swedish auteur that comes in a cheerfully unassuming package: a nostalgic adolescent comedy following the misadventures of a gangly all-girl punk trio in 1980s suburban Stockholm. Dizzy period kitsch and endearingly inept tunes abound, sometimes at once, as in the girls' infectious protest song Brezhnev and Reagan Fuck Off, but there's a nuanced appreciation of nascent female assertiveness, of rebellion both sincere and uncertain, amid all the high jinks. It's certainly a more rewarding study of divergent teen identity than, well, you know.
