"I'd watch him recite the phone book" is an overused compliment for performers who remain riveting in the most inert of circumstances. In the wake of Tom Hardy's improbably spectacular performance in Locke (Lionsgate, 15), perhaps "I'd watch him negotiate a concrete delivery while stuck behind the wheel of a BMW on the M6" should become the new standard. Hardy's sonorous grace and brute presence make every minute of Steven Knight's ultra-minimalist domestic drama compelling, though the film never quite shakes its air of high-level actorly exercise.
Bearded and mellifluously Welsh-accented, tattoos buried under a snug dad jumper, Hardy plays a family man and construction manager whose personal and professional lives go awry in calamitous unison over the course of a night-time drive from Birmingham to London. There, a former one-night stand (voiced by the ever-welcome Olivia Colman) is giving birth to his child; from the driver's seat, he breaks the news over the phone to his wife (Ruth Wilson) and young sons. Nearly 90 minutes of real-time emotional distress ensues, without Locke leaving the car – effectively a radio play with sleek, cat's-eye-stained visuals.
Knight's somewhat contrived writing never answers the question of why a decent man would choose to handle this crisis in such coldly cack-handed fashion, but Hardy's exquisite, tender-tough performance fills in the gaps.
I believed the wounded family dynamic more in Singaporean director Anthony Chen's lovely, lightly handled debut Ilo Ilo (Soda, 12), in which the overworked parents of a difficult 10-year-old boy feel gradually threatened by their son's substantial bond with his Filipina nanny. Chen regards this fractured household with unimpeachable fairness and compassion; it's a moving, sometimes mordantly funny miniature that deserved its laurels at Cannes last year. I'm less inclined to say the same for Heli (Network, 18), Amat Escalante's pristinely composed but grimly unilluminating shock-treatment study of Mexican drug-trade violence, which uses one hand for moral finger-wagging and the other to set certain unfortunates' genitals on fire. It's bravura stuff in one sense, but lacks the drive of the comparable, superior Miss Bala.
Hundreds of films will be shortly be unleashed into the wild at the Toronto film festival, some to enviable levels of acclaim. More, however, will be ignobly discarded and Arthur and Mike (Arrow, 15) is as good a cautionary tale as any. A deadeningly faux-quirky road romance between two curiously bland oddballs played by Colin Firth and Emily Blunt, it took two years to reach the UK following its Toronto premiere and still feels too soon. It leaves a kind of air-freshener aftertaste easily removed by the salty, sassy pleasures of drag-queen documentary I Am Divine (Peccadillo, 15), a loving, self-explanatory portrait of John Waters's muse. At the other end of the scale, there's a wealth of austere brilliance in the week's most essential Blu-ray boxset, the Kelly Reichardt Collection (Soda, 15). Handily collating the four previous features of America's current leading poet of rural humanism (her woozy 1994 debut, River of Grass, is nestled amid the bonus features), it's an invaluable primer for the forthcoming Night Moves.
Netflix's latest additions include some essential 2013 catch-up material: if you're somehow still lagging on Jane Campion's shimmering Kiwi-noir Top of the Lake or the ecstatic romance of Blue is the Warmest Colour, your range of excuses just got smaller. It's likelier, however, that you might have missed Journal de France, a wistful, autumnal record of the 50-year career of French photographer and film-maker Raymond Depardon, centred on a recent, rambling caravan trek across provincial France. Documenting a life and landscape that seem to be winding down together, it's a road trip as languid as Tom Hardy's is panicked.
