British actor Jack O'Connell seems on the verge of going supernova. While UK audiences may have clocked him at any point since his lairy work on TV's Skins, he'll court America in Angelina Jolie's Oscar-baiting Louis Zamperini biopic Unbroken. It's hard to imagine he'll be much better in it, however, than he is in David Mackenzie's superb Starred Up (Fox, 18), a bruising prison drama that defamiliarises every cliche of the genre with its tough, tactile attention to environmental detail.
The outside world is never glimpsed in this story of a feral juvenile offender (O'Connell) "starred up" to the adult institution where his lifelong deadbeat dad (the ever-riveting Ben Mendelsohn) is among the roost-rulers. Prison is presented instead as a complete world unto itself, with its own complex personal and political food chains – hierarchies that further fracture already toxic father-son relations. It's Mackenzie's most vivid and fleshed-out film to date, thanks in large part to O'Connell's astonishing, near-animalistic articulation of brutally arrested emotional development.
O'Connell's junior jailbird would make short work of the supposedly dangerous convict played by Josh Brolin in Jason Reitman's risible, homespun melodrama Labor Day (Paramount, 12). On the lam in 1980s New England, Brolin takes hostage an agoraphobic single mum (Kate Winslet, looking mildly stunned throughout) and her teenage son, only to swiftly emerge, in a peculiarly regressive twist, as the paternal figure the household has been craving, grinding up against Winslet as they stuff the crust of the most innuendo-laden peach pie in film history. Based on Joyce Maynard's well-regarded novel, and as dimly earnest as it is inadvertently misogynistic, it's a misstep for all involved.
Also a soapy step down from its literary source is Biyi Bandele's absorbing but overreaching adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's sprawling Nigerian civil war saga Half of a Yellow Sun (Soda, 15), a challenging prospect for any film-maker, but not well served by Bandele's decision to rearrange the narrative in reductively linear form. Happily, it's rescued by uniformly strong performances, with Thandie Newton on seething, career-best form as the headstrong lover of Chiwetel Ejiofor's radical academic.
Another ambitious adaptation, albeit of a far looser variety, hits the shelves in Richard Ayoade's slippery, atmospheric riff on Dostoevsky's The Double (StudioCanal, 15). Less precious and more aggressively eccentric than Ayoade's promising debut Submarine, this ornately assembled story of an office drone (Jesse Eisenberg, reliably dry and droll) driven to distraction by his apparent doppelganger doesn't quite find the sweet spot between the arch goofery that is Ayoade's comic signature and the more intellectual preoccupations of its source, but it's a beguiling experiment.
Heading to DVD after a mere blink of a London cinema release is Jealousy (StudioCanal, 15), the latest exercise in boho-chic Parisian angst from veteran director Philippe Garrel. Starring his puppy-eyed son, Louis, as a philandering actor, it's an improvement on his recent work, with sleek black-and-white cinematography and gentle humour lifting the mostly unsympathetic romantic shenanigans. It's aiming no higher and causing no more harm than Rio 2 (Fox, U), a zestily animated but narratively exhausted sequel to 2011's likable parrot romp, with Jemaine Clement's villainous cockatoo once more its best feature – his rendition of I Will Survive is the rewind-worthy keeper here.
Under-heralded in the UK, the first two series of frequently uproarious Transatlantic sitcom Episodes make a welcome appearance this week on Netflix. It's a deft satire of television comedy lost egregiously in translation: Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan are the British writers looking on as their creation is bastardised for the Yank market, while Matt LeBlanc (in his smartest vehicle since Friends, with which Episodes shares a creator) is a joy as their tone-deaf star. It's not quite as ingenious as Lisa Kudrow's similarly self-reflexive post-Friends effort The Comeback, but it's close.
