Title notwithstanding, there’s something about the soured sunlight and ocean-salted prickle of The Two Faces of January
(Studiocanal, 12) that makes it ideal late-summer viewing – the cinematic equivalent of a satisfying poolside paperback. Hossein Amini’s short, sharp, chic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel stars Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst as the wealthy Yank couple touring Greece with a certain duality of purpose in 1962; Oscar Isaac is the silver-tongued tourist scam artist who warily takes them on. In each other, the two conmen grudgingly meet their match, as a hotel room murder initiates a mutually suspicious alliance. Things get more heatedly Highsmithian from there, but Amini keeps a cool grip on this nasty, knotty yarn throughout. The star trio, meanwhile, could hardly be better. Or look better, for that matter, in what is surely the year’s best-dressed film so far: what a shame to smear those creamy linen suits and lemon-chiffon sundresses with blood.
Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton’s similarly style-conscious derelicts have no such qualms in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (Soda, 15), but that’s understandable – they are vampires, even if, swanning louchely about Detroit and Tangiers pontificating airily on contemporary rock music and the impending apocalypse, they’re about as threatening as a pair of Dalston art students. That’s at least partly the point of Jarmusch’s bone-dry comedy, which nonetheless isn’t above the odd cheap and cheerful gag. It’s sort of an elegy for more elegant vampire etiquette, whatever that might have been, and a riposte to the more naive Nosferatu melodrama of the Twilight series. The round-midnight atmosphere of drowsy decadence is seductive for a stretch, though a little goes rather a long way: I missed Mia Wasikowska – a brief, electrifying mid-film presence as Swinton’s more brashly bloodsucking sister – when she was gone.
Lenny Abrahamson’s vinyl-black comedy Frank (Curzon, 15), gives Michael Fassbender an improbable test of his onscreen magnetism: as a volatile indie band frontman cracking up before he cracks the big time, he has to project tortured brilliance, emotional vulnerability and a not-half-bad Bowie-Reed drawl from within the confines of a crater-sized papier-mache head in the image of Frank Sidebottom. He’s mesmerising, but the film isn’t his alone. It’s the wonderful Domhnall Gleeson who shoulders proceedings as a profoundly untalented northern songwriter who is absorbed into the band by default, and learns some tough life lessons about the chasm between ambition and ability. It’s a film kissed by moving, genuinely inspired strangeness – a significant leap for Abrahamson from the measured realism of What Richard Did and Garage, but he hasn’t made a bad film yet.
I have many learned colleagues who would say the same of Jia Zhangke, that thorniest and most politically potent of contemporary Chinese filmmakers, though I’ve often found his work more imposing than illuminating. While I found his latest, the barbed four-strand allegory A Touch of Sin (Arrow, 15), typically hard to love, it’s among his most needling, ornately layered films. Meshing high melodrama and lurid B-movie gore into a ferocious state-of-the-nation address, it takes no act of violence for granted.
A more curious candidate for a devoted auteurist following is Resident Evil director Paul WS Anderson – likely to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson in name only – whose gaudy recipe for all-in-one digital action casserole has recently inspired a profusion of post-ironic critical analysis. I don’t get it myself, and Pompeii (eOne, 12), his calculatedly cheesy fusion of Roman sword-and-sandal epic and natural disaster movie (you can guess the disaster), brought me no closer to the light.
No critic has made great claims for Swedish director Lasse Hallström, meanwhile, since My Life as a Dog in 1985. Having since graduated to Hollywood with drippy Oscar bait and drippier Nicholas Sparks romances, he returns home to jump on the Scandi crime bandwagon with the Lars Kepler adaptation The Hypnotist (Studiocanal, 15). A psychological thriller that begins with the murder of an entire Stockholm family and scarcely gets cheerier from there, it’s proficient late-night viewing with fierce supporting work from the under-employed Lena Olin. It’s a straight-to-DVD release, as is Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek 2 (eOne, 18), for which I had higher hopes: an eight-years-on sequel to one of the great modern horror films, this slick return to outback slash-and-dash territory delivers the requisite jolts with aplomb, but suffers from a self-aware jokiness that wasn’t present in its steel-cold predecessor.
There are more taxing rewards to be gained from the week’s best Netflix addition, the intricately researched, visibly incensed American political documentary Citizen Koch, which weighs in on the rights and (mostly) wrongs of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, and the degree of influence it granted corporations in funding and shaping electoral campaigns and policy. If that description sounds a bit mealy, directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin know how to assemble an urgent, compelling argument from a fog of informational noise – the film doesn’t land the gut-punch of their extraordinary post-Katrina film Trouble the Water, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
