A questionable screenplay trophy at the Oscars saved The Imitation Game (Studiocanal, 12) from the embarrassment of being one of those films expressly made for prizes it then conspicuously fails to win. But the varnish is surely already rubbing off this study of Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park accomplishments, which is as dramatically uninspired as it is historically inventive.
While some have taken Graham Moore’s gilded script to task for its fabrication of a blackmail plot that dents Turing’s integrity, it’s the fudging of more fundamental actualities that offends most: his revolutionary code-breaking activity is reduced to accidental “eureka” moments, while the narrative’s timid avoidance of Turing’s sexuality seems curiously complicit with the institutional homophobia that destroyed his life. The man is at least granted a game, gifted interpreter in Benedict Cumberbatch; in all other respects he deserves better.
One of the great British films of 2014 went comparatively unrewarded: in the crowded ranks of Irish Troubles dramas, Yann Demange’s breathless debut ’71 (Studiocanal, 15) may be the most visceral evocation yet of the era’s street warfare. An updated twist on Carol Reed’s 1947 noir Odd Man Out, this technically vertiginous white-knuckler plays down politics in favour of first-person experience: the young British soldier (Jack O’Connell) accidentally stranded by his unit in a Belfast IRA stronghold is too concerned with surviving until dawn to pontificate on the purpose of the conflict. A first-rate chase thriller it may be, but it’s also a long night’s journey into day rich in passing social detail; O’Connell, the most formidable leading man to emerge from our shores since Tom Hardy, carries it with terse intensity.
Jaws are collectively clenched even tighter in Leviathan (Artificial Eye, 15), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s despairing domestic tragedy wrapped around an incendiary takedown of Russian governmental corruption. As political satires go, there’s rarely been one sterner. At face value, it’s a classical land-battle story, as one man tries to hold on to his family homestead in the face of greedy claims by a small-town mayor (a brilliant Roman Madyanov). But even those with headline-level acquaintance with Russian current affairs can’t fail to identify the film’s furious jabs at Vladimir Putin, the Russian Orthodox church and a tangled intermediary network of oppressive authority figures. It ticks nary a box on the Russian culture ministry’s recently released list of approved film themes, and is all the more triumphant for it.
One startling sequence – a tense home invasion that becomes a passive-aggressive house party – holds the imagination in Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys (Peccadillo, 15), but it’s far from an isolated standout in this excitingly amorphous thriller-turned-romance-turned-altogether-different-thriller. Taking every left turn on offer in mapping the improbable bond between a gay Parisian businessman and an opportunistic immigrant rent boy, it’s a genuinely unexpected tale of love in a hopeless place. The same could be said of Jessica Hausner’s chilly but oddly touching Amour Fou (Arrow, 12), an exquisitely designed, supremely unlikely marriage of romantic comedy and highly formalised costume drama – concerning the suicide pact between German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel.
Those who prefer their romcoms less arch can nestle into Lynn Shelton’s amiably featherweight Say When (Icon, 15), in which Keira Knightley’s aimless kook fends off a quarter-life crisis by piggybacking on a teenager’s rebellion; its understanding of reluctant-adult insecurities is strictly magazine-deep, but Knightley (also a redeeming feature in The Imitation Game) gives it zest. The same can’t be said for Helen Mirren phoning in an ‘Allo! ‘Allo! accent in food-porn pablum The Hundred-Foot Journey (eOne, PG): supposedly about the grand culinary rivalry between a curry house and a Cordon Bleu temple in rural France, it blandly resolves said rivalry about halfway through, settling in for a concluding hour of Chardonnay and sunsets.
This week’s streaming pick, courtesy of the resourceful curators at Mubi, is a Norwegian gem from 2004 that never got a fair shake (or, indeed, a shake at all) from UK distributors. Hawaii, Oslo takes the familiar format of the everything-connects ensemble piece and imbues it with invigorating local colour, unpicking the knotted lives of a selection of Oslo strangers on the hottest day of the year. Director Erik Poppe surfaced last year with the Juliette Binoche drama A Thousand Times Good Night, but this is fresher fare – and, for this writer, a heartening online discovery.
