In a year that has been generally short on nice things, on soft things, on comfortable things, Swallows and Amazons (StudioCanal, PG) settles on the screen like a gingham picnic blanket. It’s not new, and it falls some distance short of great, but Philippa Lowthorpe’s handsome, sun-warmed adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s Lake District larks is indubitably nice: populated with amiable kids mostly playing well with others, and facing only mild peril courtesy of a shoehorned-in spy plot. Its pleasures lie less in its plotting than in its cream-tea retro trappings. Where Paddington gently but cannily brought its cuddly literary source into the 21st century, this is an unabashed period piece, in outlook as well as in milieu. Quite what contemporary pre-teens make of the film’s inward-looking world, I can only guess; it may be plainer sailing for their wistful parents.
There’s a different kind of British heritage preservation at play in David Brent: Life on the Road (Fox, 15), a belated, debatably necessary victory lap of sorts for the most affectionately loathed sitcom character of the past 20 years. In taking him out of the miserable Slough workplace that made his name and putting him on an itinerant sales beat, Ricky Gervais’s spinoff seeks to cement Brent as a pop-culture icon entirely separate from The Office (its own brand having been partially pilfered by the hit US adaptation). It’s not quite clever or inventive enough to do that – the familiar mockumentary format, in particular, is strained over the course of a 95-minute feature – but the queasy comedy value of Gervais’s creation remains intact: I laughed and winced in appropriately equal measure.
I wanted to laugh more with (or even at) Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (Fox, 12), an inoffensively randy but slightly low-energy dudebro-romcom that could as easily have been made in Wedding Crashers’ immediate wake, instead of 11 years later. Pitting two doofus jock brothers (Zac Efron and Adam Devine) against the two unexpectedly feisty blind dates (Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza) they enlist for a family wedding, the film’s general celebration of party-hearty irresponsibility proves pleasingly well-matched in terms of gender. It’s a more progressive romp, for example, than last year’s surprisingly misogynistic Trainwreck. I wish the game quartet had been given slightly more reckless material to work with, though Efron remains Hollywood’s most baby-smooth funnyman of the moment.
Developed from a reputedly jumpily effective calling-card short, Swedish director David Sandberg’s Lights Out (Warner, 15) is one of those simple enough horror exercises that appears to be predicated on a nifty concept – before the shaky execution takes even the idea’s credibility down with it. Maria Bello, forever deserving better than whatever film she’s in, is the Los Angeleno mum who finds her family is plagued by a mysterious female spectre who appears and reappears with the flick of a light switch. Having established this tidy lo-fi threat, however, the film struggles to develop much three-dimensional drama around it – Sandberg, at least, is a dab hand at visual shadowboxing.
Instead, I’d happily switch on The Blue Lamp (StudioCanal, PG): very cleanly restored on Blu-ray, Basil Dearden’s 1950 film is a milestone in British social realism that has been little discussed in recent years. That’s partly understandable, given the cracks and creaks apparent today in the semi-gritty surface of this Paddington-set police station study – not to mention an ennobling stance on the boys in blue that not all viewers will see as on-message these days. But it’s a gripping, fascinating glance back at procedural conventions that remain firmly embedded in cop dramas even today.
Meanwhile, the new Blu-ray boxset Woody Allen: Six Films: 1979-1985 (Arrow, 12) is not quite as overdue a reissue – given the profile and availability of the titles – but it’s a handsome Christmas gift for fans. Covering a particularly expansive and resourceful creative stretch of Allen’s career, from Manhattan to the jewel-box joys of The Purple Rose of Cairo, it’s also splendidly packaged and annotated – including a 100-page volume of old and newly commissioned critical writing on the films in question.
Finally, Netflix’s growing library of in-house feature films covers the mumblecore base to mostly winsome effect in Blue Jay – starring and written by indie mini-industry Mark Duplass in his distinctively shaggy style, and somewhat shyly directed by first-timer Alex Lehmann. It’s Sarah Paulson, currently on something of a hot streak, who brings the most vivid inner life to this gentle romantic shuffle between two former high-school lovers unexpectedly reunited for a day in their small California home town: the ensuing trip down memory lane covers the expected bittersweet pit stops, but it’s played with palpable warmth and good humour.
