After too many months of campaigning, speculation and red-carpet dry runs masquerading as other award ceremonies, the Academy Awards will finally be dished out tonight – yet this week’s DVD release slate looks more like a boulevard of broken Oscar dreams. There was a time, for example, when David Ayer’s Fury (Sony, 15) was seen to have gold-plated potential: a brawny, stern-faced second world war drama starring Brad Pitt, it ticked a lot of highly serious boxes, only to wind up with even fewer nominations (zero, to be exact) than that brawny, stern-faced second world war drama by Pitt’s missus. Behind its stolid exterior and notionally nihilistic violence, however, there’s an old-fashioned brothers-in-arms sensitivity to this tale of an American tank crew in Germany, grinding its way through the war’s last gasp. Ayer, a name most identified with urban thrillers like Training Day and End of Watch, brings a certain blood-on-the-lens integrity to proceedings; if only the actors, with the exception of the porous, vulnerable Logan Lerman, would unclench their capable jaws from time to time.
If it’s a lofty folly you’re after, Serena (Studiocanal, 15) provides considerably more intrigue. Susanne Bier’s long-shelved logging-industry melodrama once more pairs Silver Linings Playbook lovers Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, this time as depression-era timber mavens whose marriage is felled by their own craven impulses – the sort of story that pre-Code Hollywood would have taken to blithely steamy extremes, here turned curiously cold by the script’s near-pathological avoidance of empathy as the human tragedies mount. Lawrence, doing a kind of snappish riff on Stanwyck, is quite fascinating. She’d certainly eat Dakota Fanning’s Effie Gray (Metrodome, 12) for breakfast, though that might not flatter the proto-feminist subtext of either period piece. In Richard Laxton’s luminously mounted but damp-as-dew study of Victorian art critic John Ruskin and his psychologically abused wife, Fanning plays victimhood with intelligent resignation, as if herself working under the sexual politics of the era at hand; scripted by Emma Thompson, it’s not an unfeeling portrait, but it’s a fairly inanimate one.
A different kind of Victorian doll sparks to life in Annabelle (Warner, 15), a film no one could accuse of having shiny trophies in its sights – though this honest trash does have honourable origins of a sort in 2013’s excellent haunted-house ride The Conjuring. Borrowing the creepy, eponymous prop from that film’s intro and branching off on its own narrative tangent with it, Annabelle has nothing approaching its parent film’s wit or spiritual curiosity, but it lands more jolts than Blackwood (Spirit, 15), a tepid British attempt at covering much the same old-school territory, with a mortar-stiff Ed Stoppard as a mentally frail academic battling personal demons and other eerie intangibles in his family’s sprawling new country manor.
True uncanniness, however, reigns in the week’s most welcome box set. The Leos Carax Collection (Artificial Eye, 18) groups three suitably contrasting features – the solemn, sparse new wave romance of Boy Meets Girl, the dystopian eroticism of The Night Is Young and the freaked-out fever dream of Holy Motors – from France’s most extravagantly eccentric contemporary auteur, bound with a recent documentary, Mr X, which hardly follows its subject’s kinked course but is an essential bonus for devotees. The film scholar’s top documentary of the week, however, has to be Life Itself (Dogwoof, E), a studious, large-spirited examination of the life, work and diligently fought death of Roger Ebert, America’s most prominent film critic. Directed by the great Steve James – whose 1994 landmark Hoop Dreams was exhaustively championed by Ebert himself – the film isn’t the sentimental puff piece it might have been, given the circumstances. In his celebration of Ebert’s range and reach as a film advocate, however, James falls a little short in identifying the singularities and specifics of his subject’s criticism.
Unsurprisingly, many of my colleagues across the pond were aggrieved when James’s film failed to make this year’s best documentary Oscar shortlist, though it’s only fair to note the category’s unusual robustness this year. That the excellent Virunga – the sole Oscar nominee in any field currently available on Netflix – is only an outside shot to win is proof positive of that strength. In another year, Orlando von Einsiedel’s rousing, riveting assessment of the physical and political forces threatening the survival of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga national park could have been a winner: it’s the kind of cinematic activism that persuades through factual acuity rather than any amount of hectoring and hand-wringing. It’s essential catch-up viewing ahead of tonight’s festivities, though it won’t get you in a party mood.
