There will come a time when one can write about Xavier Dolan without mentioning his age, but I’m not sure we’re there yet: at 26, a whopping five films into his career, he still seems driven by youth’s frustrations and sudden surges of feeling. There are pinballing emotions galore in Mommy (Metrodome, 15), a study of dysfunctional mother-son adoration in which viewers themselves may experience alternating urges to embrace and throttle the wunderkind. Hailed by many newly converted critics as his most mature work, it’s actually his most manic.
That’s no bad thing, even if I prefer the sleeker psychosis of Dolan’s underrated Tom at the Farm: from its shifting aspect ratios to its soaring pop soundtrack, Mommy is film-making that meets its unhinged characters on their own restless terms. As ADHD-afflicted delinquent teen Steve (a brilliant Antoine-Olivier Pilon) and his brash, hard-as-lacquered-nails single mother Diane (Anne Dorval) tear away at each other in one furious exchange after the next, Dolan’s boxy, claustrophobic camerawork straddles the line between intimate scrutiny and Jeremy Kyle-style gawping. If you decide you can’t be around these characters a minute longer, that’s largely the point: imagine, then, how they feel about each other. It’s bravura stuff, even as it strikes only a single loud note of brilliance: an hour in, Dolan’s chargingly naked approach leaves him with little to reveal.
Dolan’s mommy issues, warts and all, are more compelling than the week’s other new releases combined. The story behind the woefully misbegotten Accidental Love (Arrow, 15) promises a train wreck for the ages: shot by David O Russell before his recent Oscar-approved hot streak, this wonky healthcare satire (originally titled Nailed) languished for years in financier-induced litigation before an edit was cobbled together without the director’s participation. Instead, this tale of a crusading waitress taking a freak injury complaint to Congress is more fizzle than folly: Russell’s wicked black-comic instincts occasionally poke through the gauzy confusion, but virtually every cue and every cut feels off by seconds. Whether the film was undone by other hands’ Frankenstein-like tinkering, or whether it was a rare Russell misfire all along, we’ll never know.
At least The Gunman (Studiocanal, 15) is awful in more honestly fathomable ways: standard-issue macho vanity projects for ageing male stars are a dime a dozen, after all. That Sean Penn is the star in question is a little more surprising. One wouldn’t have expected Hollywood’s earnest king of right-on rhetoric to be any more interested in the reactionary Liam Neeson revenge-thriller route than audiences would be in seeing him shirtless on a surfboard. And yet here we are: Penn’s veiny, gym-worked torso is certainly the key revelation in this creatively barren story of an ex-special forces assassin dragged back into the fray for the love of a good, imperilled woman. Above the neck, however, the actor could hardly look less comfortable.
Scarcely more intriguing is Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel (Soda, 15), an inert, watery fictionalisation of the Meredith Kercher case, refashioned by the director as a somewhat self-congratulatory tale of one film-maker’s thwarted quest for the heart of the story. Winterbottom is often a victim of his own productivity; this is a particularly ragged, unfinished-looking effort.
Relative to Pixar and Disney, DreamWorks Animation has long resembled the Tesco Value range of the current cartoon scene: it’s had its moments (How to Train Your Dragon chief among them), but Home (Fox, U) is about as processed and textureless as kids’ entertainment gets. The title gives away the drippy objective here, as an alien invasion of Earth leaves both a stranded human girl and an exiled extraterrestrial searching for a place to belong; your children may not mind its cruise-control storytelling and blobby visuals, but that’s not to say they don’t deserve better.
Instead, consider heading over to Netflix, where Pinocchio has recently been added to its growing collection of Disney essentials. Seventy five years old this year, the film barely looks it: its lush visual sheen and twinkling effects haven’t dulled, but it’s the scale and richness of the narrative that still dazzles most of all. Absorbing and compressing the complex, sometimes cruel moral reversals and consequences of Carlo Collodi’s novel into a slightly warmer, more streamlined fable, it still stands among the company’s most ambitious achievements; if all you remember of it are a few treacly bars of When You Wish Upon a Star, it’s time for another look.
