There are films about dogs that are expressly for dog lovers, films about dogs designed to needle cynophobics, and then there’s White God (Metrodome, 15), a film about dogs that snappishly ticks both boxes while not really being about dogs at all. Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó opens his extraordinary warping of the age-old romance between man and mutt with an indelible image: a vast, saliva-spilling pack of street dogs rampages through the streets of Hungary, trailing a 13-year-old slip of a girl on a bicycle. Whether she’s leading or running from them remains to be seen; dog-human relations are inverted several times over in the course of this sharp-incisored fable.
We gradually learn that the kid (fierce young talent Zsófia Psotta) has been separated from her beloved mongrel, Hagen, by her deadbeat dad. Yet the brutal, obstacle-ridden reunion quest that ensues – framed from the alternating perspectives of both child and beast – follows no predictable path as Hagen bands with his fellow strays to rise up against those who abused and abandoned them. You can view it as a demented social justice allegory or simply the most unnerving exercise in canine terror since Cujo, but it’s vital, vicious film-making either way.
Ethan Hawke’s antihero in Good Kill (Arrow, 15), on the other hand, frightens neither with bite nor bark: as a former fighter pilot reduced to targeting the Taliban via drone control, he’s a figure of silent danger at work and home alike. “He’s quiet – what does he do when he gets angry?” a friend asks his wife (January Jones). “He gets more quiet,” comes the reply.
A combat drama that never sets foot on the battleground, Andrew Niccol’s film is an urgently contemporary response to the war on terror, yet still somehow has the ring of science fiction: that Hawke’s military major can kill people several thousand miles away from a cushioned Las Vegas airbase office seems a possibility of a future with which we’ve all too quickly caught up. Niccol parses the moral complications of this practice with the vigour you’d expect from the writer of The Truman Show, another study of surveillance-controlled destiny. It’s less politically coy and more coolly seething than Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, but they’d make mutually enhancing companion pieces. Hawke, tightly coiled until he very much isn’t, is excellent in a part far removed from his signature slacker persona; as an actor he’s recently hit a keen patch of form.
Would that the same could be said for Helen Mirren, currently making the least interesting decisions among Britain’s reigning roster of Great Actors: in the eight years since she won her Oscar for The Queen, she hasn’t made one film anyone might conceivably want to watch twice. Getting through Woman in Gold (EIV, 12) once, frankly, is an effort: Mirren’s reliable silk and steel presence is about the only thing propping up this dreary, dramatically flaccid biopic of Maria Altmann, the Jewish refugee who fought to reclaim a family-owned Klimt masterwork seized by the Nazis. This historical terrain has already yielded one fusty bore in George Clooney’s The Monuments Men last year; in neither film can art really be said to triumph.
If you’re hungry for more good actresses being flagrantly under-utilised, there’s a feast of them in young-adult franchise placeholder Insurgent (Entertainment One, 12): Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer and Ashley Judd are all on hand to watch a dutiful Shailene Woodley go through the fantasy-quest motions in this follow-up to Divergent. If that film felt like an over-extended introduction, this one, continuing the efforts of fugitive teen Tris to overturn the class hierarchies of the near future, is comparatively garbled, though Woodley gives it some semblance of purpose.
Over to the discerning comforts of Mubi.com, currently spoiling cinephiles with a four-film retrospective of the French cinematic essayist Chris Marker. Among the selections is his landmark sci-fi short La jetée – a more alarming vision of dystopian disorder than anything in the Divergent saga. But there’s more: the time-space gymnastics of his free-association travel diary Sans soleil; the meditation on history via virtual reality in Level Five; and most recently, The Case of the Grinning Cat, his playfully politicised 2004 examination of a Paris marked by cultural transition and feline-themed graffiti. “Make cats, not war,” instructs one wall slogan; Mundruczó’s power-hungry hounds would not be impressed.
