The year’s one great movie musical so far arrives on DVD tomorrow, and it’s not the one based on a lavishly rewarded West End fixture. John Carney’s winsome, wistful Begin Again (Entertainment One, 15) sounds warning bells with a premise that reads suspiciously like a lacquered New York do-over of Carney’s organic 2007 hit Once. But what a lovely surprise it is: a loose-limbed, tender-hearted paean to the healing properties of art and friendship, with Keira Knightley hitting peak form as a shy singer-songwriter piecing together a breakup album with the help of Mark Ruffalo’s jaded record executive. The story is admittedly hard to sell in print; it’s the surprisingly unshakable songs (mostly penned by Gregg Alexander, erstwhile frontman of glorious one-hit wonders New Radicals) that give it life and body.
Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys (Warner, 15), meanwhile, has one of the most effervescent songbooks in American pop music at its disposal, yet barely has a pulse of its own – rarely has a musical pulled from the stage seemed so sheepishly reluctant to perform. Working in the drab, half-lit style that has become his latter-day signature, Eastwood renders the classic rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons barely distinguishable from J Edgar, abbreviating the songs to focus with sub-Scorsese conviction on the rocky domestic rhythms of working-class Garden State society. It flickers to life when star John Lloyd Young approximates Valli’s helium croon on Can’t Take My Eyes Off You – what film couldn’t? – but this is otherwise a notably squandered opportunity.
There is as much to be said about the over-milked X-Men franchise at this point as there is to be explored in the films themselves: very little indeed. Still, X-Men: Days of Future Past (Fox, 12) is rarely less than proficient, and occasionally alights upon a poppy visual concept that evokes the comic books whence these gargantuan, machine-tooled blockbusters came. Viewers not already waist-deep in this series, however, need not apply.
The same might be said of Melissa McCarthy fans and Tammy (Warner, 15). As a paid-up admirer of the star’s bumptious comic shtick, I found much to enjoy in this sweetly misshapen road movie that sees McCarthy’s loud-mouthed, laid-off fast-food drone setting off for Niagara Falls to find some approximation of herself, with her randy grandmother (a spirited but years-too-young Susan Sarandon) in tow. Yet it’s harder to pinpoint the film’s specific virtues than it is to accept its predictable geniality; McCarthy wrote it herself, with husband Ben Falcone, but one can’t help feeling she’s sold herself a bit short.
The week’s best foreign language release is perhaps its least glamorous: The Golden Dream (Saffron Hill, 12) is a maudlin title for director Diego Quemada Diaz’s bracingly tough immigrant song, in which a trio of Guatemalan teens set off on a long, troubled trek to the US. Vividly realised and beautifully performed by its non-professional leads, it’s a modest epic fit to be filed alongside El Norte and In This World.
There’s less human substance to Rebecca Zlotowski’s sharply styled romantic drama Grand Central (StudioCanal, 15), though it has ample body heat: it’s worth watching just for the chemical charge between Tahar Rahim and Léa Seydoux as illicitly entangled employees at a nuclear power plant, even if the intriguing semi-thriller narrative never quite reaches a rolling boil. Italian Oscar candidate Human Capital (Arrow Films, 15), meanwhile, rather overcooks the melodrama: its multi-stranded, recession-themed soap opera of class conflict is well acted and chicly clothed, but despite its title, features scarcely one character worth investing in.
The Case Against 8 (Dogwoof, E), a thorough, emotionally direct account of the Californian court battle to overturn legislation against gay marriage, heads straight from cinemas to DVD shelves in the space of a weekend, as does Gianfranco Rosi’s infectiously inquisitive roadside community portrait Sacro GRA (Soda, 15). Rosi’s film may have the Venice Golden Lion, but it’s not even the finest documentary out this week: that would be Finding Vivian Maier (Soda, 12), an alluring, melancholic investigation of the eponymous, mysterious American street photographer.
Cementing this as a strong week for non-fiction is Netflix pick Marmato, US photojournalist Mark Grieco’s sensitive, unsentimental study of a modern-day gold rush in the Colombian Andes, and its devastating effect on the local economy. It’s a worthy Sundance premiere from earlier this year that skipped cinemas altogether; happily, the streaming service continues to provide a generous alternative for docs that evade UK distributors’ impressively broad net.
