Last January an influx of year-ahead trend pieces predicted the arrival of “peak beard” – a projection to which HBO’s whip-smart semi-sitcom Looking (Warner, 18), its handsome ensemble decorated scene-for-scene with a dazzling array of facial foliage, immediately landed as a pointed rejoinder. A year later, ubiquitous urban beardage is still with us. Happily, so is Looking, the second series of which debuts across the pond tonight, while the first belatedly hits our DVD shelves tomorrow.
It’s worth catching up. A laid-back landmark in 21st-century gay portraiture for the small screen, this San Francisco-set survey of assorted bright (and not-so-bright) young things and their rotating, often freewheeling, private lives gets right what the over-stimulated US remake of Queer As Folk didn’t; the imprint of executive producer Andrew Haigh (Weekend) is clear in its balance of wistful rumination and matter-of-fact raunch. In capturing a kind of wishful coffee-bar bohemia, Looking plays particularly well as a companion piece to Lena Dunham’s evolving but persistently wonderful Girls (Warner, 15), the third series of which is also out tomorrow – though the former’s scruff is, obviously, considerably more impressive.
Insider Hollywood was abuzz last week with the news that the long-mooted US remake of Japanese action-anime Ghost in the Shell – a fiercely brilliant meditation on human-cyborg identity, 20 years old this year and conveniently added to the Netflix library only last week – is finally going ahead, with Scarlett Johansson as its live-action lead. The smartest response came from American critic James Rocchi, pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, there are good parts for women in modern film, “but a) they aren’t human and b) they’re all ScarJo”. Luc Besson’s dizzy techno-thriller Lucy (Universal, 15) further underlines the point: a steel-plated sugar-rush of irresistible idiocy, it’s the rare multiplex shoot ’em up that doesn’t just accommodate a female star’s charisma, but positively runs on it. As the eponymous heroine, a Taiwan-based student who gains psychokinetic powers from an accidental drug infusion, Johansson is as incandescently alien as she was in Under the Skin; the film’s too besotted with her to think rationally for one minute, but it’s still Besson’s best in aeons.
Would that Nicole Kidman could find a mainstream vehicle equally interested in her. An actor with an excitingly left-field taste in art, she has peculiarly duff instincts for trash. Enter the regrettably titled Before I Go to Sleep (Studiocanal, 15), which adapts the SJ Watson bestseller with commendably neo-Hitchcockian intentions – amnesia, mistaken identity, Colin Firth doing a sort of Cary Grant number – but is too stiffly tasteful to rustle up one scare.
So often, it’s the actors from whom you expect the least who throw themselves into B-movies with the necessary abandon. Dan Stevens, a suet-pudding cypher in his time on the unspeakable Downton Abbey, is a hot, nasty revelation in The Guest (Icon, 15), a fired-up, 1980s-spritzed nerve-jangler from US horror talent Adam Wingard. Gym-cut, frosty eyed and scarcely recognisable as an enigmatic ex-marine who inserts himself into a grieving midwest family with a zealous sense of purpose, Stevens reveals something genuinely alarming in his hitherto all-English implacability; a showdown between this slick-haired automaton and Johansson’s Lucy would be something to witness.
It’d certainly come to a busier boil than any of the simmering tensions in The Rover (Entertainment One, 15), Australian atmosphere merchant David Michôd’s disappointing follow-up to Animal Kingdom. Following another taciturn ex-soldier (a committed Guy Pearce) on a single-minded revenge mission – this time through a post-apocalyptic outback that, it must be said, isn’t heavily distinguishable from the pre-apocalyptic outback – the film has expertly desolate imagery and zithering sound to spare, but a markedly hollow punchline.
For slow-burning agitation done right, check out Kelly Reichardt’s excellent Night Moves (Soda, 15), in which the indie director’s aptitude for softly-softly minimalism proves a neat fit for a narrative built on high-stakes psychological terror: Jesse Eisenberg, Peter Sarsgaard and an inventively cast Dakota Fanning make a brittly compelling team as a trio of environmental activists whose right-on actions take a turn for the ghoulish. One of 2014’s less celebrated standouts, its eerily of-the-moment aftertaste lingers for longer than you might think.
