Since his bristly 90s heyday, Tim Roth has become an actor who sometimes seems even to take himself for granted – though this lower-key phase of his career hits a memorable peak in Mexican director Michel Franco’s quietly searing Chronic (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15). As a palliative nurse to the terminally ill in Los Angeles, Roth pitches his performance slyly between the frostily unknowable and the tremblingly tender. It’s an ambiguous balance that proves essential to the film’s subtly spiralling drama, as the carer’s own stability and responsibility is called into question.
Franco, who previously made the similarly complex, little-seen teen-bullying parable After Lucia, probes the tissue-paper folds of his characters’ fragile psychologies with impressive delicacy – only to squander some audience goodwill on an empty jolt of an ending. Still, Roth alone is worth the investment.
I’d like to make similar claims for James McAvoy’s maniacally committed turn as the eponymous Victor Frankenstein (Fox, 12), but the ragged incoherence of this gothic reimagining finally dulls even his notably eccentric efforts. An ineffectual Daniel Radcliffe, meanwhile, is merely folded into the slop of Paul McGuigan’s film, which frames the Mary Shelley chestnut as a kind of buddy-scientist story gone extravagantly awry. Told from the perspective of Frankenstein’s haunted lab assistant Igor (Radcliffe), the film soon submerges its handful of new ideas in a murky vat of over-familiar genre tics and gaudy digital tinsel.
A mildly less fantastical but considerably more fluorescent-hued bromance is on offer in Xenia (Peccadillo, 15), an unruly, overlong but brashly winning road comedy from director Panos H Koutras. Two sprightly newcomers, Kostas Nikouli and Nikos Gelia, amiably shoulder proceedings as teenage brothers – one gay, one straight – who jointly up sticks from their native Crete to seek a more fabulous life (and find their estranged dad) in mainland Greece. It’s poppy, jovial stuff, cluttered with surreal queer asides – tonally miles removed from the harsh, deadpan black humour of the Greek new wave typified by Yorgos Lanthimos. Yet pointed aggravation at the country’s recent socioeconomic failings seethes beneath Xenia’s DayGlo surface.
If you haven’t yet tested the sub-zero waters of Trapped (Arrow, 15), the BBC’s latest celebrated slab of Nordic noir, a second chance arrives with the DVD box set; I’m a late arrival myself. The blend of violent severity and grim local humour in its untangling of dark goings-on in the remote Icelandic town of Seyðisfjörður doesn’t feel as bracing as it might have done prior to the likes of The Killing and The Bridge, but it’s snowily engrossing all the same.
If you prefer your thrills a little more burnished, meanwhile, the handsome Masters of Cinema reissue of Three Days of the Condor (Eureka, 15) should do the trick. Forty years on, Sydney Pollack’s sleek, surprisingly tough-minded CIA conspiracy yarn should appear only superficially dated to audiences still being fed on the Bourne franchise; Robert Redford’s star power may give it a gilded veneer, but its shaping and pacing feels markedly modern.
Over at Mubi.com, viewers can encounter a film-maker who, while a familiar presence on the festival circuit, has yet to penetrate UK cinema. Italian-born Roberto Minervini has made his name as a distinctive chronicler of America’s disenfranchised south, principally through his currently-streaming Texas Trilogy. The first two films in the series, The Passage and Low Tide, have lulls alongside stretches of lyricism, but the third, Stop the Pounding Heart, is more fully, glowingly realised. This lean documentary-narrative hybrid examines the tentative romance between a strictly Christian-reared teenage girl and a rough-edged rodeo rider with clear-eyed, compassionate authenticity. It’s the kind of modest, lovely miniature for which the streaming circuit is a vital lifeline.
