If the British summer would just play ball, the DVD release of A Bigger Splash (Studiocanal, 15) would be perfectly timed. Luca Guadagnino’s slinky, shimmery indulgence is the cinematic equivalent of a beach read: it slips by in a pleasurable daze, our concentration divided between the words and the sunlight on the screen. The David Hockney allusion in the title is no accident. The setting of this lackadaisical daylight noir may be the Sicilian island of Pantelleria rather than Beverly Hills, but this is a sparkling lifestyle study, fascinated with the surface luxuries – the pools, the meals, the linen kaftans – of the rich and famous.
As the lazily decadent summer plans of Tilda Swinton’s mute rock star and her surrounding party curdle in the heat, Guadagnino’s gaze isn’t critical, exactly, but it’s almost savagely languid: sparked into irritable life by the braying intrusions of Ralph Fiennes’s vividly horrible record producer, these characters slowly tear one another apart as the camera looks lustfully on. The final reels, however, bring Europe’s refugee crisis into this elite-class soap: callously exploitative or slyly excoriating of the main characters’ privilege? I’m not sure.
With last week’s EU referendum having resulted in the Leave camp’s victory, the often toxic conversation their campaign has fuelled about immigration and refugee accommodation shows no sign of ending. With canny timing, then, Netflix recently added Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci’s new documentary, Salam Neighbor, to its library. The film follows the American film-makers as they spend a month living in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, recording the testimonies of a range of displaced Syrians. It may sound like a human interest stunt, and the film-making can be more earnest than it is artful, but this is still an attention-grabbing, eye-level view of a crisis that many of us have spent more time discussing than imagining.
Back to outright escapism, as Burr Steers’s turgidly japey adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Lionsgate, 15) shows up the limited shelf life of the novelty bestseller that spawned it – the joke’s all in the title. Steers and a reasonably cheerful cast attempt to bolster the undead premise, but as Jane Austen interpretations go, it’s not a fraction as funny (or even as modishly ironic) as Whit Stillman’s zombie-free Love and Friendship, currently in cinemas. I laughed more during How to Be Single (Warner, 15), a brightly air-freshened but rather endearing romantic comedy that sees Dakota Johnson, as winningly gawky here as she is snakily erotic in A Bigger Splash, following gobby Rebel Wilson’s lead into the tumultuous New York singles scene. Written and played with a measure of wry compassion, it represents a fair compromise between studio-movie optimism and the scuzzy lo-fi confessionals of Lena Dunham.
Feelgood formula of the arthouse persuasion, meanwhile, is on offer in the straight-to-DVD Brazilian crowd-pleaser The Violin Teacher (Studiocanal, 15), in which spiky favela kids blossom under the tutelage of a refined São Paulo violinist. It barely has more edge than the 1999 Meryl Streep cornfest Music of the Heart, but Lázaro Ramos’s performance in the title role gives it grace.
A resplendently Eurotrash Kate Winslet doesn’t exactly bring grace to the table in Triple 9 (eOne, 15); still, cast raucously against type as a Russian mafia Medusa, she serves up the most enduring lines of this cool-blooded heist thriller from genre-travelling Australian John Hillcoat. If only the film had quite as much fun with itself. Despite an A-grade, up-for-it ensemble and a crooked cop plot that double-crosses itself into next week, the energy level is oddly low throughout; Hillcoat has studied the strut of Michael Mann, but the degree of homework shows.
Finally, no new release this week can really be a match for the lucid, heart-clutching emotional immediacy of Ivan’s Childhood (Curzon Artificial Eye, PG), happily reissued on Blu-ray following a stint in cinemas. Andrei Tarkovsky’s stark, pristine 1962 debut, bringing Soviet-Wehrmacht to juddering life through the eyes and sense memories of a 12-year-old boy, remains one of the most startling and least sentimental of all second world war odysseys on screen. If you’re in the mood for a smokier, more sinuous trip to the 1940s, however, the Criterion Collection offers the velvety vamping of Gilda (Sony, 12), a winding melodrama in which postwar politics bleed into the paperback danger of Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth’s Argentine underworld romance. Seventy years old this year, it still handily out-sexes A Bigger Splash in a head-to-head battle.
