It’s a big, blockbusting week on the DVD shelves, but the best new film heading to your living rooms is one you probably haven’t had the option of seeing in cinemas. Among the most exciting titles yet to receive the direct-to-Netflix treatment, writer-director Houda Benyamina’s first solo film, Divines, is a sharp, swaggering siren call to young women of colour in a France that seems increasingly weighted against them. As Marine Le Pen’s loathsome brand of bigotry gains national traction, this story of Dounia, a hard-up teenage Muslim from the outer Paris estates determined to secure herself a taste of the good life – by hook or, dangerously, by crook – plays as an exhilaratingly amoral, empathetic minority report.
In inviting audiences to hear rather than judge an angrily under-represented demographic, Divines has understandably prompted comparisons with Céline Sciamma’s more pristine Girlhood, but Benyamina’s feminist remix of the thug life genre has a strident voice all its own. It positively bristles with the restless fury and rough-and-tumble wit of its adolescent leads. In its finest moments – boldest among them a freewheeling segue into urban fantasy in which Dounia (sensationally played by Oulaya Amamra, the director’s younger sister) and her best friend steer an imagined, ghetto-fabulous Ferrari – the film cheekily corrects the macho posturing of Scarface and its ilk. Benyamina, who deservedly won the Camera d’Or for debut features at Cannes this year, looks ready to beat a boy-dominated industry at its own game. It deserved big-screen exposure, but you can hardly blame Netflix for pouncing.
Over on the supersize side of things, I’d like to say I felt similarly invigorated by the female takeover of Ghostbusters (Sony, 12), not least as a decisive up yours to the swarm of social media misogynists whose attacks on Paul Feig’s remake made headlines this summer. Well, the middle finger can stand. It turns out the female ensemble, with their collective sparkplug chemistry, is the best reason this otherwise slightly damp candyfloss has for being. Feig proved his knack for lively, personality-led farce in The Heat and Spy, but the rhythm’s just off here. The human dynamics feel plastic, the jokes not quite loose enough, as if stiffened by the pressure of nostalgia. The genial riffing of the four expert leads, particularly the sweetly spacy Kate McKinnon, seems to happen in spite of the script, rather than in tune with it. There must be a better original vehicle for their, and Feig’s, supreme silliness.
Still, I’ll admit that any one of the better pratfalls in Ghostbusters raised a broader smile from me than the chilly entirety of The BFG (eOne, PG), in which Steven Spielberg’s signature earnestness and Roald Dahl’s black-edged drollery blend about as harmoniously as Nesquik and tequila. Dahl is routinely tricky to nail on screen, though many a better tailored film-maker might have struggled with his fanciful 1982 tale of loneliness, dream-weaving and infighting among giants, the most delightful virtues of which are discursive and language-based. Spielberg, propulsive storyteller that he is, struggles to keep the episodic whimsy of the film’s first half afloat; even his reliable world-building gifts falter here, hampered by coldly synthetic, textureless CGI. I yearned for the characterful angularity of Quentin Blake’s universe.
Sadly, then, the week’s most satisfactory Hollywood nostalgia exercise is its most risk-averse. There’s little to say about Justin Lin’s cheerfully pulpy Star Trek: Beyond (Universal, 12) other than its handsome functionality as fan-service fare. On balance, its throwback approach probably gets more right than 2013’s pompous, muddled Star Trek Into Darkness, but I might already recall more details from the latter. Similarly short on surprises, but efficiently meeting its on-the-tin promises, Ron Howard’s documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (Studiocanal, 12) unearths no fresh insights or information on the by now thoroughly demystified phenomenon of Beatlemania. Still, it’s brightly, cleanly assembled and packed with well-presented concert footage, the documentary equivalent of an oft-played but digitally remastered album.
Speaking of digital remastering, few classic rereleases this year can stand up to the restoration of Abel Gance’s astonishing, sometimes thrillingly demented 1927 silent epic Napoleon (BFI, PG), which roars and rages and rivets for more than five hours and somehow covers a mere fraction of the diminutive general’s made-for-cinema life. That hardly matters, however, by the time Gance pulls out all the stops for a berserk, beautiful, genuinely climactic finale, here presented in its full, long unavailable widescreen glory, across three co-ordinated panels with vivid interludes of colour tinting. It’s a spectacle at once years ahead of its time and with no direct aesthetic equal. I recently saw it luxuriously extended across the stage of the Royal Festival Hall, but a gleaming Blu-ray miniaturisation will still suffice.
