No film this year sounded worse on paper than The Angry Birds Movie (Sony, U): the mobile game, an irritation-based fad already past its pop-culture peak, has no obvious narrative framework, and kamikaze canaries are surely more fun when you’re the one controlling them. Against all conceivable odds, however, Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly’s suitably crazed, Crayola-splattered cartoon is a pleasure: a disposable one, low on nutrition and high on noise, but a romp that adds just enough character-based warmth to the game’s dumb, knockabout anarchy to justify the leap to a screen larger than six inches. I’ll be surprised anew if the forthcoming Emoji movie has anything like its spirit.
More chiaroscuro-toned thrills are on offer in The Clan (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15), Argentinian director Pablo Trapero’s muscular, muskily atmospheric underworld drama, based on the true story of the Puccio family and their profitable, government-enabled kidnapping schemes. It’s a riveting, luridly horrifying tale with nary a sympathetic face in sight, treated with oak-smoked solemnity by Trapero, whose brooding direction borrows liberally from the Scorsese playbook. It’s a film with one eye on Hollywood, yet the facts and political context of the case lend it bitter distinction.
It’s been too long since Susan Sarandon’s peppery charms were given as sympathetic a vehicle as The Meddler (Sony, 12), a light, humane mother-daughter comedy that is at once as soft and as sensibly solid as a woollen blanket. Sarandon stars as a recent widow who, after being ordered out of the affairs of her workaholic daughter (Rose Byrne), turns her slightly invasive generosity to the world around her. You could carp about the more sitcom-shaped constructs of Lorene Scafaria’s film, but that’s not to deny the honest compassion of its writing and performances. Comfort food of a beefier variety is on offer in The Take (StudioCanal, 15) – released in cinemas as Bastille Day, but understandably retitled after this year’s 14 July tragedy – in which Idris Elba, as a rule-busting CIA agent chasing down terrorists in Paris, continues to hone his James Bond audition. Narratively, it has few distinguishing features, but director James Watkins has a lean, keen way with an action sequence, and it dashes along most briskly.
Two epidemic-themed horror films land on DVD this week, but despite the Stephen King imprint, you can skip right past Cell (Signature, 15), a mangy, low-energy adaptation of his techno-paranoid novel in which mobile phones turn humans to zombies; if you must, watch it on your phone in defiance. Significantly better, and working more inventively around its budgetary constraints, is Viral (Lionsgate, 15), which finds teenage sisters negotiating a host of personal conflicts beside the parasitic virus eating away at their suburban town; directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, best known for the frightening social-media doc Catfish, smartly locate nervy adolescent tensions within established genre parameters.
Thrillingly demented Polish auteur Andrzej Zulawski died in February; that he’s not around to offer any further context to his final film, Cosmos (Arrow, 15), makes it all the more fascinatingly evasive. It was his first film in 16 years, and it’s fair to say the rust shows in corners of this mapcap contraption about — inasmuch as it’s “about” anything — a law student encountering a world of insanity in a Lisbon boarding house. Some of the whimsy is strained, some genuinely disorienting, while stray ribbons of wild beauty run through the whole. Fusing arthouse and genre tropes to sporadically arresting but unsteady effect is The Keeping Room (Lionsgate, 15), a civil war-era home-invasion thriller that presumes a feminist stance in its setup – three women at tortured odds with two Union soldiers – but doesn’t have much subtext beneath its stylish swaggering.
Finally, Netflix continues its recent spate of high-profile premieres with Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids, still hot from its unveiling at last month’s Toronto festival. It’s a concert film, yes, but rather more special than that – with director Jonathan Demme at the helm, you’re getting a lot more than a standard stadium-to-screen transfer. More than 30 years after his landmark Talking Heads doc Stop Making Sense, Demme still has a dazzling eye for the staging mechanics and less tangible performance qualities that go into a great pop concert. Iridescently shot (by the great Declan Quinn) in 2015 at Las Vegas’s MGM Grand, the film showcases Timberlake, in all his glassy-voiced glory, as a master showman, but also as a product of a vast, stunningly assembled pop machine.
