Even in the home entertainment market, African cinema still gets such short shrift from UK distributors that the announcement of an on-demand service from London’s Film Africa initiative is genuine cause for celebration – even if their selection at the moment, available through the Nollywood-specific Okiki app, is something of a lucky dip for the unacquainted. Dominated by Nigeria and Ghana, the menu mixes impassioned, socially conscious storytelling with clunkier stabs at genre, but it has a couple of winningly accessible entry points.
Glowingly shot but uncushioned by sentimentality, Ghanaian director Priscilla Anany’s Children of the Mountain stirringly tells of a young rural mother’s social ostracism after she gives birth to a deformed child. In a more western vein, Frenchman Simon Rouby’s gorgeous animation Adama is an engrossing first world war survival story. Detailing a young West African boy’s search for his brother across ravaged Europe in earthy, tactile tones, its rich imagery appears blotted on to canvas.
Coincidentally enough, Mubi.com is also doing its bit for African representation this week. Recent additions to their streaming lineup include Layla Fourie, South African director Pia Marais’s subtly nervy moral thriller, never released in the UK, about a female polygraphist tangled in hit-and-run guilt, and Chadian auteur Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s 2002 Abouna, a wry, gently mournful study of paternal abandonment.
The week’s new DVD releases are, put politely, a rum old bunch – and in the case of A Dog’s Purpose (Entertainment One, PG), the rum in question has turned all the way back to molasses. Deprived dog-lovers will get fleeting, heart-fluttering pleasure from this canine-reincarnation saga – wherein one stout-hearted mutt travels through multiple adorable dogs’ bodies over several decades, for maximum “awwww” value – but it’s less a movie than an unprecedentedly glossy “dogs do the darndest things” YouTube video.
That said, a few more cute-critter montages would liven up The Zookeeper’s Wife (Universal, 12), a pallidly earnest, clean-scrubbed Holocaust drama in which Jessica Chastain’s saintly Polish animal lover opens her husband’s zoo to Jews seeking sanctuary of another sort. Chastain smiles bravely through the dewy lighting, but deserves better.
So does Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the increasingly faded dragon tattoo, stoically kicking arse through a standard triple-crossed CIA obstacle course in cheerfully anonymous spy thriller Unlocked (Lionsgate, 15). Bonus points for Toni Collette in an Annie Lennox crop brandishing a machine gun; points immediately rescinded for a faux-Cockney Orlando Bloom. Meanwhile, the week’s least competent film is handily its most rompingly enjoyable. Unforgettable (Warner, 15), a riotously overbaked and underreasoned ex-versus-new-wife thriller, finds an unflattering but unexpectedly fabulous niche for Katherine Heigl’s pristine, pricklish screen personaclod High-Maintenance Psycho Barbie, spilling passive-aggressive mothering tips before going full bunny-boiler in an ice-white designer kaftan. A star is reborn.
This week’s worthiest rereleases include smart new transfers of Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (Powerhouse, 12), a stern, smoke-singed John Le Carré adaptation; Ermanno Olmi’s lovely, somewhat sidelined 1978 Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Arrow, 12), a tough and tender, season-to-season evocation of Bergamo peasant living; and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Powerhouse, 15), in which Alan Bates and Janet Suzman gutsily interpret Peter Nichols’s oft-renewed play about two parents’ perverse comic response to the plunging pain of their daughter’s disability. Finally, a spiky, salty Joe Orton double bill from 1970, as both Silvio Narizzano’s Loot (Studiocanal, 15) and Douglas Hickox’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (Studiocanal, 15) preserve the late playwright’s razored language and slinky queer sexuality to still-seductive, still-disorienting effect.
