It’s rare to see an actress sweat as much blood for a film that gives her so little in return as Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train (eOne, 15). Tate Taylor’s impersonally glossy adaptation of the Paula Hawkins bestseller boasts a protagonist who doesn’t appear to have been many more script notes than “posh drunk”, but what details and oddities Blunt forces into that bland type. It’s a performance jittering with dizzy physicality and skittish second-guessing, all appropriate to this dimly compelling yarn of an addled commuter who becomes at once the most certain and least trustworthy witness in a missing persons investigation.
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It’s a shame the film around her hasn’t her interest in psychic pain and eccentricity. It glides along as smoothly as a well-used, slimy cake of soap, with Blunt’s Bafta-nominated tour de force the sharp, intractable bit of grit somehow caught in its surface.
Would that Blunt could find a film as devoted to her as A Date for Mad Mary (Element, 15) is to Seána Kerslake. The young Irish actress blossoms in the care of Darren Thornton’s simple, lovable but oh-so-slightly barbed directorial debut, which is rather unfairly skipping UK cinemas. As an ex-con awkwardly adjusting to life outside the slammer, alienated from her social circle as she accepts maid-of-honour duty for her former best friend, Kerslake gives aching social specificity and character to a story that otherwise hits a lot of familiar beats. Her just-off moral compass and sexual uncertainty, confused further when she falls for a female musician who dares to give her the time of day, make everything and everyone in Thornton’s film more complicatedly human.
Also undeserving of direct-to-DVD status is Jason Bateman’s The Family Fang (Sony, 15). Outwardly yet another dysfunctional family scramble in the Royal Tenenbaums mould, it’s given, well, teeth by an unusually patient, perceptive screenplay from Pulitzer winner David Lindsay-Abaire. He wrote Rabbit Hole, and appears to have a happy kinship with Nicole Kidman. Cast as grown siblings still living in the shadow of their wilfully off-kilter parents, she and Bateman do gentle, beautifully synced work together. It’s one of the most warmly empathetic brother-sister dynamics we’ve seen on screen since You Can Count on Me.
Belgium’s revered Dardenne brothers stray watchably off-form with The Unknown Girl(Curzon Artificial Eye, 15), a measured, compassionate but wholly surprise-free fusion of realism and gumshoe storytelling in which a young GP investigates the death of a stranger outside her practice. It never accumulates either the social or narrative urgency it should, but the reliable Adèle Haenel gives it complex conviction in the lead.
Kids of varying ages have a handful of goofy distractions to choose from this week. Following The Lego Movie as the second effort from Warner Bros’ revived animation division, baby-delivery comedyStorks (Warner, U) maintains the manic energy of its predecessor. Otherwise, this is an amiable disappointment, missing a trick by avoiding any savvy update of its regressive how-babies-are-made myth.
I’ll take it over the standard-issue kook of Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Fox, 12), in which only Eva Green’s batty vamping manages to pop out from Burton’s usual elaborate art direction. Professedly dark, it lacks the savoury perversity of Revolting Rhymes(eOne, PG), the BBC’s affectionate, well-voiced adaptation of Roald Dahl’s warped fairytale updates. Only the animation, too airbrushed and bulbous to compete with Quentin Blake’s spiky illustrations, falls short.
Finally, Netflix’s classic documentary shelf – far less abundantly stocked than its recent nonfiction department – has got an essential addition with 1990’s Paris Is Burning. Jennie Livingston’s then-groundbreaking study of the New York City drag ball scene may not open as many eyes in an age when RuPaul’s Drag Race Move ludacris. is popular comfort viewing, but has lost none of its vibrancy or tangy good humour as it observes the assembly of multiple races, classes and genders bound by shared difference. It would be a mistake to view it simply as a marker of subsequent social progress in the annals of queer cinema; in many respects, this wildly entertaining film commemorates a cultural meeting point that we have lost.
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