Dreamcatcher
15, 104 mins
Kim Longinotto’s documentary has a vivid central figure and, for added value, an intriguing supporting player. The former is Brenda Myers-Powell, who knew abuse and prostitution in her youth, and now, in ebullient middle age, runs a Chicago organisation that rescues and counsels young women in need. She’s a wonderful heroine amid a host of depressing stories, and she is sometimes helped in her work by a former pimp, Homer King, who has renounced his old life (though not, it seems, the dress code), yet talks about those days in a matter-of-fact style that’s slightly confounding. Lucid and arresting.
Life of Riley
12A, 113 mins
The final film by Alain Resnais, who died last year aged 91, is a French version of Alan Ayckbourn’s comic play about a terminally ill man’s powerful effect on the women in his social circle. It is the director’s third Ayckbourn adaptation (after 1993’s Smoking/No Smoking and 2006’s Private Fears in Public Places) and the most straightforwardly theatrical of the lot — so deliberately stagey, in fact, cinemas might want to think about selling programmes. It’s perfectly pleasant, but it’s also a film that’s much easier to recommend to Ayckbourn fans than to lovers of Resnais’s high-modernist masterpieces.
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Difret
12A, 99 mins
Supported by Angelina Jolie as an executive producer, this Ethiopian drama, written and directed by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, draws attention to a brutal custom in the country — the idea that men are entitled to abduct women and girls, and force them into marriage. Based on the true story of a teenager who killed her abductor and was defended by a campaigning legal aid organisation, it’s an educational work not greatly concerned with cinematic flair: a couple of scenes that seem to promise tension and excitement are cut short with bemusing abruptness. Thanks to Meron Getnet’s strong performance as the chief lawyer, however, it has a basic dramatic eloquence.
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Hyena
18, 112 mins
There is impressive style and deadly seriousness in this thriller about a sordidly corrupt London police officer whose reign is challenged by Albanian gangsters, yet its writer/director, Gerard Johnson, and leading man, Peter Ferdinando, fail to generate the potent Bad Lieutenant-style magnetism that a film needs if it’s to sell an audience on such dank and joyless material. Ferdinando was well used in Johnson’s previous film, Tony, but his sweaty agonising here is doomed to look synthetic: the script doesn’t rise quite far enough above Danny Dyer-level rough stuff.
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Appropriate Behaviour
15, 86 mins
The Iranian-American Desiree Akhavan has a part in the latest series of Girls, and it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that this film, which she wrote and directed, served as the showreel that won her that job. It’s a studiedly nonchalant, mildly funny comedy about a bisexual Brooklynite stumbling into various tricky social situations after breaking up with her girlfriend. Played by Akhavan, this central character is a gawky, sardonic mixture of insecurity and vanity, and she’s engaging enough to carry the film through the occasional stretches in which its casualness becomes downright slackness.
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Kill the Messenger
15, 112 mins
Dramatising the true story of Gary Webb, a newspaper journalist whose 1996 report on the CIA’s links to the drug trade made him an enemy of the Establishment, Michael Cuesta’s movie is in the tradition of All the President’s Men and The Insider, but it leans more than those films do towards Hollywood clichés. From its scenes of Webb (Jeremy Renner) meeting informers and pinning maps and photos to his office wall, to its soapy depiction of his careworn wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), its style is shop-bought. And while Renner, a producer on the film, is doubtless sincere in wanting to tell Webb’s story, he also seems cheesily keen on the role’s flashy side — driving a sports car and losing his temper explosively.
Unfinished Business
15, 91 mins
Vince Vaughn’s father was a salesman, and the actor’s apparent fondness for playing corporate patter merchants — in films that sometimes hinge on sales pitches or business negotiations — has been noted. He’s at it again in Ken Scott’s comedy about three associates (Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson and Dave Franco) prepared to go to frantic lengths to secure a contract for their fledgling company. It’s a movie that resoundingly fails to seal the deal: its boysy, lecherous jokes aren’t funny and its sappy picture of the trials of white-collar life is just plain depressing.
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