Hitchcock/Truffaut
12A, 80 mins
★★★★
Named after the important 1966 book for which François Truffaut interviewed Alfred Hitchcock at length, Kent Jones’s documentary begins as a history of that project, complete with marvellous audio clips of the two men talking. Gradually, though, it becomes a straightforward study of Hitchcock’s movies, with talking-head contributions from Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Wes Anderson, among others. By the time everyone is discussing the sudden twists in Psycho, Jones’s film has itself turned into something other than what it was when it started. This wandering method is a little exasperating, but I suppose it honours the Truffaut book’s role as an inspiration for further analysis of Hitchcock and, anyway, the series of clips and comments is enjoyable in itself.
Time Out of Mind
15, 118 mins
★★★
You don’t expect American films starring Richard Gere to have as much social-realist fibre as British films starring Peter Mullan, yet this tale of a homeless New Yorker (Gere) can stand comparison with Hector, the homelessness drama in which Mullan appeared last year. Directed by Oren Moverman, it’s an unsentimental picture of down-and-out life, shot in a way that emphasises the inhospitable hubbub of city streets. Still, for all Gere’s skill and commitment, he can’t shake that plush movie-star aura. No one’s going to mistake the film for a documentary, so Moverman would have done better to give us more drama and fewer shots of his leading man just trudging about.
Goodnight Mommy
15, 100 mins
★★★
Produced by the cheerless auteur Ulrich Seidl, this gruesome film is for anyone longing to see pulpy horror done in the style of Austrian arthouse miserabilism. When a pair of preteen twin boys decide their mother has been replaced by some sort of impostor — behind the facial bandages she is wearing after supposed cosmetic surgery — their violent response has us wondering what we’re watching: Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Lord of the Flies? While that tension is maintained, the film is intriguing, but when the plot grows even more outlandish, the disparity between this blatant yarn-spinning and the po-faced tone imposed by the joint writer/directors, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, gets wearisome.
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London Has Fallen
15, 99 mins
★★
Babak Najafi’s action movie is a slightly naffer sequel to a film that was hardly a premier league blockbuster itself: Olympus Has Fallen (2013). It blows most of its special-effects budget on its opening gambit — a terrorist attack that wipes out several world leaders while they are in London — and thereafter it is set mainly in backstreets and tunnels, as Gerard Butler’s secret service hunk escorts the American president (Aaron Eckhart) through the capital in search of safety. There’s a measure of fun to be had from the film’s loyalty to the preposterous, gung-ho action-movie style of the 1980s and 1990s, but we’re not talking Die Hard here: everything is more Steven Seagal.
The Other Side of the Door
15, 96 mins
★★
Entirely predictable upsets occur in this horror film after its protagonist, a woman (Sarah Wayne Callies) mourning the loss of a child, uses supernatural means to communicate with the dead boy and fails to obey all the rules of the ritual. The biggest novelty is the setting: although the heroine and her husband are American, Johannes Roberts’s film is a British/Indian production set in Mumbai. Yet this just adds a slight feel of touristy condescension to the proceedings. I preferred 2010’s Wake Wood, placing a similar story in a remote English village.