Clint Eastwood’s tough, tender, multi-Oscar-winning movie is brilliantly made but, for the squeamish, at times almost unwatchable. Hilary Swank is Maggie, a young woman from a trailer-trash background who longs to be a boxer, leading at first to hard-won success, but then to tragedy. Eastwood is Frankie, her trainer and the manager of a run-down Los Angeles gym, who is fighting his own demons — an estranged relationship with his daughter and doubts about his Catholicism.
Morgan Freeman is Eddie, a wise former boxer who works in the gym; his voice-over links the action.
The performances are superb, with the bond between Frankie and Maggie as each other’s substitute parent/child the intense focus. It is shot beautifully in murky, subdued light; the extras, however, are unusually illuminating. Eastwood’s account of his attitude to directing is succinct: “I just like what I like.” Four stars
Adrienne Connors
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My Summer of Love
Universal, 15, 83 mins; £19.99
“So is it, like, a lesbian flick?” asks a post in the IMDB chat room, and the answer is: kinda. Pawel Pawlikowski’s film about an obsessive relationship between two teenage girls is a fresh, funny exploration of faith, fakery and manipulation. Tamsin (Emily Blunt), back from boarding school for the summer, has the run of her parents’ mansion; Mona (Nathalie Press) is a parentless, prospectless Yorkshire lass, roaming the streets to avoid her brother, a God-bothering ex-con (Paddy Considine). When the pair meet, Mona becomes an accomplice in Tamsin’s faux-ho fantasies; but do they have as much in common as she thinks? The languid Blunt beguiles the camera, Press is superb in tragic and comic modes, and Pawlikowski balances dreamy romanticism and gritty realism with rare sensitivity and a healthy contempt for garden gnomes. Perfunctory extras. Three stars
Matthew Davis
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Ozu Volume 2: Record of a Tenement Gentleman/ Flavour of Green Tea over Rice
Tartan, PG, 71/116 mins; £29.99
With two current releases, Café Lumière and Five, paying homage to Yasujiro Ozu, and Halliwell’s Top 1000 rating his Tokyo Story as the greatest film ever made, this release couldn’t be more auspicious. Record of a Tenement Gentleman is typical Ozu. The simple plot — abandoned boy grudgingly adopted by irascible old woman — is handled with consummate restraint and no trace of Hollywood-style sentimentality. Flavour of Green Tea over Rice, however, breaks with his stylistic conventions, using an unusually mobile camera to ponder the subject of arranged marriage. The film contrasts a couple whose relationship has gone stale with a young woman fighting her parents’ plan to find her a husband (youth rebelling is an Ozu motif). The only noteworthy extra is an intermittent commentary on Tenement Gentleman by the critic Derek Malcolm, who often just describes the action. These subtle, rewarding films deserve better. Four stars
Jeff Potter
My Own Private Idaho
EIV, 100 mins, 18; £22.99
Gus Van Sant has made better films (To Die For, Elephant), and worse (Finding Forrester, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), but this self-consciously arty road movie from 1991 is the director’s most cultishly revered. A pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix play bisexual hustlers, one slumming it, Prince Hal-style, in a deadbeat echo of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, the other a real lost kid. Handsomely shot and, set in grunge-era Portland and Seattle, sometimes resembling a gay Easy Rider, it is unintentionally poignant and painful. Phoenix, a genuine talent, died of drug-induced heart failure two years later, while Reeves speaks the “verse” passages like a dunce. Far too contrived, it is best viewed as a period piece. Extras include a video essay by the critic Paul Arthur and audio interviews with Van Sant, the film-makers Todd Haynes and Jonathan Caouette, and the possibly apocryphal rent boy-turned-writer JT LeRoy. Three stars
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Richard Clayton
Duck Season
Optimum, 15, 80 mins; £19.99
This starts like a genre staple — teenage boys go wild without adult supervision — as two 14-year-olds wave off mother and settle down to a video-game orgy. Then the 16-year-old girl from next door comes to use the oven. The pizza-delivery man arrives and won’t leave until they pay him. The electricity goes off, and the drama subtly modulates into that other staple, the coming-of-age, rites-of-passage movie, though one that happens to take place solely within the confines of a high-rise flat somewhere in urban Mexico one boring Sunday. Funny, yet freighted with an unsentimental poignancy that comes from the gradual revelation that one boy’s parents are going through a bitter divorce, this is almost excellent — not bad going for a first-time director (Fernando Eimbcke). Black-and-white, with negligible extras. Three stars
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David Mills