Critical Mass: DVDs

SIDE EFFECTS:
Steven Soderbergh’s final theatrical film – or so he promises – encapsulates the best of the director’s style. The slick and smart thriller is clinical and disquieting. Rooney Mara plays a young depressive and Jude Law is her psychiatrist, paid to endorse certain drugs. Side Effects begins as an examination of mental illness and the self-serving pharmaceutical industry. Soderbergh quickly and deftly upends his apparent agenda and the film segues into a thriller in the vein of Psycho or Basic Instinct.  However, there is a loss of intensity in the final third. There is too much exposition and the director strains for a derivative, Hitchcock-style denouement. Extras include fun spoof feature by Catherine Zeta-Jones.

EVIL DEAD:
Avoiding the camp outrageousness of Sam Raimi’s 1981 low budget classic (actually I think you mean Evil Dead II – horror ed) Fede Alvarez’s slick reboot raises the gore ante. Jane Levy heads up the usual posse of teenagers who – as ever – visit an isolated cabin and unwittingly summon demons. As faces are sawn off, tongues sliced in two, needles puncture eyes and those pesky plants begin to take advantage, Alvarez offers some canny winks towards Raimi’s directing style. Swooping cameras give us the point of view of a rampaging demon; several scenes are lifted shot-by-shot from the original. Disappointingly Alvarez buys into horror’s grand tradition of saving the graphic torture and sexual violence for the mostly disposable female characters. A nasty little beast – in a perfectly adequate way, if you’re so inclined. Packed extras.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES:
The sprawling The Place Beyond the Pines desperately wants to be a movie about big ideas: causality, patriarchy, the cyclical nature of violence. An overbearing sense of his own importance prevents Cianfrance from achieving the Mallick-esque gravitas he craves. Ryan Gosling shines as a laconic, post-James Dean dreamboat with tattoos and a blond dye job. He embodies that Northeastern USA spirit that made Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine so distinctive. Bradley Cooper underwhelms as an ambitious street cop with political ambitions, and Emory Cohen plays Cooper’s rebellious son. Cooper isn’t half as engaging a leading man as Gosling, and the film’s final third is crushingly dull. Basic extras include commentary.

A LATE QUARTET:
Set in the privileged world of upper middle class Manhattanites, Yaron Zilberman’s talky character drama is a meditation on ageing, friendship and ego. The leads are sublime, particularly Christopher Walken as the irresistibly tender Peter. He is the gentle cellist of a reknowned quartet. When he reveals he has Parkinson’s, his fellow musicians (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Mark Ivanir) panic. The group begins to unravel. Old resentments rise up in long, beautifully scripted scenes. At one stage Peter tells the quartet that playing is a commitment to “continuously adjust to each other up to the end, even if we are out of tune”. The metaphor of music as life is not subtle. Neither is the classical score. However, former documentary maker Zilberman has a brilliant eye for the practical. His realistic settings of rehearsal spaces and classrooms ground this classy piece. Sparse extras include short cast interviews.