For an ostensible Everyman, Tom Hanks has a performer's hunger to please that has shone through some of his most stoic roles. That eagerness, however, is suspended to marvellous effect in Paul Greengrass's titanium-tough tension exercise Captain Phillips (Sony, 12), in which Hanks plays the real-life skipper of an American cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates with nothing to lose. Emotionally bare and physically distressed, Hanks looks palpably out of his depth, and the result is his best performance – unlucky not to receive one of the film's six Oscar nominations. (Riveting newcomer Barkhad Abdi, playing the invading captain, was more fortunate.) It's a formidable fist of a film, yet not even the best Somali pirate thriller of 2013 – happily, its remarkable Danish twin A Hijacking is available on Blinkbox, so compare for yourself.
This week's DVD releases, in fact, effectively round up some of 2013's most invaluable screen acting. I'm not sure any actor last year gave a more tender, heart-crushing performance than the late James Gandolfini as a disillusioned divorcee in Enough Said (Fox, 12), a typically wry, sun-bleached character comedy from Nicole Holofcener that dares to take an interest in the romantic lives of the over-40 and imperfect-looking; Julia Louis-Dreyfus, long owed a big-screen part this generous, meshes delightfully with Gandolfini as a weary Los Angeles masseuse taken off-guard by her desire for him.
Holofcener's film would make a pretty neat double-feature with Chilean director Sebastián Lelio's Gloria (Network, 15), a rapturous, often riotous tale of middle-aged rebirth and sexual discovery. Graced with an incandescent lead performance by Paulina García as the title character, a 50-ish firecracker reclaiming her identity minus husband and children, it's frank, funny and exquisitely free of condescension; Meryl Streep would kill for the remake rights.
Rounding off an unusually generous week for mature romance is Le Week-End (Curzon, 15), Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi's bittersweet study of an academic couple's 30th-anniversary jaunt to Paris. There's something in Kureishi's writing here that puts the "pat" in pathos, but Lindsay Duncan is luminous as the marriage's more restless half.
There's rougher British stuff to be found in Filth (Lionsgate, 18), an appropriately unhinged adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel about a depraved Edinburgh detective who's a greater threat to society than most of the yobs he's chasing. Inspired and uneven, it's galvanised by James McAvoy's entirely mercurial turn as a very bad lieutenant indeed.
An altogether less frenetic criminal study is the stately lovers-on-the-run romance Ain't Them Bodies Saints (Universal, 15) – a sort of spiritual sequel to Terrence Malick's Badlands, awash with dazzling sound and imagery. It's a film that David Gordon Green might well have made 10 years ago, but the whimsical backwoods buddy comedy of Prince Avalanche (Metrodome, 15) is more his speed these days. Buoyed by the sprightly chemistry of Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, this slight, sweet remake of a 2011 Icelandic film proves that's no bad thing.
Netflix subscribers have an early opportunity to catch up with one of the talking points of last month's Sundance film festival: Greg Whiteley's fly-on-the-wall documentary Mitt, an intimate but impartial study of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's failed 2012 campaign (as well as his unsuccessful 2008 candidacy). You'd be forgiven for wanting no further reminders of the man, but he emerges as a disquietingly disarming figure, some distance from his glib, glue-haired public self: this is a compelling examination of campaigning as performance.
