Remember Edge of Tomorrow (Warner, 12), Doug Liman’s time warp thriller that, despite its slick cleverness and muscular, metallic clatter, underwhelmed at the box office in June? If you don’t, that’s exactly what the studio is hoping for. Never has a blockbuster been as drastically rebranded for DVD as this one, which now goes by the ungainly double-barrelled moniker Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, that sneaky colon optimistically implying a franchise that will never be. It’s not the first such change the film has endured, either: they might as well have stuck with its pre-release title, All You Need Is Kill. (What is the edge of tomorrow, anyway? Today?)
More’s the pity, since by any name, Liman’s film remains an exciting, conceptually rich hunk of mainstream sci-fi. Dismissed by some critics as “Groundhog Day with aliens” – not an inaccurate description, but not an unappealing one either – its one-day-on-loop structure cannily channels the perfectionist drive of video-game culture. Tom Cruise, recently so stainless in his action vehicles, gets an unusually prickly, self-aware role as a demoted military figurehead forced to walk the talk when he’s sent to the front line, literally fighting the same extraterrestrial battle over and over until he’s worthy enough to survive it. Likewise, Edge of Tomorrow arrives on shelves reincarnated, renewed and battle-ready: it deserves another go.
I’m less inclined to lobby for an autumnal reappraisal of The Other Woman (Fox, 12), a lacquered, would-be feminist farce that plays a little like the already light-headed First Wives Club on alcopops – but it’s not as toxic as its critical reputation. Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann give it some comic snap as the mutually scorned mistress and wife of a Wall Street love rat who embark on a collaborative revenge mission, and its gender politics are often arrestingly strange, but the fizz flattens as the film succumbs to lowbrow pratfalls.
Unreservedly deserving of its fatal reviews, however, is Grace of Monaco (Warner, 12). Olivier Dahan’s stylistically unhinged Grace Kelly portrait is every bit as risible as you’ve heard, wafting as it does between Hitchcock meta-pastiche, Ferrero Rocher-wrapped Princess Diaries fantasy and vacant historical reflection on Charles de Gaulle’s 1963 blockading of Monaco, in which the rights of French tax evaders are defended with riotously impassioned verve. Nicole Kidman, committed if brazenly miscast, survives it. You might not.
Dahan’s folly looks even more like frippery when placed beside Camille Claudel 1915 (Soda, PG), fellow Frenchman Bruno Dumont’s very different idea of a tortured artiste biopic. A measured, selective snapshot of the eponymous sculptor in decline, set two years after she was unjustly institutionalised by her family, it’s as tonally dour and formally severe as you’d expect from the director, with real mentally ill patients making up the majority of the cast. It’s Juliette Binoche’s astonishing, open-hearted lead turn that makes the impressively hard graft worthwhile.
One wonders how the perma-glowing Audrey Tautou would fare under Dumont’s chilly control, but she’s on agreeably familiar turf in Chinese Puzzle (StudioCanal, 15), a sprightly, primary-coloured closer to director Cédric Klapisch’s loose trilogy of globe-trotting romantic comedies. This time we’re in the Big Apple, where Tautou is one of several markedly pretty expats on a bed-hopping carousel; the stakes are low and leisurely, the comedy droll, the result a bright, chic divertissement.
The virtual bargain bins of online streaming outlets are often clogged with ominous no-name castoffs, but nestled amid the more hilarious Z-list offerings in Blinkbox’s 99p rental section – I’ve already bookmarked Angel Dog, in which the title is applied quite literally, for future viewing – are some unexpected diamonds that you won’t find on Netflix. The pick of the lot is American director Ramin Bahrani’s moving 2008 miniature Goodbye Solo, in which a crusty, elderly loner in North Carolina hires a gabby Senegalese taxi driver to ferry him to his intended suicide spot. It’s a disarming story of diverted destiny; a more grounded take, one might say, on living, dying and repeating.
