Much was made in advance of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Disney, 12) being a standalone film in the now 40-year-old space-hopping franchise, a narrative that tucks in snugly before the events of 1977’s series starter, but introduces fresh characters and objectives within a known world. It’s a good idea: studio money guzzlers wouldn’t dream of letting the whole thing lie, but the overt nostalgia mined by The Force Awakens isn’t a limitless resource. So why does Rogue One, for all its ostensible newness of story and tone, feel so heavy, so desultory, so beige in look and outlook?
Gareth Edwards, who graduated to the big league with style in Godzilla, takes his cue from more terrestrial war cinema. Squint a bit and you can spot flecks of Platoon or even The Thin Red Line in its sober dedication to battle, as it follows doughty Jyn Erso – Felicity Jones, trying hard with a character written only as a collection of virtues – and a troupe of fellow lock-jawed rebels on a quest to steal plans for the Death Star from the Empire.
It’s a pretty dry mission, superficially complicated by the film’s darting structure and reverent regard for its fighters, but what started as a series knowingly in thrall to B-movie cheesiness is now dourly in thrall to itself, cloaking even its most extravagant visuals and gizmos in a layer of stern, neutralising dust. Rogue One is imposingly serious, with not all that much to be serious about.
Swiss Army Man (Lionsgate, 15), on the other hand, conjures emotional gravitas from a premise seemingly devised from a MDMA-assisted round of Mad Libs. Stranded and suicidal on a desert island, Paul Dano happens upon the washed-up corpse of Daniel Radcliffe, uses the body’s posthumous methane expulsions as a kind of jet-fart-ski and gradually reanimates him into a companion of sorts. It’s a synopsis that will either have you first in line or running for the hills, but either way, the film doesn’t deliver what you might expect. Promising first-time directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (oh-so-preciously billed as “Daniels”) don’t skimp on the lunatic comic potential of their idea, but find in it a tender metaphorical paean to resilience. Meanwhile, saying Radcliffe’s never been better than as a gaseous cadaver is somehow less unkind than it sounds.
Largely clad in dove-white briefs, Russell Tovey is on robust form – in more senses than one – as a closeted Premier League footballer in The Pass (Lionsgate, 15), a smartly acted film transfer of John Donnelly’s Royal Court play from 2014. “Transfer” is the operative word: preserving the text’s brisk, chatty chamber piece structure, director Ben Williams makes few concessions to the new medium and the result lacks some of the play’s sensual charge. But it’s lively and thoughtful nonetheless; for those who couldn’t get to the theatre, it’s a slicker step up from an NT Live-style transmission.
Another eccentrically detailed character etching by Michael Shannon is the chief virtue of Frank & Lola (Universal, 18), an indie perched uneasily between bruised May-December romance and Death Wish-style revenge exploitation. Shannon’s crumpled chef, on the warpath against his young girlfriend’s rapist, is a more nuanced alternative to Charles Bronson; it’s a shame that Imogen Poots, as the said girlfriend, is granted scarcely any perspective in this affair.
Still, she’s better off than poor Naomi Watts, handed little more than a series of alarmed expressions to play as a widowed, paranoid psychologist in Shut In (Arrow, 15), a limp, stencil-drawn remote-house horror; “Shit ’Un” is a better title.
Iconoclastic documentary maker Alma Har’el moves into beguilingly esoteric territory in LoveTrue (Dogwoof, 15), investigating and subverting human expectations of true love via a series of intimately observational human studies and performance interludes. Har’el fluidly bends form to fit her most abstract ideas.
Luchino Visconti fans have been well treated by the reissue market this month. Trimmed with thorough documentary extras, a pleasing restoration of the Italian master’s 1976 swansong The Innocent (Cult Films, 15) does justice to its softly seething 19th-century melodrama. Both the film and the package seem restrained, however, beside a hefty, dazzling multi-disc rerelease of Ludwig (Arrow, 12), the four-hour Bavarian royal biopic that was Visconti’s passion project, a thing of wild, exhausting beauty, both chilly and red blooded.
Finally, Netflix’s vintage back catalogue may look increasingly bare, but the streaming service has done classic film lovers a favour with the premiere of Five Came Back, a riveting three-part documentary that does full justice to Mark Harris’s meaty history book of the same name. Probing the second world war frontline activities of American alpha film-makers John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, William Wyler and George Stevens, it’s equally perceptive about the conflicts of creative propaganda and model American masculinity, the latter subtly highlighted by Meryl Streep’s considered narration.
