Clint Eastwood, like Woody Allen, is routinely praised for the near-clockwork regularity of his output: not every film’s a gem, but you can be sure another one’s coming down the pike. Sully: Miracle on the Hudson (Warner, 12), however, is one of those Eastwood films you wish he’d taken a little more time over. There are whispers of a deeper, sadder, more stirring psychological portrait in this study of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the American pilot who successfully landed a plane in the Hudson river after bird-induced engine failure, but they are hard to hear over the more mechanically assembled procedural drama surrounding it.
Tom Hanks, now enjoying his best years as an actor, decades after all that excessive Oscar gilding, lends the film a measure of sorrowful complexity, teasing out the reserved ambiguities in Sullenberger’s response to what was either an act of heroism, recklessness or both. Eastwood, however, never appears quite as interested in such character detailing, returning repeatedly to the scene of the crash – joltingly realised, certainly, but not where the human stakes in this almost-tragedy are to be found.
For several months before Moonlight was even a topic of conversation in Hollywood, there was a widespread assumption within the industry that Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (Fox, 15) was set to dominate the Oscars. It wound up entirely unnominated, knocked off track by the resurfacing of a university rape trial against the writer-director-star. But the ensuing controversy also diverted focus from the dubious merits of the film itself. A heavily fictionalised biopic of Virginian slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, it’s a cinematic war cry with undeniable fire in its belly, but ham in its hand. Parker plays Turner with sturdy conviction, but his film-making technique is cribbed entirely from Mel Gibson’s flatulently macho playbook, minus the formal nous. If you need extended slow motion and a handy montage of lynched bodies set to – wait for it – Strange Fruit to underline the atrocities of slavery for you, Parker’s film may be of value, but its provocative title should have been reclaimed from DW Griffith by a more accomplished artist.
The admittedly niche pick of the week’s DVDs is Four Days in France (Matchbox Films, 15), a witty, erotic, surprisingly hypnotic French road movie that may be LGBT cinema’s most substantial engagement to date with the social and sexual politics of Grindr. Jérôme Reybaud’s film has something of an updated Jacques Rivette wiggle to its wandering, as it follows a recently separated gay couple on an eccentrically horny sequence of rural encounters.
Another new director worth following: Britain’s Rachel Tunnard, whose charming, thirtysomething coming-of-age comedy Adult Life Skills (Kaleidoscope, 15) succumbs to a few hyper-quirky pitfalls, but finds more rueful honesty in its study of a stalled woman regathering her life after her twin brother’s death. Children, meanwhile, will be agreeably diverted by Ballerina (eOne, U), a lushly rendered French-Canadian animation about a plucky orphan with grand ballet aspirations in which everything goes reassuringly as expected – save, perhaps, for the musical supplanting of Tchaikovsky by Carly Rae Jepsen.
Finally, while the canon of holiday-appropriate films is thinner and mostly more dour than its Christmas-themed counterpart, Mubi has uncovered a small, rapturous jewel in French artist Andy Guérif’s Maesta, The Passion of the Christ. Not to be remotely confused with Mel Gibson’s bloody bluster, it’s a kind of hour-long cinematic frieze, telling the story of the Passion in a series of painstakingly exquisite living tableaux. Recreating a 14th-century artistic aesthetic with a mixture of contemporary irony and exuberance, it’s by no means only a feast for the faithful.
