Unless he has an eight-part adaptation of The Silmarillion in the works, Peter Jackson will bid adieu to Middle Earth this Christmas, when the final part of his Hobbit trilogy wheezes its way into cinemas. Whatever its individual merits, it won't be a moment too soon. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Warner, 12) represents a beefy improvement on 2012's turgid kickoff, An Unexpected Journey – like any second act, it's unburdened by groundwork – but still exposes the craven pointlessness of trisecting JRR Tolkien's slim fantasy yarn.
Covering the further travails of Bilbo Baggins and a lairy pack of dwarves as they trudge through Mirkwood in pursuit of guarded treasure, it should remain the plottiest entry in the series, yet at 160 effects-stuffed minutes still feels over-extended, with Jackson concocting redundant subplots of his own to pass the time. (No one, least of all Tolkien himself, called for the return of Orlando Bloom's insipid elf Legolas.) As the cuddly, beleaguered Bilbo, Martin Freeman remains the series' chief delight; if only Jackson would stick to him with more conviction. Still, fans will revel again in the most dazzling set pieces (the climactic liquid-gold battle against Benedict Cumberbatch's eponymous dragon is narratively arbitrary, but still a wow), and the Blu-ray bulges with almost enough extra features to keep them occupied until December.
If Jackson is a gifted artist obstinately treading water, the same can't be said of Spike Lee, a gifted artist lately determined never to make the same bad film twice. The unlikelihood of a repeat is the chief consolation to be taken from his peculiarly botched remake of Oldboy (Universal, 18). Park Chan-wook's gleamingly grotesque revenge thriller needed wilier translation to work in a western context and Lee's very literal lift achieves only unmastered absurdism, with a well-cast Josh Brolin adrift as an inexplicably imprisoned adman on the trail of his mystery captor and a radioactively awful Sharlto Copley yawing hopelessly as our dainty villain.
Strangely denied a cinema release in the UK despite prominent festival berths in London and Sundance, and eminently widescreen subject matter, Nick Ryan's handsome documentary The Summit (Metrodome, 15) investigates the 2008 mountaineering disaster that saw 11 climbers perish on K2 in highly questionable circumstances. It's a grabby mystery, vividly reconstructed with an assist from ace cinematographer Robbie Ryan, though its Rashomon-style layering of perspective is fussy and unilluminating, particularly when the film's focus overwhelmingly favours a single casualty, Irishman Ger McDonnell. Still, it's muscular stuff.
Subtitle-inclined viewers haven't much to choose from lately, with Scandi crime sequel Easy Money II: Hard to Kill (Icon, 15) the most prominent release. Its taut, alert predecessor appeared in UK cinemas last summer; the fact that this one's going straight to DVD accurately suggests the boilerplate proficiency of this return for Joel Kinnaman's economics-trained underworld antihero. (A third film is on its way.) Fans of seamy Swedes would be better off checking out the week's best Netflix addition, Mikael Marcimain's Call Girl. An engrossing dissection of a 1970s prostitution scandal involving several high-ranking government officials, it plays a little like Tinker Tailor Soldier Pimp.
The best new film appearing online this week, however, is the excellent Georgian coming-of-age drama In Bloom, which makes history as the first film to premiere in the UK via Video On Demand prior to its cinema release, an increasingly popular distribution model in the US for arthouse fare. A perceptive, generous study of two teenage girls whose friendship sees them through the political tumult of the post-Soviet civil war, it debuts on Curzon Home Cinema on Tuesday, the same night it opens the female-powered Birds Eye View film festival in London. It hits cinemas next month, but should cultivate the audience it deserves on smaller screens.
