For a time, smart US pop culture writer Joe Reid ran an elegantly simple Tumblr titled This Had Oscar Buzz – an online cemetery of sorts for films that enjoyed fleeting, dolefully unfulfilled awards hype before anyone actually saw them. (I'm partial to the acronym THOB.) Released in January to a chorus of polite silence, Jonathan Teplitzky's prisoner-of-war drama The Railway Man (Lionsgate, 15) is a THOB film of the first order, which isn't to say that it's at all bad: it's dun-hued and solidly unfashionable, the cinematic equivalent of sensible shoes.
Colin Firth is comfortingly cast as Eric Lomax, the former British army officer on whose bestselling autobiography the film is based. Still traumatised years later by second world war experience in a Japanese POW camp, he seeks out his chief captor (Hiroyuki Sanada) in an attempt to gain closure.
Nicole Kidman offers conscientious support as his wife, Patti; Jeremy Irvine is particularly bright and affecting as the younger Lomax. Fustily but touchingly out of time, it plays better as Sunday-night telly.
I was more moved by The Railway Man than I was by Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father, Like Son (Arrow, PG), a shamelessly sudsy switched-at-birth melodrama that had grown men bawling in the aisles at Cannes last year. One suspects those same critics would be less forgiving of such algebraic emotional calculation from Steven Spielberg, whose jury duly handed the film a prize. (A remake by Spielberg's DreamWorks studio is naturally in the works.)
Kore-eda's supple command of everyday domestic exchanges goes some way toward disguising the irksomely patronising class politics at play in this story of two contrasting couples – one cheery and working class, one chilly and white-collar wealthy – grappling with the discovery that they've been raising each other's sons for the past six years.
It's a set-up ripe for effectively sentimental wrench-work, and Kore-eda has been there successfully with I Wish and Still Walking, but the machinations this time are too one-sided, and his interest in the children themselves too vague.
Spring isn't the time to be savouring chestnuts (or indeed Morris Chestnut) on an open fire, but timing isn't the strong suit of Christmas bauble The Best Man Holiday (Universal, 15). An amiable sequel to the 15-year-old African-American ensemble comedy The Best Man, it's too late, but you couldn't accuse it of being too little. Stuffed to the gills with ripe melodrama, lewd sexual banter and seasonal mawkishness as a squabbling gang of friends congregate at their wealthiest member's mansion, it's a Big Chill knockoff with added sass.
Continuing the wintery theme, there's less sentiment than there is icicle-spiked scenery – not surprising, given that it's the Discovery Channel's first foray into drama – in Klondike (Entertainment One, 15), a Ridley Scott-produced epic miniseries about gold-seeking adventurers (played with beardy gusto by Game of Thrones alumnus Richard Madden and Augustus Prew) in the Yukon circa 1897. Dramatically a bit windy, it's still gung-ho fun, with zesty star support from Tim Roth, Sam Shepard and a refreshingly well-used Abbie Cornish.
Making its way to UK viewers via iTunes, the week's most notable online premiere is the South African festival hit Material. Rescued from occasional stiffness by the quickfire charisma of star Riaad Moosa, Craig Freimond's thoughtful film tells the story of a young Muslim shop clerk caught between his nascent career in standup comedy and his family's rigid faith. As such, it places a welcome spotlight on the country's vast but under-represented Indian population, and the eternally unloved city of Johannesburg.
