Six years ago, William Friedkin's magnificently raw adaptation of Tracy Letts's paranoid psycho-thriller Bug managed to slip under the radar of most UK filmgoers, thanks in part to the bemusement of its distributor, which simply couldn't figure out how to sell the damned thing. Not so his next Letts collaboration, Killer Joe (2011, Entertainment One, 18), a deep-fried, jet black slice of twisted Texan gothic that has attracted the kind of attention and notoriety that Friedkin has not enjoyed since the days of Cruising.
Boasting barnstorming ensemble performances from Matthew McConaughey, Gina Gershon, Thomas Haden Church and rising star Juno Temple, this tale of trailer park lowlifes conspiring variously to bump off and/or pimp family members became an outre cause celebre thanks in part to a grotesquely prolonged scene of quasi-sexual chicken-bone abuse upon which an attention-grabbing PR campaign was built. Ironically, it's the least well-judged part of a movie that veers throughout between smartly psychotic satirical dialogue and hackneyed virgin/whore gender role cliches.
At its best, this reminds us what an unruly force of cinematic nature Friedkin can still be, encouraging a level of fearlessness in his cast that is electrifyingly captured by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Having cut his teeth adapting Pinter and Mart Crowley for the screen, the director still knows how to make a stage play look anything but stagey and there's little sense here of the text's theatrical origins. Good, too, to know that at the age of 77 Friedkin can still infuriate and alarm as much as ever, showing little sign of mellowing with age, and resolutely refusing to cut the movie to avoid a box-office-killing NC-17 rating in the US. The result is a visceral assault, impressively spiky and scuzzy, although anyone impressed by Killer Joe's down-and-dirty edge should also seek out its predecessor, which remains the real mother lode.
Commercially speaking, neither of the Friedkin/Letts collaborations can hold a candle to Rules of Engagement, a military courtroom drama that (briefly) topped the US box-office chart in 2000, and featured a typically committed performance by Tommy Lee Jones. There's none of that commitment in Men in Black 3 (2012, Sony, PG), in which TLJ looks like a man world-wearily picking up the cheque while waiting for Josh Brolin to step into his time-travelling shoes and inject the missing zing as Agent K's younger self. Will Smith is as ebulliently bouncy as ever, and Emma Thompson makes the most of an all-too-fleeting cameo, but it's depressing to remember just how unexpectedly sparky the first movie was back in 1997 and how corporate this third instalment seems by comparison. For proof, check out the Men in Black trilogy box set, which is an object lesson in diminishing returns.
You could be forgiven for dismissing the kookily entitled Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012, Studio Canal, 15) as merely a romcom rehash of Melancholia in which existential angst is replaced by a saccharine sweet faux-alternative sensibility. Yet for all its formulaic offbeat tics (the character who loves vinyl and suffers from a lovable sleep disorder etc) there's something oddly endearing about this quietly apocalyptic affair. Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley play it fairly straight as the mismatched couple thrown together (and apart) by impending Armageddon and Lorene Scafaria retains the deadpan likability of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist as she graduates from writer to writer-director. Nothing like the bomb that its box-office failure in the States suggested, this may be uneven fare but it's also sweet, touching and occasionally quite poignant.
In the self-explanatorily titled The Five-Year Engagement (2012, Universal, 15), Jason Segel and Emily Blunt negotiate elongated prenuptial ups and downs as her career subtly threatens his, with relationship-challenging results. There's a terrific 90-minute movie buried in this more than two-hour offering from the post-Bridesmaids Judd Apatow production stable, with the disintegration of co-writer Segel's character being overcranked for comic effect, undercutting the more recognisable reality of the movie's best observed low-key moments. It's a credit to Blunt that even when things get dramatically out of hand her droll delivery and naturalistic responses stop the narrative from completely crossing the line of credibility. Rhys Ifans has fun as a lecherous academic whose predatory shtick is skin-crawlingly spot on, and the laugh count is satisfactorily high. A relief, too, that (in a break from Apatow tradition) there's no gross-out talking point, Segel and his Muppets collaborator Nicholas Stoller settling instead for a scene in which adult matters are discussed in the voices of Elmo and the Cookie Monster to wonderfully strange effect.
