At some point – quietly, without ceremony and certainly at no one's urgent request – Zac Efron morphed from a fibreglass facsimile of matinee-idol perfection circa 1957 into rather a good actor. The Paperboy and At Any Price showed flashes of a burgeoning sense of self-awareness in the former High School Musical poppet, but it's Nicholas Stoller's lewd, lairy and very funny comedy Bad Neighbours (Universal, 15) that heralds his fully formed arrival.
Like Channing Tatum, Efron has clocked that beefcake is best served with a side of irony: he's both gleefully repellent and improbably vulnerable as the dimwitted, near-sociopathic president of a party-hearty college fraternity who resolves to make life a living hell for the obliviously square thirtysomething couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) living next door. The film itself pulls off an unexpectedly deft balance too, smartening up its riotous gross-out material with sharper, tarter character comedy, as their ongoing war against the fratboys forces the older couple to admit to their own spent youth – it's a keener, rowdier reflection on the American manchild complex than any of Judd Apatow's drippy recent efforts.
As a story of self-acceptance in stunted suburbia, Bad Neighbours has an improbable feminine companion piece in Stacie Passon's wryly pained and subtly erotic Concussion (Channel 4 DVD, 15). Hitherto best known as the rough-edged Calamity Jane in TV's Deadwood, the wonderful Robin Weigert gives a pointed, peppery performance as the less content half of a moneyed Garden State lesbian couple, who finds the inner ignition that motherhood and interior design have failed to show her when she embarks on a secret career as a high-end escort to other women in her position. Risky, precisely observed and bracing in its matter-of-fact response to sexual exploration, it's coincidentally the week's second-best release to be set in Montclair, New Jersey.
No shame in that, given the peerlessness of the first. Breaking Bad's recent Emmy victory renewed the "greatest TV drama of all time" discussion: for me, it's tidily ended by the long-overdue Blu-ray release of The Sopranos: The Complete Series (Warner, 18). Luxuriating across 28 discs, David Chase's magnificent saga of crime, punishment and cannoli amid the high-flying lowlifes of the suburban mob has lost none of its wit, social acuity or literate elegance in the 15 years since it first surfaced on HBO and changed pretty much everything: lent extra emotional clout by James Gandolfini's subsequent premature passing, it deserves to stand alongside the Godfather films in America's cultural pantheon. The Blu-ray set, gorgeously transferred and overrun with carefully planned featurettes and audio commentaries, will be making a lot of early Christmas lists.
The series' match of bleak gunplay to everyday domesticity resurfaces in the crisp, clattering arthouse thriller Blue Ruin (Channel 4 DVD, 15), its slow-smouldering story of a Virginia vagrant on a complicated revenge trail calling to mind the Coen brothers in its ruthless structural efficiency and tar-dark humour. Reaching for a similar shelf of inspiration is Texas teen noir We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Metrodome, 15), the junior Jim Thompson mechanics of which tick along nicely enough until a slack finale. Also doing a reasonable directorial impersonation is A Thousand Times Good Night (Arrow Films, 15): a sensitive, somewhat simplistic melodrama about a combat-zone photojournalist (an excellent Juliette Binoche) facing the war at home, it's so worthily Susanne Bier-y that I had to rewind to check the Dane's name wasn't in the credits.
Whatever hand, human or randomly digital, is guiding the programming over at Netflix, they are to be commended on consistently turning up the most pleasingly unexpected documentaries. This week's is the splendidly titled The Bastard Sings the Sweetest Song, which received some minor festival attention in 2012 before dropping off the radar. It deserves another chance: a tough-minded dual portrait of a hard-up Guyanese cockfighter and his alcoholic 75-year-old mother, it's a study in severely compromised unconditional love that works hard for its unsentimental emotional rewards.
