Corporate multiplex weepies can do strange things to your emotions. The effective ones – and Me Before You (Warner, 12) is certainly one of those – tickle your tear ducts without mercy for the two hours you sit with them. The second they’re over, however, you care not a whit about the plastic people you’ve just watched love, cry and/or die, and you’re principally thinking about what to have for dinner. Thea Sharrock’s vastly popular film proved mildly controversial for its sympathetic view of euthanasia in the face of disability, but it’s not an issue film. For better or worse, it’s entirely wrapped up in the subjective personal yearnings of its petal-faced young lovers, so dewily played by Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke that you wind up rooting for their prettiness in the absence of other clear human dimensions. There’s scarcely a thing I believe about the contraption, yet there I was, wiping salt water from my face anyway: it’s been crafted, timed and scored to sell out your better instincts.
My head can more easily back up the feelings that Mediterranea (StudioCanal, 15) stirred in me. Among the finest and flintiest in the recent spate of films tackling the European migrant influx, Jonas Carpagnino’s serenely confident debut (not a documentary, though there’s little narrative varnish here) tracks two friends from Burkina Faso as they make a new life in Italy, sparing us no complication or point of frustration in the adjustment process. It’s not expressly political film-making: Carpagnino invites viewers to consider his two subjects (beautifully played by Koudous Seihon and Alassane Sy) not as symbols or statistics, but as lively, imperfect people in even less perfect circumstances: amid the broader crisis, they bicker, bruise and rock out to Rihanna. Deservedly a big deal on the festival circuit last year, it’s quietly slipping straight to DVD here.
StudioCanal’s giving the same low-key treatment to Shelley (StudioCanal, 18), also well worth rescuing from the shelf: Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s Danish-set film is a refreshingly humane, slow-simmering spin on the often lurid pregnancy-horror genre. Soberly following the eerie fallout when a wealthy liberal couple employ their immigrant maid as a surrogate, the film adds all manner of complex social stitching to its velvety atmospherics.
It’s already among the bigger flubs of a bleak summer for blockbusters, so I shan’t spend too much time telling you what you’ve already heard about Duncan Jones’s optimistically titled video-game adaptation Warcraft: The Beginning (Universal, 12): a turgid corned-beef hash of multiple familiar fantasy realms and aesthetics, it might just be the most biliously ugly film ever to cost £125m. I’m not going to make any great claims for Race (Spirit, PG), but it’s a film with some time for beauty. A diverting if overly smooth-sanded Wiki-biopic of trailblazing Olympic athlete Jesse Owens, the film gazes in gilded awe upon his aesthetic prowess, though invites more questions than it perhaps expects to answer when a half-formed subplot semi-celebrates Hitler’s favourite film-maker Leni Riefenstahl for doing the same at the 1936 Munich Olympics.
Two of this week’s re-releases are rather special. The Criterion Collection’s latest addition is a double bill: The Emigrants/The New Land (Sony, 15) gives bright new life to Swedish director Jan Troell’s ravishing yet largely unromanticised 19th-century family saga of a Småland clan journeying to Minnesota. Though they met with Oscar-approved crossover success in the 1970s, the films seem to have fallen out of fashion a bit among cinephiles, but their stately muscularity has aged very well. Meanwhile, the Quay Brothers, the most spookily singular force in stop-motion animation, get the Blu-ray retrospective they deserve in the short film omnibus set Inner Sanctums – Quay Brothers: The Collected Animated Films 1979-2013 (BFI, 15) – which includes, beyond the obvious and treasured content, a new, short Christopher Nolan documentary on the duo’s curious workings.
Netflix’s drive towards having 50% original content is gathering pace. This week saw the online release not just of Ava DuVernay’s eagerly awaited race-relations study 13th – see below for Wendy Ide’s take on that – but also the premiere of The Siege of Jadotville, which dramatises the eponymous colonial-era siege in the Congo, as Irish UN troops battled Katangese rebels in 1961. Richie Smyth’s film offers a light grounding of measured political context before launching into rousing gung-ho territory – anchored sturdily by Jamie Dornan who, after this and the recent Anthropoid, has probably had his fill of bullet-pocked standoffs for a while. Thinly scripted but technically hale-and-hearty, it’s a slab of action history that looks entirely cinema-ready.
