Also showing: Tower Block, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel and Big Boys Gone Bananas

Our critics round up the best of the week's other new releases
Film: Tower Block
21 September 2012

Tower Block

Cert 15, 90 mins

**

If you live on the top floor of a soon-to-be-demolished tower block, the last thing you want is a psychopathic marksman picking you off one by one through the windows.

This is what happens in James Nunn and Ronnie Thompson’s movie, and it takes Sheridan Smith as a lonely blonde to sort things out for the few survivors. The film is efficiently made and more realist than some of its ilk, in that the desperate inhabitants seem credible. What it lacks is directorial flair. Derek Malcolm

Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel

Cert PG, 86 mins

***

This intriguing documentary about leading fashionista and iconoclast Diana Vreeland is based on audio recordings she made while preparing her 1984 biography, which had the same title as the film. It offers a persuasive part-archival portrait of a witty woman who started out in the Thirties and continued to seem thoroughly up-to-date more than half a century later. “I think your imagination is your reality,” she once said. And so hers proved. Derek Malcolm

Big Boys Gone Bananas!

Cert PG, 90 mins

***

Swedish film-maker Fredrik Gertten made a film called Bananas! not so long ago. It eloquently recounted the successful lawsuit 12 Nicaraguan plantation workers brought against the Dole Food Company, a corporate giant whose pesticides were said to have caused infertility and illness in many of its employees. It was to be shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival but was suddenly removed from competition. Gertten’s new film explains why. Dole’s expensive attorneys tried every trick in the book to stop the film. “It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than a bad reputation,” one of them said. And fortunately the Swedish courts agreed, eventually giving Gertten a notable victory. A salutary story. Derek Malcolm

Inbred

Cert 15, 98 mins

**

In Alex Chandon’s loud horror flick including Jo Hartley’s Kate, four young offenders and their case workers embark on community service in a Yorkshire village where a contretemps with the locals leads to bloody disaster. “They came in peace and left in pieces” is the film’s tagline. One leaves the cinema with one’s brain in pieces. Derek Malcolm

Santa Sangre

Cert 18, 123 mins

****

Horror fans hoping for art along with the artifice should take another look at Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1989 epic, within which you can detect Buñuel as well as gore and surreal wit. A Mexican survivor of a circus childhood serves as the torn-off arms of his mother as they go on a serial killing spree. Not as good as his previous El Topo, but pretty eye-opening all the same. Derek Malcolm

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Cert PG, 115 mins, reissue

****

The combination of a younger Harrison Ford as Dr Indiana Jones and a whole set of Steven Spielberg’s best set pieces renders this 1980 reissue still enjoyable today, especially all smartened up and showing at Imax theatres. It grossed $363 million, a huge amount then, despite everyone but him going down with the lurgy in Tunisia. As action adventure goes, it’s about the best there is. Derek Malcolm

The Prophet

No cert, 75 mins

***

Whatever you think of the philosophical musings of Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, whose 1923 book is still a cult classic, Gary Tarn’s film, narrated by Thandie Newton, is a pleasure to watch. Tarn’s own music is dovetailed with the words as he travels between Lebanon, Serbia, New York, Milan and London, teasing out images that underscore Gibran’s text, in a visual essay that owes something to Werner Herzog and Chris Marker. Derek Malcolm

Untouchable

Cert 12A, 112 mins

**

Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s film arrives here as one of the biggest box-office successes France has ever given us and is festooned with the French equivalent of Baftas. Francois Cluzet is a millionaire quadriplegic, engaging a smiley black guy from the projects (Omar Sy, above) who encourages him to laugh again. The whole thing is so predictable that it actually hurts, and the fact that it is vaguely based on a true case makes it seem all the more compromised. At one point, the millionaire engages a chamber orchestra to play classical staples to educate his helpmate. The carer then plays Earth, Wind and Fire, which makes all the straight-laced present jump up and dance. God help us all! There is something so fatuous about the whole farrago that one will never again believe the old saw that the French are more cultured than the Brits and couldn’t possibly be taken for this sort of gooey ride. Derek Malcolm

Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen Live in Budapest ’86

Cert 12A, 115 mins

***

Essentially a chance for Queen fans to see the group strutting their stuff back in 1986 (with visuals courtesy of the thorough Hungarian state film department). There’s also a 25-minute intro, which features dreary, post-Live Aid interviews with Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon. Luckily, Freddie Mercury proves their equal and opposite. The missing link between Peter Sellers and Sacha Baron Cohen, the toothy lead singer burbles explosively. Flirtatious, hyper-aware, funny. What a champ. Charlotte O’Sullivan

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