CALIBRE (Netflix) won Best British Film at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and well deserves the large audience it will now at last reach. Two young men (Jack Lowden and Martin McCann) decide to take a hunting trip to the remote Scottish Highlands. Whilst they are deerstalking something goes terribly wrong. They make matters far worse by a misjudged reaction. The marginalised locals are a rough lot and their idea of justice is Biblical, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. How will the young men fare? Can they survive and on what terms? Director Matt Palmer keeps up the tension. This is an excellent little thriller and it moves to a gripping climax leaving you wondering how you would cope in similar circumstances.
DREAMLAND (Bulldog DVD). Canadian director Brian McDonald comes up with an extremely weird and creepy children-trafficking thriller, which will (no doubt about it) have a classy cult following but will also be too disturbing and incoherent for many viewers. A hit-man is ordered to cut off a finger of a trumpeter. Both roles are played by Stephen McHattie, particularly charismatic as the hit-man who also saves a 14-year-old girl from a forced marriage to a vampire paedophile (Thomas Lemarquis). The massacre at the wedding banquet is second only to the wedding massacre in Game of Thrones. Juliette Lewis is allowed free rein and goes wildly over the top.
OF HUMAN BONDAGE (YouTube for free). Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel is very misogynist. A club-footed medical student (Leslie Howard) becomes besotted with a cockney actress who needles, humiliates and bankrupts him. What does he see in her? She is manipulative, dislikeable, contemptible and dead common. They disgust each other. It was not a role any Hollywood actress wanted to play – except Bette Davis and it made her a star in 1934. She has a great tirade: “I never cared for you. I always wiped my mouth after I had kissed you.” The cockney accent is imitation cockney and doesn’t feel real to English ears
THE HOST (iTunes). Naive young banker steals money and loses it all gambling. He is told his debt will be paid if he carries a briefcase to Amsterdam and exchanges it for another briefcase. He ends up in a luxurious house with a beautiful but strange woman. He goes missing. His brother sets out to find him. I thought I was watching a thriller about a Chinese cartel of smugglers; and then, without any warning, I found I was watching a completely different genre, a horror film. The two strands never gel.
INTOLERANCE (YouTube for free). D W Griffith’s silent epic, which premiered in 1916, is a must for anybody who is seriously interested in the history of film. There are four alternating stories: the fall of Babylon in 539BC, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, the massacre of the Huguenots in 1572, and a modern story about a man wrongly accused of murder and whether he can be saved from hanging in time. The last, acted by Bobby Harron and Mae Marsh, is the most involving, emotionally. The crosscutting between the stories and the intercutting increases the tension and excitement. The historical sequences with their grandiose sets and 3,000 extras offer spectacle on a colossal, jaw-dropping scale, never repeated.
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