Film

Look, could everyone please stop denigrating the Entourage movie for spurious reasons like 'it feels like an extended episode of the TV series'? Since the US release a few weeks ago, critics across the Atlantic have booed and shamed writer and director Doug Ellin’s long-awaited reunion of Vinnie Chase and co for just that. As if, instead of being a cheery summer feel-good flick for nostalgic fans, the show ought to have morphed into some erudite reflection for Entourage neophytes on how childish 20-something boys grow up into upstanding young gentlemen. Yawn. What a boring film that would have been. What did detractors expect? A brand new cast, novel character arcs and an entirely different raison d’etre?

With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it is now safe to conclude: there are good documentary makers and there are excellent documentary makers and then there is Joshua Oppenheimer, who is amazing.

Queen & County is John Boorman’s follow-up to his 1987 semi-autobiographical film Hope & Glory, although why a sequel now, after 28 years, I don’t know. (We’re not in regular contact.) I can only tell you that if you absolutely loved the first film, as I did — and still do — the news I’m about to deliver is not great, but there’s no avoiding it, so here you are: this is tonally confused, emotionally unengaging, doesn’t seem relevant in any way, and as for Bill, who was once so bright and charming and promising, he’s nothing special any more. I don’t know what I expected him to turn out like, but dull? I didn’t see that coming, I confess.

Man Up is a British rom-com starring Simon Pegg as Jack and Lake Bell as Nancy. Nancy’s problem, at the outset, is that she is 34 and still single — has yet to ‘man up’ — and is therefore a failure, and if you can buy that as a premise for a film, then that’s your look-out. I’m old and I’m tired and I can’t be always telling you what’s right and what’s plain wrong. So it opens with Nancy, who is single (at 34!; the horror!), attending a friend’s engagement party and refusing to come down from her hotel room as her love life, we are given to understand, has been somewhat disastrous and now she has a pathological fear of putting herself out there.

Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops at SeaWorld. Super Size Me reduced neither the all-American waistline nor the profit margin of McDonald’s. The Cove did not prevent the Japan whale industry slaughtering dolphins. So what possible chance, more than a decade after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, has a mere film of bringing about that most chimerical of holy grails: an admission that the case for invading Iraq was knowingly built on a lie? We Are Many revisits the anti-war marches of 15 February 2003.

At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in which sinners guilty of simony, hypocrisy and graft are punished. The last of those spend eternity immersed in a river of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liquid, the poet noted, looks much like the tar that Venetians boil up in their arsenal to smear over the hulls of their ships. Those lines came to mind more than once as I walked around the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, not least because a large section is installed in the ancient buildings of that very Arsenale. The Biennale is always the same — the crowds! the people! — yet always different.

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great auteurs maudits of this century, Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein simply died young. Not Welles. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for cheap liquor (he, the great bon viveur; he, for whom the very word commercial was an insult when applied to film), he sent a pang through the world’s heart.

Firstly, a message to all Marvel fanboys: there is nothing for you here. Nothing. No CGI, no endless battles, no superheroines with their boobs on show, no deafening soundtrack and no Andy Serkis popping up for reasons I still can’t fathom, and don’t care to fathom anyhow. So go away and heckle someone else, unless you want to stick around, in which case, be warned: this is a proper film with proper acting and it even comes with a proper story that makes proper sense. Some films are like this, you know. This adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, scripted by David Nicholls, and stars Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts, the hunk du jour who is everywhere at present.

If you’re unsure about the man (or woman) you’re dating, go and see this film. It’ll cause rifts in a weak relationship, and yield powerful debate – or perhaps agreement on the central themes – in a strong one. It asks men to defend or disown the role of hero, and begs us to consider whether motherhood naturally graces its host with more altruistic instincts than fatherhood. Who’s braver: men or women? Or, let’s cut to the chase, you or me? At the core of this slick and sometimes hilarious Swedish film by Ruben Östlund is the non-rhetorical question: when push comes to shove, what would you do? I’ve always been a believer in the universal – and the humorous – springing from the particular.

For the past year Russell Brand - who is worth an estimated £10 million - has been making a film about inequality. You may already know this. The comedian’s antics filming across the capital have regularly made the news. His attempt to storm RBS resulted in a temp angrily blogging that the palaver had caused his paella to go cold. Meanwhile, his visit to confront the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere about his non-dom tax status came to no avail as he wasn’t home. Not that such a small technicality has stopped the scene from being included in the final cut. Russell instead interrogates a woman over the telecom - a woman who I can only presume was Lord Rothermere’s housekeeper.

If the Fast & Furious team made Casablanca 2 ('Morocco Drift') it would be a more artistically credible, better acted, and more entertaining movie than Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Vin Diesel’s Victor Laszlo may have gained an impressive set of guns fighting for the Czech resistance since we last saw him - shame, too, about the hair loss - but at least he wouldn’t spend even one second of the film talking about 'midi-chlorians'. In his decision to revisit the Star Wars universe and create a trilogy of prequels, George Lucas looked upon the epic vista of his cinematic triumph and decided to open-cast strip mine it for cash.

It was called Frankly Speaking and by golly it was. The great screen actress Bette Davis was being interviewed by not one but two men: George Coulouris, with whom she co-starred in Hollywood, and a BBC producer. ‘It’s a little sad for some of us who adore your work that a lot of your best performances have been in fairly trivial films,’ said the producer, Peter Duval-Smith, as if to tempt Davis into dishing the dirt on the directors who made her what she became. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Davis replied, not a woman to be tricked into anything. ‘Who do you think made you a star?’ Duval-Smith persisted. ‘Me myself,’ said Davis. ‘And my sweat, blood and tears...’ ‘Nobody helped you?