Angus Wolfe

Was Kate due a grounding after the awards extravaganza of Revolutionary Road and The Reader? Because Labor Day (12A) slipped into cinemas in March and slipped out again almost unnoticed. With the DVD release this is a good time to reappraise her contribution to a film that deserves to be seen. Directed by Jason Reitman, the man who made Juno, it is no soft-centred love story aimed at lonely middle-aged dreamers. It has a tension that burns. Winslet plays the depressive mother of a 12-year-old boy, divorced after her worse half legged it with a lady down the road. She lives in a large, messy house in Massachusetts, surrounded by trees and the hint of wilder country beyond. One day at the supermarket a man approaches her son. He is injured and says he fell out of a window.

Admit it. Say it! ‘My name is Blah and I am a boxaholic.’ Life on hold, marriage in bits, job swinging from a rusty nail, the box-set fanatic grabs every available minute to feed an addiction. I mean, you can’t leave, can’t breathe until you find out whether Jesse and Walter make it up before someone else gets killed in Breaking Bad, or how on earth Jack can keep his daughter safe in 24. Box sets are not movies. They have a different time scale. What can you say in two hours that can’t be said better in 400? Relationships change, grow, collapse, move on. Fear is faster, immediate, for ever present. Plots range from incredible to intimate with the same intensity.