DVD OF THE WEEK

A CHRISTMAS TALE ****
Dir: Arnaud Desplechin
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny

This film actually came out on DVD a couple of months ago but I've been saving it, waiting for two and a half hours of free time to slip into the delicious French machinations on offer. And I'm glad I did, since the film is simply fantastic.
It centres around the Vuillard family, as mixed-up a bunch as you could hope for, echoing other dysfunctional units in such films as The Royal Tennenbaums. They are assembled for Christmas with an added complication that matriarch Catherine Deneuve has cancer and is in need of a life-saving transplant, which has to come from one of the family. If that sounds heavy then the strange and surprising treatment it gets (Deneuve seems completely unconcerned) is refreshingly light. There is much bickering and familial dissent but all done in the most charming of French ways.
Amalric is the black sheep of the family and provides a performance every bit as good as his remarkable turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or as a Bond villain in Quantum of Solace), while the rest of the cast is littered with classy French talent (special shout out for Jean-Paul Roussillon as Deneuve's husband).
Desplechin makes a fine job of keeping his story strands under control and by stylising aspects of the storytelling gives the film a very modern feel. If American drama is leaving you a little bored then this should be the perfect antidote – a long classy slice of French family fun. And, as it's not always the case, I should mention that the subtitles are well-presented and easy to read.

Film buffs have long had Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn marked as One To Watch. His cult Pusher trilogy was a brilliant dissection of the grimy end of petty crime, but little there would prepare you for Bronson (****), Refn's first English language film. In a strikingly stylised assault on the senses it tells the true story of Michael Gordon Peterson, a Welsh criminal often referred to in the English press as the 'most violent prisoner in Britain”. He changed his name to Charlie Bronson during his time as a bare-knuckle boxer. The film is stunning, a wild and weird and brilliantly presented biography of a life of violence.

Coming on like a hard-bitten private eye mystery, The Assassination of a High School President (****) is a whole bunch of fun, as school paper nerd Bobby Funke is set up and writes a story framing the popular jock school president. He then has to solve the mystery to make amends. With an hilarious cameo from Bruce Willis as the Iraq war-obsessed headmaster this is both smart and funny. Likened by some to Brick and that film's stylised noir approach to high school, this is much more accessible and loaded with gags, from broad toilet humour to copious Chinatown references.

After the gruelling marital woes of Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes has turned to something altogether lighter and more charming with Away We Go (***). It follows perky newly-pregnant couple – relative unknowns John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph – on a road trip as they travel from friends to relatives via Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal, and Miami in a search for the best place to settle and bring up baby. They are a sweet, positive and engaging couple and much good humour is generated from the various eccentrics and others they encounter, making for an easy pleasant ride.

.Winter of Frozen Dreams (*) is a low-budget mystery thriller based on a book based on an apparently true-life American murder from the seventies. There is, however, little mystery and no thrills on offer in this tale of a manipulative hooker. It's mainly a character study, but the characters remain stubbornly undeveloped, while the device of a continually shifting time-frame was obviously intended to be clever but is merely irritating and confusing. And, despite the presence of Thora Birch and Keith Carradine, the production values are surprisingly shoddy.