Guy Lodge 

Guy Lodge’s DVDs and downloads – Easter special

Look no further for a bracing antidote to hoary biblical epics on television and a little healthy escapism, writes Guy Lodge
  
  

The Gospel Acccording to St Matthew
Enrique Irazoqui as Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Every year, the aisles of Easter greeting cards in stationers' shops grow wider, as more commercial enterprises clock to the holiday's prettier-than-Christmas potential – but the film industry, by and large, has resisted. The list of great Easter-related films is short, and the list of those available online considerably shorter. Happily, iTunes recently identified an exception by adding Pier Paolo Pasolini's rapturous The Gospel According to St. Matthew to their download roster – and you could not ask for a more bracing antidote to the hoary biblical epics that TV programmers routinely trot out over this particular weekend.

Not at all the reading one might expect from the bristly gay Marxist, this spare, serene observation of Jesus Christ's trajectory from birth to death to, well, beyond instead surprises with its devotion to the text, making its stray flourishes of subversion – notably the bluesy surge of Odetta's Motherless Child on the soundtrack – hit that much harder. Fifty years old this year and pristine as ever, it's a film about belief for viewers of all persuasions.

Working from slightly less sacred source material, that's very much what Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Fox, 12) would like to be. Redesigning the 1947 Danny Kaye comedy (itself fairly far removed from James Thurber's satirical short story) into a very 21st-century paean to self-actualisation, it's a film that goes to impressive technical lengths to make pamphlet-sized points: chase your dreams, only connect, and so on and so forth. Stiller plays the eponymous fantasist – oddly, a photo editor at the long-defunct Life magazine – as a kind of guarded Forrest Gump figure, living out the spirit of his publication through elaborate, CGI-heavy flights of fancy. It's handsome, agreeably earnest and ephemeral as a daydream.

It's hard to say whether Allen Ginsberg would have been sneerier about the tidy liberation sentiments of Mitty or Kill Your Darlings (Universal, 15), John Krokidas's diverting but oddly puppyish portrait of the Beat poet's Columbia University days. Daniel Radcliffe is eager, if uncomfortably cast, as the naive English student finding his sexuality and creative voice via an unrequited crush on destructive fellow student Lucien Carr – played by Dane DeHaan with an amped-up vigour and eroticism the film could use more of. The man wears the hell out of a herringbone coat, too – it may be the most covetably styled anti-establishment movie in memory.

The sad death last year of impeccably sculpted Fast & Furious star Paul Walker hasn't stirred quite enough morbid sentiment to grant unapologetically lurid B-movie trifecta Hustlers (Lionsgate, 18) a cinema release, but it has pushed him to the fore in the film's marketing campaign. Luckily enough, his go-for-broke gonzo performance – as a meth-head embroiled in a botched heist – is one of the best things Wayne Kramer's strung-out collection of deep south underworld stories (released in the US as Pa wn Shop Chronicles) has going for it.

As restful and gently rippled as Hustlers is manic, Eric Steel's documentary Kiss the Water (Soda, E) is quite the best cinematic study of fly-fishing since Robert Redford's feature A River Runs Through It. It's also the only one, but that's not to deny its modest loveliness: a fond portrait of eccentric Scottish fly designer Megan Boyd, coated in misty-silver landscape photography, it's a film that exudes its own kind of non-denominational spirituality.

 

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