This week's column comes to you from the Venice film festival, another marathon of red carpets, cocktail-fuelled schmoozing and surname-based auteurism – "the Iñárritu" screened only this morning – where, as a friend once remarked: "Critics get the opportunity to overrate films months before everyone else does." Such cynicism! Yet it's easy to understand how readers might get frustrated by festival reports – the critical equivalent of holiday-snap slideshows. Due credit to Venice, then, for attempting to address the imbalance with its Sala Web programme, a selection of 11 films from this year's festival made available to the global public to view online.
For five days after each film's world premiere on the Lido, interested punters can stream them at the invaluable industry-targeted site Festival Scope, having purchased one of a limited number of digital "tickets" in advance. This year's options, mostly coming from the festival's non-competitive Horizons section, include The President, the latest political drama from new Iranian cinema veteran Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and British director Duane Hopkins's Bypass, his long-brewing, George MacKay-starring follow-up to his auspicious 2008 debut, Better Things.
Other options come from Croatia, India and, of course, Italy; I can only inform rather than recommend, given that I haven't seen any of them yet. That, of course, is the beauty of the system: the democratisation of film festival culture begins here.
Bar the odd accidental leak, such as this summer's much-publicised The Expendables 3 cock-up, it'll be some time before Hollywood studios are willing to allow audiences initial online access to tentpole blockbusters such as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Sony, 12). If they did, after all, not only would the sanctity of the cinema experience be forever destroyed, but they wouldn't be able to release heftily stuffed Blu-ray packages such as this one, which includes nearly two hours of exhaustive making-of footage, plus nine deleted scenes with director Marc Webb's commentary.
Watching the film itself, it's hard to believe that any scenes were left out at all: clocking in at over 140 minutes, with extraneous villains and subplots to spare, the film's self-mythologising bloat doesn't really square with the nimble, get-the-job-done approach of Spidey himself. Coming just 10 years after Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, still the gold standard for the superhero genre, Webb's steelier, less playful vision can't quite make the case for the bewilderingly swift reboot of this particular franchise.
Yet the film is not without its charms, most of which belong to Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, marvellously overqualified actors whose spiky, sparky romantic chemistry as Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy holds more supernatural power than any number of green goblins and radioactive muscle men.
They're enough to make you wish mainstream film-makers would recover the lost formula for the breezy mainstream romantic comedy. Peter Glanz's agreeable, unmemorable debut, The Longest Week (Signature Entertainment, 15), premiering, unusually, on DVD in the UK days before opening in US cinemas, attempts the sweet-and-sour New York relationship terrain of vintage Woody Allen, but despite the efforts of a game Jason Bateman and Olivia Wilde, the laughs simply aren't there. The French don't come any closer, either, in A Perfect Plan (Icon Entertainment, 15), a strenuously zany affair from Heartbreaker director Pascal Chaumeil with a cute high concept – believing most first marriages end in divorce, a dentist seeks to get hitched and ditched by someone else when she meets the man of her dreams – that makes little case for Diane Kruger and Dany Boon being together, on screen or otherwise.
The best DVD release of the week is also the most modest: Steve Jamison and Mike Brett's utterly disarming documentary Next Goal Wins, about the feisty efforts of the American Samoa football team to escape their position at the bottom of the international rankings. Compassionate, unpatronising and often riotously funny, with a charismatic gaggle of human subjects that includes world football's first transgender player, it's the underdog story to end – or perhaps begin – them all.
