Nordic noir may not be out, but after several years of chilly, chunky-knit dominance, aficionados of European crime drama could use a Mediterranean break. Enter Italy – not, to put it mildly, a nation hitherto known for world-class television. Gomorrah (Arrow, 15), however, is a pungent exception: an ambitious 12-episode expansion of Matteo Garrone’s blazing 2008 film, itself based on Roberto Saviano’s dense exposé.
This petrol-fumed descent into the heart of Naples’s Camorra crime syndicate is at once bleak and bustling, riveting and repulsive. Garrone’s film, expansive as it was, now looks a mere precis for the tangled underworld politics of this mob saga, in which young, antiheroic foot soldier Ciro (Marco D’Amore) rises through the very dirty ranks of the Savastano clan. It’s a grower, one that requires a couple of episodes to get the hang of its knotty storytelling and heaving ensemble, but its eventual payoff, at once grimy and operatic, rewards patience.
There’s a pleasing rhythmic relationship between the titles Gomorrah and Godzilla (Warner, 12), and while one could forge some kind of strained metaphor of urban destruction to link them, I’d best leave the segue there. Gareth Edwards’s megabucks revival of the Tokusatsu franchise is, if not quite the anarchic blockbuster described by some excited critics back in May, a good, robust monster movie characterised by what the Michael Bay generation might term restraint.
You know where it’s going, but there’s an intelligent amount of foreplay before we get there. Having made his name with the shoestring sci-fi Monsters, Edwards knows the merits of rationed spectacle, though the film wreaks other forms of visual and sonic havoc en route to the reptilian carnage.
The muted tonal and structural conventions of the American coming-of-age indie feel so familiar now as to constitute a rulebook, yet Daniel Patrick Carbone’s woozily affecting debut Hide Your Smiling Faces (Matchbox, 15) has an eerie energy of its own. The story of two brothers (beautifully played by Ryan Jones and Nathan Varnson) whose summer is set off-kilter by a friend’s unexplained passing, it’s a minor-key delicacy that promises heavier things from its director. I was hoping for more muscle from Mystery Road (Axiom, 15), a slow-burning, hard-scowling Australian thriller in which an indigenous Australian detective finds himself frozen out by both the white and indigenous populations while investigating a teenager’s murder. The neo-western premise is a cracker, the execution’s leanly stylish, but the narrative rumbles just shy of third gear throughout.
That’s not an accusation that could be levelled at Manuscripts Don’t Burn (Studiocanal, 15), a gutsy, impassioned thriller from persecuted Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof that boldly takes state censorship as its subject; it’s politically significant, yes, but also a razor-sharp tension exercise. In case the title left any doubt, such economy is far from the objective in The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Studiocanal, 15), a droll, shaggy-dog comedy based on the Swedish bestseller that, while certainly entertaining in the moment, goes straight in one ear and out the other. Similarly disposable, but neatly timed for Halloween, is jaunty high-school horrorcom All Cheerleaders Die (Spirit, 18), in which undead pom-pom princesses throw the classroom social ladder (and the genre’s gender politics) out of whack; it’s a clever little exercise, though its laughs and jolts alike are on the modest side.
If you’re looking to be actively frightened this Friday evening, nothing new on the DVD shelves will do the job as elegantly or effectively as this week’s remarkable cinema release The Babadook, but for those staying in, a terrific primer for Jennifer Kent’s film is freely available on Vimeo. Kent’s 2005 short Monster establishes the characters and premise that have been fleshed out in her debut feature, but also delivers as a freestanding film: 10 minutes of sly, concentrated terror, presented with wit and monochrome beauty to burn. It’s a brisk appetiser for any fright-night movie marathon.
