Are there many stranger films nominated for an Oscar this year than The Boxtrolls (Universal, PG)? I’m not sure. Laika, the offbeat stop-motion animation house that also crafted the wonderful Coraline, has a knack for making films that feel like scrappy outsiders even as they rack up the millions. There’s a subversive degree of social subtext to this densely imagined tale of class warfare between humans and the eponymous tribe of junk-hoarding subterranean beasts, and not in a worthy or sanctimonious sense. Rather, the film’s high-concept Holocaust allegory is touched by genuine, impassioned madness. It’s not especially cuddly – which will disarm some kids and alarm others – but a triumph of miniaturist world-building.
It’s certainly a more grownup story of community repair than Antoine Fuqua’s idiotic vigilante thriller The Equalizer (Sony, 15), a gruesomely pumped-up adaptation of the 1980s TV series. Denzel Washington, on especially humourless form, stars as an ex-CIA agent turned hardware-store clerk turned avenging angel for the man in the street. It’s perhaps most interesting as an alternative campaign ad for the gun-control lobby: all you need to conduct mass carnage, we learn, is already in your garden shed.
Swedish documentary maker Göran Hugo Olsson might be OK with that message. His stylistically arresting, thematically enervating film Concerning Violence (Dogwoof, E) proffers a reading of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a literal reading at one point, by an oddly placed Lauryn Hill – that makes a case for the necessity of violence in black decolonisation. Calculated to provoke, it hits that target with inelegant intelligence. Taking a far gentler tack in essaying minority oppression is Swiss docudrama The Circle (Matchbox, 15), which blends talking heads and dramatised romance to uneven but touching effect in its survey of Zurich’s underground gay scene in the mid-20th century.
A pair of biopics take wildly different approaches in entering the fevered creative headspace of genius subjects; both being effectively pulled into shape by thrilling lead performances. John Ridley’s Jimi: All Is By My Side (Curzon, 15) is a restless, whirling reappraisal of the Jimi Hendrix myth that might not function as a film at all without the electric concentration of André Benjamin (aka Outkast’s André 3000) in the title role. Martin Provost’s Violette (Soda, 15) is a considerably more sober, gathered effort, recounting the intense mentor-protege relationship between feminist authors Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc with studious restraint and academic detail – but it’s the ever-fascinating Emmanuelle Devos as the gifted, fiercely needy, Leduc who gives it a beating, even bleeding, heart.
Intimate relations go more brutally awry in Honeymoon (Arrow, 15), a promising lo-fi horror effort about newlyweds jerked from connubial bliss by unseen, insidious forces, kicked up several notches by the hard-driving performances of Harry Treadaway and ex-Games of Thrones star Rose Leslie. Meanwhile, without any supernatural intervention, the vacation hijinks propelling What We Did On Our Holiday (Lionsgate, 12) manage to be even weirder. Lifted by the snippy comic timing of Rosamund Pike (light years removed from Gone Girl) and David Tennant, it’s a not-quite-funny family Britcom that takes borderline sociopathic behaviour entirely in its stride. Meanwhile, the less said about Zach Braff’s ghastly Wish I Was Here (Koch Media, 15), a garishly affected, stunningly disingenuous paean to dysfunctional family values, the better.
Happily, there’s no better antidote to such gloopy hugging and learning than a dose of pre-Code Hollywood hedonism: head over to VOD website Mubi for a rare chance to stream Raoul Walsh’s glorious silent melodrama Sadie Thompson. Starring a resplendent Gloria Swanson as a San Francisco prostitute facing off against would-be moral guardians in American Samoa, it retains its progressive, kinky zeal 87 years after its release. Swanson’s wanton luminescence here brings her immortal line reading from Sunset Boulevard to mind: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” They sure did. Guts, too.
