Mainstream films have run for cover in the DVD market this week, fearing the obliterating shadow of Marvel’s perfunctory team-building event Avengers: Age of Ultron (Disney, 12). The only one facing it, perhaps in desperate hope of title confusion, is the mortality-minded romantic fantasy The Age of Adaline (EIV, 12), starring Blake Lively as a woman eternally frozen at the age of 29 who finds love on top of this good fortune.
Avengers: Age of Adaline would be a more interesting film than either. Still, I’ll stump for the sweetly sincere ludicrousness of Adaline – boasting, alongside its treaclier charms, Harrison Ford’s first emotionally engaged performance in at least half an Adalinal age – over the hollow-hearted rigmarole of the superhero coalition’s latest adventure, which is short even on the glib Joss Whedon wit that powered the first.
Happily, world cinema isn’t nearly so intimidated by fine physical specimens in hyper-macho fetishwear, and this week’s selection is a rich one. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen anything quite like The Tribe (Metrodome, 18), and that would be true even if the film had subtitled dialogue for its sign language-speaking cast. Set within the oppressive confines of a corrupt high school for the deaf, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy’s astounding debut presents its signed exchanges untranslated, yet you’d be surprised how swiftly comprehension arrives in this complex, chilling moral tale.
Gone are the patronisingly beatific or stoically suffering types that deaf characters usually embody in mainstream film; the teens here are competitive, bristlingly charged by conflict, and hard as nails. New kid in class Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) is our closest thing to a proxy in this daunting world, its deaf inhabitants divided along other lines of power and ability in a violent gang hierarchy. Slaboshpitskiy’s approach is immersive but formally refined, appropriating perspective with a camera that is either a fixed witness or a fluid participant in the system’s ugly devolution of order. It’s a brutal, bracing slap of the new.
Don’t watch The Tribe back-to-back with Hard to Be a God (Arrow, 15): the sheer severity of the undertaking could put your back out. But this three-hour final feature from the late Russian auteur Aleksei German is a sight to behold: a stony sci-fi opus in which life beyond Earth, on the far-flung planet of Arkanar has a muddy medieval slant. Human scientists arrive in the midst of battle between the Black and Grey tribes, the differences between which are hard to discern in the film’s wildly visualised monochrome story world. Just let its possessed energy buffet you as it may.
Beside these two films, The Wonders (Soda, 15) is a veritable avalanche of light, though Alice Rohrwacher’s mystic Italian fable of rural community and coming of age has a melancholic shiver of its own – there’s a silent cynicism to its observation of commodified rustic charm, but it’s not averse to the possibility of magic in the soil. Also worth investigating this week: Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth (Artificial Eye, 12), a moving, airy, visually inventive celebration of the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, and The Dance of Reality (Artificial Eye, 18), a self-described “imaginary autobiography” from 86-year-old midnight-movie legend Alejandro Jodorowsky that bounces with typically extravagant daffiness and a new hint of self-effacing reflection. Beside these, hard-bitten Spanish noir Marshland (Altitude, 15) seems rather more prosaic, but its sweat-soaked Andalucian atmosphere impresses.
If, after all that, you’re in the mood for some high-calorie American trash, the first season of Empire (Fox, 15) lands on DVD tomorrow and will gladly oblige. I’m still working my way through Lee Daniels’s glistening, snappish hip-hop industry soap; if I haven’t yet fully swallowed the hook that has made it a gargantuan phenomenon in the States, Taraji P Henson’s galvanising turn as an ex-con turned mogul is livewire bait.
Alternatively, seek more familiar comforts in the best new addition to Netflix’s classics pile in many a month: Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is the kind of film whose place in the canon you accept without much consideration based on distant, approving memory, until you watch it again, and realise anew just what a crackling, unnerving and enticingly strange spin on familiar genre form it still is.
