This is ‘Magic’ Matthew McConaughey in his best form yet
DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (R16)
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee
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Reviewed Reviewed by by Graeme Graeme Tuckett Tuckett
MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY became a leading man in the 1990s, but never quite graduated to Pitt/ Clooney/Depp megastardom, and was seemingly destined to grind out the next decade of his career being an attractive place to temporarily hang a shirt in romcom hell.
But McConaughey read the tea leaves, took a sabbatical, and reemerged in 2011 with a strong performance in the drama The
Lincoln Lawyer. He has followed that with a run of seriously good work in some good and interesting films. In the past 18 months alone, McConaughey has turned up looking all sorts of serious in Mud,
Magic Mike and The Wolf of Wall Street. But nothing you have seen him in thus far will prepare you for McConaughey’s work in Dallas Buyers Club.
The actual Dallas Buyers Club was a collective of HIV-positive individuals who payed money to buy the drugs that they believed would prolong their lives better than anything the authorities would allow American doctors to prescribe.
The man who founded and ran the club was Ron Woodruff, a Texan good ol’ boy, boozing and carousing his way through life. Sometime in the 1980s Woodruff contracted HIV, probably from sex with an intravenous drug user, and his life took an almighty turn.
Dallas Buyers Club is the story of Woodruff’s conversion from trailer-park redneck to unlikely patients’ rights campaigner.
As Woodruff, McConaughey gives one of the most indelible performances I’ve seen in years. Apart from his physical transformation, which is astonishing, McConaughey invests Woodruff with a lovely damaged insouciance that is utterly electric on screen. If ever there was a single performance that was worth the price of your ticket, McConaughey gives it here. Among a uniformly strong cast – and Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner are both excellent in support – McConaughey simply picks this picture up and swaggers off with it.
Dallas Buyers Club is a remarkably good picture. It deserves every award nomination that has come its way, and it may yet go on to surprise a few bookmakers come Oscar night.
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (M)
Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen
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Reviewed by James Croot
LLEWYN DAVIS (Oscar Isaac) has every reason to be singing the blues. Once part of a successful folk duo, he’s now struggling to make ends meet as a solo artist.
‘‘People need time to get to know you,’’ his manager assures him, while only able to offer him a winter coat rather than any payment. Couch surfing among his various friends and acquaintances, Llewyn can’t even look after a cat properly. ‘‘You’re like King Midas’s idiot brother – everything you touch turns to shit,’’ rages fellow folk singer Jean (Carey Mulligan) after he puts potentially a large wrinkle in her future plans. With time and money running out, Llewyn may have to give up his musical dream and rejoin the merchant marines, but even that may be far more difficult than he thought.
While lacking the narrative drive of recent Coen Brothers westerns True Grit and No Country for Old Men, this look into New York’s folk music scene circa 1961 is no less a compelling watch.
Fans of the Coens will be delighted that the usual mix of crazy characters, quotable dialogue, wild hair and a put-upon protagonist is all present and correct, while more casual cinephiles will lap up the moody, evocative visuals (cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, responsible for the look of French smash Amelie, here delivers some powerful point of view shots and a sense of space and place to rival the Coen’s best like The Man Who Wasn’t There and Fargo), addictive earworms (the memorable toe-tapping soundtrack is T-Bone Burnett’s best work since O Brother Where Art Thou) and a terrific cast that features a host of Coen newbies like the soulful Isaac ( The Nativity), spikey Mulligan ( Gatsby), sardonic F Murray Abraham ( Amadeus) and a surprisingly square Justin Timberlake ( Friends with Benefits), as well as regular fixture John Goodman ( Barton Fink).
Special mention must also go to Ulysses the cat (actually played by three different red mackerel tabbies) who threatens to steal the entire movie while barrelling down fire escapes, breaking free in subway cars and running down city streets.
ALL IS LOST (M)
Directed by JC Chandor
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Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
AFEW years back I was much impressed with a film called Into The Wild. That was the story of young Chris McCandless, the self-styled ‘‘Alexander Supertramp’’ who decided to pit his skill and wits against an Alaskan winter, and succumbed to malnutrition trapped on the wrong side of a river. At the time, I thought it was a moving and admirable film, and I wrote it up accordingly. But a few weeks later, I chanced on an article about McCandless which pointed out that if he had spent a few dollars on a map, then he would have known that there was a perfectly good bridge only a few kilometres away, and he would have been able to cross the swollen river to safety.
I thought about this while watching All Is Lost, the latest from Robert Redford and director Jeffrey Chandor ( Margin Call).
Redford plays an unnamed yachtie alone and in strife somewhere out in the Indian Ocean. Redford’s beloved boat has been punctured by a rogue shipping container.
For the next 100 minutes, we will watch as Redford tries to save his boat, and then simply to survive, as everything that can go wrong, does. Your respect and affection for this film will rest almost entirely on your tolerance for Robert Redford.
Personally, I think Redford’s great years are a long way behind him, and these days he’s a leathery old streak of tedium with nought but earnestness where his charisma used to be.
But the real reason All Is Lost failed to move me is this: there is a device called a personal locator beacon. They can be had for a few hundred dollars.
If Redford’s hapless yachtie hadn’t spent all his spare cash on cosmetic dentistry and hair dye, he might have bothered to buy one, and this entire film would have been over in about 15 minutes flat as Redford was rescued by the nearest ship.
Into The Wild was a fine film, but knowing that its subject was a complete bloody fool tends to diminish the story in my memory. All Is Lost is a fictional film about a fictional idiot. Despite a great deal of skill behind the camera, and – to be fair – Redford giving it his all, I really couldn’t bring myself to care.