The 10th Victim (18)
The 10th Victim (18)
Stylish and wonderfully bonkers (though also oddly prescient) 1965s sci-fi film shot in Rome and turning on a Hunger Games-style reality TV show in which Ursula Andress has to bag her 10th victim - Marcello Mastroianni, no less - to win fame and fortune. It was directed by Elio Petri, the forgotten man of Italian political cinema, with just enough camp to make it an underground cult classic and it featured in a retrospective of his work which screened in Edinburgh in 2005. Well worth catching, in other words.
The Butler (12)
Forest Whitaker turns in a solid (and solidly white-gloved) performance in Lee Daniels's film based on the life of African-American Eugene Allen, who spent 34 years working as a butler in the White House. Here he's renamed Cecil Gaines and he looks back on race, politics and world affairs through the prism of the US administrations he served, beginning with Eisenhower's and ending with Reagan's. Among Whitaker's starry helpmates are Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr and - as Eisenhower and Reagan - John Cusack and Alan Rickman.
Ender's Game (12)
Harrison Ford returns to hyper-space alongside Ben Kingsley and pint-sized Hugo star Asa Butterfield in this so-so 2013 adaptation of Orson Scott Card's sci-fi novel. It's directed by South African Gavin Hood who made his name with the hard-hitting festival hit Tsotsi before graduating to actioners like X Men Origins: Wolverine. The plot? Earth has been threatened for decades by aliens called Formics so military academics have been set up to train the most promising of the world's children to fight. Butterfield's one of them.
Mouchette (15)
Blu-Ray release for Robert Bresson's hard-hitting 1967 film about the titular Mouchette (Nadine Nortier), a young teenage girl living with an alcoholic father and ill mother in the French countryside. That, however, is far from the worst of her problems.
Barry Didcock
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