The Tunnel: Sabotage (15)
RLJ Entertainment, £24.99
English language remakes of hit Scandi noir dramas have a chequered history. The American version of The Killing was too dreary and cheerless to match the original and, though watchable, Kenneth Branagh's Wallander has had its detractors too. An American remake of The Bridge, set on the US-Mexico border and also called The Bridge, staggered into a second season but was then cancelled.
Far more successful is this Anglo-French version of the same, called The Tunnel and starring Clémence Poésy and Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon in Game Of Thrones, for all your Westerosians out there). The tunnel in question is the one linking Kent with the Pas-de-Calais. Series two has just come to a shuddering climax on Sky Atlantic and it's hard to believe a third won't be commissioned.
For the uninitiated, the series turns on a cross-border police partnership between a female detective who probably suffers from a form of autism (it's never actually confirmed) and an amiable, womanising male counterpart. In the original, called Bron/Broen, she's Swedish and he's Danish. Here, she's French and he's English though cutely the writers have fudged things slightly: his first name is Karl (Roebuck), her surname is Wassermann, first name Elise.
Series one stuck closely to the plot of the original, depositing a body on the Channel Tunnel's national demarkation line in such a way that both jurisdictions had to investigate. Cue the Karl-Elise match-up and the first of many chalk and cheese encounters. The series ended with the murder of Karl's teenage son.
The eight episode second series, Sabotage, flirts with elements of Bron/Broen's second season but bolts on an awful lot more. Too much, in fact: the sabotage in question refers to the plane which is brought down in the English Channel by a terrorist group called Defence, but that plot line is soon submerged beneath others involving a shadowy MI5 figure (Happy Valley's Con O'Neill), the Georgian Mafia, a cheroot-smoking sex trafficker (Emilia Fox) and a dodgy South American commune run by ex-Nazis and frequented by the CIA. The sure hand of series one director Dominik Moll is missing too, so the unifying palette of browns and greys which he brought has given way to something less visually arresting.
Despite those shortcomings, The Tunnel is never less than gripping and excels because of its central casting: Dillane and Poésy are dynamite together. It's probably heretical to say so, but they're actually better than Sofia Helin and Kim Bodnia, who played their characters in the original. This Anglo-French adaptation is shaping up to be superior to it too.
600 Miles (15)
Soda Pictures, £15.99
Proof that straight-to-video doesn't have to be shorthand for “not worth showing on the big screen”, this 2015 debut feature from American scriptwriter Gabriel Ripstein wasn't picked up for theatrical release in this country despite featuring at the Berlin and Edinburgh film festivals and being chosen as Mexico's official Oscar entry. And despite having acclaimed British actor Tim Roth as one of its two leads.
Roth plays Hank Harris, an investigator with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known as ATF. Sin Nombre star Kristyan Ferrer plays Arnulfo, a naïve and low-ranking member of a Mexican crime cartel whose job is to buy assault rifles in the US then drive them back across the border. He's desperate to impress his uncle, one of the cartel's head honchos. With that in mind, he kidnaps Harris after a confrontation and heads south with his prize in the secret compartment he uses for his illicit rifles.
What happens next is part road movie, part thriller but so pared back as to function like a series of artful and elliptical vignettes. Gradually the power balance between the pair changes and the inscrutable Hank is the key: here is a man who you suspect would lie and dissemble even if his life didn't depend on it, and who is possessed of the same never-a-backward-glance ruthlessness as the cartel bosses themselves.
For a first film, 600 Miles shows rare confidence and vision on the part of its director. And if you need more evidence of quality, the handheld, quasi-documentary feel comes courtesy of the Dardennes brothers's cinematographer of choice, Alain Marcoen.
Room (15)
Studio Canal, £12
In this 2016 Oscar-winner, Irish director Lenny Abrahamson repeats the technique behind his 2012 film What Richard Did and adapts a novel based on real-life events with powerful human drama at its heart. Here it's an adaptation of Emma Donoghue's novel Room, based on the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, held captive by her father Josef for 24 years.
Our abductee is 24-year-old Joy (Brie Larson), snatched seven years earlier by a man referred to as Old Nick by her and by the son he fathered, five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay, eight at the time of filming). “Room” is Jack's word for the only world he has ever known: a shed containing a bed, a toilet, rudimentary cooking equipment and the cupboard he sleeps in during Old Nick's nocturnal visits.
Larson won the Best Actress Oscar but it's Tremblay who captivates - an astonishing performance in what is a powerful, mesmerising and at times unbearably tense film.
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