Burroughs (15)
Criterion, £17.99
BEGUN in the late 1970s as a student project by director Howard Brookner, then at New York University, and finally completed in 1983, Burroughs follows five years in the life of cult Beat Generation author William Burroughs. It was the only time the author co-operated with a biographical film-maker so its value as a historical document is immense – doubly so when you consider that it was effectively lost until 2012, when Brookner's nephew began to piece it together from disparate fragments, funded by a Kickstarter campaign.
For the cast of extras alone it's worth watching. We see Burroughs chatting to Francis Bacon, mugging with Allan Ginsberg on a New York rooftop as shots ring out in the distance, sitting at dinner with Terry Southern and Lucian Carr. But it also offers valuable insights into Burroughs's life and work. Brookner accompanies the author to his childhood home in St Louis, sits with him and his brother Mortimer as they leaf through family photograph albums and reminisce, and captures Burroughs talking about the day he accidentally shot dead his wife, Joan, in a drunken William Tell routine. We see Burroughs at work, in performance (by the time Brookner started filming, the author was a regular in what he calls “punk rock clubs”) and at rest – or what passes for it in the world of this voluble, learned, irascible talent.
The people behind the camera are worth mentioning too. Helping Brookner with photography and sound were fellow NYU film students Jim Jarmusch, who needs no introduction, and Tom DiCillo, the man who would go on to give Brad Pitt his first starring role in 1991's Johnny Suede. Burroughs, though, is very definitely the star.
Disorder (15)
Soda Pictures, £9.99
ANTWERP-born actor Matthias Schoenaerts is fast becoming Europe's answer to Ryan Gosling, which is to say he has talent, charisma, the sort of off-kilter looks which make him disarmingly handsome and a (so far) unerring ability to get himself cast in decent films by interesting directors. This unsettling psychological thriller is no exception.
Directed by Alice Winocour, the young French film-maker who also co-wrote Oscar-nominated Turkish film Mustang, it casts Schoenaerts as Vincent, a former French Special Forces soldier on furlough. He's waiting for a medical report which, if the diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), could see him have to leave the army. In the meantime he's moonlighting as a black-clad, earpiece-wearing, gun-toting security guard for a wealthy Lebanese businessman, who may or may not be an arms dealer, and his family, German trophy wife Jessie (Diane Kruger) and young son Ali (Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant). We're somewhere in the south of France, in a massive white mansion kitted out with CCTV and alarm systems. When the businessman is called away to Geneva and then arrested at the Swiss border, and two unknown assailants try to snatch Jessie on a trip to the beach, Vincent hunkers down with her and Ali in the now-empty house to wait for the inevitable second attempt.
But behind the home invasion thriller set-up there's a lot more going on. Winocour's camera stays locked on Vincent for much of the time and Schoenaerts, who slept for only two hours a night during production, gives a good impersonation of a man on the edge of complete breakdown. We know the extent to which his paranoia and suspicions are based in fact - the kidnap attempt was certainly real - but there are aspects of the violent closing scenes where the threat is ambiguous to say the least.
Among the extras are three short films by Winocour (always a welcome bonus) and a poorly-filmed on-stage question-and-answer session with her and Schoenaerts in which she talks about the research she did among PTSD-suffering French veterans of the Afghanistan campaign.
Absolute Beginners: 30th Anniversary Edition (12)
Second Sight, £10.99
IF British films of the 1980s have a unifying characteristic, it's nostalgia for previous eras. Of course there are honourable exceptions which reflected life in the present, from The Long Good Friday and Babylon to Rita, Sue And Bob Too, but from Chariots Of Fire in 1981 to Scandal in 1989, mainstream British cinema regularly turned its eye on the past, to reflect, laugh, marvel or simply ogle.
Bang in the middle of the decade came this musical adaptation by director Julian Temple of a 1958 novel by unsung British author Colin MacInnes which dipped into the emerging teenage culture of late 1950s London and its attendant social and racial tensions. More nostalgia, then, though with contemporary flavours in the form of its soundtrack. Still, critical reception at the time wasn't kind and audiences were distinctly underwhelmed too.
But in this year of all years it's worth returning too if only for the cast: alongside Patsy Kensit (as heroine Crepe Suzette) and pop star Sade is David Bowie, who also contributed the title song. Watch out too for James Fox, Mandy Rice-Davies (she of Scandal fame) and Kinks frontman Ray Davies. Among the extras are a documentary on the film, and new interviews with Temple and producer Stephen Woolley.
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