Youth (15)
Studio Canal, £19.99
Over the course of a 15 year, seven feature career, Naples-born Paolo Sorrentino has collaborated with the great Italian character actor Toni Servillo on three unforgettable films - The Consequences Of Love, Il Divo (in which Servillo plays Italy's controversial Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti) and 2013 Oscar-winner The Great Beauty, a sort of love letter to Rome - and shown himself to be one of Europe's most stylish and individual directors as a result.
His two (so far) English language films have been less successful, however. It's as if straying from his Italian milieu somehow weakens the director. The first of these films, 2011's This Must Be The Place, starred Sean Penn as a reclusive American rock star living in Dublin and cut between there and the United States. The second is Youth, released earlier this year and starring Michael Caine as a reclusive conductor languishing in an expensive Swiss sanatorium where he is joined by old friend Mick (Harvey Keitel), a film director. Pop singer Paloma Faith appears playing herself, relatively unknown actor Roly Serrano plays fellow guest Diego Maradona, and Paul Dano plays a very famous actor who's best known for playing a robot but who is in training for a new role whose identity is revealed at the end. Got that?
There's a blistering cameo from Jane Fonda but mostly the characters drift languidly between encounters, talking about their prostate problems (Caine and Keitel), ogling Miss Universe when she walks naked into their spa (Caine and Keitel) or having pretentious conversations about art, memory, love, loss and ageing (yup, Caine and Keitel). Youth is never less than engrossing and shows plenty of Sorrentino's trademark visual brio - but it lacks the majesty and weight of which he is also capable.
Journey To The Shore (12)
Eureka!, £12.99
Fans of cult Japanese author Haruki Murakami will enjoy this ghostly romance-cum-road movie from compatriot and Cannes favourite Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It starts with browbeaten piano teacher Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu) being scolded by the mother of one of her pupils, then takes a turn for the phantasmagorical when husband Yuskuke (Tadanobu Asano) suddenly pops up in her living room. He drowned himself three years previously but has now returned from “the other side”. So Mizuki does what anyone would in her position: she packs an overnight bag and sets off with him. On the bus.
What follows is a low-key meditation on loss and life as the couple retraces his wanderings, visiting other ghosts still operating in the world of the living, or helping the living to come to terms with their grief at losing a loved one. It's ripe for an American re-make, though whether Hollywood could avoid over-egging the sentimentality is questionable: with his prodigious use of cheesy music, Kurosawa only just keeps it in check.
Orange Is The New Black: Seasons 1-3 (15)
Lionsgate, £59.99
Along with House Of Cards, this prison-set comedy-drama is the most garlanded of Netflix's original commissions and is by far the most-watched. Based on Piper Kerman's real-life memoir of a year in prison, it centres on New York WASP Piper Chapman (the excellent Taylor Schilling) and the culture shock she experiences when she swaps her comfortable middle class life for a stretch in a women's prison. Without giving away plot spoilers, she's banged up as a result of a roguish ex-lover and a spot of accidental drug running a decade earlier. Imagine Prisoner: Cell Block H crossed with Porridge and sprinkled with some of what gives Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat its bad reputation (and cult appeal).
The series launched in 2014, so to date Schilling has served twice as long in the fictional Litchfield Penitentiary as Kerman did in her real one. Still, that's what happens when you have a hit series on your hands. If you're dreading next month's Euro 2016 football tournament and want to get a binge-watching week in the diary to counter it, you could do a lot worse than this. And if you've watched it all by June 17, which is only a week into the Euros, you can always catch season four when it goes live on Netflix.
Rams (15)
Soda Pictures, £17.99
If the genre known as “slow cinema” has a subsection labelled “Agrarian” - and it surely does - then Grímur Hákonarson's 2015 Cannes favourite will have pride of place in it, alongside films such as Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (about a Calabrian goat herder).
Hákonarson's film introduces us to Gummi (Sigurdur Sigurjonsson) and Kiddi (Theodor Juliusson), two rival sheep farmers in a remote Icelandic valley. They're also close neighbours and (the bit which provides this ovine blockbuster with its dramatic engine) brothers who haven't spoken to each other for 40 years. We never find out why, but when scrapie infects their flocks we watch as Gummi and Kiddi are forced into a reconciliation and, in the film's powerful climax, an act of tender beauty. Beautifully paced and with strong performances from its leathery leads (as well as its four-legged supporting cast), Rams proves that slow can be dramatic. Extras include Hákonarson's excellent short film Wrestling, another culturally-specific study of male bonding, this one with a sort of Brokeback Mountain feel.
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