Before We Vanish (2017)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray/DVD
Before We Vanish may be the most easy-going alien invasion movie ever made. This sedate sci-fi from Japanese genre master Kiyoshi Kurosawa, now on Blu-ray and DVD, sees three extra-terrestrials arrive in Japan on a reconnaissance mission ahead of full-scale attack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, they take over human bodies while (and here’s the novel twist) stealing their ‘conceptions’ of ideas like ‘family’, ‘work’ and ‘freedom’ – great for their info gathering on the human race; not so good for the victim left bereft of certain basic knowledge. Kurosawa is best known for chilling J-horror classics like Cure (1997), but adopts a lighter tone here. In the end, it’s all a bit too languid for its own good, but there’s fun to be had along the way.
The China Syndrome (1979)
Where’s it on? Sony Movie Channel, Sunday, 3.30am
This close-to-prime slice of 70s paranoia brings together Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and a young Michael Douglas (who also produced it) in the story of a TV news crew who stumble upon safety lapses and a cover-up at a nuclear power station. Lemmon is the whistleblower, Fonda the reporter (both Oscar nominated) and Douglas her cameraman. It’s a tense thriller that was condemned as alarmist fantasy by the nuclear industry, but which came to seem eerily prescient when the Three Mile Island disaster occurred just 12 days after The China Syndrome went on release.
Kinetta (2005)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Whether or not The Favourite will follow through on its BAFTA glory with a sweep of Oscars next week, Yorgos Lanthimos’s ascent to the top of the directorial A-list feels done and dusted. So the arrival of his first solo feature film on BFI Player presents a good opportunity to trace just how far he’s come. Pretty far, in case you were wondering. As crackers as his Queen Anne movie often is, it’s never as legitimately out-to-lunch as this cryptic story about a trio of oddballs re-enacting murder scenes in an out-of-season coastal resort. Kinetta was one of the first shots across the bow in the so-called Greek weird wave, and each strange moment offers the same askance eye on human behaviour that Lanthimos would take to bigger audiences with Dogtooth in 2009.
The Lady Eve (1941)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
“If I were asked to name the single scene in all of romantic comedy that was sexiest and funniest at the same time,” famed critic Roger Ebert once wrote, “I would advise beginning at six seconds past the 20-minute mark in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve.” Barbara Stanwyck’s beautiful con artist Jean Harrington has set her sights on Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) – jungle explorer, snake expert and heir to the Pike Ale fortune. Their paths have crossed on an ocean cruise. She bares her leg suggestively, cooing innuendo, and Pike looks good to pop. “You’re certainly a funny girl for anybody to meet who’s just been up the Amazon for a year,” he tells her. Sturges’ immortal screwball is back in cinemas around the country, and there’s nothing like it.
Mektoub, My Love (2017)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Midway through this new one from Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) director Abdellatif Kechiche, our French-Tunisian protagonist’s mum tells him to stop watching films and get out to the beach, get a tan. For those of us stuck inside a British February, however, watching Kechiche’s horny, hazy, three-hour plunge-pool of Mediterranean romance will be our best chance of vicariously catching some rays. Unfolding at an almost radically leisurely pace, with camerawork that drinks in the unbridled hedonism of its young cast during long improv-y scenes at the beach or out dancing, Mektoub is either a formless indulgence or a heady trip for the senses, but probably both at once.
