Dark Waters (2019)
Where’s it on? DVD/streaming, including BFI Player
A handbrake turn after his underrated whimsy Wonderstruck (2017), this gripping eco-drama from Todd Haynes is the soberest, sombrest thing he’s ever done. In the mould of cover-up investigation movies like The Insider (1999) and Spotlight (2015), it features Mark Ruffalo as the corporate lawyer who finds himself defecting to the side of the little people after a farmer from his Ohio hometown convinces him that his cattle are being poisoned by polluted water. It’s based on a real story, first broken in a New York Times article, and makes no bones about dragging the name of US chemical company DuPont through the dirt, amplifying a tale of corporate malfeasance with frighteningly expansive implications. Dialling down his usual lush formalism, Haynes seems fuelled by righteous anger here, charting Ruffalo’s dogged quest over many years – all of which come engulfed in the same greyish, autumnal gloom.
Hanagatami (2017)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
When Nobuhiko Obayashi died in April this year, UK film fans could be forgiven for not having much of a grasp on who he was. With the exception of his loopy haunted-house debut Hausu (1977), very little of his work has been made available on these shores and, until now, we’ve had no chance to vouch for the acclaim his two final films, Hanagatami and Labyrinth of Cinema (both pushing three hours long and both made after Obayashi had been diagnosed with cancer), have received elsewhere.
Let’s hope this Blu-ray release of Hanagatami heralds the opening of the floodgates, although the experience of watching this thing is already like being washed uncontrollably away. Ostensibly a story of a group of adolescents growing up in an idyllic spot on the west coast of Japan as the Second World War looms, it’s served up in a whirlwind of hyper-real textures and denaturalised effects, including giant moons, garish skies, glaringly obvious green screen and actors who are surreally old for their parts. At times, its world of fireflies and falling blossoms almost suggests a live-action Ghibli movie, though the frenetic artifice is closer to Guy Maddin or Raúl Ruiz. Nothing else from 2017 looked like this: cinema as a snowglobe, with lost-innocence melancholia pumped in for air.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Where’s it on? Amazon Prime
A smattering of vintage classics from Hollywood master William Wyler have started appearing on Amazon Prime this week, as part of an unheralded haul of films from the stable of old-time mogul Samuel Goldwyn. They’re streaming in better-than-presentable quality too. The Best Years of Our Lives is the most celebrated of them, a best picture-winning drama taking the temperature of the nation at the time when American soldiers were returning after the end of the Second World War and bumpily attempting to settle back into civilian life. At nearly three hours long, it was on the outer limits of duration for a standalone Hollywood film of the time (only Dudley Nichols’ Mourning Becomes Electra was longer all decade), but Wyler’s panorama of small-town America is so finely grained and emotionally affecting that it earns every minute. His films These Three (1936), The Little Foxes (1941) and the peerless Dodsworth (1936) are also available.
Babylon (1980)
Where’s it on? Amazon Prime
Another welcome addition to Prime this week, especially given no other subscription service currently has it, is this landmark black British drama from Italian director Franco Rosso. One of the key British films of the 1980s, yet deemed too incendiary to be released in the US at the time, it’s an evocative dive into soundsystem culture in Brixton in the early Thatcher years, following the beleaguered fortunes of a reggae DJ (Aswad’s Brinsley Forde) preparing for an upcoming competition. Often seen as the British answer to Jamaica’s reggae movie classic The Harder They Come (1973), Babylon portrays a time of racial tensions, police brutality and straitened circumstances in the lives of London’s Jamaican settlers. But it’s also one of our best youth movies – not a bad record for co-writer Martin Stellman, who’d just written Quadrophenia (1979) too. No wonder that Idris Elba recently called upon his services for his own roots-fuelled London story, Yardie (2019).
The 39 Steps (1935)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Even at 85 years of age, Alfred Hitchcock’s early wrong-man thriller The 39 Steps is still a model balance of suspense, fun, mystery and sexiness. Robert Donat stars as Richard Hannay, the dashing Canadian in London who unwittingly becomes entangled in the affairs of a network of foreign spies, escaping north to the Scottish Highlands in order to attempt to clear his name of murder. The idea of an innocent man on the run is one Hitchcock returned to repeatedly, but there’s something pristinely distilled about this original. The plot is hokum, but so many moments are indelible: Hannay eluding the police on the Flying Scotsman, the mastermind’s missing-finger reveal, everything involving Hannay and Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) handcuffed together and trying to pass as newlyweds at a Scottish inn. There’s not a second you’d want to cut.