What to Watch this Week (8-15 Aug)
The best films to watch this week on the big screen, the small screen and your laptop screen, including the latest film from Todd Solondz, 80s-set coming-of-ager Sing Street and shark thriller The Shallows
Best new film in cinemas this week: Wiener-Dog
Fans of fierce and profane humour rejoice: Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse director Todd Solondz is back, and he’s as bracing as ever. His new film Wiener-Dog consists of four short stories linked by the dachshund of the title, who moves from owner to owner, who range from Keaton Nigel Cooke as a neglected nine-year-old to Danny DeVito as a film professor who despises his students. All four films are great, but together they have an accumulative emotional power, building towards a remarkable climax.
“It is not only Solondz’s most accomplished film in years,” said our reviewer Philip Concannon, “but it might be his most profoundly moving work to date.” Read the full review.
Released 12 Aug by Picturehouse Entertainment
Also worth a watch: The Shallows
Surprise of the week is that The Shallows, an unpromising-looking shark movie starring Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, is actually an excellent little thriller shipwrecked in the sea of mediocrity that has been this summer's blockbuster season.
If you’ve been following the career of the film’s director, Jaume Collet-Serra, The Shallows' qualities won’t come as a surprise at all, though. Since making 2005's House of Wax, a fun remake of a Vincent Price shocker that got most of its publicity due to the presence of Paris Hilton in the cast, the Spaniard has made a string of modest thrillers – demon seed horror Orphan; a trio of robust Liam Neeson vehicles (Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night) – that showed a flair for lucid action and inventive set-pieces. The Shallows continues the trend, and looks to be the film that might give Collet-Serra the opportunity to make bigger (although not necessarily better) things.
Released 12 Aug by Sony
Best thing streaming this week: The Get Down
The king of gaudy cinema, Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom) breaks loose from the big screen with his first TV project, The Get Down. Set on the mean streets of New York at the birth of hip-hop, the film follows a group of poor black kids coming up in the Bronx in 1977. Fans of the Australian director’s brand of vibrant camp needn't worry, however; Luhrmann isn’t going for gritty realism here. Reports suggest this love-letter to 70s New York is as stylish and full of vigour as anything he’s done on the big screen.
It’s also Netflix's most expensive series ever, so expect wonderful costumes, authentic period detail and lavishly mounted set-pieces put to brilliant music.
Available to stream 12 Aug on Netflix
Best thing to watch online: The Duffer Brothers' short film Eater
Horror serial Stranger Things can now be classed as a bit of a phenomenon, right? Little is known about the Duffer Brothers, the pair behind this hugely enjoyable TV hit of the summer. We do know that they made little-seen thriller Hidden, which starred Alexander Skarsgård, and a few of their short films are now appearing online, including their graduate film Eater.
Based on the Peter Crowther short story of the same name, Eater follows a rookie cop who encounters eerie activity during his night shift. Fans of Stranger Things will certainly get a kick out of this mini-monster movie, and should be able to spot some of the horror tropes that would seep through to the Duffers' Netflix hit nine years later. Take a look at the film above.
Best film to watch at home: Sing Street
Here’s a blast of joy for you. This sharply detailed coming of age musical follows a group of schoolboys in mid-1980s Dublin who decide to put a band together – the chief inspiration being that one of the lads wants to impress a girl way out of his league. It’s written and directed by John Carney, who brought us Once and Begin Again. Don’t let that fact send you reaching for the mute button. This has all the sweet sentimentality of those two films, but the 80s setting also adds some spiky edges.
The performances across the board are beautifully lived-in and expressive, but the real reason to pick up this Blu-ray is the songs. Taking influence from the music they see on Top of the Pops, the boys pilfer wholesale from everything from the pretentious pomp of the New Romantics to the happy-sad warbling of The Cure, changing their outfits as they go. “Carney has managed to show all of the melancholy and loneliness of youth,” said our reviewer Tom Charles, “but has counterbalanced it with so much joy and enthusiasm that you’ll be left reeling.” Read the full review here.
Available on DVD and Blu-ray from 8 Aug from Lionsgate