Only moderately admired on release, it stands up rather well as a summation of an ageing artist’s vision, gaining in wistful power as its strange, rapturous vignettes flow into each other. Silky, existential musing is also the order of the day in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Sony, PG), the Japanese master’s little-discussed 1990 swansong, now lavishly restored for the Criterion Collection. As grieving parents ambling out their anguish in Death Valley, she and Gérard Depardieu give this metaphysical shaggy-dog tale all the weight it has, but it’s still a wisp.
When a performance as finely wrought as her work in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15) can nonetheless be described as the most disposable of the three, she’s clearly on a hot streak. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstockīetween Things to Come and the upcoming Elle, Isabelle Huppert may be having the banner year of a banner career. But however strange the truth, there’s something contrived about the film’s patchy assembly.ĭepardieu and Huppert in Valley of Love. Revelations are few, but it’s the machinations of the search that provide the dark comic intrigue here, particularly as the lens is flipped and Theroux himself winds up under the church’s scrutiny.Īlso on the curiouser-and-curiouser end of the doc spectrum is Tickled (StudioCanal, 15), which boasts a killer investigative hook as its breezy study of fetishistic competitive tickling morphs into a latently violent conspiracy thriller. Turns out it’s very much a film – and a rollicking one too, as the gangly journalist probes the bizarre layers of security and insecurity surrounding the holy house of Hubbard. John Dower and Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie (Altitude, 15) has quietly become the UK’s top-grossing documentary of 2016, surprising many who pegged it as an outsize Theroux TV special.
Photograph: Flat Creek Films/BBC Worldwide Louis Theroux’s Scientology film has become the biggest-grossing documentary in the UK this year.
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