Beasts of No Nation (2015)
Netflix’s debut foray into feature-film production is one to avoid if you are looking for cheery festive fare, but we can’t recommend it highly enough. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s tale of child soldiers caught up in a West African civil war is a brutal and uncompromising study of the horrors of war. It features standout performances from 14-year-old Ghanaian actor Abraham Nii Attah, as unwilling soldier Agu, and Idris Elba as his savage, yet strangely fatherly, commandant. The movie collected award nominations by the bucketload, and Elba became the first actor to win a Screen Actors’ Guild Award for his performance without also being nominated for an Oscar.
Available on Netflix
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
This Coen Brothers' comedy follows 1950s Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix as he attempts to discover the whereabouts of movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who disappears while filming his studio's ancient-Roman epic, Hail, Caesar! The supporting cast includes Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill and Alden Ehrenreich (who will play the young Han Solo in the upcoming Star Wars spin-off). The script is a typically mind-bending Coen Brothers affair, featuring Communist cells, singing cowboys, rival twin-sister gossip columnists and stray Soviet submarines. All in all, a hugely funny/not funny satire of Hollywood as the studio system started to unravel at the height of the Red Scare. Well worth a few of hours of your time during Ramadan.
Available on iTunes
Spotlight (2015)
Tom McCarthy's drama, which tells the true story of the investigation by the Boston Globe's investigative Spotlight team into the extent of child abuse in the Catholic church, and the resultant cover-up, collected critical acclaim and award nominations by the sackful – but aside from screening at the Dubai International Film Festival in December, it failed to get a release in the UAE. This might be explained by its low US$39.2 million (Dh144m) haul at the North American box office at the time of the Oscars this year, when it became the second-lowest-grossing film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (after The Hurt Locker, which had taken just $17m when it won). Fortunately, the film – starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery – is now available for download, so don't miss one of the best, and most shocking, films of the last few years.
Available on iTunes
Ex Machina (2015)
If we were looking for dystopian sci-fi, we could easily have picked Mad Max: Fury Road. But that had a healthy run in UAE cinemas, unlike Alex Garland's directorial debut, Ex Machina. Garland, previously a novelist and screenwriter on the likes of The Beach, 28 Days Later and the woefully underrated Dredd, creates a world where we are forced to ask ourselves just how far artificial intelligence can go – and how far we want it to. With recent statements by the likes of Elon Musk suggesting that we might all be living in a computer-generated simulation, the film seems to take on an even more interesting role in recent cinema history. But it is exceptionally well written and made, with fine performances from Oscar Isaac as the creator of an exceptionally lifelike robot, Alicia Vikander as his creation and Domhnall Gleeson as the employee he enlists to test whether the robot can pass for human.
Available on iTunes
cnewbould@thenational.ae
