Movie reviews

Matthew McConaughey has a well-deserved reputation for being a beefcake who likes to take his shirt off in front of a camera, but his role as Killer Joe (18s) suggests that he has much more to offer than pecs appeal.

When Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) finds himself owing a debt to a loan shark in Smallsville, Texas, he decides to bump off his mother for the insurance. Killer-for-hire Joe Cooper (McConaughey) is his hitman of choice, not least because Joe is a cop who can cover up his own murders. Unfortunately, sociopath Joe takes a shine to Chris’s teenage sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), and complications ensue. William Friedkin’s first film since Bug (2006) is a riveting neo-noir, crackling with tension and bleakly comic immorality. McConaughey’s performance is utterly compelling. Its intensity is such that it should blow every other actor off the screen, but co-stars Hirsch, Gina Gershon and Thomas Haden Church more than hold their own, while Juno Temple’s turn as a naïve teen is the most powerful performance by a young actress since Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone (2009). The plot does hit a couple of speed-bumps, and the confined spaces betray the film’s theatrical roots (Tracy Letts adapting her own play for the screenplay), but even that adds considerably to the claustrophobic, noirish sense of fatalism that draws us inexorably onwards to a stunning climax.

Fuelled by 30-something angst, Friends With Kids (16s) opens with a group of friends who are ‘living the dream’ of Manhattan life but gradually succumbing to the inevitability of marriage and family, in the process discovering that there is more to life than trendy restaurants and shallow sex. The story centres on Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, who also writes and directs) and Jason (Adam Scott), life-long friends who decide to make a go of platonic parenthood, this on the basis that their other friends — Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O’Dowd), and Missy (Kristen Wiig) and Ben (Jon Hamm) — have drained their relationships of magic by combining romance and children. If that all sounds like an episode of Sex in the City, you wouldn’t be far wrong, but it’s an episode from the early days, when Sex in the City still had interesting things to say about relationships, commitment, and the difference between romance and love. Westfeldt and Scott make for an affecting leading couple, both of them plausible as individuals and generating a believable chemistry when together, while their co-stars provide solid support, with Chris O’Dowd overshadowing Jon Hamm. On the downside, the movie is nowhere as edgy and provocative as it clearly believes itself to be, and the ending can be pretty much guessed at after 10 minutes. Overall, it’s an enjoyable meditation on the nature of modern relationships.

Ice Age: Continental Drift (G) opens with a massive earthquake that rips apart the world of our prehistoric beasts, and sends mammoth Manny (voiced by Ray Romano) out to sea on an iceberg with his buddies the sabre-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo), leaving Manny’s family of Ellie (Queen Latifah) and Peaches (Keke Palmer) behind. The fourth in the Ice Age series is as improbable as any of its preceding instalments, but it’s an action-packed tale as Manny & Co encounter an iceberg in the shape of a pirate ship, which is captained by ape-like buccaneer Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage) and his side-kick Shira (Jennifer Lopez). The animation is strong and the story pacy, and younger kids will love it.

Dark Horse (15A) is a downbeat tale of the emotionally stunted Abe (Jordan Gelber), who tries to woo manic depressive Miranda (Selma Blair). Fans of the work of Todd Solondz, who writes and directs, will know that happy endings will be at a premium here, but Dark Horse is nowhere as dark. The fine cast — Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken play Abe’s frustrated parents — provide plenty of diversion, but as Abe’s tale grows increasingly hallucinatory, it’s difficult to know where his fantasies end and reality begins. Or care.