This weekend sees Scorsese and DiCaprio unite once again, and an unholy union of ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’.
Based on the memoir of New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort, ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’ is a lurid portrait of debauchery following the same misaligned moral compass as Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning 1987 drama Wall Street.
Greed isn’t just good, it’s a cornerstone of this gaudy, hallucinogenic American dream, allowing the unscrupulous to prey on the weak and vulnerable in order to finance flashy apartments, fast cars and copious amounts of nose candy.
It’s hard to believe that 71-year-old Martin Scorsese, whose last film was the family-friendly fantasy Hugo, is the ringmaster of this booze-, sex-, coke- and testosterone-fuelled circus.
The director pulls no punches in his depiction of Belfort’s wild excesses including myriad scenes of pill-popping and a slow motion orgy on a private jet - the film wears its 18 certificate as a badge of honour.
‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’ howls but doesn’t bite. It offers us a cautionary tale that revels in Jordan’s triumphs for so long, we almost forget he must get his comeuppance.
Scorsese’s directorial brio coupled with DiCaprio’s twitchy lead performance ease some of the pain of the excessive running time, and the nasty stink left by the script’s depiction of women as suckers and sex objects.
While individual scenes pulsate with misplaced youthful exuberance, as a whole, ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’ and its repugnant characters overstay their welcome.
We hanker for a shower to wash away the grubbiness and grime of Jordan’s enterprises well before the three hours are up.
Things go bump in the womb as well as the night in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s laboured found-footage horror.
‘Devil’s Due’ is the unholy union of ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ – ‘Prenatal Activity’, if you will – which employs video camera footage and CCTV recordings to chart the nightmarish experiences of two first-time parents, whose unborn child is the seed of Beelzebub.
A passage from the Bible, which foretells the coming of the antichrist, opens the film and is repeated by a crazed priest as the doomed mother-to-be approaches full term.
Screenwriter Lindsay Devlin breastfeeds her thinly sketched characters clunky dialogue. She also glosses over gaping plot holes, not least the lost final night of the couple’s honeymoon, which results in Satan impregnating the blushing bride in a cave laden with ancient runes.
The newlywed’s video camera captures this demonic intervention yet the couple don’t review the footage or proudly screen the video for relatives, which would tip the wink about the conception from hell.
‘Devil’s Due’ delivers shocks that will be disappointingly familiar to fans of the ‘Paranormal Activity’ saga.
Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett engineer a couple of neat sequences like the demise of three teenagers, who stumble upon demonically possessed Sam in the woods.
For the most part, though, they embrace second-hand stylistic conceits including a game of hide and seek played through the lens of the camera in night-vision mode.
Miller and Gilford are solid in roles that demand very little of them. Their characters ignore warning signs until it is too late, like piles of ash around the home, the disappearance of a friendly obstetrician (Donna Duplantier) and strange figures lurking in the street.
When the bridegroom tells his beloved tenderly, “I promise, I will always protect you, keep you safe,” he might as well start digging them both shallow graves in the backyard.
Penn & Teller are best known as Las Vegas magicians, who challenge our perceptions with their dazzling and sometimes dangerous illusions.
They co-produce this fascinating documentary, directed by Teller, in which they follow their good friend and inventor, Tim Jenison, as he attempts the seemingly impossible feat of recreating one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous works, ‘The Music Lesson’, using apparatus and materials that would have been available to the 17th century Dutch painter.
Over the course of five years, Jenison explores ways that Vermeer might have achieved his photo-realistic images and recreates ‘The Music Lesson’ to scale with a space reserved for one of his daughters to stand motionless in costume as the young woman in the painting.