The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Based on the memoirs of stock market scamster Jordan Belfort, who defrauded the system and investors with glee in the '80s and '90s, this unites Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio for the fifth time, but in truth brings little new to the table. It's basically a real-life Wall Street shot in the style of Casino and Goodfellas, complete with an ironic, winking voice-over by the antihero, and plenty of digressions to fit in knowing cutaways and period pop tunes. It is riotous entertainment, and DiCaprio commands the screen as the self-aggrandising and voracious monster Belfort, pill-popping, snorting and fucking his way like a machine through the years. But at three hours it's also far too long for the point it has to make and as Scorsese can churn out this kind of thing in his sleep, you have to ask whether, given such a meaty topic, a black comedy was all that he should have contented himself with making of it.

6/10

7 Days in Havana (Julio Médem, Laurent Cantet, Juan Carlos Tabío, Benicio del Toro, Gaspar Noé, Pablo Trapero & Elia Suleiman, 2012)

A loosely-linked anthology film with a multinational band of directors, each taking a day-long segment, 7 Days in Havana has all the usual failings and virtues of the form, the uneven quality promising an improvement after a duff segment and conversely a deterioration after a stronger one, even though in this case the screenplay comes from a single local writer. As a common denominator, it would be fair to say that a fair degree of appreciation of Cuban music and of the vivacity against adversity of the Cuban people are prerequisites for a sympathetic response.
The stand-out episode here is the furthest from conventional narrative, with Elia Suleiman directing and starring as a silent Middle Eastern observer walking around Havana simply looking at things in detail, to some telling and wryly humorous effect, while Laurent Cantet's end piece on the penniless residents of an apartment building banding together to build a shrine overnight is also of human interest. Conversely, Julio Médem's contribution is a soap and Gaspar Noé's voodoo ritual nightmare exactly as tiresome as you'd expect of him. The rest is filler.

5/10

Rush (Ron Howard, 2013)

The directorial career of Ron Howard has fluctuated wildly between the saccharine and weighty, with particular lows in his Dan Brown adaptations and highs whenever the source material is a biopic. So, it comes as no great surprise that when he turns to the story of the intrinsically dramatically-charged Hunt-Lauda Formula 1 confrontation of 1976, the end result comes with a virtual guarantee of quality. Put simply, a ready-made real-life drama like this is easy to convert and it would take a poor director to mess it up completely, which he doesn't.
The two contrasting leads, Chris Hemsworth as the playboy Hunt and Daniel Brühl as his calculating rival Lauda, the latter getting his character's voice and accent down to a tee, do admittedly contribute a lot to make the package work. This is particularly difficult to do for a viewing generation used to the idea of the sport being an anodyne economic comparison between manufacturers of cars rather than slightly unhinged mavericks dicing with death, which it really was back then and which means that the tension can work even for people, such as this reviewer, who are not seduced in the slightest by millionaires in very fast cars. Basically, Rush achieves everything required of a decent sports biopic: it involves you in the event itself while filling in the human drama around it with some intelligence. I wouldn't go expecting any follow-ons either, which is a blessing. Mansell vs Prost, anyone?

7/10