Rebel Ridge review - 'smart, slick, muscular and entertaining as hell'

★★★★★

Starve Acre (15)

★★☆☆☆

Firebrand (15)

★★☆☆☆

blur: Live at Wembley (15)

★★★☆☆

Blue Ruin and Green Room writer/director Jeremy Saulnier returns with Rebel Ridge, a hard-charging action film of the sort Walter Hill used to make, but one that updates its one-man-against-a-corrupt-town plot for the era of Black Lives Matter and the increased scrutiny of law enforcement. Didacticism takes a back seat to pure storytelling, though, as Saulnier uses an initiative to defund a local police force as a catalyst for even more corruption, courtesy of the town’s chief of police (Don Johnson) using a loophole in legal search-and-seizure procedures to replenish their budgets and maintain their old ways unchallenged. 

Into this situation stumbles Terry Richards (Aaron Pierre), an ex-Marine en route to the town’s court house to post bail for his cousin. Knocked off his bike by brazenly racist cops looking for their next payday, Terry’s status as a Black man in a predominantly white town full of trigger-happy police means he has to play their game. But when they take his bail money and his savings and start threatening him with trumped-up, all-too-plausible charges, he’s forced to weigh up his rapidly narrowing options and put his own specialised military training to use. 

One of the things Saulnier has always done well throughout his career is take genre tropes and put intriguing spins on them and he does the same here, twisting the story in ways that shouldn’t be spoiled in a review, but which deliver escalating tension and action sequences that unfold in thrillingly unexpected ways. He’s aided by Pierre, a British stage actor who broke through in Barry Jenkins’ TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad and demonstrates his movie star bona fides with a commanding performance of quiet power and hulking physicality.

It’s not just their film, though. In a role that starts off as a small supporting one but gradually evolves into an almost co-headlining part, AnnaSophia Robb is a good foil for Pierre as Summer, a nervy law clerk with a dark past who might be the only other person in town with the spine to do what’s right. The end result is bravura filmmaking: smart, slick, muscular – and entertaining as hell.

Having impressed with his BAFTA-nominated debut feature Apostasy back in 2017, British director Daniel Kokotaljo returns with Starve Acre, a disappointingly un-scary folk horror tale based on the 2019 novel by Andrew Michael Hurley. It stars Matt Smith and Saint Maud’s Morfydd Clarke as an unhappily married couple living on the eponymous (and ominous-sounding) Yorkshire farm where Smith’s character, Richard, grew-up and where – it soon transpires – he had a thoroughly awful childhood thanks to an abusive father with some wacky and unpleasant ideas about the occult and childrearing. 

That Richard and Clarke’s Juliette have decided to raise their own son on a farm full of unpleasant associations is partly explained away by their son’s asthma and partly by said child’s own amnesia concerning the strange behaviour he’s started exhibiting. Even so, the film doesn’t really attempt to resolve its characters’ lifestyle choice, presumably hoping that their gradual descent into madness following an all-too-predictable tragedy will distract from this creaky set-up. 

The mid-1970s setting helps to some extent, buying the film some leeway when it comes to enhancing the farm’s sense of isolation. And it’s well acted, with Clarke and Smith good at capturing the unspoken strain of a marriage at a time when openness wasn’t the norm. 

But it’s tasteful to a fault, with Kokotaljo never quite finding ways to deliver the sort freakiness that might help its more outré elements – especially his provocative final image – land without seeming comical. 

The irony of making a protofeminist film about Henry VIII’s final wife only for Henry VIII to emerge as its most compelling character is completely lost on the writers and director of Firebrand, a tediously prosaic film for every minute Jude Law isn’t on screen as the Tudor king with the insatiable appetite and penchant for beheading his wives. Taking the lead as Henry’s sixth wife, Katherine Parr, Alicia Vikander has to wrestle with a lot of dreary dialogue about freedom of religion as the film explores her efforts to create a Protestant powerbase to ward off a plot to frame her for treason. Meanwhile Law – entertainingly gone-to-seed as the putrid, flabby-arsed, gout-ridden Henry – gets to act up a volatile storm with impunity.

It’s a shame for Vikander, more so when the film starts sidelining her in favour of newcomer Junia Rees’ turn as Katherine’s stepdaughter and future heir to the throne – part of an inept, last-minute bid to turn Firebrand into an unofficial prequel to the 1998 Cate Blanchett hit Elizabeth.

If the recently released documentary leading up to blur: Live at Wembley was frustratingly vague, the concert captured here at least reminds us why they’re so revered. The most creatively adventurous British guitar band to emerge from the 90s, their songs remain streets ahead of Oasis’ for lyrical ingenuity and musical inventiveness, something clearly evident from the parade of career-spanning hits they played as part of last year’s Wembley Stadium shows. 

As a concert film it’s a bit basic, but Damon Albarn’s stage presence is fascinating, caught somewhere between irony laced disdain for his own stadium rock stage banter and genuine love for the fans that have – to paraphrase Albarn himself – enabled four old blokes to throw themselves around for their entertainment. 

Rebel Ridge is available on Netflix from 6 September; Starve Acre, Firebrand and blur: Live at Wembley are in cinemas from 6 September