Film reviews: Bullhead | Antiviral | Cirque du Soleil 3D | Bullet to the Head

By SIOBHAN SYNNOT
Published on 27/01/2013 00:00

Siobhan Synnot reviews the rest of the week’s releases

Bullhead (15)

* * *

This Belgian drama stars Rust And Bone’s Matthias Schoenaerts as Jacky, a cattle farmer who owes his busted bullish physiognomy to his part-time job as a thug and self-administered doses of animal hormones. Michael R Roskam’s first film is not purely about Jacky, and that’s a pity, because no-one else is as good as Schoenaerts in this Academy foreign language film entry.

Glasgow Film Theatre from Friday; Dundee Contemporary Arts from 8 February

Antiviral (15)

* * *

Brandon Cronenberg follows in his father David’s footsteps with a squirmy first feature that combines a satire on celebrity fandom with hypodermics that allow them to share their diseases. It doesn’t all work but it’s a stylish, promising debut.

On selected release from Friday

Cirque Du Soleil: Worlds Away 3D (PG)

* *

The Canadian entertainment troupe get a 3D showcase. A skimpy storyline about a woman (Erica Liz) who falls for an aerial acrobat (Igor Zaripov) provides the framework for 90 minutes of rubber-limbed acrobatics. 
The athleticism of a contortionist in a large martini glass, or human-powered hamster wheels suspended in mid-air, is flat-out astonishing but the film doesn’t convey a sense of danger to Cirque’s trapeze ballets and you’ll struggle to find any sort of narrative logic to the Mexican wrestlers bouncing to Elvis numbers.

Cameo, Edinburgh, 3 and 7 February; Cineworld Fountainpark and Vue Ocean, Edinburgh, Vue Hamilton, and Cineworld Dundee, 
3 and 5 February

Bullet To The Head (15)

* *

Sylvester Stallone teams up with veteran action director Walter Hill for another assault on the nostalgia and wallets of action fans. Stallone is a hitman who teams up with Fast And Furious’s Sung Kang for revenge when his partner is killed. What follows is certainly noisy, occasionally amusing, but chiefly a reminder that the cinematic legacy of dull 1980s storytelling deserves a bullet of its own. «

On general release from Friday