Film Carew

On closing title, Only God Forgives is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, all but confessing to the extended homage of its ultra-violent, blood-spraying psycho-surrealism. Winding Refn has claimed that Jodorowsky has christened him his “spiritual son”, but, in truth, his ninth feature could just as easily be dedicated to David Lynch, given the way it creeps down dark hallways, breaks for bizarre karaoke interludes, and has the quality of a nightmare. Nicolas Winding-Refn's follow-up to Drive - again starring Ryan Gosling as a borderline-mute anti-hero descending down the slippery slope of revenge - is one of the most meticulously-stylised films of the year, a gloriously lit, shot, scored, sound-designed, wallpapered, and wardrobed piece of pure cinema that, were it taken solely on its high-contrast, neon-lit aesthetic, would be an utter delight. Y'know, like Drive. But Only God Forgives never gets anywhere near that picture's synth-pop fizz nor tensely-staged chase sequences. Instead, this sustained cinematic nightmare has the feeling of one of those dreams where you wake up confused, wondering how your subconscious could come upon something quite so strange, so silly.

Here, Gosling plays an American ex-pat who runs a Muay Thai gym in Bangkok. He's haunted by persistent castration-anxiety dreams where his hands are cut off by a preternaturally-calm police chief (Vithaya Pansringarm), an “avenging angel” who floats throughout Only God Forgives like the grim reaper, a priestly-collard messenger-of-death seemingly strolled out of a samurai movie. The nightmares so prey on Gosling that when he visits his favourite call girl (Thai pop-starlet Yaya-Ying), all he wants to do is hold her hands; to feel hers on his. When he looks down at his hands, slowly flexing them, it's to confirm that they're still there. It also seems to suggest that, maybe, these dukes are deadly weapons, but that's later revealed to be a ruse: Gosling may invite a climactic battle with the monosyllabic challenge “wanna fight?”, but it turns out he's actually a terrible fighter, especially when click-clacking about in dress shoes.

Gosling's the sensitive soul of his fight-fixing, drug-smuggling, double-dealing family, who are a collection of villains so caricature that they border on comic. First comes bro Tom Burke, who walks into a brothel, barks “I wanna fuck a 14-year-old!”, then adds raping and killing to the bill. He's soon beaten to death by a grieving father in a piece of backwoods, locked-room vengeance, which leads to the arrival of avenging mama Kristin Scott Thomas, a Lady MacBeth straight outta the trailer park. In pink eyeliner and matching harem pants, peroxide extensions and wedge heels, she swans into Bangkok and calls the first Thai she sees a “cunt”. Just in case you're unsure of her villainy, she mocks Gosling's beloved hand-holder as a “cute little cum-dumpster”; publicly compares the cock sizes of her two sons; rationalises her first-born's drunken raping-and-murdering thusly: “I'm sure he had his reasons”(!!!); then vows to get the “yellow nigger” who killed him; all whilst trussed in drag make-up, cigarette packet under bra-strap, leopard-print her constant motif.

On opening, you wonder if Winding Refn is authoring a piece of social commentary, about the neo-colonialist foreigners who treat Bangkok as their own personal playground; plundering the local landscape - buying women, bribing cops, hiring goons - as if granted dominion. The first 20 minutes takes place entirely in a nocturnal haze lit solely in red; a piece of hyper-stylisation out to suggest that these foreigners are dwelling in a perpetual red-light-district, even if the effect is of a noir-film shot in a darkroom. Yet across his entire career, Winding Refn has never be able to sustain a single theme or forward a cogent thesis; like some lesser (or, really, just pre-Inglourious Basterds) Tarantino, he is all style, no substance; a cinematic “visionary” for whom dialogue is a burden and consistency a poison. Only God Forgives has the coldness of a formal exercise, but none of the philosophical rigour.

And this makes its extreme violence, and its depiction of women, feel plenty problematic. In one scene, Pansringarm tortures one of Thomas's lackeys by slicing up his eyeballs, Buñuel-style, whilst a roomful of immaculately-trussed-up prostitutes sit perfectly still, eyes closed, resembling lifeless dolls, or plastic brides atop wedding cakes. Thomas is so demonised she becomes a figure-of-all-evil, and her relationship with her sons is so very Oedipal; a gloriously-gory scene in which Gosling fists an open wound(!) in mommy dearest making ridiculously literal the notion. The only time Gosling is aroused from his slumber is when Yaya-Ying dares criticise Thomas; the sleepwalkin' beefcake suddenly shaking down and threatening his terrified pseudo-paramour, screeching “she's my mother!” with terrifying volume.

Cliff Martinez's fascinating score - easily the most interesting major-movie music in 2013 - also works with terrifying volume. When not dallying through Giallo-aping space-prog-disco, he works with a palette of pounding percussion - from thudding thimpanis to Thai long-drums - and the nails-on-blackboard scrapes of discordant strings, and brilliantly summons monolithic bursts of pure tonality reminiscent of the wall-of-noise terror of folk like Kevin Drumm or Sunn o))). In one scene - which has shades of the infamous creeping-down-the-back-alley-behind-the-dumpster sequence from Mulholland Drive - Winding Refn shoots a lowlife and his odd-looking son with a slowly-creeping camera, watching them as their eyes widen at an unseen something approaching. Then, scored noise is blared at foghorn volume, announcing imminent doom. Cue: Pansringarm striding into frame, limbs soon sliced off. And, in turn, the merry trail of carnage marches on, fabulous to look at but worrisome to think about; Only God Forgives essentially amounting to one of the most artfully-made exploitation movies ever.

Damon and Douglas, as you've never seen them before.

Even as the Golden Age of television erased the once-insurmountable class divide between the big screen and the idiot box, the stigma of the 'TV movie' still persisted. Behind The Candelabra happily obliterates it: premiering at Cannes, then showing on HBO in the US (as the highest-rated TV movie in a decade), and now arriving on local cinema screens. Steven Soderbergh boasts that Hollywood refused to make the portrait of the life-and-times of Liberace on account of it being “too gay”, but, good lord, this thing scans as a classic prestige picture: a celebrity biopic starring celebrities - a feather-haired Matt Damon and bewigged Michael Douglas, plus an amazing range of iconic TV types like Scott Bakula, Paul Reiser, and Rob Lowe - that comes with a classic rise-and-fall arc. Luxuriating in the “palatial kitsch” of Liberace's famous excesses, it's a tale of celebrity egomania (“God looks upon me with special favour,” Douglas pronounces), extreme plastic surgery, rampant drug use, and obscene wealth (a scene in which Damon and Douglas waddle into a XXX video-store in gargantuan furs is a piece of grotesque comedy). Soderbergh, ever the classicist, leans on cinema's long history of portraying men of unimaginable means as lonely, insecure, and manipulative; his picture playing like Citizen Kane trussed in sequin and sodomy. 15 Emmy nominations may not sound so impressive when they give that shit out to, like, Modern Family, but, “too gay” or no, those just as easily could've been Oscar nods.

What's In A Name? Plenty, if you're planning on calling your unborn son Adolf. Adapting their own stageplay to screen, Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandra de la Patelliere stage a conversation movie whose central dinner-party, with the mere mention of the Führer, suddenly unravels; polite social façades falling by the wayside when the gloves come off, and a quartet of old friends (Patrick Bruel, Charles Berling, Valérie Benguigui, Guillaume de Tonquédec) suddenly start confessing long-held secrets, letting loose unexpected revelations, verbalising vicious resentments. After beginning with a Jean-Pierre Jeunet-esque opening filled with hijacked stock footage, flurries of fated connections, and all manner of whimsy, What's In A Name? stays true to its stageplay roots: effectively locking its characters in the one lounge-room, and not allowing them to leave. The dialogue is rapid-paced and cutting, though you suspect it sings better in its native French than it does in translation; and the actors clearly get to relish cycling through a wide, wild range of emotions. Folk fond of classic French farces à la The Dinner Game, or even Polanski's recent Carnage, will find plenty to like.