Guy Lodge 

DVDs and downloads: The Wolf of Wall Street, Orange is the New Black and more

Guy Lodge reviews Martin Scorsese's surprise box-office hit, Jenji Kohan's Netflix drama and the rest of the week's big releases
  
  


Either Jordan Belfort made a few calls to clear the shelves, or not many rival films are daring to take on the beast that is The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, 18), but Martin Scorsese's frenzied finance-world freakout lords over this week's DVD release schedule like, well, a shark-suited One Percenter surveying his minions from a skyscraper height. As well it might, with more than £22m in the bank making it Britain's third-highest grosser so far this year – a pretty surprising result for a three-hour fiesta of craven capitalism driven by an openly loathsome hero.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Belfort – the self-made New York stockbroker turned motivational speaker by way of imprisonment for fraud – in a mode of grinning, shellacked burlesque, while Scorsese goes equally large, cramming Belfort's Quaalude-assisted ride to hell with noise, grimy comedy and sometimes literal ticker-tape. It's entirely too much, yet on the other hand, any less would probably be inappropriate to its milieu. And while the film doesn't actively celebrate Belfort's misdeeds, it enjoys them in dubiously complicit fashion; while earlier rumours of a four-hour cut for DVD haven't come to pass, its luxurious length already feels an indulgence of both its director and his subject. Scorsese has made better films in recent years, then, but he hasn't made one quite this electrified.

Women get rudely short shrift in The Wolf of Wall Street, so it's a good week for Orange is the New Black (Lionsgate, 15) to make its DVD debut, months after originally airing on Netflix. There's a distribution pattern that may seem quaint in the near feature, though for non-Netflixers, it's a welcome chance to catch up on one of the most wickedly smart American TV imports of recent years. Based on a memoir by writer Piper Kerman, a Wasp-ish bisexual sentenced to 15 months in prison for smuggling drug money, Jenji Kohan's coolly funny series offers a gratifying cross-section of modern-day femininity amid its spiky ensemble. Taylor Schilling's clever, commendably unlikable work in the lead is complemented by a range of deft, tangy supporting players – Laura Prepon is especially marvellous as Kerman's rough-edged ex.

A couple of low-key but worthwhile independent dramas surface this week after having skipped cinemas. The best of them is Wish You Were Here (Metrodome, 15), a sharply whittled, exactingly plotted Australian mystery from first-time director Kieran Darcy-Smith, with a steely performance from Joel Edgerton as one of four friends whose southeast Asian couples' vacation sours alarmingly when one of their party disappears. Parcelling out information in staggered, non-linear fashion, it's slippery, surprising stuff. The reliably superb Aidan Gillen, meanwhile, overcomes some Benetton-cinema contrivances in The Good Man (Soda, 15), a handsome, well-intentioned parable that braids two seemingly separate moral dramas – one concerning a slick Belfast banker, the other a poor, socially conscious student in a Cape Town township – across geographic and class lines.

Debuting with little fanfare on iTunes, meanwhile, is the modest charmer A Birder's Guide to Everything – a generically kooky indie-style title for a genuinely sweet coming-of-age tale. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the adolescent wounded by his mother's death and his father's impending nuptials, who seeks solace in his school's Young Birders Society; it's a light, tender distraction, less precious than it sounds and enlivened with one of Ben Kingsley's customarily daffy cameos as a celebrated bird-watcher – if any such thing exists.

 

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