New video: ‘T2 Trainspotting’ is an unlikely sequel and surprisingly profound
New on Blu-ray
“T2 Trainspotting” (Sony DVD, $25.99; Blu-ray, $30.99; 4K, $45.99; also available on VOD)
One of the year’s unlikeliest sequels, “T2 Trainspotting” reunites the cast of the 1996 indie hit “Trainspotting” with its director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge in a story that catches up with the restless Scottish heroin addicts of Irvine Welsh’s original novel, 20 years later. Like the original, “T2” is more of a series of sketches — some comic, some poetic, some bleak — than it is a single cohesive story. Even though they’ve had thriving and diverse movie careers since the first film, Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle fall right back into their old disreputable characters, lending gravity and soul to a shaggy, surprisingly profound slice of life, about young scoundrels settling into middle age.
[Special features: A Boyle-Hodge commentary track, deleted scenes and a comprehensive featurette]
VOD
“Hamish Macbeth” (available June 26 on Acorn TV)
Shortly before his breakout roles in “Trainspotting” and “The Full Monty,” Robert Carlyle starred in BBC Scotland adaptation of M.C. Beaton’s mystery novels about Constable Hamish Macbeth, a small-town cop who takes care of the locals while trying to stay out of the limelight. Caryle made 20 episodes of “Hamish Macbeth” between 1995 and 1997, anchoring low-key stories that are a little bit “The Andy Griffith Show,” a little bit “Murder, She Wrote,” and a whole lot of rich local color. They’re little gems of the Eurocrime genre, well-acted and easy to like.
TV set of the week
“Home Movies: The Complete Series” (Shout! Factory DVD, $59.97)
Fans of Fox’s smart and delightful “Bob’s Burgers” should check out creator Loren Bouchard and voice-actor H. Jon Benjamin’s earlier animated sitcom “Home Movies,” which ran for 52 episodes on the UPN and Cartoon Network from 1999 to 2004. Co-creator Brendon Small stars as 8-year-old Brendon, an aspiring director who turns his life with his imaginative friends and divorced mother into clever little films. The animation itself is crude — with rough drawings rendered in an eye-straining process dubbed “squigglevision” — but the partially improvised voice-work is loose and funny, and the stories of ordinary dysfunctional family life have an honesty and sweetness that’s rare in any medium.
[Special features: Commentary tracks, interviews, featurettes, and bonus shorts]
From the archives
“The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog” (Criterion Blu-ray, $39.95)
The first Alfred Hitchcock film truly worthy of the master of screen suspense’s name, the 1927 mystery-thriller is loosely based on the legend of Jack the Ripper, and stars Ivor Novello as a handsome young man who fits the description of a notorious serial killer. Without the benefit of sound — an aspect of cinema he’d later use better than any other filmmaker of his era — Hitchcock began developing the visual grammar that would later inform his better-known work. The film is consistently clever and genuinely tense, exploring what would become some of the director’s major themes: guilt, obsession, suspicion and the dark desires that animate the seemingly civil.
[Special features: Old and new interviews, a video essay, a radio adaptation, and another 1927 Hitchcock silent feature, “Downhill”]
Three more to see
“The Apple” (Kino Lorber Blu-ray, $29.95); “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” (IFC Midnight/Shout! Factory DVD, $16.97; Blu-ray, $24.97; also available on VOD); “The Belko Experiment” (20th Century Fox DVD, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.99; also available on VOD)
Only good movies
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