How I Live Now is a dark-themed drama, directed by Kevin Macdonald, and adapted from the original novel by Meg Rosoff by Jeremy Brock, Tony Grisoni and Penelope Skinner. The film will only see a limited theatrical release in the US, so is also available right now to rent on iTunes. I thought I’d give it a quick review.

Opening statement: I haven’t read the book. But the film made me want to. As it stands I found the film interesting enough to discuss on its own.

Channeling an odd-mix of coming-of-age and post-Walking-Dead social breakdown drama the film is certainly not run-of-the-mill. I immediately found myself comparing it to ‘Lore’, which explored similar territory, although was far darker in it’s conclusions.

Lead actress Saoirse Ronan has been in just about everything in the last couple of years, and delivers a solid performance. The rest of the cast are sufficient. 

Happier times.

How I Live Now iTunes 1080p Download Technical Quality

The 1080p iTunes rental clocks in at 4.3 GB at has an average video bit-rate of 5.5 Mbps. It features a stereo as well as 5.1 soundtrack. The image is slightly letter-boxed at 1.85:1

I was impressed by the picture quality throughout, the extra 0.5Mbps bump over the average iTunes bitrate gives the encoder enough elbow room to satisfactorily represent most of the material without any artifacts, a few grainy night scenes show a few slight artifacts during motion, but probably won’t be noticeable at normal viewing distance.

I only reviewed the Stereo soundtrack, but was impressed by it.

Daisy, (Saoirse Ronan) reaches the end of her strength.

Conclusion

5 out of 5. For six dollars – it represents a great value rental. Picture quality is excellent, and the feature is first-class. A shame it didn’t see a wider release in the US.

 FTC Disclosure: I am an iTunes and Amazon affiliate advertiser, this means that if you click on one of the links above, I get a very small amount of money.