Wednesday 4 July 2012

Critical Week: Bedtime stories

Topping the US box office, Seth MacFarlane's raucously funny comedy Ted was screened to UK critics this past week and kept us laughing all the way through (this had nothing to do with the beer and pizza they served to us beforehand). We also caught up with Marc Webb's enjoyable but unnecessary origin-reboot The Amazing Spider-man, of which the best aspect is the teen rom-com between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone;; and the still-entertaining fourth animated adventure Ice Age: Continental Drift, which was preceded by a Simpsons short that's nothing short of genius - The Longest Daycare, a wordless adventure starring Maggie.

We also had an early screening of Bradley Cooper and Dax Shepard in the roady comedy Hit and Run, for which reviews are embargoed. And further off the beaten path were the low-budget British prison drama Offender, an ambitious approach to a rather tired genre, and the British indie thriller In the Dark Half, which is a proper cinematic creep-out.

Coming up this week, I'll catch up with two Edinburgh Film Festival titles I missed while I was there: Disney-Pixar's Scottish epic Brave and John Hillcoat's Lawless. There's also the British drama My Brother the Devil, the American indie Shut Up and Kiss Me, the Monty Python doc A Liar's Autobiography, the green-technology doc Revenge of the Electric Car, and restored versions of Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Orson Welles' F for Fake.

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