Critical Week: You're the one

The film festival wrapped up on Sunday night, and I have two weeks now before I head to another one. This week's screenings included the involving, beautifully written and played true-life addiction drama Beautiful Boy, starring Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet (above) as father and son. Bohemian Rhapsody is a somewhat toned-down biopic of Freddie Mercury and Queen that's still watchable thanks to both a thunderous performance by Rami Malek and a line-up of fabulous songs.

Lower-profile films included the sensitive, low-key drama 1985, starring Cory Michael Smith as a young man trying to tell his conservative family the truth about himself. The Guilty is a riveting real-time Danish thriller about a cop working in an emergency services call centre dealing with a scary crisis while personal issues gurgle in the background. M/M is an offbeat German drama about a young man who becomes fixated with a man whose life he tries to take over, with unexpected results. And Adrift in Soho is the micro-budget British experimental drama looking at the iconic London neighbourhood in the 1950s.

Screenings are a little thin at the moment, mainly because the big studios simply aren't showing their films to most critics, and also because I've seen many current releases at film festivals. This coming week I'm seeing Rose Byrne in Juliet Naked, Lars Von Trier's The House That Jack Built, the American drama Monsters and Men, and the Halloween treat Hell Fest.