Critical Week: The waiting game

While there are glimpses of a post-pandemic new normal, everything still feels up in the air. The Sundance Film Festival is currently running a virtual edition, while major film releases continue to shift their releases further back to hopefully less turbulent times. Meanwhile, I've been busy putting together the London Film Critics' Circle awards as another virtual ceremony. And press screenings are in a strange phase as well, with very few things in the diary. Aside from a few shorts, the only narrative film I saw this week was a catch-up awards contender, the indie drama Test Pattern, a pointed, bracingly honest romance that gently takes the audience through some rather enormous tonal shifts.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Compartment No 6
Parallel Mothers • Taming the Garden
Boris Karloff: The Man Behind
the Monster
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All the other movies I watched were documentaries. Two looked back on a century of film history, skilfully exploring the lives and careers of cinema icons. Although neither feels like it gets too deep under the skin, fans will love both: The Real Charlie Chaplin and Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster. The other three are serious awards contenders: The Rescue is a thrilling, strikingly well-shot doc about the operation to free 12 boys trapped in a flooded Thai cave. Procession movingly traces a group of men taking inventive action as they try to heal from childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests. And the visually gorgeous Taming the Garden quietly observes the startling impact a billionaire has on nature, culture and history as he creates a landscaped garden.

Films to see over the coming week include Johnny Knoxville and crew's continuing idiocy in Jackass Forever, Scout Taylor-Compton in The Long Night, Sam Claflin in Book of Love, the Spanish drama Bringing Him Back, the documentary The Tinder Swindler, and the shorts collection The French Boys 3.

Stage: Let's get radical

AKEIM TOUSSAINT BUCK
Radical Visions
Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells • 20-21.Jan.22

This Wild Card programme was presented as a series of seven separate elements over more than three hours. It included two dance pieces and a film in the Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler's Wells, while beforehand, during the interval and at the end, more informal events were held in the Fox Garden Cafe and Khan Room. Each portion of this evening reverberated with the spirit and energy of Britain's Black subculture, exploring issues of identity and legacy that are easy for everyone in the audience to connect with.

Inscribed in "Me"
choreographer-performer Alethia Antonia
composers Akeim Toussaint Buck & Mikel Ameen
lighting Ali Hunter

Slowly emerging from pitch-black, Antonia athletically perches atop a wooden crate, balancing and twisting, trying to escape its gravitational pull, then finally giving in and facing a whole new set of challenges. It's a remarkably controlled performance, urgent in its intense physicality and the vivid sense that she is being held, called, pushed and pulled by a force much greater than herself. Her physicality is simply stunning, muscular and passionate. The audience takes this journey with her, and it's so forceful that we often find ourself holding our breath as we wait the next flicker of free expression. It's focussed and utterly riveting.

Black Is...
by Fubunation
choreography Rhys Dennis & Waddah Sinada
performers Mayowa Ogunnaike, Rhys Dennis, Rose Sall Sao, Waddah Sinada
composer Sam Nunez
lighting Kieron Johnson

With strikingly angled lighting, this piece features four dancers undulating in various formations around the stage, creating shapes together and separately as each dancer forges his or her own identity within the group. It's a remarkably simple idea, effective in the way the choreography emerges from the centre of these focussed and seriously skilled dancers' bodies, vibrating to the rhythmic soundscape. The effect is often dazzling, shifting tempo from pulsating slow motion to race rapidly around the space. And while the actions are largely contained within the body, there are stunning moments of expansive movement that add an exhilarating soulfulness.

Radical Visions: music and spoken word
performers Lateshia Howell, Kai Larasi, Tatenda Naomi Matsvai, Muti Musafiri
musicians Amynata Adigada, Azizi Cole, Pariss Elektra, Otis Jones

During the interval, a team of performers gathers the crowd around them, delivering a series of spoken-word pieces with musical underscore that explore powerful themes connecting humanity to its ancestry and the universe. "Warrior blood runs through me," intones one poet, and another riffs on the fact that at our core each of us is a cosmic being. In between these, a dancer rallies the cast, musicians and audience to chant in celebration of radical visions. Perhaps these ideas aren't particularly radical, but they are delivered with an artistic skill that is utterly mesmerising, reenforcing big ideas that are easy for us to forget.

Displaced
dir Akeim Toussaint Buck & Ashley Karrell
scr Akeim Toussaint Buck
with Akeim Toussaint Buck, Arthur France, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Pariss Elektra, Azizi Cole, Cleve 'Rev Chunky' Freckleton, Solomon Charles-Kelly, Lorina Gumbs
22/UK 40m

Expanded from Buck's original one-man dance theatre production Windows of Displacement, this beautifully shot and edited film plays out in self-contained chapters as performer Buck delivers words and movement from a variety of locations, connecting his personal legacy from his ancestors in Africa to his birth in Jamaica to his childhood and life in Britain. Scenes are shot on beaches, forests, city streets and inside a church, surrounded by fellow performers who celebrate human connections and commonality. It's a very clever piece, both warmly uplifting and sharply pointed. And watching it is an eye-opening experience, a reminder that each of us has a complex history that makes us who we are. We really need to stop defining people by whatever is the most obvious.

photos by Ashley Karrell, Camilla Greenwell, Sanaa Abstrakt • 20.Jan.22

 

Critical Week: Say cheese

Covid restrictions are lifting in Britain, but I haven't had many press screenings this week, mainly because many of the films opening this month are ones I saw at a festival last year. Thankfully, this gives me some extra time to work on the forthcoming London Critics' Circle Film Awards - there are less than three weeks to pull everything together for that, even as a virtual event. Bigger films this week included A Journal for Jordan, a sentimentalised true drama starring Michael B Jordan and Chante Adams, directed by Denzel Washington. It's a good story, but feels too gentle and worthy. And then there's the silly fantasy fairy tale The King's Daughter, in which Pierce Brosnan plays Louis XIV, whose daughter (Kaya Scodelario) befriends a mermaid (Bingbing Fan) and refuses to fall for the suitable man. It's ridiculous but fun.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Belfast • Cicada • Torn
Nightmare Alley
ALL REVIEWS >

And then there's the jaunty Spain-set comedy Rifkin's Festival, which has some terrific touches but is another uneven film from the troublesome Woody Allen. From Brazil, The Pink Cloud is eerily prescient, shot in 2019 but expertly capturing the feeling of lockdown in its story about a toxic cloud that traps a new couple in a flat for years. Buzzy Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi skilfully tells three separate stories in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and their thematic angles dovetail beautifully. And in the documentary Torn, filmmaker Max Lowe recounts the involving, twisty story of his mountain-climbing superstar father and his legacy.

This coming week I have mainly documentaries to watch, including The Real Charlie Chaplin, Taming the Garden, Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster and awards contenders Procession and The Rescue.

Critical Week: This round's on me

As movie awards season heats up, things are getting busier for me - we're in the final week of voting in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards. I'm the chair of this group, so have quite a lot to do over the next few weeks before we announce our winners. Only a couple of the films I saw this week are awards-worthy. Ben Affleck earned a SAG nomination for his role in The Tender Bar, a gentle and somewhat uneven personal drama that also stars Tye Sheridan and is directed by George Clooney. On the big screen, I had a press screening of the fifth Scream movie, another self-referential meta-horror that plays it rather straight rather than going for something original. But it's fun to see Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette back together on-screen.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Memoria • Cow • Belle
Save the Cinema • Scream
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Smaller movies this week included the nutty horror The Free Fall, which plays out in swirly confusion before a terrific but very late reveal. Lucy Hale stars in Borrego, an underpowered thriller set on the drug-overrun desert on the California-Mexico border. There's more arthouse horror in The Scary of Sixty-First, a stylish and sexy Manhattan freak-out. And from Switzerland, The Fam (La Mif) is a riveting doc-style drama set in a children's care home.

Films to watch this coming week include Michael B Jordan in A Journal for Jordan, Christoph Waltz in Rifkin's Festival, the Brazilian thriller The Pink Cloud and the mountain-climber doc Torn, plus awards contenders Test Pattern, El Planeta, Azor and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy .

Critical Week: Killer heels

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Amid growing covid-related issues in the UK, London-based critics have had our first press screening of 2022: a masked-up full house enjoying pre-film cocktails, popcorn and photo ops before watching the globe-hopping action movie The 355 on a huge Leicester Square screen. The movie has its moments, thanks to the far above-average cast (above are Penelope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o and Diane Kruger), although the lazy script and choppy-shaky action scenes let it down rather badly.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A Hero • Writing With Fire
Licorice Pizza • Ailey
Munich: The Edge of War 
ALL REVIEWS >

Other films seen this week were an eclectic bunch. Minyan is a thoughtful, insightful drama set in 1980s Brooklyn as a teen struggles with the tension between his tight Russian-Jewish family and his newfound homosexuality. From Kosovo, Hive is a superbly understated true story of a woman taking on her sexist society. Mads Mikkelsen is terrific as a burly soldier in Riders of Justice, an unusually smart and engaging Danish variation on the Taken vengeance formula. Quentin Dupieux is back with another endearingly bonkers adventure, Mandibles, about two chuckleheads who find a gigantic housefly. And from Spain, More the Merrier is a multi-strand comedy set around a club for swingers. Sometimes very sexy, the film struggles to escape from the usual prudish attitudes.

This coming week I'll finally catching up with Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, Shawn Ashmore in Free Fall, the Swiss drama La Mif, and the documentary Taming the Garden.