Critical Week: Super Sly!

For some reason, August has been one of my busiest months this year, with barely a free moment between all of the movies I need to watch. And yes, it feels like work! At least, to balance the heavy arthouse fare, there were two loud masculine thrillers this week. Sylvester Stallone gets to play an ageing superhero in Samaritan, an unusually violent movie that seems made for kids. Its writing and direction are simplistic, but Sly is great, as is Pilou Asbaek as the villain. Meanwhile, Idris Elba takes on an angry lion in Beast, an entertaining but simplistic thriller with some terrific action moments. Its family angles have a bit more texture.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Private Desert • Funny Pages
Official Competition • The Good Boss
PERHAPS AVOID:
Samaritan
ALL REVIEWS >

The British post-WWII thriller Burial stars Tom Felten and Charlotte Vega (with a boost from Harriet Walter) in a dark tale about a Soviet mission. It's  messy, but atmospheric. The British thriller Black Mail is slick and watchable, but the filmmakers' inexperience shows in its lack of originality. And I also watched six films for the forthcoming FrightFest in London (coverage is coming this weekend) and just started working through my advance list of films that will be shown at the 79th Venice Film Festival (coverage starts next week).

This coming weekend is FrightFest in London, and then next week I'm heading to the 79th Venice Film Festival. I have 13 films to watch before I go (yikes!), then need to find time to write about them before seeing even more movies in Venice. Watch this space for updates...

LFF 10: Close with a bang

And that's it. The 60th BFI London Film Festival came to a close tonight with the red carpet UK premiere of Ben Wheatley's Free Fire. Most of the cast were on hand (that's Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Michael Smiley, Enzo Cilenti, Jack Reynor and Cillian Murphy, above), and I'm sure the party was a lot of fun. Not that I'd know: in the 19 years I've been covering the LFF I have never been invited to a festival party. But never mind - it's about the films for me, and here are some final highlights from Sunday...

Free Fire
dir Ben Wheatley; with Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley 16/UK ***.
With a bracingly simple premise and a screen full of hilariously quirky characters, Ben Wheatley plays a jazz riff on Tarantino in this riotous shoot-em-up. The plot may be under-defined and only barely developed, but the actors are having so much fun adding various shades of comedy and intensity to their roles that they keep the audience chuckling from start to finish.

Mascots
dir Christopher Guest; with Jane Lynch, Ed Begley Jr 16/US ***.
Using his improvisational mock-doc style, Christopher Guest takes on the world of sports mascotery. As in films like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, Guest's gifted ensemble provides a constant flow of verbal and visual gags, playing up the wackier aspects of this subculture. There's nothing particularly new here, no innovation to the format, but the movie is consistently hilarious.

The Salesman
dir-scr Asghar Farhadi; with Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti 16/Irn ****
Here's yet another almost overpoweringly perceptive everyday drama from Asghar Farhadi, putting a normal couple through a series of events that push them to the breaking point. The plot centres on unexpected conflicts that provide challenging comments on both morality and forgiveness. This is a subtle, personal film that holds the audience in its grip, unable to work out where it might be going next.

The Last Laugh 
dir Ferne Pearlstein; with Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman 16/US ****
Like The Aristocrats, this documentary explores the boundaries of what's appropriate in comedy. The specific topic here is when it's OK to crack a joke about a tragic event, specifically something as big and horrific as the Holocaust. What makes the film worth a look is how director Ferne Pearlstein strikes such a remarkable balance between the views of comics and survivors.

And finally, another film I saw in Venice was the Golden Lion winner The Woman Who Left, the riveting, nearly 4-hour drama by Lav Diaz. It was a last-minute addition to the London programme.

On the Road: Oldboy and coming attractions

For me, one of the most important things about being on vacation is not seeing movies! But of course with my job I'm always needing to see things to fill in gaps since I'm missing London press screenings by being away. And at this time of year there are also awards-consideration screenings to keep in mind - so I may try to catch some of those in Los Angeles this weekend.

Today I saw Spike Lee's remake of Park Chan-wook's 2003 fan favourite Oldboy, which opened today in America and hits Britain next week. It's the twisty story about a man (Josh Brolin, pictured) inexplicably imprisoned for 20 years and then released without warning, then trying to figure out who did this and why. Brolin is good, as is his guardian angel Elizabeth Olsen. But Lee's direction is so overstated that it flattens the film's snaky plot. This includes the frustratingly obvious score, pushy emotions and strangely broad performances by the villainous Samuel L Jackson and Sharlto Copley (oddly channelling Darren Brown). In other words, this is the kind of movie that needs the edgy Do the Right Thing-era Lee rather than the bland technical skill of Inside Man-era Lee.

There were eight trailers before Oldboy - which was cool since I so rarely get to see them on a big screen. I'd seen the teaser for Pompeii before (looks over-serious but fun), and also the latest, more detailed look at Scorsese's The Wolf of a Wall Street (can't wait to see all three hours of it). It was fun to get some more detail on David O Russell's star-packed and apparently unmissable 1970s drama American Hustle (including both Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams with their hair in rollers). 

On the other hand, the more detailed trailer for Walking With Dinosaurs gave me pause: despite the photo-realism, these are comical talking dinosaurs, so expectations are down a big notch. And That Awkward Moment doesn't look like nearly as much fun in its cleaner green-band trailer, but I still like Zac Efron, Michael B Jordan and Miles Teller enough to look forward to it.

Otherwise, I hadn't yet seen anything from Non-stop, the latest Liam Neeson action romp, which promisingly costars Julianne Moore and Michelle Dockery (neither of whom actually does anything in the trailer). It looks like a po-faced thriller that would really benefit from a hive of snakes. Grudge Match looks frankly ridiculous, playing on Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro's boxing movie past for a comedy-drama that looks unsurprisingly uneven (it's also no surprise which actor seems to be taking things rather a lot more seriously). And finally, Devil's Due is a terrific title for a B-movie antichrist horror thriller about a happy couple whose life goes all Rosemary's Baby on them. The movie looks appropriately slick and stupid.