Critical Week: A trick of the mind

There haven't been any press screenings in London over the past week, so I've been catching up with things on the small screen. Well, one TV show had a big-screen event opening: Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were back on New Year's Day for Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, a film so relentlessly, almost exhaustingly clever that it felt a bit too much like Inception. But the cast is terrific, and a sharply evocative visual sensibility kept it riveting. Also, I wanted to revisit Star Wars: The Force Awakens when I wasn't working, and it was fun to see it again with a boisterous crowd in a local cinema to watch it again (although I didn't enjoy the boisterous snack-rustling and constant phone-use). Yes, the film holds up to a second viewing, as the box office bonanza is proving.

The only other new film I watched was the Ecuadorian coming-of-age drama Holiday, a sensitive story beautifully shot in the country I grew up in (homesickness alert!). And I also caught up with the final two awards nominees I hadn't yet seen - both British-made docs...

A Syrian Love Story
dir Sean McAllister; with Amer, Raghda, Bob, Shadi 15/UK ****
Beautifully assembled, this strikingly involving documentary follows a Syrian family through four years of upheaval. British filmmaker McAllister first starts videotaping Amer and his children while his wife Raghda is being held in prison in 2011, then follows them as they flee to Lebanon and eventually get refugee status in France. Along the way, they watch their country reduced to rubble by a government willing to massacre its own people rather than allow them to have a democratic vote. But it's the film's personal touch that makes it compelling, tracing Amer and Raghda's difficult relationship, often through the eyes of their precocious young son Bob. (Nominated for Documentary of the Year in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards.)

Palio
dir Cosima Spender; with Gigi Bruschelli, Giovanni Atzeni 15/UK ***.
Gorgeous cinematography and clever editing set this documentary apart. The Palio is a bareback horse race that has been run around Siena's Piazza del Campo since the 14th century, pitting the city's districts against each other. Filmmaker Spender lets the participants tell the story, which seems to make the city properly medieval for two races each summer. Rivalries are out of control, the money passing around is absurd, and both the horses and the jockeys are crowned as heroes or vilified as losers. By having three generations of jockeys narrate the film, it unearths all kinds of fascinating, unexpected details. Although the relevance of all of this outside Siena is rather tenuous, it's a sharply well-observed exploration of one of Europe's most colourful traditions. (Nominated for Documentary of the Year in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards.)

Screenings are cranking up very slowly so far this year, but I have Kristen Wiig's festival film Nasty Baby in the diary, plus the gospel singer documentary Mavis! More are sure to come along soon...

Critical Week: My head hurts!

I caught up this week with Will Smith's new film Concussion, a true drama that's very well shot and acted, and also relentlessly "Important!" Hopefully it'll finally give traction to the dangers of brain injury in America's favourite sport, which has suppressed medical findings for decades. Long delayed here in the UK, Ramin Bahrani's 2012 film At Any Price will be released in the wake of the filmmaker's 2014 drama 99 Homes. This is a similar story of the American dream gone sour, and it gives Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron (astutely cast as father and son) unusually meaty roles.

Vincent Cassel is terrific as the patriarch in Partisan, an elusive drama about a commune in an isolated country (it was shot in the Georgian Republic) where one of his children begins to doubt the nature of this created reality. It's clever and startlingly involving. And from Denmark, A War cross-cuts between life at home and on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Shot like a documentary, the film feels rather derivative (see Restrepo for the real thing) but carries a strong kick in the moral dilemma of the final act. I also caught up with two previously released awards contenders:

Hard to Be a God
dir Aleksey German; with Leonid Yarmolnik, Aleksandr Chutko 13/Rus ****
With a virtually plotless structure and nearly three-hour running time, this Russian epic will test the patience of even the most ambitious moviegoer. But there's so much going on in every extraordinary frame that it's never boring. Violent, silly and utterly bonkers, the premise is that a group of scientists has travelled to help a distant planet that's stuck in its middle ages, unwilling to move into a renaissance. Shot in vivid black and white, the film follows one of these men, Don Rumata (Yarmolnik), through an odyssey of mud and blood. Details are observed in long takes by the bravura camerawork and jaw-dropping production design. It may ultimately be a meandering and bleak look at the tenacity of human ignorance, but it's utterly dazzling. (Nominated for Foreign-Language Film of the Year by the London Critics' Circle.)

Radiator
dir Tom Browne; with Richard Johnson, Gemma Jones, Daniel Cerqueira 14/UK ****
A beautifully played three-hander, this astutely written, shot and acted film centres on Daniel (Cerqueira) who finds that he needs to travel more often out of London to visit his parents as their eccentricities increase. Leonard (Johnson) has confined himself to the sofa, while Maria (Jones) keeps herself unnecessarily busy. In very different ways, both are extremely demanding, and Daniel struggles to adapt to this new paradigm in which he is their primary caregiver. Each scene is packed with astute observations, played to perfection by the sharp cast with an offhanded sense of humour. And the emotional kicks, when they come along, are potent. (Nominated for Breakthrough British Filmmaker by the London Critics' Circle.)

I still have a few more screeners to watch before I cast my final votes in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards and make my nominations in Galeca's Dorian Awards. And I also need to finalise my own year-end lists, which I'm planning to post on Thursday.