Critical Week: On an adventure.

I took a four-day trip to France this week to attend the Annecy Festival of Film Animation, and along with spending time with filmmakers and fellow journalists, I also managed to see five films. Writer-directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado enthusiastically offered a sneak screening of Forgotten Island, a ripping, gloriously animated adventure centred around friendship memories. And Pierre Coffin and Chris Meledandri were on hand to open the festival with the world premiere of Minions & Monsters. It's a joyous romp through early Hollywood, the best minions movie yet. I also saw Nobody, a gorgeously animated and superbly well-told adventure from China; The Violinist, a beautiful but unsatisfying personal drama set over half a century in Singapore; and Soul Shift from Germany, a riotously silly, bright-hued sci-fi comedy with a sharp point. (NB. Titles link to reviews; Forbidden Island is embargoed until closer to release.)

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Drunken Noodles
A Private Life
ALL REVIEWS >

Meanwhile in London, the 34th Raindance Film Festival is heading into its final weekend. I caught four films: Think of England is a cheeky wartime British comedy that morphs into a rather intense drama; from Iran, My Daughter's Hair is a dark and involving family melodrama; Pescador is a provocative, artistic road movie that plays with magical realism in Mexico; and The Troll is a brightly deadpan pastiche of influencer delusion. Raindance reviews are linked HERE >

Finally, I saw two films that open in cinemas this week. Milly Alcock is Supergirl in a followup to last year's Superman. Set in outer space, it's a very different film, enjoyable but derivative, with lots of big action-comedy set-pieces. And the Icelandic vampire thriller Thirst has a dry, camp sense of humour running through the queer, outrageously grisly nuttiness.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching a few more films at Raindance and catching up with others that I've missed. Oddly, there are no press screenings in the diary for my birthday week, but I do have a show titled -370°F at Sadler's Wells.

Critical Week: Mountain-top experience

Year-end screenings continue as distributors try to show us their films before voting deadlines (London Critics' Circle votes for nominees on Friday; Online Film Critics Society votes in the final round on Saturday). This week's big hitters included Ben Stiller's remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an earnest movie about life choices; Out of the Furnace, a gritty Rust Belt drama starring Christian Bale and Casey Affleck; and Spike Jonze's lovely romantic drama Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with his computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and we believe it.

The other big one was Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, the silly 10-years-later sequel to WIll Ferrell's cult classic. We also had the late-scheduled press screening for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the livelier and more involving sequel to last year's An Unexpected Journey, which ends in a cliffhanger until next year's There and Back Again. I also caught up with Paolo Sorrentino's gorgeous Fellini anthem The Great Beauty, as well as the German drama Two Mothers, an engaging, personal story of two women grappling with inequality in fertility treatment.

Next week things start to slow down for the holidays, although I still need to catch Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, and there's also Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie, the acclaimed doc Tim's Vermeer, and Mark Cousins' Albanian road movie Here Be Dragons. I'm also on the jury panel for a Shorts on Tap event on Tuesday evening in Shoreditch!