Critical Week: Soaking up the sun

Even though there aren't many actual screenings at the moment, there's an excess of films to watch simply because film festival season is imminent. There's just over a week until London hosts FrightFest, and immediately after that I'm heading to Italy for the Venice Film Festival. It's my first trip to mainland Europe since November 2018 (now where have I stashed those leftover euros?), and five years since I've been in Venice. Meanwhile, I caught up with two of this year's festival darlings this week. Ruben Ostlund's Triangle of Sadness, starring Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson (above), won the Cannes Festival's Palm d'Or, and rightly so as it's a wild ride packed with themes and class-based provocations. And After Yang premiered at Sundance, featuring a remarkably nuanced, internalised central performance from Colin Farrell as a father exploring the connections in his family. Director Kogonada makes unusually thoughtful films.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
My Old School
The Feast • Anais in Love
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Runner • Glorious
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Rather a lot more mainstream were three B-movies: the splintered-reality comedy Look Both Ways with Lili Reinhart is enjoyably corny; the perhaps too-tightly contained horror movie Glorious with Ryan Kwanten is gleefully grisly; and the thriller The Runner relies on corny movie cliches but has a strong central actor in rising star Edouard Philipponnat.

As if I didn't have enough on at the moment, I'm also involved in a project with the Kyiv Film Critics, and watched four Ukrainian films this week: the rural dramatic thriller Pamfir and the harrowingly personal odyssey Butterfly Vision both premiered at Cannes this year; the intimate mothers-daughters drama How Is Katia recently premiered at Locarno; and the inventive, blackly comical coming-of-age film Rock Paper Grenade is still awaiting its premiere.

Films to watch this coming week include Idris Elba in Beast, Sylvester Stallone in Samaritan, Tom Felten in Burial and the British thriller Black Mail, plus various films for the forthcoming FrightFest in London and the 79th Venice Film Festival.

Critical Week: On a mission

Well, the 93rd Oscars managed to completely reinvent their ceremony for the pandemic era, although the severely simplified structure left it feeling a bit awkward. A host would have helped provide some humour, context and connectivity. The one comedy bit didn't work at all (aside from Glenn Close's apparently not-so-impromptu jig), and the order shuffle at the end left it ending on a dry note. But the winners were all hugely deserving, and it was great so see people celebrating in one place together.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Limbo • About Endlessness • Laddie
The County • Truman & Tennessee
Heavy Trip • The Outside Story
PERHAPS AVOID:
Without Remorse
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Back to the movies, the big movie this week was Without Remorse, Michael B Jordan's take on the Tom Clancy franchise-launcher. Jordan delivers the goods, but the film is rather tough going. More intriguing is the sci-fi drama Stowaway, with its low-key approach and philosophical themes, plus a terrific four person cast led by Toni Collette and Anna Kendrick. Much bigger still, Mortal Kombat is a big-scale battle epic that holds the interest in a guilty pleasure way, despite the simplistic plot.

A bit higher brow, Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the Cold War biopic The Courier, a tautly written, directed and acted thriller about a normal guy pulled into the spy game. Bob Odenkirk is solid in the derivative but engaging action thriller Nobody. Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough really go for it in the uneven Americans-in-Greece romance Monday. China's maestro Zhang Yimou brings his stunning visual approach to the riveting 1930s spy thriller Cliff Walkers. Veteran filmmaker Agnieszka Holland finds some superb textures in the fact-based 1950s Czech drama Charlatan. The dryly funny and enormously violent Dutch thriller The Columnist has its moments. And the stylish doc Some Kind of Heaven explores the lives of residents in America's most enormous retirement community, basically Disney World for pensioners. Hint: it isn't heaven for everyone.

Films to watch this coming week include the animated adventure The Mitchells vs the Machines, the marital drama The Killing of Two Lovers, the house party comedy The Get Together, the moviemaking action comedy In Action and the horror comedy Fried Barry.