Critical Week: Taking notes

The autumn festival season continues all over the world (London's largest fest starts next week), even as awards season has already begun, with contenders screening for voters. And yes, I need to take notes when I see so many movies in a concentrated period - tricky in the dark, but it helps to write things down even if I struggle to read my dodgy handwriting in the light later. For me, this week's movies included the comedy Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, starring a particularly radiant Lesley Manville. Yes, it's cute and sweet, but it's remarkably never silly or sentimental. A proper gem. And then there was the horror thriller Smile, which will probably top the box office this weekend thanks to horror genre fans. Anchored by a superbly committed performance from Sosie Bacon, it's unnerving, grisly and jumpy but not actually scary.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Argentina, 1985 • Flux Gourmet
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris
Girls Girls Girls • Taming the Garden
ALL REVIEWS >

Meanwhile, Francois Ozon is back with his terrific new film Peter von Kant, a skilful pastiche that's part remake and part biopic about Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Control is a contained thriller from Canada with a limited setting and small cast, and it never quite develops its high concept. From Iceland the dramatic epic Godland is gloomy and gorgeous in equal measure, packed with provocative themes. The French drama Rodeo has a kinetic sense of edgy energy, but a rather simple plot, as it follows a feisty young woman into the masculine world of trick motorbikers. And the kaleidoscopic Egyptian doc-drama Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day? boldly explores how it feels to be a gay man in the Arab world.

Films to watch this next week include Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in Amsterdam, Sally Hawkins and Steve Coogan in The Lost King, Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal, the Bronte biopic Emily, surreal comedy All Sorts, British drama Big Boys Don't Cry and the comedy Phantom Project.

Critical Week: A family affair

It's been a rather thin week for screenings, or maybe I'm just out of the loop because I've been pre-occupied with organising the Critics' Circle Film Awards. The biggest movie I saw was The Odyssey, the French biopic about Jacques Cousteau starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. It's beautifully filmed and acted, but lacks narrative coherence. The others were independent British oddities: Mindhorn is a somewhat uneven pastiche thriller about an actor asked to re-inhabit his 1980s TV cop character to solve a real murder. It has a terrific cast including Julian Barratt, Russell Tovey, Steve Coogan and Kenneth Branagh. And Spaceship is a swirly arthouse drama about a teen who may have been abducted by aliens, although the plot never quite makes any sense. And then there was a four-hour thriller released next week on DVD in the UK...

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Deep Water
dir Shawn Seet
scr Kym Goldsworthy
with Noah Taylor, Yael Stone, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Craig McLachlan, Danielle Cormack, Ben Oxenbould
16/Aus SBS 3h40 ***.
This four-part Australian TV series may feel somewhat melodramatic, but it taps into some darkly relevant themes. When a Muslim man is found murdered in his flat overlooking Bondi Beach, detective Tori (Orange Is the New Black's Yael Stone) and her partner Nick (Noah Taylor) begin to discover inexplicable links to a series of unsolved murders from the late 1980s. But these were hate crimes involving gay victims, and the officials simply turned a blind eye at the time. The show is assembled with a soapy emotional flair that kind of ignores authenticity in lieu of flashy plot points, hot potato themes and shifty suspects. This makes it feel like a rather standard television procedural, complete with far too many characters to keep straight and lots of shocking revelations. But the underlying issues are solidly engaging, touching on things in society that perhaps haven't improved as much as we'd like to think they have in the past 25 years. And it's strikingly well shot, with engaging performances from the skilled cast.

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This coming week we have screenings of another rather thin, offbeat collection of movies, including the British boxing drama Jawbone, Cristian Mungiu's award-winning Graduation and the doc All This Panic.