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...

Critical Week: Kick into action mode

Women led the charge in two big action thrillers screened to London-based press this past week. Noomi Rapace stars in Unlocked as a CIA sleeper agent put back on active duty in London. Comments on the film are embargoed, but the starry cast includes Toni Collette, Michael Douglas, John Malkovich and Orlando Bloom. And Scarlett Johansson takes the lead role in Ghost in the Shell, an exhilaratingly visual but thematically thin sci-fi mystery-thriller that's well worth seeing in Imax 3D.

A bit further afield, two low-budget horror dramas were effectively freaky. Catherine Walker and Steve Oram star in A Dark Song, a creepy story of angelic incantations in an isolated house in Wales. And The Transfiguration is an evocative drama set in New York, where a young boy with vampire tendencies befriends an unsuspecting neighbour.

Screenings over this rather busy coming week include Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson in The Fate of the Furious, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine in Going in Style, Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling in The Sense of an Ending, Octavia Spencer and Sam Worthington in The Shack, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Aftermath, Dennis Quaid in A Dog's Purpose, Cate Shortland's Berlin Syndrome and the Oscar-nominated animation My Life as a Courgette.

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.