Critical Week: Larger than life

It's been a fairly relaxed week at the movies for me, as I've just tried to get caught up on things, posting reviews from autumn festivals and catching up on some films. There are a lot of awards-buzzy movies I haven't seen yet, so there's still a ways to go. One I'd been looking forward to certainly didn't disappoint: Vicky Krieps delivers a wonderfully nuanced performances as Austria's Empress Elisabeth in the inventive and rightfully award-winning biopic Corsage. And a terrific cast brings a more introspective tone to the sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a blockbuster that I liked better than the first film, mainly because it dodges the usual Marvel pitfalls. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
No Bears • Wakanda Forever
Homebody • Being Thunder
PERHAPS AVOID:
A Couple • Dear Zoe
ALL REVIEWS >

Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes and Nicholas Hoult star in the blackly comical The Menu, which tilts intriguingly from parody into horror. Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek team up with their children Jake Hoffman and Schuyler Fisk in the warmly dramatic romcom Sam & Kate. Romain Duris and Berenice Bejo join director Michel Hazanavicious for the witty and perhaps too-meta zombie movie pastiche Final Cut. Ryan Kwanten goes Blade Runner for the enigmatic futuristic Hong Kong noir Expired. The comedy Homebody creates an unusually knowing body-swap scenario. And the Latin American horror Blood-Red Ox is confusing but packed with clever details.

The Critics' Circle Film Section also held its annual lunch with the British Board of Film Classification, an event that has been virtual for the past two years. It was great to be back in-person again, learning about the BBFC's new endeavours and going through some of the borderline cases over the past year. And it was also nice to be in a room full of critics as well - for the second time in a week after last Thursday's special Critics' Circle all-sections award lunch for Emma Thompson.

Movies to this coming week include Lili Taylor and Jason Schwartzman in the romcom There There, Lukas Dhont's teen drama Close, Costa Rica's drama Clara Sola, the French animated comedy Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and the Indian action epic RRR. I'm also flying out to Southern California to visit my family and friends for a couple of weeks, and of course to watch more movies too.

Critical Week: He's smokin'

Jason Statham strutted through the London press screening of Hummingbird, a much more thoughtful and darkly emotional thriller than he usually offers us. Set in Soho, Chinatown and Covent Garden, it was also fun to see the streets outside the screening room represented so stylishly. More action came in two "dead" movies: Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace are both on very personal revenge missions in Dead Man Down, a stylish but nonsensical mob thriller that holds our interest even if we never believe it; and Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are outlaw siblings in Deadfall, a stylish but nonsensical family dysfunction thriller that shifts into deranged guilty pleasure mode as it goes along, largely thanks to Sissy Spacek.

We also had a double dose of unsettling nastiness in The Seasoning House, a dark dramatic thriller about a rather too-grubby brothel in the 1990s Balkans, and the gimmicky 26-part The ABCs of Death, a mixed bag of good, merely ok, bad and utterly pointless shorts. The most original film of the week was the gentle Italian drama Shun Li and the Poet, about a lovely friendship between two immigrants in a fishing village near Venice.

I saw rather a lot more films this past week as part of the Sundance London Music and Film Festival - scroll down for comments on all of those.

This coming week, the big one screening for the London press is Star Trek Into Darkness - plus a press conference with the entire cast and crew. And we also have Paul Walker in Vehicle 19, Alex Balabanov's The Stoker, the Brazilian doc Tropicalia and three newly restored classics: Tom Conti in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963), Terence Stamp in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem (1968) and Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972).