Critical Week: Ignite the light

My work schedule on a TV crew was a bit lighter this week, so I was able to see a few screenings. These included the documentary Will & Harper, attended by Will Ferrell, Harper Steele and director Josh Greenbaum. It's a gorgeously involving film focussed on a long-term friendship, and its topicality makes it important as well. Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Keegan-Michael Key and director Josh Cooley came along to a screening of Transformers One, the hugely entertaining animated origin story that's packed with comedy and action.

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Filmmaker RaMell Ross creates a stunning visual style for Nickel Boys, a powerful drama about a teen reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. It's also beautifully played, unusually vivid and involving. From Britain, Portraits of Dangerous Women is a light-hearted multi-strand drama about a group of people whose lives intersect unexpectedly, while Inherit the Witch is a bonkers horror thriller that enjoyably evokes freaky classics. And Notice to Quit is a likeable but rather too-busy comedy starring Michael Zegen as a single dad at the end of his rope. 

This coming week, I'm planning to see Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, Joseph Gordon Levitt in Killer Heat, Alice Lowe's Timestalker, Hellboy: The Crooked Man and the documentary Rez Ball, plus anything else I can find time to see while working long days. 

Critical Week: Trust no one

There were two very different action movies screened to the press this past week. Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is a whizzy thriller packed with gimmicky filmmaking touches and snappy performances from the likes of Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, Eliza Gonzalez and Jon Hamm (above), plus Kevin Spacey, Lily James and others. Michael Bay's Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth in the series, is a cacophonous adventure that looks pretty awesome on Imax 3D but is a painful two and a half hours without a coherent story or characters.

Outside the mainstream, we also had a screening of Phyllida Lloyd's bracingly inventive Julius Caesar, a filmed version of her female-prison set version of Shakespeare's eerily resonant play. Scribe is a Hitchcockian thriller from Belgium starring Francois Cluzet as a man pulled into a political nightmare that seems to be actually taking place right now in the world around us. Tom of Finland is a gripping if somewhat mannered biopic about the unassuming man who completely changed the world's image of masculinity with his hyper-macho illustrations. Risk is Laura Poitras' long-in-the-works doc about Julian Assange, whose enigmatic nature infects this film. And City of Ghosts is the stunning, essential documentary about a group of brave journalists covering Daesh's destruction of their hometown Raqqa, Syria.

As the East End Film Festival continues in London, the Edinburgh Film Festival gets underway in Scotland. And this week's press screenings include the animated sequel Despicable Me 3, Ryan Reynolds in The Hitman's Bodyguard, Armie Hammer in Final Portrait, the French period drama The Death of Louis XIV, the Indian drama Hotel Salvation, and the Baltic road movie You Can't Escape Lithuania.

Critical Week: Metal-on-metal

Having opted to take a holiday the last week of June, I missed key press screenings of two July blockbuster sequels. But I caught up with them this week. Transformers: Age of Extinction is yet another loud and incoherent robot fighting extravaganza from Michael Bay - just as ludicrous as the previous films while wasting an all-new cast including Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer and acclaimed rising star Jack Reynor, plus this episode's requisite scantily clad female Nicola Peltz. Fortunately, I cleansed the memory of that movie from my system with How to Train Your Dragon 2, a strong film in its own right with a startlingly complex script, unusually detailed animation and the most thrilling movie action sequences we've seen all year.

Also this week, I caught up with Philip Seymour Hoffman's intriguing but relatively thin Philadelphia drama God's Pocket; Michael Caine in the engaging but somewhat lightweight French drama Mr Morgan's Last Love; the rather too-repressed but sharply well-made period drama A Promise, starring Rebecca Hall and Alan Rickman; the moving and visceral American indie Hide Your Smiling Faces; the extremely well-observed Danish mystery thriller Keeper of Lost Causes; and the blackly comical Spanish zombie-soccer thriller Goal of the Dead, which actually has its moments. There were also two artful but deeply pretentious epics: from Mexico, Julian Hernandez's I Am Happiness on Earth is a sensual exploration of physical connections. And with Norte, the End of History, gifted Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz takes an unnecessary four hours to tell a darkly involving story about crime and unjust punishment. I also managed to revisit Bob Fosse's classic 1972 film version of Cabaret, starring a particularly fabulous Oscar-winning Liza Minnelli.

This coming week, we have the Daniel Radcliffe rom-com What If, the acclaimed British feel-good drama Pride, the British football drama Believe, the Britain's Got Talent-inspired Pudsey the Dog: The Movie, and the Aussie skateboarding movie All This Mayhem, among other things.