Critical Week: Back in the UK

After two trips out of London in the past month (to Edinburgh and Los Angeles for film festivals and a bit of California holiday sunshine), I'm back home now and working to get my weekly screening schedule back up and running. It's always a challenge juggling communications with literally dozens of film press officers to make sure I cover as many movies as possible, and my diary is already starting to fill up.

As for the non-festival movies of the past three weeks, there have been a few stand-outs, including Michael Mann's elegantly understated Public Enemies, featuring especially vivid performances from Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard and Bully Crudup; Bruno, featuring more hysterically biting comedy from the outrageously full-on Sacha Baron Cohen (pictured); the eye-catching new Disney-Pixar movie Up, which is literally a flight of imagination; and Woody Allen's Whatever Works, a very funny observational comedy about a grumpy genius.

In the next week I'll catch up with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (I missed the first press screening while in L.A. last week), Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth, Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke in The Informers, Paul Bettany in Creation, Will Ferrell in Land of the Lost, Isabelle Huppert in Home, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, aka Heath Ledger's last film.