Critical Week: Not a word

Alas, an embargo prevents me from saying anything about the big press screening this past week: Sony's animated 3D romp Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. But the screening itself was good fun, with the usual Sunday morning "fun in the foyer" featuring photo ops (see right) and other goodies. The week's other notable screening was just 15 minutes long: namely a special glimpse of several scenes in James Cameron's Avatar, also shown in 3D but on the Imax screen. The film looks extremely impressive on a big scale, although it's not remotely photorealistic, which is a surprise for Cameron. It looks thoroughly animated, with rubbery skin. Although the movements are realistically captured by the computer.

The rest of the week's screenings were much lower profile: the gritty British drama Harry Brown, starring an excellent Micahel Caine; Cristian Mungiu's impeccable five-part black comedy from Romania Tales from the Golden Age; the excessively grisly revenge-torture Aussie horror The Horseman; the WWI fighter pilot adventure The Red Baron, which has thrilling aerial dogfights to make up for the rather dull melodrama; Park Chan-wook's offbeat and thoroughly unsettling vampire drama Thirst; the hugely involving French immigration drama Welcome; the provocative and powerful 15-years-in-the-making photojournalism doc Shooting Robert King; and the Wayans brothers' resolutely unfunny pastiche Dance Flick.

This coming week, I'm looking forward to the award winning Kazakh drama Tulpan, Shane Meadows' latest micro-movie Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee; Philip Ridley's eerie thriller Heartless; Richard Linklater's biopic Me and Orson Welles; and The Final Destination, the fourth in the series but the first in 3D. Less interesting but hopefully surprising are Nia Vardalos' My Life in Ruins, the remake of Sorority Row, and the stack of DVDs on my desk that need watching. We always need hope...