Critical Week: Wild at heart

As the World Cup kicks off on Friday, high-profile films are utterly missing from UK cinemas over the next month. The only big screening this week for critics was the Apatow-produced comedy Get Him to the Greek, a spin-off from Forgetting Sarah Marshall centring on Russell Brand's nutty rock star alter ego. It's pretty funny with some intriguing dark edges, although the combination is a little uneven. The other big-name movie also tries to mix broad comedy with darker drama, but it's much smaller affair: Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt and Rupert Grint in Wild Target, a remake of a 1993 French film.

Even smaller films included the gripping Everest doc-drama The Wildest Dream, Chris Rock's enjoyable afro doc Good Hair, the too-silly rom-com When in Rome, the gorgeously visual dramatic thriller Hierro from Spain, the rough and riveting South African crime thriller Jerusalema: Gangster's Paradise, the grisly and rather pointless torture horror The Collector and the nutty zombie horror of The Horde. Yes, it's been a wild week.

Next week I head north for the 64th Edinburgh Film Festival - the biggest in the UK and easily my favourite film fest anywhere on earth. Of the 130 films showing there, 22 are world premieres and 12 are international premieres. There's no way I'll see them all (or even half of them), but I'm planning to blog daily from Edinburgh as always, so watch this space...