Critical Week: Take the wheel

Nicolas Winding Refn's Cannes-winning thriller Drive was the big movie for London critics this past week, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Stylish filmmaking and a terrific central performance from Ryan Gosling He's definitely on a roll this year with this, Crazy, Stupid, Love and George Clooney's forthcoming The Ides of March.

Other screenings took us on a world tour, starting with two Australian films - the scruffy-endearing Red Dog with Josh Lucas and the bizarre and beautiful art-film Sleeping Beauty with Emily Browning - then it was off to Greece for the quirky and very clever Attenberg, to West Africa for the inventive zombie romp The Dead, to Spain for the ghostly freak-out Atrocious, and finally to America for the realistic and engaging indie romance The One, the skilfully unsettling misogyny of The Woman and the hilariously entertaining backwoods horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs Evil. If it seems like there were an inordinate number of scary movies there, this is mainly due to the fact that London's notorious FrightFest took place over the long weekend.

This coming week we have another eclectic bunch of movies, including the ultimate fighting drama Warrior, starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, Zoe Saldana fighting her way through Colombiana, the French rom-com Romantics Anonymous, the 3D horror doc (yes really) Cane Toads: The Conquest, the doc Ultrasuede about iconic designer Halston, and a digital restoration of Terrence Malick's 1978 classic Days of Heaven.