Critical Week: Give us a minute

This week's big, very late press screening was for the alternate-reality thriller In Time, in which Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried are on the run from the Timekeepers (cops), the Minute Men (mobsters, above) and Amanda's angry dad. Unfortunately that was about as complex as the promising plot got. We also saw the reboot/prequel/reimagining/whatever it is of The Thing, which is essentially the exact same story as John Carpenter's 80s remake, with a good cast but no subtlety.

And then there was the notorious sequel The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), which was momentarily banned in the UK when the British Board of Film Classification didn't even want to let people over 18 see the film. Now they have butchered nearly five minutes from the film, but I doubt it would have hung together any better. I also caught the American independent fantasy Judas Kiss, an enjoyably odd little story about a filmmaker who gets the chance to fix his own past mistakes. And then there was the extremely odd British documentary This Our Still Life, in which Andrew Kotting returns to his family home in the Pyrenees for another perplexing, kaleidoscopic exploration of something or other (I'm not completely sure).

This coming week I'll be catching up with press-screened films I missed during the festival, including Johnny Depp's The Rum Diary, Aardman animation's Arthur Christmas, James Gandolfini's Welcome to the Rileys, the British ensemble comedy How to Stop Being a Loser and the love story Romantics Anonymous. Plus I plan to revisit remastered versions of Francis Coppola's The Outsiders, One From the Heart and The Conversation, none of which I've seen since the early 80s. Looking forward to that!