Critical week: Rainbow connection

The Muppets was one of my most-anticipated movies of the year, and then Disney pushed its UK release back to February. But they kindly screened it for London critics last week, and I was most impressed by the way it pulls us back into nostalgic hilarity. Of course, there were bigger films this past week, with much bigger titles: Tom Cruise in the outrageously exhilarating Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Robert Downey Jr in the wild and silly Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and the hugely emotional 9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock.

Smaller films included the delightful French period romance The Well-digger's Daughter, starring Daniel Auteuil (it's also his directing debut); the strikingly well filmed and edited documentary Bombay Beach, about a community seemingly living at the end of the world (even thought it's Southern California); and I also caught a rare screening of the 1991 TV drama Absolute Hell, a raucous look at post-War Soho life starring Judi Dench and Bill Nighy.

This coming week votes are due in both the London Critics' Circle Film Awards and the Online Film Critics Society awards. But I only have one more big movie to see: David Fincher's remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I'm seeing in just a couple of hours. I've also got a few trailing screenings, including the Canadian drama Goon, the Chemical Brothers' movie Don't Think and catch-up awards-consideration dates with Mexico's Miss Bala and the documentaries Hell and Back Again and Buck.