Critical Week: Don't read that book!

The week's biggest screening was Evil Dead, a remake of Sam Raimi's 1981 classic about a group of young people who find a sinister book in a cabin in the woods and unleash all sorts of nasty horror. This version has some very nice touches, and gore-hounds will absolutely adore it. We also caught up with Danny Boyle's twisty, gleaming, enjoyably over-complicated hypnosis thriller Trance, starring James McAvoy; Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy in the amusing but pointlessly overcomplicated comedy Identity Thief; Bryan Singer's epic-sized fairy tale action movie Jack the Giant Slayer, in which a lively cast rescues us from digital overload; and Jim Sturgess and Kirstin Dunst in the fantasy-romance Upside Down, which is strong on ideas but short on logic and story.

A bit further off the beaten path were Bernardo Bertolucci's perceptive and remarkably youthful Italian drama Me and You; the astonishing, essential British doc We Went to War, which catches up with Vietnam veterans after filmmaker Michael Grigsby (who sadly died last week) first documented them in 1970; and an intriguing but annoyingly indulgent French actor-director encounter in Unfaithful.

This coming week we have the action sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the comedy 21 and Over, Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan in Byzantium, Eric Bana and Olivia WIlde in Deadfall, the American indie Four and the Filipino-Malaysian drama Bwakaw.