Critical Week: He's smokin'

Jason Statham strutted through the London press screening of Hummingbird, a much more thoughtful and darkly emotional thriller than he usually offers us. Set in Soho, Chinatown and Covent Garden, it was also fun to see the streets outside the screening room represented so stylishly. More action came in two "dead" movies: Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace are both on very personal revenge missions in Dead Man Down, a stylish but nonsensical mob thriller that holds our interest even if we never believe it; and Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are outlaw siblings in Deadfall, a stylish but nonsensical family dysfunction thriller that shifts into deranged guilty pleasure mode as it goes along, largely thanks to Sissy Spacek.

We also had a double dose of unsettling nastiness in The Seasoning House, a dark dramatic thriller about a rather too-grubby brothel in the 1990s Balkans, and the gimmicky 26-part The ABCs of Death, a mixed bag of good, merely ok, bad and utterly pointless shorts. The most original film of the week was the gentle Italian drama Shun Li and the Poet, about a lovely friendship between two immigrants in a fishing village near Venice.

I saw rather a lot more films this past week as part of the Sundance London Music and Film Festival - scroll down for comments on all of those.

This coming week, the big one screening for the London press is Star Trek Into Darkness - plus a press conference with the entire cast and crew. And we also have Paul Walker in Vehicle 19, Alex Balabanov's The Stoker, the Brazilian doc Tropicalia and three newly restored classics: Tom Conti in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963), Terence Stamp in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem (1968) and Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972).