Critical Week: Into the blue

This week, London critics caught up with this year's Palme d'Or winner, Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a staggeringly involving romance starring Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux. The film has had a lot of press for its three-hour running time and explicit lesbian sex scenes, but it's also an unnervingly honest relationship movie. It deserves the prizes. And there will be more to come.

More in the mainstream, we had a late-scheduled screening of the concert documentary One Direction: This Is Us, which is a lot of fun, and sharply well made, although calling it a documentary is stretching the definition of the word, as it's actually a 90-minute promo for Syco Records. Saoirse Ronan stars in How I Live Now, based on the book about teens trying to start their lives over in WWIII Britain (an embargo means I can't say more). Halle Berry stars in The Call, a more-involving than normal thriller about an emergency phone operator who gets caught up in a nightmare. The ending is contrived, but it's utterly riveting.

From Korea we had Pieta, the new drama from Kim Ki-duk, who delights in making audiences squirm - and this is no exception as it cleverly tells a twisted story of redemption and sacrifice centred on a mother and son. Sort of. From Britain, the Indian-subculture drama Jadoo is lively and engaging, and packed with delicious food from Leicester's Golden Mile. And we also saw the restored final cut of Robin Hardy's 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man, which hasn't really aged well but is still pretty freaky.

This coming week I've got: Robin Wright and Naomi Watts in Adore, Harrison Ford in the baseball drama 42, Ryan Reynolds in the ghostly action-comedy R.I.P.D., Hirokazu Kore-eda's acclaimed Like Father Like Son, the Seoul Olympics doc 9.79*, the Aids medication doc Fire in the Blood, and the BFI's restoration of the 1924 expedition doc The Epic of Everest. We also have the launch event for the 57th London Film Festival (9-20 Oct), where we'll finally get our hands on this year's programme.