Critical Week: A cry for help

Jennifer Connelly gives a storming performance in Shelter, written and directed by her husband Paul Bettany and costarring the excellent Anthony Mackie. The film tries to say too much about homelessness, but the drama is involving and the themes important. I've tried to keep this week a bit slow screening-wise, but caught the British comedy A Christmas Star, a goofy romp in the vein of the Nativity! movies - in other words, almost charming enough to make up for its silliness. And The Hallow is an Irish horror about a family that finds sludgy demons living in the woods. It's enjoyably yucky, but not very scary.

But of course the big film of the week was Spectre, the 24th James Bond movie, which I thoroughly enjoyed because it combines the darkly personal elements of Skyfall with old-style 007 storytelling. And for sheer wonder, I have binge-watched the entire first series of David Lynch and Mark Frost's 25-year-old classic gonzo mystery Twin Peaks and am now diving into the second, which I know will remember was more troublingly surreal. I hadn't seen the show since it originally aired 1990-1992, when I participated in Operation Pine Weasel to save the show from cancellation! On Wednesday evening I'm attending the London diner/bar experience The Owls Are Not What They Seem - and I'll cover it here later this week.

I'm preparing for a break in November, so have a few films to catch up with over the next week, including awards-season contenders like Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, as well as the horror comedy Scouts Guide to the Apocalypse, the South African heist movie Momentum and the drag-queen doc Queen of Ireland.