Critical Week: Old friends

As the weather finally broke, giving us relief from this relentless heatwave, screenings this week for London-based critics were led by Christopher Robin, which was a nice surprise: a sensitive live-action Winnie-the-Pooh sequel starring Ewan McGregor. Although it might be a little slow for children. Much livelier but not nearly as engaging, The Festival has a bright young cast and superb real-world setting, but the story is thin and the jokes simply aren't funny. Featuring an even starrier young cast, including Ansel Elgort, Taron Egerton and Jeremy Irvine, Billionaire Boys Club is a slick money-based thriller that feels eerily over-familiar.

A little further afield, there was the superb Irish thriller Black '47, set during the devastating 19th century potato famine and featuring terrific characters in a riveting story. David Tennant chomps on the scenery as a killer in Bad Samaritan, a nasty little thriller with very little in the way of subtext. We the Animals is a simply stunning coming-of-age drama, gorgeously shot and played on every level. And Memoirs of War is a wrenching, slow-burn WWII epic starring Melanie Thierry as author-filmmaker Marguerite Duras.

Still further off the beaten path, Redcon-1 is a crazed British zombie apocalypse adventure that makes very little sense on any level. From Norway, Revenge is a, well, revenge thriller that's insinuating and involving as its story twists and turns. The sensitive German drama Paths traces the dissolution of a long-term relationship in a quietly meaningful way. And the documentary Nureyev is perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good, with a lot going on with the imagery, sound and voiceovers, but a too-"official" narrative.

This coming week we have Idris Elba's directing debut Yardie, Australian thriller I Am Vengeance, acclaimed Italian drama Dogman, the German thriller The Year I Lost My Mind and three documentaries: Hot to Trot about ballroom dancing, Gun No 6 tracing the life of a firearm and the, ahem, self-explanatory American Circumcision.