Critical Week: Locked in

Having passed the one month mark of being in isolation here in London (plus 10 days in California before that), the days are beginning to blur together. I wanted to cook some food to liven things up, but the shops are still missing some basics - for example, not one of the many grocery stores around me has any flour in stock. I badly need to add some variety to my culinary routine, and am enjoying being creative. Otherwise, the days are a blur of watching movies, writing about them, watching TV shows, then more movies.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Moffie • Circus of Books
PERHAPS AVOID:
Radioactive • Crisis Hotline
We Summon the Darkness

The week's biggest film for me was The Willoughbys, an energetic animated adventure comedy about a quirky group of siblings trying to make up for deadbeat parents. It's colourful, very funny and packed with nice little emotional moments. Shailene Woodley, Jamie Dornan and Sebastian Stan are terrific in the romantic melodrama Endings, Beginnings, which never quite builds a head of steam as a woman mopes through her indecision about which man is right for her (neither is). Wagner Moura is excellent in the biopic Sergio, tracing the life of an important UN figure with real insight and some skilful filmmaking. And Alexandra Daddario leads the grisly horror romp We Summon the Darkness, which has some fun 1980s nods but little to make it memorable.

For more adventurous viewers, these are streaming: Cuck is well-made, involving and deliberately provocative pitch-black drama about a guy whose right-wing views push him over the edge; Ghost is gorgeously shot on an iPhone to add a thoughtful angle to the usual British crime drama; Crisis Hotline is an uneven but thoughtful dramatic thriller about a helpline caller threatening murder; from Russia, Why Don't You Just Die is a funny-but-pointless wildly violent black comedy about a group of people trying to kill each other for a variety of reasons; and the excellent documentary Circus of Books tells the fascinating, involving story of a traditional Jewish family that ran an unlikely gay porn business.

Films on my list to watch this coming week in lockdown include Sally Potter's The Roads Not Taken with Elle Fanning and Javier Bardem, Jeffrey Wright in All Day and a Night, Jamie Chung in Dangerous Lies, the rodeo drama Bull, the road comedy-drama Vanilla, the horror thriller The Shed and the Israeli drama 15 Years.