Critical Week: Dress to impress

Lockdown rolls on, with another random batch of movies to watch this week. I'm always hoping there will be a gem hidden in there somewhere. The weather has been glorious in London, so I ventured out for a picnic one day, seeing friends (at a safe distance) for the first time in two months. It kind of gives you hope that this will all end someday. Meanwhile, one of this week's movies, the action comedy The Lovebirds, offered some ideas about how to dress to spice up those Zoom meetings. It's a dopey bit of fluff, but kind of just right for these times, and Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae make a unexpectedly terrific duo.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
I'm No Longer Here • Snowpiercer
Only the Animals • End of Sentence
The Man Standing Next

John Hawkes and Logan Lerman are another solid double-act in End of Sentence, an engaging father-son road movie set in Ireland. Mario Van Peebles makes the B-movie crime drama A Clear Shot almost worth watching, plus the fact that it's based on a real hostage event. But it's very cheesy. There are no big-name actors in the sweet romance Angelfish, but it's charming enough. The French mystery thriller Only the Animals is expertly directed by Dominik Moll with an excellent ensemble cast and a twisty, involving plot. From Korea, The Man Standing Next is a riveting, exceptionally well-made thriller about the real-life assassination of the Korean president in 1979. From Thailand, Krabi 2562 is a moody experimental doc about the collision of past and present in a tourist city. And The Uncertain Kingdom is a collection of 20 short films addressing current issues in Britain (nine of them were screened to the press in January, and I saw the other 11 this week). Specially commissioned, the fascinatingly varied clips were made to explore the wake of Brexit, and have an additional resonance amid the pandemic chaos.

I have a rather long list of movies to watch over the next week, so we'll see how many of these I get around to: Dakota Johnson in The High Note, Sebastian Stan in The Last Full Measure, Luke Wilson in Guest of Honor, Willem Dafoe in Tommaso, the small-town drama To the Stars, the horror thriller The Dinner Party, the German drama The Collini Case and the documentary Homosaywhat.