Critical Week: Secret admirerer

Lockdown continues to loosen here in Britain, with more people taking advantage of the government's August half-price eating out bargain. I even took a three day trip out of London. But the big news (for me at least) was the first major studio blockbuster coming to cinemas in five months: Christopher Nolan's Tenet. I saw the film at a press screening at the BFI Imax on Monday, and then went again to a multiplex on Wednesday with a friend - my first public screening since March. The film isn't the knock-out masterpiece we were hoping for, but it's hugely entertaining and made on a gloriously ambitious scale. For the record, the picture was of course better in Imax, the sound was better in the multiplex, and the movie itself is even more fun the second time around.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Garden Left Behind • Tenet
She Dies Alone • Away
Breaking Fast • Nomad
FULL REVIEWS >

I also saw some films on streaming links. The moody teen drama Chemical Hearts, with Lili Reinhart and Austin Abrams (above), looks great but falls apart. The One and Only Ivan is a Disney family movie with above-average effects and a surprisingly witty script. Jessica Chastain turns to action as an assassin in Ava, which is let down by a barrage of cliches. She Dies Tomorrow is a fiercely clever horror movie that plays on some very deep human fears. A Latvian filmmaker working almost on his own reveals impressive talent with Away, an evocative animated fable. And from Greece, the dark fairy tale Entwined is intriguing but somewhat uneven. I also got to attend an online reading of a new play...

Star Man
by James Cole • with Jasper William Cartwright, Harry Edwin, Kim Tatum, Neil Summervile, Jaymes Sygrove, David E Hull-Watters

A hugely emotional drama told with some properly inventive storytelling tricks, James Cole's darkly powerful play centres on Ben (Cartwright) and his step-brother Tony (Edwin), who's also his boyfriend. Ben is struggling to recover from a past trauma, and the audience follows him as he interacts with a variety of people who trigger memories in painful ways. It's a remarkably effective exploration of the reverberations of abuse on the victim as well as everyone around him. Watching this in a zoom performance makes everything feel very serious indeed, leaving us to imagine what sounds like some intricate and very clever staging (described by narrator Hull-Watters). So I'm really looking forward to seeing this in a real theatre at some point.

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No press screenings in the diary this week, but I will probably buy a ticket to see the X-Men spin-off The New Mutants in a cinema this weekend. Streaming films to watch include Disney's epic remake of Mulan, Hugo Weaving in the Shakespeare riff Measure for Measure, the British fantasy Undergods, the Spanish thriller Unknown Origins and the short film collection Right Beside You.