Critical Week: Be excellent to each other

As the American political landscape gets uglier, with flagrant lies deployed to stoke fear and division, perhaps we should all be listening to Bill and Ted, who are back on the big screen with their ridiculous but deeply engaging third adventure Bill & Ted Face the Music. It was refreshing to watch something that never pretends to be anything other than optimistic and fun.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Les Miserables • Mulan
Socrates • Unknown Origins
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Even better this week is Mulan, retelling the folktale from the Disney animated classic as a proper Chinese action epic. It's a powerhouse story told beautifully by director Niki Caro and star Yifei Liu, and it's such a visual feast that it really should have been released on the big screen. Hopefully Disney will see sense and put it into cinemas where it belongs.

I went to the cinema once this past week, to see a film that had no screenings or review links available: The New Mutants had its release delayed by Disney's dismantling of Fox, and it's not as awful as some critics have said. Although it's not great either, a muddled attempt at a terrific idea, combining teen angst and horror in the X-Men universe. There were also two films from Australia: I Am Woman is a likeable biopic about singer Helen Reddy that opts more for politics than depth of character, while Measure for Measure is a clever and somewhat murky adaptation of Shakespeare starring Hugo Weaving as a present-day Melbourne crime boss. Outside the mainstream, Unknown Origins is a terrific comic book movie from Spain that's smart, funny and full of action. Right Beside You is a new collection of five strong short films under the New Queer Visions label, pointed dramas about companionship. And premiering at Fantasia International Film Festival this week, Undergods is a fiendishly clever dystopian parable with a superb pan-European cast in multiple storylines.

I have one actual press screening in the diary for the coming week, the British drama Rocks. Otherwise, as the first physical film festival continues in Venice, I'll be watching online screeners of Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Andrea Riseborough in the sci-fi horror Possessor, the romantic comedy Love Guaranteed, the thriller Up on the Glass and the Thai trafficking drama Buoyancy.