Critical Week: School daze

Well, Britain didn't reopen as planned on Monday, as the mishandling of new variants meant any lightening of regulations has been delayed. Thankfully, the accelerated vaccination programme seems to be making headway, so fingers crossed for any steps we can take back to normality. Cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars and clubs particularly depend on this. In the meantime, big films are beginning to appear again, some with enormous press screenings. This past week's main offerings included the teen comedy-horror mashup Freaky, an uneven but witty concoction in which serial psycho Vince Vaughn swaps bodies with cute high schooler Kathryn Newton. And those vrooming speedsters were back on the Imax screen for F9 (aka Fast & Furious 9), which is an unusually joyless instalment in the saga but pushes the spectacle to new (ahem!) heights.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Supernova • I Carry You With Me
The Man Standing Next • Bare
ALL REVIEWS >

Smaller movies this week included Harvey Keitel as Lansky, a finely made but familiar biopic tracing the fascinating life of the notorious gangster. The intriguing but never quite provocative The God Committee stars Kelsey Grammer in a serious role, exploring the people who decide who receives an organ transplant, and who doesn't. From Spain, the silly animated romp Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds brings the 1980s 2D cartoon characters to 3D imagery, with mixed results. And the horror comedy Vicious Fun is a snappy and rather cartoonish play on horror movie tropes, centred around a film critic.

Coming up this next week I have Channing Tatum as George Washington in the action pastiche America: The Motion Picture, Timothy Spall in The Last Bus, the fantastical romance Jumbo and the shorts collection Upon Her Lips: Heartbeats. I'll also be heading to a West End theatre to finally catch Everybody's Talking About Jamie ahead of the movie adaptation in the autumn.