Critical Week: Who runs the world

It's been another busy week at the movies. As the Cannes Film Festival continues in the South of France, there have been plenty of screenings, events and films to watch online here in London. Warm weather is coming back too, which won't be great for cinemas that are reopening to full capacity next week - but people may want to escape the heat and get back to big-screen movies after such a long break. There were two big movies to watch this past week: on a screening link, I enjoyed the stylised chaos of the female-powered action thriller Gunpowder Milkshake, featuring the starry lineup of Carla Gugino, Lena Headey, Karen Gillan, Angela Bassett and Michelle Yeoh (above). On a big screen, I only mildly enjoyed the stylised chaos of Space Jam: A New Legacy, which looks amazing but feels rather random and cynically packaged. But fans will love it.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Summer of Soul • Two of Us
Gunpowder Milkshake
Deerskin • Toofaan
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Birthday Cake
Space Jam: A New Legacy
ALL REVIEWS >

Another starry lineup populates the offbeat mob thriller The Birthday Cake, which stars Shiloh Fernandez alongside Ewan McGregor, Val Kilmer, William Fichtner and Lorraine Bracco. But the plot doesn't hang together. An eclectic cast featuring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong and Bill Skarsgard leads Nine Days, an existential fantasy that's intriguing and only sometimes moving. In an uneven French comedy, Isabelle Huppert has a lot of fun as Mama Weed, a police translator turned drug kingpin. Bollywood megastar Farhan Akhtar goes for a full body transformation in the thrilling and enjoyably soapy boxing epic Toofaan. And the acclaimed French farce Bye Bye Morons throws three random people together for a madcap quest that turns out to be unsettlingly bleak.

As a member of the UK Critics' Circle council, I also attended a lunch to present our top honour for distinguished services to art to playwright-novelist Michael Frayn. And I had a press night for a lively pub garden production of Love's Labour's Lost as well. It's great to see live theatre coming back.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Matt Damon in Stillwater, M Night Shyamalan's Old, Mark Wahlberg in Joe Bell, Ben Platt in Broken Diamonds, offbeat French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux's Mandibles and the French horror thriller Kandisha.