Critical Week: Soaking up the sun

Even though there aren't many actual screenings at the moment, there's an excess of films to watch simply because film festival season is imminent. There's just over a week until London hosts FrightFest, and immediately after that I'm heading to Italy for the Venice Film Festival. It's my first trip to mainland Europe since November 2018 (now where have I stashed those leftover euros?), and five years since I've been in Venice. Meanwhile, I caught up with two of this year's festival darlings this week. Ruben Ostlund's Triangle of Sadness, starring Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson (above), won the Cannes Festival's Palm d'Or, and rightly so as it's a wild ride packed with themes and class-based provocations. And After Yang premiered at Sundance, featuring a remarkably nuanced, internalised central performance from Colin Farrell as a father exploring the connections in his family. Director Kogonada makes unusually thoughtful films.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
My Old School
The Feast • Anais in Love
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Runner • Glorious
ALL REVIEWS >

Rather a lot more mainstream were three B-movies: the splintered-reality comedy Look Both Ways with Lili Reinhart is enjoyably corny; the perhaps too-tightly contained horror movie Glorious with Ryan Kwanten is gleefully grisly; and the thriller The Runner relies on corny movie cliches but has a strong central actor in rising star Edouard Philipponnat.

As if I didn't have enough on at the moment, I'm also involved in a project with the Kyiv Film Critics, and watched four Ukrainian films this week: the rural dramatic thriller Pamfir and the harrowingly personal odyssey Butterfly Vision both premiered at Cannes this year; the intimate mothers-daughters drama How Is Katia recently premiered at Locarno; and the inventive, blackly comical coming-of-age film Rock Paper Grenade is still awaiting its premiere.

Films to watch this coming week include Idris Elba in Beast, Sylvester Stallone in Samaritan, Tom Felten in Burial and the British thriller Black Mail, plus various films for the forthcoming FrightFest in London and the 79th Venice Film Festival.