Critical Week: A new friend

These have been busy days with a variety of events and lots of errands before I travel over the coming weeks. But I caught up with two terrific all-audience movies that have been showing up at festivals and will likely feature at awards time. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is the loveable Aardman duo's first film in 15 years, and it's a pure joy. It's so much fun, in fact, that I can't imagine how it could be any better if it tried - a barrage of terrific verbal and visual gags, pastiche moments and a superb thriller-style plot. And then there's the Latvian animation Flow, which is a bit rough-looking but also utterly mesmerising as it follows the astonishing adventures of a cat as its world is flooded.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Last Dance
All We Imagine As Light
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And then there was this season's big awards movie, Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, a four-hour epic (including an intermission) about an immigrant architect (Adrien Brody) in mid-20th century America. It's riveting and powerfully pointed. Daniel Craig is fully immersed in an unusual role for Luca Guadagnino's Queer, based on the William Burroughs novel about sex and drugs in Latin America. It's a stunning film, if a little enigmatic. And Isabelle Huppert is at her understated best in Hong Sang-soo's loosely observational drama A Traveler's Needs. I also attended the UK premiere performance of the exhilarating Exit Above at Sadler's Wells.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be visiting friends and family in Southern California, and I'm sure to see some awards screenings before my ballots are due. There's also the question of what I might watch on the plane! I'll be posting about the movies as I see them...

Dance: Walk away the blues

Exit Above
After the Tempest / D’après la Tempête / Naar de Storm
choreography Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
music Meskerem Mees, Jean-Marie Aerts, Carlos Garbin
dancers Abigail Aleksander, Jean Pierre Buré, Lav Crnčević, José Paulo dos Santos, Rafa Galdino, Nina Godderis, Solal Mariotte, Mariana Miranda, Ariadna Navarrete Valverde, Cintia Sebők (danced by Margarida Marques Ramalhete), Jacob Storer
musicians Meskerem Mees, Carlos Garbin
scenography Michel François
lighting Max Adams • costumes Aouatif Boulaich
Sadler's Wells, London • 12-13.Nov.24 ★★★★

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Belgian dance company Rosas brings this show to the UK for the first time. The approach is refreshingly offbeat, creating a loose atmosphere that often feels improvised but actually involves complex layers of movement tracing elaborate geometric patterns on the stage. This tone shifts and evolves throughout the performance, intertwining music and movement to create a powerfully visceral catharsis.

The first to take to the fully deconstructed stage are guitarist Carlos Garbin and vocalist Meskerem Mees, both of whom participate in the dance numbers as well. To an engulfing soundscape, Mees recites the words of philosopher Walter Benjamin, exploring the nature of history and the storm that is progress. Then a single dancer throws himself into the air and back to the floor in spiralling gymnastic moves, while a shimmering curtain wafts overhead.

From here, the show surges through an expansive series of dance styles, with performers on their own, in pairs or as one. The demanding choreography is expressive and broad, drawing on huge physicality as the seriously gifted dancers spin, jump, lift, balance or stand silent and still. But mostly they are walking ever forward, tightly connected to each other and the music. Accompanying this is Garbin's guitar, which cycles through a series of blues numbers that are sung by the angelic Mees, shifting the mood from pulsing rhythms to searingly pure tones. 

With lights positioned far above, the shadow of the rigging is projected onto the walls, creating an elemental space that's augmented by some lighting trickery. A spotlight traces slow circles around the stage, which is covered in geometric lines. The dancers echo the light's movement, creating a kind of counter-clockwise whirlpool. All of this is exploring the idea of everyday movement, walking ahead regardless of what's happening in our lives. It may feel a bit meandering, but there's also a strong sense of both individuality and community. And in the later scenes, as dancers fling off clothing in abandon, their connection grows powerfully strong, leading to a series of stunning final sequences.

For information, SADLER'S WELLS > 

photos by Anne Van Aerschot • 12.Nov.24

Critical Week: Are you not entertained?

As we get stuck into November, the year's big titles are beginning to turn up at press screenings, and none is bigger than Ridley Scott's sequel Gladiator II, a mammoth epic set in Ancient Rome starring Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal. The script is flawed (Connie Nielsen's role is criminally underwritten), but the film is hugely entertaining. Another sequel might even be more anticipated: while not as magical as No 2, Paddington in Peru is a charming, funny movie that sees our heroic little bear on an Amazon adventure accompanied by Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
No Other Land
Piece by Piece
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Another big one, Wicked: Part I stars Cynthia Erivo Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey (with added spark from Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum). It's gloriously assembled on a lavish scale, and we have to wait a year for Part II. Bill Skarsgard is imperious in Robert Eggers' profoundly horrific Nosferatu, costarring Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Willem Dafoe. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton find lovely textures in Almodovar's The Room Next Door, while Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson shine in the complex and powerfully provocative drama A Different Man. Meanwhile outside of awards contention, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans provide some sparky banter in the otherwise over-familiar Christmas action comedy Red One. And the quirky British comedy Time Travel Is Dangerous is packed with hilarious performances and local North London gags.

This coming week I'll be watching the long-awaited Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the acclaimed animated adventure Flow, Isabelle Huppert in A Traveler's Needs, the biopic Bonhoeffer and more awards contenders. I'm also travelling to Southern California to visit family for a couple of weeks, and I'm sure to see a few things out there before it's time to submit my ballots.

Critical Week: Generations

Awards season is cranking up for anyone who votes in these things, and yet there are still regular releases opening in cinemas that I need to cover, So the week was a combination of films aimed at very different audiences. As for cinema releases, there was the latest film directed by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood, the old-fashioned dramatic thriller Juror #2, starring Nicholas Hoult, and Toni Collette. It's slow and not nearly as complex as it looks, but enjoyably gripping. Hugh Grant is excellent as the charming-but-shifty villain in Heretic, a rather simplistic horror film that's livened up by deeper theological questions. And Liam Neeson's latest action movie is Absolution, a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on mortality and redemption.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A Real Pain • Emilia Perez
Anora • Super/Man
Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives
ALL REVIEWS >

There were also a few more films that showed at the London Film Festival. Pharrell Williams uses Lego animation to tell his life story in Piece by Piece, an uplifting and delightfully original concoction packed with hilarious gags and lots of great music. Cate Blanchett leads the ensemble cast of Rumours, a nutty satire about G7 leaders lost in the woods. The film is a bit lost itself. From Hong Kong, The Last Dance is a beautifully well-made comedy about the tension between tradition and progress. From Britain, Secrets of a Wallaby Boy is a very scrappy hand-made comedy about a delivery boy. And there were two docs: Christopher Reeve is the focus of the fascinating, moving Super/Man, which has some important things to say about curiosity and compassion, and How to Build a Truth Engine is a fascinatingly detailed exploration of the spread of fake news.

As the big movies keep coming, this coming week I'll be watching Paul Mescal in Gladiator II, the adventure comedy sequel Paddington in Peru, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked Part 1, Dwayne Johnson in Red One, Emma Corrin in Nosferatu and the FrightFest Halloween comedy Time Travel Is Dangerous.