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
ALL REVIEWS >

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...