Thursday, 2 October 2025

Critical Week: Ready, aim, fire

Things are definitely cranking up in London as awards season takes over screening rooms across the city. Many of the big hitters from recent festivals are being screened for those of us who vote in various awards. There's not a free evening in my diary for a few weeks. After a clash prevented me from attending the only press screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, they made public showings available, so I was able to watch it in glorious VistaVision this week. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall and Chase Infiniti (above) and is a thrillingly entertaining rollercoaster ride.  

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Urchin • The Smashing Machine
The Lost Bus • The Shadow's Edge
Scared Sh*tless
PERHAPS AVOID:
Him • The Ice Tower
ALL REVIEWS >
I also caught up with Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, in which Ethan Hawke gives a superb one-man-show kind of turn as legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart. Riz Ahmed and Lily James are excellent in David Mackenzie's nerve-jangling and smartly twisty thriller Relay. Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers give it their all in the horror thriller Him, but it never amounts to much. And Malcolm McDowell turns up in The Partisan, the intriguing but dryly told true story of a female Polish spy (played by Morgane Polanski) working for Britain during WWII. I also attended live performances of the disco-tastic KC and the Sunshine Band musical Get Down Tonight at Charing Cross Theatre and Bogota at Sadler's Wells East.

Films this coming week include George Clooney in Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, Idris Elba in Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite and Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in Kiss of the Spider Woman. The 69th London Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday with Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunit Wake Up Dead Man. And there's a live performance of Ghost Stories at the Peacock Theatre.

No comments:

Post a Comment