Critical Week: Go long

Another busy week in the cinema catching up with awards contenders and box office hopefuls, and a few that fall in between somewhere. Several of the best films of the year are in cinemas this weekend. Easily the most earnest one was The Mosquito Bowl, a true story starring Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgard, Ray Nicholson and Tom Francis as four American football players serving as US Marines during WWII. It's a great story, but the film feels a bit too reverential. And then there was the Japanese post-war sequel Godzilla Minus Zero, catching up with the characters from Godzilla Minus One as they face both the familiar monster and a new three-headed beast. It's melodramatic but also thrillingly massive.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Club Kid • La Bola Negra
Wild Horse Nine • I Play Rocky
Being Heumann
Onwards and Sideways
De Gaulle: Resistance
ALL REVIEWS >

Smaller films included the Sundance-winning drama Josephine, starring Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan and remarkably young newcomer Mason Reeves. It's a fiercely inventive take on a troubling topic. Chris Rock wrote, directed and stars in the involving Hollywood drama Misty Green, which stars the excellent Rosalind Eleazar as an actress trying to get her life on track, with mixed results. The Czech thriller Manipulation is packed with sinister twists and insidious turns, but is a bit too murky to pull us in. The Mexican comedy-drama The Divine Tragedy is a grippingly funny and moving story about two gay brothers who need each other. There were also two docs: Ava DuVernay's fiercely urgent 14th, about the Constitutional amendment guaranteeing citizen's rights that is being unpicked piece by piece, and the strikingly well-edited Barbara Forever, tracing the work of experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, I also attended a live performance of Germán Cornejo's Tango After Dark. 

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Robert De Niro in Focker-in-Law, Andrew Garfield in Artificial, Johnny Depp in Ebenezer, Javier Bardem in The Beloved, Mike Leigh's Tender Loving Care, Rob Lowe in Confession and the documentary 1 in 2.