Critical Week: Let's get weird

After two straight months of film festivals, I made the decision to sit out the 30th Raindance Film Fest, which is underway in London this week. It's always packed with great screenings, unsung films often with filmmaker Q&As. But I've needed some mental health space. I also had to prepare for the annual Critics' Circle Services to the Arts award today, which this year went to Emma Thompson. As chair of the Film Section, I sat next to her for lunch and then delivered a speech about her career before she replied with a fabulous speech of her own about the nature of criticism and its impact on her life. There were about 75 members of the Circle in attendance from across all six sections - film, theatre, dance, music, books and art. A superb afternoon.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Causeway • Living
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Missing • Utama • Neptune Frost
PERHAPS AVOID:
Dear Zoe
ALL REVIEWS >

Movie-wise, the surprising highlight was the pastiche biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, starring Daniel Radcliffe as the king of parody songs. It's a riotously hilarious film, and the screening was accompanied by a lively launch party for Roku in the UK. Other films included the violent and entertaining action drama Medieval, starring Ben Foster, Michael Caine and Sophie Lowe; the superbly unsettling urban horror drama Nanny, with Anna Diop as a Senegalese woman in New York; the remarkable Sadie Sink in the melodramatic and rather slushy drama Dear Zoe; the latest from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, the folkloric freak-out Enys Men; and a new inventively nutty mind-bender from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the paranormal adventure Something in the Dirt.

Movies to watch this next week include the sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek in Sam & Kate, Romain Duris in Final Cut, Latin American horror in Blood-Red Ox, the Australian romance Expired and the surreal comedy Homebody.

Sundance London: Face to face

I only caught a slice of the programme at this year's Sundance Film Festival: London, but the films were exceptional. Since I was attending public screenings at Picturehouse Central, all of them were attended by the directors, and also often key members of the cast and crew, offering insight into how the films were conceived and shot. Most of the Sundance London films will be released in cinemas, and are worth keeping an eye out for. Here are final highlights...

Leave No Trace
dir Debra Granik; with Ben Foster, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie 18/US ****
After the indelible Winter's Bone, filmmaker Debra Granik carries on exploring the connections of people with nature in this strikingly visceral drama set in the Pacific Northwest. As it expands to touch on a variety of timely themes, the film maintains its tight focus on the central father and daughter, played beautifully by Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie. It's a provocative film that reaches deep to evoke a powerfully emotional response.

Generation Wealth
dir-scr Lauren Greenfield; with Florian Homm, Kacey Jordan 18/US *****
Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield takes her fabulous doc The Queen of Versailles and spirals out to explore the much bigger picture, creating one of the most vital, urgent films in years. An expertly assembled film packed with striking imagery, it's also a riveting exploration of consumerism, taking a surprisingly personal approach that touches on unexplored aspects of a society that's addicted to monetising virtually everything.

Skate Kitchen
dir Crystal Moselle; with Rachelle Vinberg, Ardelia Lovelace 18/US ****
Filmmaker Crystal Moselle skilfully creates a loose vibe in this drama about skater girls in New York City. The narrative is deliberately thin, as the film instead focuses on on the camaraderie, connections and rivalries between young people who are discovering who they are in the context of the tribe in which they find themselves. It's fascinating, honest and thoroughly gripping, expertly shot and edited to bring out the natural performances.

Sundance Short Film Tour
There are seven films from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in this programme, which has been travelling around the world to cinemas and festivals. This includes the grand prize-winning Matria (Alvaro Gago, Spain), a stunning and rather gruelling depiction of a woman trying to hold her family together through sheer force of will. Two others won jury prizes: Hair Wolf (Mariama Diallo, US) is a witty horror pastiche set in a Brooklyn beauty salon that's being invaded by zombie-like white people looking for "braids!" And Fauve (Jeremy Comte, Canada) is an intensely raw little film that shifts from lively romp to painful drama in the blink of an eye. The other stand-out for me was The Burden (Niki Lindroth von Buhr, Sweden - pictured), an inventively surreal stop-motion animation about the struggles of everyday life.

Critical Week: Off the grid

London critics had a chance to catch up this week with the pointed drama Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortensen as a father raising his six kids out in the forest with a very well-rounded education. It's packed with great ideas, and has terrific performances from Mortensen and George MacKay as his eldest son.

Also this week, Matt Damon was back as Jason Bourne, reuniting with Paul Greengrass for another ripping espionage thriller. Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster all get great roles in the present-day Western Hell or High Water, a riveting exploration of the modern world with plenty of added suspense. There was also a new movie version of the children's' classic novel Swallows and Amazons, with the excellent Kelly Macdonald, Rafe Spall and Andrew Scott in the cast, but little in the way of tension. And the TV series Looking concluded with a movie that continued creator Andrew Haigh's refusal to play into stereotypes in his exploration of the intertwined lives of three gay men in San Francisco, beautifully played by Jonathan Groff, Murray Bartlett and Frankie Alvarez.

I have no screenings in the diary for the coming week, because I am heading out of London on holiday. It will be my first time out of England since last November - a well earned break, I think! So I intend to see no movies, although I may preload a couple on my phone for the flights, such as Brian Cox in The Carer and the gritty teen romance Black. But I need a screen break...

Critical Week: You shall not pass!

I took a break from screenings this past week, and the only one I attended was the massive Monday night 3D extravaganza of Warcraft, based on the videogaming universe. Alas, I'm not allowed to make any comments about the movie until next week! I'll try to do better at watching some of my backlog of screeners this weekend, although I have several projects to do around the flat.

I also saw three theatre pieces. Harold Pinter's The Caretaker was staged beautifully at the Old Vic, with razor sharp performances from Timothy Spall, George MacKay and Daniel Mays in a clever story about identity and social structure. Also at the Old Vic, Jekyll and Hyde is an astonishing dance-based thriller that tells a riveting story that's funny, sexy, violent and darkly emotional. It's stunningly choreographed, designed and performed. And The Chemsex Monologues at the King's Head tells its story through, yes, monologues from four characters as they trace a year on the drug-infused sex scene in London. It's bracingly honest, told from an intimate, engaging perspectives, and remarkably never preachy.

This coming week, I'll be watching the romance Me Before You, Anthony Hopkins in Misconduct, Billy Crudup in The Stanford Prison Experiment, Michel Gondry's Microbe and Gasoline, the indie British thriller Ghoul, and HBO's MLK/LBJ movie All the Way.

LFF 4: Strike a pose

The 59th London Film Festival forges ahead with more red carpet mania (that's Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren and John Goodman out last night, for Trumbo). It's only Day 4 and I'm already suffering from burn-out, so tonight I'm taking a break and heading to the theatre! That should help me face the coming eight days, even with those nasty 8.45am press screenings. Thankfully the films have been good enough to (mostly) keep me awake. More highlights...

Bone Tomahawk 
dir S Craig Zahler; with Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson 15/US ***.
A fresh take on the Western genre, this film combines dark drama with snappy wit and grisly horror to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. So while it's riveting and unpredictable, with strikingly bold performances from the entire cast, it's also vaguely ridiculous in its grotesque exaggeration of frontier fears about Native Americans.

The Program
dir Stephen Frears; with Ben Foster, Chris O'Dowd 15/UK ***. 
With a quick pace and steely tone, this drama traces Lance Armstrong's career in a strikingly lucid way. Never simplistic, it sees the events through the cyclist's own perspective, acknowledging the moral issues while carefully exploring why a sportsman would cheat his way to success. Anchored by a bracing performance from Foster, this is also one of the edgiest movies in Frears' eclectic filmography

Couple in a Hole 
dir Tom Geens; with Paul Higgins, Kate Dickie 15/UK **. 
Like something from the Greek new wave, this film takes a surreal look at fundamental human emotions through a premise that feels both fantastical and eerily realistic. On the other hand, this particular parable is far too on-the-nose, never quite coming up with anything very insightful. Still, it's packed with unexpected twists and characters that defy expectations.

Men & Chicken 
dir Anders Thomas Jensen; with Mads Mikkelsen, David Dencik 15/Den **** 
A wickedly grotesque look at family connections, this Danish black comedy is both hugely entertaining and utterly bonkers. A mixture of scientific creepiness and Three Stooges-style slapstick, the film defiantly refuses to fit into a genre. Which makes it gloriously entertaining in all the wrong ways.

Aligarh
dir Hansal Mehta; with Manoj Bajpai, Rajkummar Rao 15/Ind ****
It would be easy to write off this true drama as something that could only happen in India, but the film has striking layers of global resonance. Not only is it a vivid depiction of the struggle for human rights, in this case relating to sexuality, but it's also a subtle indictment of how Western media have created a need for everyone to be put into their appropriate box. And it's written, directed and acted with remarkable sensitivity and insight.

Critical Week: Full of sound and fury

Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender bring their A-game to Macbeth, the visceral new film screened this week to London critics. It's emotional and strikingly visual, but much of Shakespeare's language is muffled in the process. Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer are suave, bickering partners in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a groovy, stylish action romp without a whiff of meaning. The new version of Fantastic Four is a lot more enjoyable than the recent social media storm would suggest, although its final act is deeply flawed. And the surviving members of Monty Python reteamed for the wacky and rather astonishingly terrible sci-fi comedy Absolutely Anything, starring Simon Pegg and the voice of the late Robin Williams.

Even the smaller films were pretty high-profile this week. The Program is Stephen Frears' take on the Lance Armstrong scandal, and Ben Foster's central performance is the best thing about it. War Book is a riveting boardroom-roleplay drama pondering the fallout from nuclear war. Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism is a frantic and rather annoying British kids' romp with an all-star cast including Emily Watson, Lesley Manville and Dominic Monaghan. And The Curse of Downers Grove Air, cowritten by Bret Easton Ellis, is a bleak teen drama that never quite makes its point.

Coming up this week, we have Tom Hardy as both Kray brothers in Legend, Ed Helms in the Vacation sequel/reboot, Josh Hutcherson in Escobar: Paradise Lost, Marcia Gay Harden in After Words, more horror in Sinister 2, dark drama in Drown, family comedy-drama in Brahmin Bulls and a gonzo freak-out in the beautifully titled Aaaaaaaah!

On the Road: Frozen, alone and fearsome

After only watching two films in the past two weeks, I had a bit of a flurry this weekend in Los Angeles, starting with Disney's new animated movie Frozen, about two sisters (voiced by Kristen Bella and Idina Menzel) struggling with what seems to be a family curse. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, the plot has some real weight and the characters are unusually strong, offering a strong twist on the usual Disney formula . Although the filmmakers couldn't resist filling the screen with silly jokes and comic relief characters, the animation is gorgeous and the themes are handled with a refreshing lightness,

I also had a couple of awards-consideration screenings on Saturday, my first two in Los Angeles. Both were pretty harrowing films, for different reasons. First was the true thriller Lone Survivor, in which Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch and Emile Hirsch get into serious trouble on a mission in Afghanistan. It's riveting and exhausting, and a bit too rah-rah heroic for its own good. But it's also electrically charged and sharply well made. Second was the dysfunctional drama August: Osage County, starring Meryl Streep as a fearsome matriarch who locks horns (and then some) with her equally tetchy daughter Julia Roberts. The ace ensemble includes Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis and Julianne Nicholson. And the insights from playwright/screenwriter Tracy Letts are startlingly honest. It sometimes feels hugely over-dramatic, but every scene strikes a nerve.