Critical Week: Plot your escape

I caught up this week with three films that are circling in awards season this year, but are only just now being screened for London critics. The documentary Minding the Gap is a provocative look at three childhood friends in Rockport, Illinois. It's relaxed, entertaining and darkly moving. A more artfully poetic doc, Hale County This Morning, This Evening explores similar themes, focussing on young men who dream of escaping their close community in rural Alabama. It's sumptuously shot, and remarkably introspective. And the Italian drama Happy as Lazzaro is a masterful fable about how humanity hasn't really changed with modernisation. This is told through the magical tale of an engaging young farmhand who simply never has a mean thought in his head.

The one big movie I saw this week was M Night Shyamalan's Glass, which brings together two of his earlier films (2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split) to deconstruct superhero mythology. It's creepy and almost startlingly serious, with meaty performances from leads James McEvoy, Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. Tom Everett Scott stars in the high-concept comedy I Hate Kids, which is amusing but never very funny. James Franco has a brief role in Don't Come Back From the Moon, an elusive but compellingly well-made drama set in the California desert. The Hole in the Ground is an Irish horror movie that's scary but a bit thin. And Pond Life is a lushly shot British drama featuring a superb ensemble of teen actors over a summer of yearning.

I attended the event at which the British Board of Film Classification announced its new guidelines this week. Every five years they canvas more than 10,000 people around the country to update what people expect from the UK's film ratings system. The changes are intriguing, with harder lines taken toward sexual violence and discriminatory language and imagery.

This coming Sunday is the 39th London Critics' Circle Film Awards, which I chair. I've been rather swamped with organising that over the past few months, and especially this week. Look for a report with pics next week. I also have some screenings lined up, including Jonah Hill's Mid90s, Alex Lawther in Old Boys, the Polish drama Nina and a doc called ParTy Boi.

Parental Guidance

Parental Guidance
dir Andy Fickman; with Billy Crystal, Bette Midler 12/US ***
There's not much to this silly, sentimental comedy, but it goes down easy as a bit of undemanding, unoriginal nonsense. Crystal and Midler don't stretch themselves at all in their roles as grandparents taking care of the three lively children of their uptight daughter (Marisa Tomei). Life lessons are announced early on, so there are no surprises there. And the continual stream of wacky slapstick set pieces is unimaginative and predictable. But there are some nice moments along the way, mainly in Crystal's snappy delivery of usually obvious one-liners. It all turns unnecessarily sentimental in the end, by which time we have nearly been lulled to sleep, so we're vulnerable to the manipulative warm-fuzzy interaction. None of the actors breaks a sweat, there's nothing to stimulate thought and Fickman's direction is functional at best. And yet, in the end it leaves us feeling happy and mildly entertained. And it makes us wonder why Crystal doesn't get better scripts than this.

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REPORT FROM ON THE ROAD:
I've only seen one other film in cinemas in the past week, and that was a family outing to Les Miserables, my second look at the film. It's still a surging emotional experience, although the flaws are more visible on a repeat viewing, including Tom Hooper's bludgeoning direction and the rather odd stage-bound street sets. Otherwise we've been watching lots of holiday movies on TV, including the best of them all, It's a Wonderful Life, which is always more engaging than we remember it being. And the there were the three Santa Clause movies starring Tim Allen, with their ever-diminishing returns, and Allen also stars in Christmas With the Kranks, an enjoyably corny holiday comedy. Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn just bout maintain their charm through the uneven Four Christmases, but even Jim Carrey can't keep us smiling through Ron Howard's eerily mean-spirited How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Where was Bad Santa when I needed it?

Back to London on Sunday, with a stack of screeners to watch before casting final votes in the Online and London critics awards - including Compliance, Jiro Dreams of Sushi and The Invisible War.