Critical Week: Looking for answers

With so many critics away in Cannes this week, you'd think it would have been a quiet one back here in London. But screenings have continued as usual, and will get even busier after the holiday weekend. For the next few months, there will be the blockbuster of the week to track down, plus whatever movies intrepid distributors decide to put up against them, either as counter-programming or to give audiences something else to feed their hunger for big-screen spectacle. For a critic, this can feel rather exhausting, as the smaller, more intriguing movies get lost in the shuffle. 

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But there are some guilty pleasures lurking in the studio output, such as Robert Rodriguez's twisty thriller Hypnotic, starring Ben Affleck and Alice Braga. It's brainy enough to feel smart, even if it isn't. But it's thoroughly entertaining. Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid is still largely animated, now with the heads of ace human stars like Javier Bardem and Melissa McCarthy grafted to the digital fish-bodies. Halle Bailey is likeable as Ariel, the story and songs are engaging, but the visuals are murky and the tone feels rather grim.

Off the beaten path, Breaking Infinity is a small-budget British thriller that plays around with time travel. It's choppy but involving, and Neil Bishop is a terrific leading man. From China, the animated adventure Boonie Bears: Guardian Code is funny and silly, and also rather chaotic. And Mark Cousins' documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock has some fun with the filmmaking master, to the delight of fans. There were also two stage shows: the prickly romantic drama The Misandrist the Arcola and the dazzlingly acrobatic dance piece Corps Extrêmes at Sadler's Wells.

This next week I'll be watching two highly anticipated comic book blockbusters: The Flash and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, plus Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera in Carmen, Chris Messina in The Boogeyman, French drama The Innocent, Italian drama The Neighbour and International Male documentary All Man. I'll also attend live performances of The Ruggeds: State Shift at Sadler's Wells (review here soon), and the immersive revival of Guys and Dolls at the Bridge.

Critical week: Watching the world burn

Marc Forster's long-awaited zombie apocalypse movie World War Z was shown to the UK press this past week, seemingly five years after Brad Pitt and crew were marauding around Britain filming it. The first half of the film is an excellent Contagion-style thriller, before things get rather ridiculous. The other most anxiously awaited movie was the prequel Monsters University, which traces Mike and Sulley's earlier days studying to be scarers. It's packed with snappy visual and verbal gags, although the plot races a bit too quickly. And the other big-name movie this week was Admission, starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd. They're always excellent - I could watch them just sit and chat for two hours - and the film has some great dialog even if the plot isn't up to much.

Further from the mainstream, I caught Ulrich Seidl's second part in his trilogy, Paradise: Faith, an even more razor-sharp pitch-black comedy than Love. From Germany, Men to Kiss is a twisty gay romantic comedy that has it's moments of genuine emotion. The harrowing The Act of Killing documents the 1965 Malaysian massacres with an inventive twist that's utterly mind-spinning, while the almost unnervingly quiet Silence documents a sound recordist trying to escape human noise. And then there were two iconic oldies on the big screen: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the pristinely restored studio-busting 1963 epic Cleopatra, and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho at the BFI Southbank - perhaps the most iconic film ever made introduced by James Franco, who has a Psycho-themed art installation in London all summer.

This coming week features another very late-screening Warner Bros blockbuster: Man of Steel. We also have the animated sequel Despicable Me 2, Kristen Wiig in Girl Most Likely, Nicolas Cage in The Frozen Ground, and Iain Softley's Trap for Cinderella. I'm also currently planning exactly when I head up to Edinburgh for the film festival, which starts on June 19th.

Olympics Day 12: Glory days

London continues to buzz with Olympic energy on Day 12 - even if Britain didn't win any gold medals today, there was plenty to cheer about. In athletics, it seemed like the Americans were winning absolutely everything. And the Brits couldn't even get a break in equestrian showjumping. But the city is packed with happy tourists and fit competitors, and Londoners seem just a tiny but less grumpy than usual.

My day today was a bit dull: I was at home reporting hourly on the Olympics for two four-hour shifts, and in between I had a live radio slot to do. That meant that I only got out of my flat briefly, but I also was able to watch the Games action all day long in the background as I looked for last-minute results and sought out interesting stories.

Tomorrow I'll be back in the thick of things, as I head to the Olympic Stadium early in the morning for the first session of athletics. I applied for these tickets more than 18 months ago, thinking that since it was the only athletics session without a final I had a better chance of getting seats - bingo! Looking forward to being in the Olympic Park again, especially since it's supposed to be a warm, sunny day this time.

CRITICAL WEEK: I haven't had quite as much time for movies this past week, as the Games have kept me busy. But I did manage to catch up with a few things: the all-star action blockbuster The Expendables 2, which I'm embargoed from talking about until Monday; the shockingly unfunny Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn alien comedy The Watch; the creepy/silly independent British horror The Devil's Business; the devastatingly moving Cannes-winning French drama Our Children; and the stunning restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's first Hitchcockian movie, the 1927 silent The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, which has been given a remarkable new score by Nitin Sawhney.

This coming week, there's the shockingly late press screening of The Bourne Legacy, the British indie horror I Against I, the appropriately timely thriller Cockneys vs Zombies, the FrightFest title Sinister, and the music doc Shut Up and Play the Hits.