On the road: Bring it home

So here I sit in cold, rainy Southern California, all my plans derailed. I've seen some friends and family while I've been here, but not everyone I came out here to visit. And virtually everything has been cancelled due to covid-19, with cinemas and theatres closed, along with bars and restaurants. So as I distance myself socially, I have little to do. When not listening to music on hold, I've watched a few films. For example, out this week in the UK (perhaps!) is The Jesus Rolls, John Turturro's offbeat remake of the 1974 Les Valseuses featuring his Big Lebowski character Jesus Quintana. It's loose and perhaps too smiley.

I also watched, to review them, the engaging and creepy German arthouse thriller Darkroom, about a nice guy serial killer, and the adorable Swedish animated romance Top 3, about a guy with self-esteem issues. And exploring Netflix I found the warm Spanish film Live Twice, Love Once, an involving, very cleverly written and played drama about memory, as well as the concert video Steve Martin & Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life, which is as hilarious as you want it to be and leaves you wanting more.

I'll continue prowling around Netflix and, since cinemas are closing, I'll be covering more films released online over the next several weeks. The website will need to begin to reflect this new reality (this week's cover, right, replaces the planned one for A Quiet Place Part II). I'm still working out how this all looks, while I currently have review links for upcoming streaming movies titled: The Perfect Candidate, Hooking Up, The Other Lamb, Gold Dust, Just Sex Nothing Personal and, ahem, Butt Boy. So I have plenty to do whether I'm isolating in California or, hopefully, back home in London...

Critical Week: A family affair

It's been a rather thin week for screenings, or maybe I'm just out of the loop because I've been pre-occupied with organising the Critics' Circle Film Awards. The biggest movie I saw was The Odyssey, the French biopic about Jacques Cousteau starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. It's beautifully filmed and acted, but lacks narrative coherence. The others were independent British oddities: Mindhorn is a somewhat uneven pastiche thriller about an actor asked to re-inhabit his 1980s TV cop character to solve a real murder. It has a terrific cast including Julian Barratt, Russell Tovey, Steve Coogan and Kenneth Branagh. And Spaceship is a swirly arthouse drama about a teen who may have been abducted by aliens, although the plot never quite makes any sense. And then there was a four-hour thriller released next week on DVD in the UK...

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Deep Water
dir Shawn Seet
scr Kym Goldsworthy
with Noah Taylor, Yael Stone, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Craig McLachlan, Danielle Cormack, Ben Oxenbould
16/Aus SBS 3h40 ***.
This four-part Australian TV series may feel somewhat melodramatic, but it taps into some darkly relevant themes. When a Muslim man is found murdered in his flat overlooking Bondi Beach, detective Tori (Orange Is the New Black's Yael Stone) and her partner Nick (Noah Taylor) begin to discover inexplicable links to a series of unsolved murders from the late 1980s. But these were hate crimes involving gay victims, and the officials simply turned a blind eye at the time. The show is assembled with a soapy emotional flair that kind of ignores authenticity in lieu of flashy plot points, hot potato themes and shifty suspects. This makes it feel like a rather standard television procedural, complete with far too many characters to keep straight and lots of shocking revelations. But the underlying issues are solidly engaging, touching on things in society that perhaps haven't improved as much as we'd like to think they have in the past 25 years. And it's strikingly well shot, with engaging performances from the skilled cast.

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This coming week we have screenings of another rather thin, offbeat collection of movies, including the British boxing drama Jawbone, Cristian Mungiu's award-winning Graduation and the doc All This Panic.

Critical Week: American pride

Even though it was made for the small screen, HBO's The Normal Heart is one of the biggest movies of the year - a fiercely intimate exploration of the 1980s Aids epidemic that not only grips on an emotional level but shows clearly which community of Americans should be proud of the way they approached the situation (hint, it's not the politicians). Thunderous performances by a first-rate cast (Taylor Kitsch and Mark Ruffalo are pictured above), Larry Kramer's sharp script (based on his 1985 play) and clever direction by Ryan Murphy make this a film that really should have been released on the big screen. [Full review on the website]

Films screened to the London press this week include Maleficent, Disney's revisionist take on Sleeping Beauty starring an imperiously fabulous Angelina Jolie as the eponymous no-longer-evil fairy. The tough drama Joe features a nicely against-type performance from Nicolas Cage and another star-making turn from young Tye Sheridan (see also Mud). Last week's costars Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou are back for Chinese Puzzle, a New York-set ensemble piece costarring Cecile De France and Kelly Reilly. It's the third in Cedric Klapisch's decade-long trilogy of silly-sweet rom-coms. And Omar received a deserved Oscar nomination for its complex story about a young Palestinian freedom fighter trying to find love as his world collapses around him.

Coming up this week: Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt live a day of warfare over and over again in Edge of Tomorrow, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill go back undercover for 22 Jump Street, Seth MacFarlane and Charlize Theron go for laughs in A Million Ways to Die in the West, Rosamund Pike and David Tennant have some fun in What We Did on Our Holiday, Karen Gillan faces the horror of Oculus, and a young boy comes of age in 1967 Palestine in When I Saw You.