Critical Week: To the stars

It's been nice to see new films coming into cinemas for a change, alongside the continuing trickle of festival gems from last year. Perhaps the biggest movie yet, Project Hail Mary is almost a one-man show for Ryan Gosling, and it's enormously entertaining on several levels: as a comedy, thriller and outer space adventure. Include Sandra Huller back on earth and a genuinely charming friendship with a rock-like alien. Glen Powell leads How to Make a Killing, a remake of the classic black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets that starts well but struggles to find a consistent tone. And Pixar's first film this year is Hoppers, a colourfully amiable romp with adorable critters and a wacky sci-fi twist in the premise.

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Further afield, I caught a big-screen presentation of the inventive Chinese epic Resurrection, with an on-screen Q&A with filmmaker Bi Gan. It's fiercely original, visually stunning, thematically a bit bewildering. The French drama Wild Foxes is a beautifully assembled drama about teen boxers, exploring machismo with a remarkably light touch. Also from France, the rather talky but beautifully animated biopic A Magnificent Life traces author and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol's life as a history of cinema itself. And from Japan, the anime crime drama The Last Blossom gets under the skin with its quietly involving storytelling. I also attended the European premiere of the emotionally intense TV series The Madison, with the entire cast in attendance, including Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell (see below).

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Jesse Buckley in The Bride (buying a cinema ticket tomorrow because I couldn't attend the one press screening), Maika Monroe in Reminders of Him, Ferzan Ozpetek's Diamonds, Japanese/British drama A Pale View of Hills, Oscar-nominated doc Cutting Through Rocks, and quite a few movies in the BFI's Cinema Made in Italy season. I'll also attend a live performance of Sugar Daddy at Underbelly Boulevard.

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Critical Week: In a haze

It's a film festival week in London, which means a glut of screenings even if the festival in question is only four days long. It's the 4th Sundance Film Festival: London this weekend at Picturehouse Central, and I am seeing nine of the 11 features in the programme. So far, I've caught Ben Schnetzer and Nick Jonas in the hazing drama Goat (above), Jesse Plemons and Molly Shannon in Other People, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Burstyn in Wiener-Dog, plus the documentaries Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Weiner. More to come, with comments about these films later in the week.

As for normal press screenings, we had a special screening of the weepy romance Me Before You, presented by Emilia Clarke herself, with tissues on every seat. Brady Corbet's Venice-winner The Childhood of a Leader is a complex, difficult and fiercely original exploration of the personality of power. The Ghoul is a beautifully made indie British dark thriller. And the Oscar-nominated Colombian odyssey Embrace of the Serpent is staggeringly beautiful and deeply moving.

Sundance films still to come include Ellen Page in Tallulah, Logan Lerman in Indignation, Clea DuVall's The Intervention and the horror-comedy The Greasy Strangler. And I'll also catch up with Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey in Elvis & Nixon and some home screenings I've been putting off.