Critical Week: Hope floats

Things are slowly cranking back up after Christmas and New Year, although I haven't yet been to a screening room in 2018, as my films so far have all been at home on screener discs or links. Jupiter's Moon is a fiendishly clever drama from Hungary about a Syrian refugee who discovers he can levitate. Brad's Status stars Ben Stiller as a guy who is annoyingly overthinking his mid-life crisis, with the excellent rising star Austin Abrams as his teen son. Saturday Church is a sensitive, moving drama about a young teen (the superb Luka Kain) trying to balance who he knows he is with who he's expected to be. From Bulgaria, Glory is a clever, involving satirical adventure into the messy depths of publicity and bureaucracy. And I also caught up with this one...

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Columbus
dir-scr Kogonada; with Haley Lu Richardson, John Cho 17/US ***.
This extremely low-key drama gets under the skin with its vivid characters and lovely settings, beautifully shot with an architectural eye. Writer-director Kogonaga is exploring the delicate connections we have between each other and our surroundings, using formal camerawork that hones in on the characters, buildings and greenery around them. And it's anchored by a terrific central performance by Haley Lu Richardson as a young woman, only a year out of high school, who has decided to stay in Columbus, Illinois, to take care of her ex-addict mother (Michelle Forbes). Then she befriends Jin (John Cho), in town to look after his eminent architect father, who is in a coma. Their conversations swirl around expectations and dreams as they push each other to break free of the issues that are holding them back. It's a gentle film that never quite works up a head of steam, but its ideas are moving and provocative.

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This coming week there are only a few screenings in actual cinemas (things get started very slowly after the holidays), but I'm set to see Martin Landau's last film Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game, the migrant drama In Another Life, the musical doc Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars and the sporting doc The Ice King, among other things.

Meanwhile, awards season shifts up a gear with the Golden Globes, the Bafta nominations and more. Keep track of who's winning overall with my annual SHADOWS SWEEPSTAKES.

LFF: Heading out on Day 2

Today was the first full day of films at the 61st BFI London Film Festival, and I'm beginning to feel the strain. But then I've been watching movies for three weeks already, and it's merely getting more intense now! Here are some more festival highlights, with additional twitter updates during the day...

Mudbound
dir Dee Rees; with Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund 17/US ***
There's an epic scope to this Deep South drama that demands attention, although the script hews perhaps too closely to the source novel for its own good. Nonstop voiceover from a variety of characters adds soul but is distracting, as is a surplus of plot detail. But even though it's set in the 1940s, the themes are still vivid, carrying a powerful kick that resonates in uncomfortable ways.

Stronger
dir David Gordon Green; with Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany 17/US ****
A strikingly earthy approach to this true story eliminates any hint of sentimentality from what easily could have become a swellingly sudsy story of hope and inspiration. Instead, director David Gordon Green has crafted a gritty, honest look at a young man who is forced by a shocking event to grapple with elements of his personality he has long ignored. And by refusing to push the themes, the film is genuinely hopeful and inspirational... FULL REVIEW >

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
dir-scr Noah Baumbach; with Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller17/US ****
Like a Woody Allen movie, this episodic film chronicles the collisions between members of a lively Jewish family in New York, blending sharp-edged humour with several much darker themes. Much of the film is downright hilarious, as these people rarely listen to what anyone is saying, talking over each other and obsessing over their personal issues. But there's also a lovely sense of what holds them together... FULL REVIEW >

Good Time
dir Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie; with Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie 17/US ***.
With a grimy B-movie vibe, this film propels the audience into a twisted odyssey with a loser who simply can't get a break over the course of one long, nasty night. It's shot and edited with lurid style, accompanied by a pulsing electronic score that makes it feel like it belongs in the 1980s. As events spiral further out of control, it begins to feel rather scripted and contrived. But it's still fascinating... FULL REVIEW >

Loveless
dir-scr Andrey Zvyagintsev; with Maryana Spivak, Aleksey Rozin 17/Rus ****.
As he did in 2014's Leviathan, Andrey Zvyagintsev tells a provocative personal story that reveals layers of painful truth about both Russian society and the whole world. Among other things, it explores how compassion is evaporating from "polite" society, with people more concerned about posting Instagrams of their food than paying attention to where their children are. Beautifully shot and acted, the story and themes get deep under the skin... FULL REVIEW >

Rift
dir-scr Erlingur Thoroddsen; with Bjorn Stefansson, Sigurdur Thor Oskarsson 17/Ice ****
Sleek and dark, this Icelandic thriller gets under the skin quickly with filmmaking that's enticingly mysterious. Writer-director Erlingur Thoroddsen skilfully shoots the film to catch deep colours while positioning characters against stunning landscapes, giving everything a powerfully visual kick while the story develops beneath the surfaces. It's overlong but beautifully made, and packed with fiendishly clever touches... FULL REVIEW >

Critical Week: Up on the roof

Press screenings this past week included Spooks: The Greater Good, the first big-screen adventure for the long-running BBC TV spy series (titled MI-5 in the USA). Comments on the film are embargoed until closer to the May 8th release, but the cast includes Kit Harington (above), Jennifer Ehle, David Harewood and series actors Peter Firth, Tim McInnerny and Lara Pulver. And there were two other action movies this week: Sean Penn is The Gunman, an oddly dull and brutal Euro-thriller with the spark of a topical theme, while Jason Statham leads Wild Card, an oddly dull and brutal Vegas thriller with a jazzy undertone.

There were also four comedies: Noah Baumbach's engaging but contrived While We're Young features Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts facing the early flares of middle age; Mae Whitman is terrific in The Duff, a smartly written and played teen comedy that keeps the audience laughing; from the same producers, the perhaps too-snappy meta-comedy Playing It Cool stars Chris Evans as a screenwriter trying to write a rom-com while resisting romance; and Andrew J West leads a starry cast as Walter, a likeable young guy who thinks he's God's messenger and takes a surprisingly engaging journey back to reality.

And two superbly well-made but essentially plotless art films were a tonic to critics worn out by too-literal commercial movies: the rural British coming-of-age drama The Goob and the Colombian class-clash drama Gente de Bien are both beautifully observed studies of people grappling with life in their specific cultures.

Coming up in the next week, we have screenings of the Divergent sequel Insurgent, Liam Neeson in Run All Night, Russell Crowe in The Water Diviner, Elizabeth Moss in Listen Up Philip, James Franco in I Am Michael, sirs Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine in Stonehearst Asylum, the animated adventure Home, the Swedish drama Something Must Break and the finally uncensored 54: The Director's Cut.

Requisite Blog Photo: Smoking gun

Critical Week: Mountain-top experience

Year-end screenings continue as distributors try to show us their films before voting deadlines (London Critics' Circle votes for nominees on Friday; Online Film Critics Society votes in the final round on Saturday). This week's big hitters included Ben Stiller's remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an earnest movie about life choices; Out of the Furnace, a gritty Rust Belt drama starring Christian Bale and Casey Affleck; and Spike Jonze's lovely romantic drama Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with his computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and we believe it.

The other big one was Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, the silly 10-years-later sequel to WIll Ferrell's cult classic. We also had the late-scheduled press screening for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the livelier and more involving sequel to last year's An Unexpected Journey, which ends in a cliffhanger until next year's There and Back Again. I also caught up with Paolo Sorrentino's gorgeous Fellini anthem The Great Beauty, as well as the German drama Two Mothers, an engaging, personal story of two women grappling with inequality in fertility treatment.

Next week things start to slow down for the holidays, although I still need to catch Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, and there's also Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie, the acclaimed doc Tim's Vermeer, and Mark Cousins' Albanian road movie Here Be Dragons. I'm also on the jury panel for a Shorts on Tap event on Tuesday evening in Shoreditch!

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.