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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Sisu • Being Mary Tyler Moore
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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: Monumental

Screenings have been a bit slow in London during the Cannes Film Festival, so it's perhaps appropriate that I saw two French films this week. Romain Duris plays the eponymous tower-building character in the biopic Eiffel, which injects Hollywood-style melodramatic romance into a fascinating story. And Juliette Binoche is wonderful as always in Between Two Worlds, an earthy doc-style drama about a journalist who joins a community of very low-paid workers.

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There was also the offbeat Watergate thriller 18½, about two people who discover a copy of that "accidentally erased" tape. It's witty and very clever. And from China, Boonie Bears: Back to Earth is the eighth movie in a 10-year franchise, but only the first to get a UK release. It's a strikingly well-animated romp involving bears and aliens, with some terrific action set pieces and a surprisingly big story too. I also caught up with these two recent streaming releases...

Senior Year
dir Alex Hardcastle; scr Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli, Brandon Scott Jones 
with Rebel Wilson, Sam Richardson, Angourie Rice, Mary Holland, Zoe Chao, Justin Hartley, Chris Parnell, Jade Bender
22/US Paramount 1h51 ***
Refreshingly, this comedy never aspires to be anything more than a goofy romp that keeps us smiling and occasionally laughing. Slick and bouncy, the film's chirpy attitude makes up for a string of cheap jokes and a lack of anything substantial under the surface. The story centres on Stephanie (Wilson), who has just woken up after 20 years in a coma following a cheerleading accident. Now at 37, she wants to finish high school, again as head cheerleader and this time as prom queen. There are the obvious gags about about how the world has changed since Stephanie's heyday, including of course mobile phones, social media and Lady Gaga. Her best friend (Holland) is now the principal, the boy (Hartley) she loved is married to her nemesis (Chao), and the friend (Richardson) who had a secret crush on her is for some reason the school librarian. It's annoying that the writers never dig any deeper, because there's scope for a more layered comedy here. Instead they fall back on simplistic plotting, buckets of sentimentality and oddly vague nostalgia. But because the movie is so happily superficial, it just about does the trick as mindless entertainment.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers
dir Akiva Schaffer; scr Dan Gregor, Doug Mand
with Andy Samberg, John Mulaney, Will Arnett, KiKi Layne, JK Simmons, Seth Rogen, Keegan-Michael Key, Eric Bana, Dennis Haysbert, Tress MacNeille
22/US Disney 1h37 ***.
Intriguing reviews made me want to check out this new take on the iconic Disney chipmunks, set in a world where cartoon characters live alongside live-action people. Filled to the brim with cameos, it's a meta-comedy about the movie business. Years after their act broke up, Chip and Dale (voiced by Mulaney and Samberg) have gone their separate ways. Chip is selling insurance, while Dale has had "CGI surgery" and wants to reteam with Chip for a reboot of their 30-year-old hit TV show. Along with wildly inventive effects, witty sight gags and a surprisingly strong mystery plot involving bootleg cartoon characters, the film is a steady stream of hilarious pop culture references. There's even a trip to Uncanny Alley, where everyone has those creepy "Polar Express eyes". A deeply irreverent attitude infuses this film, which makes the barrage of gags unusually sharp and surprising, and the action sometimes feels thrilling too. But it's the character details that make this riotous romp unusually involving. 

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Things remain a bit quieter than usual next week as far as screenings go, but I have one rather big film, Baz Luhrmann's epic biopic Elvis, plus a few to watch at home, including the award-winning Italian drama Il Buco, the burlesque doc Baloney, the comical doc A Sexplanation and the shorts collection The Male Gaze: Fleeting Glances.