Critical Week: Don't be shy

The weather perked up this week, giving us three days of summer-style heat to revel in just as lockdown restrictions eased slightly. It's been great to get outside each day and enjoy it, and I hope there's more of this soon (we've returned to the chill again today). Meanwhile, I'm back to normal movie-watching after the festival glut of the past two weeks. The most notable film I caught up with this past week was the Oscar-nominated Tunisian drama The Man Who Sold His Skin, a fiendishly clever and remarkably moving film that uses a true premise to explore enormous issues in an earthy, often witty way. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Undine • The Man Who Sold His Skin
PERHAPS AVOID:
Chaos Walking • Last Call
ALL REVIEWS >

There are also important themes in the Canadian drama Like a House on Fire starring Sarah Sutherland, although the film is relentlessly mopey. Jeremy Piven is charming but miscast in the loose, ramshackle comedy Last Call. The British romance The Drifters is an enjoyably freeform take on the immigrant experience with a slightly contrived plot. And from Kosovo, the dark drama Zana is a gloomy but involving look at the emotional devastation of war.

Films coming up this week include a very late press screening of the blockbuster mashup sequel Godzilla vs Kong, Jessica Brown Findlay in the horror The Banishing, the Argentine thriller A Common Crime and the Chilean doc The Mole Agent.

Critical Week: A horse and his boy

We seem to be in the dog days of summer, as distributors unload festival titles that they couldn't figure out what else to do with. It's a glut of variable quality, some very good, some only OK (I've seen half of the 16 titles opening in the UK this week). At least there are intriguing things at arthouse cinemas beyond the dregs of the blockbusters. This week's press screenings featured the drama The Mustang starring Matthias Schoenaerts (above), terrific as an inmate at a Nevada prison who begins to find himself through working with a horse. It's beautifully shot, and very moving, but nothing terribly new. A great supporting role for Bruce Dern makes it worth a look.

The eclectic mix includes Scarborough, a strikingly well-made, darkly involving adaptation of a four-person play nicely adapted for the big screen with Jessica Barden, Jodhi May, Edward Hogg and Jordan Bolger. The Belgian thriller Spider in the Web rides on an effortless performance by Ben Kingsley as a veteran Mossad agent who simply gets on with the job despite all kinds of murky goings-on. Monica Bellucci costars in an underwritten role. A fiercely unflinching autobiographical drama from actor-filmmaker Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Farming tackles a thorny historical topic in a personal way. It's provocative and intense, but almost misses the best part of the story. From Norway, Phoenix is a relentlessly grim story about a 14-year-old grappling with family issues. It's not easy to watch, but is very well made. And then there was the documentary sequel All Male, All Nude: Johnsons, which again takes a homemade approach as it looks at world of male strippers at Johnsons in Ft Lauderdale. It's not very deep, and includes far too much footage from the first film (about an Atlanta club).

This coming week, while many of my colleagues are in Venice, I'll be watching the anticipated sequel It: Chapter Two, the South African drama Cargo, the sci-fi thriller Empathy Inc, and the queer comedy-drama Bathroom Stalls & Parking Lots. And I'm chasing screenings of Downton Abbey, Judy, The Farewell and Hustlers, among others.

LFF 3: London goes starry

The red carpet parade continues this weekend at the 57th London Film Festival. Running the gauntlet tonight at the festival are Julia Jouis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener with their film Enough Said; Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige and Richard Ayoade with The Double; and Charlie Cox, Jodie Whittaker and Christian Cooke with Hello Carter; plus Japanese maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda, French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch and Norwegian actor Pal Sverre-Hagen (of Oscar-nominee Kon-Tiki, below). Here are some of today's film highlights...

Starred Up
dir David Mackenzie; with Jack O'Connell (pictured), Ben Mendelsohn 13/UK ***.
Even though this film deploys just about every cliche in the prison-thriller genre, it continually twists its story in more personal directions, which allows the fine cast to create vividly intense characters. So although the plot has some nagging holes in it, we are gripped to the action unfolding on-screen... [review coming soon]

Nebraska
dir Alexander Payne; with Bruce Dern, Will Forte 13/US ****
Harking back to his own About Schmidt as well as David Lynch's The Straight Story, Payne gently explores Middle America with equal doses of spiky observational wit and soft-hearted sentiment. With bristlingly detailed performances, the film worms its way under our skin as it reveals some awkward truths about family connections... [review coming soon]

Camille Claudel: 1915
dir Bruno Dumont; with Juliette Binoche, Jean-Luc Vincent 13/Fr ****
Bruno Dumont continues his provocative exploration of religion in society with this true story, which plays out like a sequel to the 1988 biopic. Like the film itself, Binoche plays the title role in a stripped down, unadorned way that forces us to listen to her words and look beneath the surface... [review coming soon]

Hello Carter
dir Anthony Wilcox; with Charlie Cox, Jodie Whittaker 13/UK **
With its charming tone and a likeable cast, this warm British comedy draws us into a gentle story about a young guy trying to get his life back in track. But about halfway in the script pivots suddenly into into implausibility, leaving the characters looking so idiotic that we cease to care what happens to them... [review coming soon]

Kon-Tiki
dir Joachim Ronning, Espen Sandberg; with Pal Sverre-Hagen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen 12/Nor ***.
The astonishing story of a man who risked his life to prove a scientific theory, this biopic has a strong sense of passion and tenacity that makes it utterly riveting. It's also a staggeringly well-made film, grounded both in the vivid characters and a skilful attention to detail... FULL REVIEW >

Critical Week: Palatial kitsch

The most talked-about screening in London this week was for Steven Soderbergh's superb Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, featuring revelatory performances from Michael Douglas, Matt Damon and a superior supporting cast. The film is so good (it also took Cannes by storm) that everyone is perplexed as to why HBO didn't put it in cinemas for a week to make it eligible for the Oscars. So look for it to mop up awards from Bafta, the London Film Critics and probably Emmys and TV Golden Globes as well. We also had a last-minute screening of The Hangover Part III, at which critics laughed just once, leaving us even colder than Part II did.

More interesting were two smaller thrillers: Blood, starring Paul Bettany and Stephen Graham, and Black Rock, with Katie Aselton, Kate Bosworth and Lake Bell - both are effectively unsettling (the girls' film is actually scary). And further afield, we caught up with Studio Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill, another beautifully mature animated drama; the arty and involving French odyssey Atomic Age; and a pristine rerelease of John Schlesinger's 1972 forgotten gem The King of Marvin Gardens, with marvellous against-type turns from Jack Nicholson, Ellen Burstyn and recent Cannes-winner Bruce Dern.

This coming week I'll be seeing Ethan Hawke in the horror film The Purge, Logan Lerman in the comedy Stuck in Love, the human trafficking drama Eden, Travis Matthews' controversial I Want Your Love, the British drama Dream On, the first in Ulrich Seidl's trilogy Paradise: Love, the German romance Men to Kiss, and the Johnny Cash doc My Father and the Man in Black.