Critical Week: Run away and join the circus

The lockdown continues to slowly ease in Britain, with most museums and cinemas reopening this week. Watching a movie in a mask isn't great, but it's great to see movies on a big screen again. And in addition to a press screening (with others coming up), I also attended a press launch for a museum exhibition. Even so, it's about time we had a silly animated circus adventure to take our mind off all of this. Animal Crackers isn't a great movie, but it's lively, colourful and wacky enough to do the trick.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Shadow of Violence • Casting
Summerland • The Vigil
PERHAPS AVOID:
Unhinged
FULL REVIEWS >

There were also some mid-range movies punching above their weight. Dave Franco's directing debut The Rental is a ripping thriller about a weekend getaway gone very wrong. Survive the Night is a clunky home invasion horror with a stone-faced Bruce Willis. Summerland is a skilfully made exploration of unexpected human connections with a terrific Gemma Arterton. And Life With Music is a rather sudsy drama about nostalgia starring Patrick Stewart and Katie Holmes.

Further from the beaten path, The Vigil is a stunning horror thriller rooted in Hasidic Jewish tradition, while Casting is an inventive improvised German comedy-drama about an attempt to cast a movie. There were also two docs: Pornstar Pandemic is an unstructured collection of footage in which adult actors talk about how they're coping with lockdown, while 2015's Scrum looks at the lives of players on Sydney's gay rugby team. And there's also a collection of four superb football-themed shorts from the UK, Germany and France called The Male Gaze: Strikers & Defenders.

I have one press screening in the diary this coming week, for Seth Rogen's An American Pickle. And on my list to watch at home, there's Roberto Begnini in Pinocchio, Gillian Jacobs in I Used to Go Here, the ensemble thriller What We Found, the horror fantasy Peripheral, the fantasy adventure Mortal, the Algerian memoir Papicha and the dark Guatemalan's drama La Llorona.

Critical Week: Plot your escape

I caught up this week with three films that are circling in awards season this year, but are only just now being screened for London critics. The documentary Minding the Gap is a provocative look at three childhood friends in Rockport, Illinois. It's relaxed, entertaining and darkly moving. A more artfully poetic doc, Hale County This Morning, This Evening explores similar themes, focussing on young men who dream of escaping their close community in rural Alabama. It's sumptuously shot, and remarkably introspective. And the Italian drama Happy as Lazzaro is a masterful fable about how humanity hasn't really changed with modernisation. This is told through the magical tale of an engaging young farmhand who simply never has a mean thought in his head.

The one big movie I saw this week was M Night Shyamalan's Glass, which brings together two of his earlier films (2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split) to deconstruct superhero mythology. It's creepy and almost startlingly serious, with meaty performances from leads James McEvoy, Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. Tom Everett Scott stars in the high-concept comedy I Hate Kids, which is amusing but never very funny. James Franco has a brief role in Don't Come Back From the Moon, an elusive but compellingly well-made drama set in the California desert. The Hole in the Ground is an Irish horror movie that's scary but a bit thin. And Pond Life is a lushly shot British drama featuring a superb ensemble of teen actors over a summer of yearning.

I attended the event at which the British Board of Film Classification announced its new guidelines this week. Every five years they canvas more than 10,000 people around the country to update what people expect from the UK's film ratings system. The changes are intriguing, with harder lines taken toward sexual violence and discriminatory language and imagery.

This coming Sunday is the 39th London Critics' Circle Film Awards, which I chair. I've been rather swamped with organising that over the past few months, and especially this week. Look for a report with pics next week. I also have some screenings lined up, including Jonah Hill's Mid90s, Alex Lawther in Old Boys, the Polish drama Nina and a doc called ParTy Boi.

Critical Week: Manly men in skirts

There were two memorable screenings in London this week, including Hammer of the Gods, the corny ancient-Britain 300/Braveheart romp, and Hugh Jackman's valiant attempt to revive the reputation of The Wolverine. Both films value chaotic action over plot or characterisation, and both also know that audiences love nothing more than gratuitous bare male torsos. Although at least Jackman himself turned up to introduce his film at the screening, eliciting crazed cheers from the crowd and laughter from director James Mangold and the screening's host Alex Zane, who couldn't get a word in edgeways.

We also had two action comedies this week: Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy were a terrific double-act in the hilarious but over-violent buddy cop movie The Heat, while veterans Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich were back for more underdeveloped comical spy antics in RED 2. Much darker and more interesting, Only God Forgives stars Ryan Gosling as a hapless guy caught in a nasty spiral of revenge partly orchestrated by his mother Kristen Scott Thomas, who's on blinding form. And The Great Hip Hop Hoax documents the jaw-dropping true story of rappers Silibil n' Brains, who hit the big time when they claimed to be from California. But they were actually guys from Scotland. A terrific story.

This coming week we have Matt Damon in Neil Blomkamp's Elysium, the all-star comedy-drama The Way Way Back, the festival favourite Like Father Like Son, the Gilberto Gil doc Viramundo and Ferzan Ozpetek's A Magnificent Haunting.

Critical Week: Into the woods

The most anticipated press screening this past week was The Place Beyond the Pines, a moody three-part drama starring Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper that's beautifully filmed and acted. It certainly leaves us with more to think about than the colourful Disney adventure Oz the Great and Powerful, which has fantastic 3D and a strong cast led by James Franco, Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis, but feels both too family friendly and over-reliant on digital flashiness. We also caught up with Fire With Fire, a contrived but watchable thriller with Bruce Willis and Josh Duhamel; the lushly photographed French double-biopic Renoir, an intriguing film about both the painter father and filmmaker son; and the Icelandic true-life adventure The Deep, an astonishing story of survival that's intriguingly (and slightly dully) told without any manipulative moviemaking.

I also continued to preview films from the upcoming 27th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (14-24 March). There was more James Franco - both on-screen and as codirector this time - with the seriously clever arthouse oddity Interior. Leather Bar., recreating 40 censored minutes from Al Pacino's 1980 thriller Cruising; rising stars Juno Temple and Riley Keough in the mopey romance Jack & Diane; the powerfully moving Iranian drama Facing Mirrors (my best of the fest so far); the provocative, intense Israeli drama Out in the Dark; the engaging, startlingly honest retiree documentary Les Invisibles; an eye-opening doc about female-to-male transexual pornstar Mr Angel; the artful Swedish kaleidoscopic doc She Male Snails; and the intensely powerful activism doc United in Anger.

This coming week, I've got still more James Franco in the crime comedy Spring Breakers, Steve Coogan in the Soho property tycoon biopic The Look of Love, Steve Carell as The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the animated prehistoric comedy-adventure The Croods and the Spanish drama The Sex of the Angels.

Critical Week: This little piggie

The most striking film of the past week was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's notorious, acclaimed novel Filth, starring James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan, Jim Broadbent, Imogen Poots and Shirley Henderson. Comments on the film are embargoed pending the announcement of a release date (or perhaps a prominent festival slot?). Once the embargo is lifted, this is likely to become one of the most talked-about movies of the year.

Two films were screened very late to critics this past week: the fifth in the Bruce Willis franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard, was more of the same although slightly more coherent than the previous episode, and the teen-franchise launcher Beautiful Creatures caught us off guard when it turned out to be rather good, with strong rising-star performances from Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert. We also had Viggo Mortensen speaking Spanish as identical twins in the atmospheric Argentine thriller Everybody Has a Plan, Brady Corbet speaking French in the unsettling sociopath drama Simon Killer, an indie cast speaking Shakespearean English in Joss Whedon's enjoyable but awkward black and white version of Much Ado About Nothing, Mathieu Kassovitz marshalling the French military on a South Pacific island in the riveting thriller Rebellion, and the contrived but charming New York graffiti artist comedy Gimme the Loot.

There were also three documentaries this week, including Reincarnated, which follows Snoop Dogg's trip to Jamaica to reinvent his music and himself. It's a bit of a stoner comedy, but has some strong moments. And I caught up with two docs nominated for the Oscar on Sunday night: from Israel, The Gatekeepers is a brainy, inventive look at how the Israeli government tries to control Palestine, while The Invisible War is an urgent, stomach-churning exposé of the sexual assault epidemic in the US military.

This coming week we have Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper in the dramatic thriller The Place Beyond the Pines, another all-star Steven Soderbergh cast in the pharmaceutical thriller Side Effects, Richard Gere in the financial drama Arbitrage, Dominic Cooper in the art colony romance Summer in February, Michael Bay's found-footage thriller The Bay and two docs about Aids: Fire in the Blood and How to Survive a Plague, which is the final Oscar nominee for me to catch, just in time for Sunday's ceremony. Watch this space for my predictions as always...

Critical Week: Where'd the time go?

Time travel movies always do your head in a bit, although Rian Johnson's Looper isn't as impenetrable as some. No, my problem this past week was recovering from the full-on Paralympics schedule I kept up over the previous two weeks. But I'm starting to feel a bit more normal now, just as meetings are kicking in to organise the Critics' Circle Film Awards in January! Clearly there's no rest for me in the near future.

Anyway, back to Looper, which was screened last week to UK critics: we're embargoed from saying much about the film, which stars Joe Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as the same hitman character meeting up in a time loop. So what can I write about. We also saw Woody Allen's latest Euro-pudding, To Rome With Love, which is very fluffy but still worth a look. Oliver Stone's Savages is a return to Natural Born Killers nastiness without the bite, mainly due to a pretty dire script that even a terrific cast can't rescue. And it gets worse: Sam Riley and Garret Dillahunt star in Walter Salles' take on the Jack Kerouac novel On the Road, which simply doesn't hold together at all, despite gorgeous production values.

The nicest surprise of the week was British comedy sequel Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger, of which I didn't expect much. It starts in the same annoying vein as its predecessor, but wins us over with an infusion of Christmas spirit that worked on me even on a sunny September morning. Two other independent films held my interest even though they're both flawed: Sally Potter's drama Ginger & Rosa is a dark coming-of-age drama starring Elle Fanning and newcomer Alice Englert. While Jason Biggs is superb in the lively grassroots politics comedy titled, erm, Grassroots.

This coming week is even busier, screening-wise, with Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson in the comedy Pitch Perfect, Olivia Munn and Paul Schneider in The Babymakers, the British action thriller Tower Block, the Swedish political comedy Four More Years and the Queen documentary Hungarian Rhapsody, plus a chance to revisit Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Imax screen.