Critical Week: Eat me

A couple of upstarts are arriving this month to challenge the dominance of Barbie and Oppenheimer at the box office, although it doesn't look like a fair fight. Jason Statham is back for more over-the-top action mayhem in Ben Wheatley's Meg 2: The Trench, a guilty pleasure mashup of shark chaos and thrilling villainy. Meanwhile, Seth Rogen has recharged another franchise with the hugely engaging Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mania, a gorgeously animated romp that's funny and thrilling. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Klondike • Shortcomings
TMNT: Mutant Mayhem • Lola
Smalltown Boys • Kokomo City
PERHAPS AVOID:
Til Death Do Us Part
ALL REVIEWS >

Also screened this week was Gran Turismo, the hugely crowd pleasing true story of a gamer-turned-racer starring Archie Madekwe, David Harbour and Orlando Bloom. The British comedy-drama The Trouble With Jessica is uneven but has a terrific cast led by Shirley Henderson and Rufus Sewell. Til Death Do Us Part is a choppy mess of a thriller with Cam Gigandet and Jason Patric. The doc Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is a surprisingly intimate, important look at the closeted Hollywood icon. And I finally caught up with the exuberant British comedy Polite Society, which uses wildly inventive action to punch its involving story.

This coming week I'll be watching Disney's remake of Haunted Mansion, Judy Greer in Aporia, Ben Kingsley in Jules, Daisey Ridley in The Inventor, Grant Gustin in Puppy Love, Jeremy Allen White in Fremont, the Japanese drama Love Life and the Romanian drama RMN.

Critical Week: Backstage antics

The most enjoyable film I watched this past week was Stage Fright, the musical-comedy horror drama set in a performing arts camp. It's actually a skilfully made film that works on most of those levels while poking straight-faced fun at each genre. (That's Minnie Driver above in the film's witty Phantom-pastiche opening.) By contrast, the comedy Bad Johnson was painfully under-developed, wasting the charisma of leading man Cam Gigandet as a womaniser whose penis leaves him to live as a lowlife jerk (Nick Thune) until he learns his lesson. More of a moralising sermon than the promised gross-out comedy.

Further afield, the clever but slow-burning Norwegian thriller In Order of Disappearance has a bone-dry blackly comical tone as the always terrific Stellan Skarsgard inadvertently sparks a violent drugs war. A multi-national present-day adaptation of Joseph Conrad's shipboard story, Secret Sharer starts very nicely and builds a strong sense of characters and the setting, but struggles to come together in the final act. Truth is a gay romance that slips into a quietly unnerving thriller as both men lie to each other about their pasts, which adds an unnecessarily moralising tone. And Patema Inverted is a gorgeously animated and surprisingly involving Japanese adventure about teens from two societies with opposite gravitational pulls.

Things are generally slow for critics in May unless you go to Cannes (which I don't), but I have a few filsm to see over the coming week. There's Belle, the British period drama starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, based on true events that took place just up the road from where I live. Devil's Knot is the true crime/courthouse drama starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon. In Secret is a retelling of Therese Raquin with Elizabeth Olsen and Oscar Isaac. Don Peyote is a comedy with Josh Duhamel and Jay Baruchel.  Top Dog is a British crime thriller directed by Martin Kemp. A Touch of Sin is the latest from Chinese maestro Jia Zhangke. And then there's a little blockbuster called Godzilla...

Critical Week: King of the jungle

There was yet another new movie version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' iconic Tarzan screened for press this week - German animation that has high technical quality but some dodgy artistic and plot elements. Kellan Lutz performs and voices the king of the jungle, and when everything comes together, it's very entertaining. Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff play brothers in The Motel Life, a strong, low-key drama that taps into a real sense of desperation. So it's also rather grim.  Mindless action came in the form of In the Blood, starring Gina Carano as a new bride who kicks into battle mode when her husband disappears. Gorgeous Caribbean scenery helps us ignore the silly script.

Further afield, Robin Weigert is terrific in the drama Concussion, a warm, offhanded exploration of middle-aged desire. The Lisbon-set thriller After the Night takes us into a bustling favela for a fast paced all-night thriller that's low on detail but strong on atmosphere. And the Swedish film The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is an engaging blend of black comedy, dark drama and cheeky history.

This coming week's biggie is The Amazing Spider-man 2, and other screenings include Chiwetel Ejiofor in Half of a Yellow Sun, the comedy Jesus People, and Mike Myers' documentary Supermensch. I'm also attending the launch event for Jean-Paul Gaultier's exhibition at the Barbican, which promises to be a lot of fun combining fashion and film. Watch this space...