Critical Week: Land, sea, air and space

Two big movies this week were passion projects written and directed by top filmmakers. Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an almost outrageously colourful outer space romp starring Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne. It's visually fabulous, but never terribly thrilling. By contrast, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is so viscerally inventive that it pulls us into a cleverly splintered narrative - on land, sea and air - surrounding Britain's epic 1940 evacuation across the channel. Unlike any war movie you've seen, it's perhaps the year's best film so far. And it's especially powerful on the Imax screen.

Much sillier thrills were to be had at Captain Underpants, the riotously rude animated comedy centred on a friendship between two pranksters who convince their principal that he's a superhero. Frenetic but very funny. The Vault is a heist movie with supernatural horror overtones starring James Franco and Francesca Eastwood (comments are embargoed). Killing Ground is more straightforward grisly horror from Australia about two families who face scary locals in the woods. And the 1961 British classic Victim gets a welcome reissue to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It's also still a great drama, with powerhouse performances from Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms.

Coming up this next week are Kathryn Bigelow's 1960s riots drama Detroit, Bill Nighy's Victorian whodunit The Limehouse Golem, Jada Pinkett Smith and friends on a comical Girls Trip, Gerard Butler as A Family Man, a couple of women trapped 47 Metres Down, and the festival-winning On Body and Soul.

Critical Week: I'll be right here

It was a bit of a mixed bag of screenings this past week, with a variety of expectations leading to so-so movies. Paper Towns has a terrific lead in Nat Wolff, with plenty of presence from Cara Delevingne, but the story never quite develops into anything truly meaningful. Amy Schumer brings her distinct brand of comedy to the big-screen in Trainwreck, with a superior leading-man performance from Bill Hader, but the script hedges too many bets, ultimately winding up as a standard rom-com. And Pixels proves that Adam Sandler needs to take a long break and work out if he wants to make movies anymore. According to this evidence, he gave up long ago.

More intriguing, The Lobster is the latest bit of amazing weirdness from Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), a pointed relationship satire with Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Ben Whishaw. Max is a predictably slushy boy-and-his-dog movie sideswiped by an unnecessary arms-trade thriller subplot. Captain Webb is an enjoyably quirky low-budget British drama about the first man to swim the Channel, in 1875, but the narrative is pointlessly fragmented. From Ukraine, Stand is a harrowing Moscow-set drama about the result of government-sponsored bigotry against gay men. And the documentary Unity blends 100 starry narrators into a swirling collage about the meaning of humanity, concluding that we should all be vegetarians.

This coming week we have Michael Fassbender as Macbeth, Ben Foster as Lance Armstrong in The Program, and very, very late press screenings for the superhero remake Fantastic Four, the 60s-TV inspired action romp The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the Monty Python gang's alien-invasion comedy Absolutely Anything.

Critical Week: On the nose

In a relatively slow week for press screenings, the biggest film shown to the press was Mortdecai, a zany romp starring Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor and Paul Bettany. Opinions are embargoed until Thursday (the movie opens on Friday). I also caught up with Michael Winterbottom's latest Italy-set film The Face of an Angel, a fictional exploration of the Meredith Kercher murder starring Daniel Bruhl, Kate Beckinsale and Cara Delevingne. It's an odd mix of moody drama, creepy mystery and dark emotions - interesting but not hugely satisfying.

Further off the beaten path, we had Alain Resnais' latest Alan Ayckbourn adaptation Life of Riley, a French-language Yorkshire-set comedy-drama shot on stage-like sets. All a bit mannered, but a fascinating exploration of barbed interaction. And there were two documentaries: Dior and I is an entertaining doc about Raf Simons' first show as Dior's creative director - both invoving and surprisingly moving because of the strong characters and powerful narrative. Maidan is rather more difficult, merely putting us right in the middle of the Ukrainian revolution in Kiev's central square - an outrageously sensual onslaught.

This coming week's films include a couple of movies I've been trying to catch up with for weeks: Stephen Daldry's Trash, Gregg Araki's White Bird in a Blizzard and Simon Helberg's We'll Never Have Paris. There's also Kevin Hart in The Wedding Ringer and the British indie Hinterland.