Critical Week: Keep looking up

This is the final week in this year's wildly over-extended awards season, with the Academy Awards capping things off on Sunday night in Los Angeles. They're promising a fresh take on the awards show, mixing in-person events with virtual elements, so it will be interesting to see what the show's director Steven Soderbergh and friends come up with. And a relief to finally have this year's marathon behind us. Shadows' annual SWEEPSTAKES has racked up a record number of awards, tallied together to see this year's true winners.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Homeward • Tu Me Manques
Black Bear • Into the Labyrinth
ALL REVIEWS >

It's also been a busy week at the movies for me, with a bunch of smaller films. The Outside Story stars the terrific Brian Tyree Henry (above) as a homebody who gets locked out of his flat and learns some cosy but (ahem!) key life lessons. It's gently engaging, as is Percy vs Goliath, which stars Christopher Walken as a real Canadian farmer who takes on a greedy multinational corporation (is there any other kind?). And then there's the gifted RJ Mitte starring in the conceptual thriller The Oak Room, which spins stories within stories in a way that's likeable and rather chilling.

A bit further afield, the involving Stone Fruit uses nonstop dialog and naturalistic performances to knowingly explore a waning relationship, while Making Sense mixes brainy science with sudsy soap-style plotting for some low-budget fun. There were two lively, colourful docs:  Steelers tells the story of the world's first gay-inclusive rugby team in London, and House of Cardin looks at the fashion designer's work, and a bit of his personal life. The short film collection Upon Her Lips: Pure Feels features five strong clips about female emotionality, while the 15th anniversary director's cut of Another Gay Movie offers a great excuse to revisit this silly and strikingly bold pastiche comedy. And then there's this drama from Hong Kong, the only Oscar-nominated feature I hadn't seen. So now I'm all ready for Sunday night's ceremony...

Better Days

dir Derek Kwok-cheung Tsang
scr Lam Wing Sum, Li Yuan, Xu Yimeng
with Zhou Dongyu, Jackson Yee, Yin Fang, Huang Jue, Wu Yue, Zhou Ye, Zhang Yifan, Ran
release Chn 25.Oct.19, US/UK 8.Nov.19
19/China 2h15 ****

Taking on intense academic pressure as it's multiplied by ruthless bullying, this drama from Hong Kong has a striking visual style that cuts to the core of the issue. Director Derek Kwok-cheung Tsang shoots this with loads of visual style, capturing small details of teen life while depicting the everyday challenges of survival for China's underclass. The knotted plot is overlong, but it's powerful, important and strongly moving. And the two central performances are knock-outs.

The story takes place in 2011 in Anqiao, as Nian (Zhou) is preparing for her university entrance exam. After a friend commits suicide due to bullying, the mean girls ramp up their violent attacks on Nian. Her mother (Wu) is only concerned about grades, so Nian feels she can't talk to her. She's also so conscientious that she can't help but go to the assistance of teen petty criminal Bei (Yee) as he's being brutally beaten by thugs. Afterwards, they develop an unusual friendship, as he becomes her protector.

Students in Nian's class are desperate to get into prestigious universities, and because she's not as pretty as the other girls but gets better marks, they ruthlessly harass her in ways that are genuinely horrific. Young detective Zheng (Fang) is shocked by these cold-hearted girls. And it's painful to see how such vile abuse has left Nian scared and worryied about the mental health of her only remaining school friend. And all of this is beautifully countered by her warmly offbeat connection with Bei.

Nian believes that everything will be fine once she makes it past the exam, but Bei tries to ground her. Their evolving friendship is infused with humour and beautifully played interaction that hints at a possible romance without being seedy about it. The script sometimes gets preachy regarding the topic, but it feels earned. Yes, the violence is difficult to watch at times, while some of the plot's twists are emotionally wrenching, but the tenderness is simply gorgeous.

15 themes, language, violence • 19.Apr.21

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In the next couple of days, I'll catch up with this week's big releases Stowaway, a space-mission drama with Toni Collette, and Mortal Kombat, the videogame-based action battle thriller. There's also Bruce Dern in The Artist's Wife, the 1950s-set Czech drama Charlatan, the Dutch revenge-comedy The Columnist and the care home doc Some Kind of Heaven. I'll also be up all night on Sunday to watch the Oscars live at London time.

Requisite Blog Photo: Walk Like a Man

For one night only: Eric, Rich and Martin are the Three Seasons

Critical Week: Fields of gold

London-based critics finally had a chance to catch up with last year's Terrence Malick film To the Wonder, a deeply personal meditation on relationships and faith starring Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams (pictured), plus Olga Kurylenko. It's a swirling, virtually dialog-free drama that kind of spirals out of control in the final third, but leaves us thinking. The only real mainstream film last week was the enjoyable geriatric caper romp Stand Up Guys, with the all-star trio of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin. I also had the chance to catch up with Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, an unhinged style-over-substance comedy-drama clearly based on elements from the life of star Charlie Sheen.

Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral is an exercise in style and substance, a gleamingly yucky futuristic tale of fandom taken to life-threatening extremes. Sammy's Great Escape is a sequel to 2010's A Turtle's Tale, and keeps us entertained with a slightly deranged script and a gloriously excessive use of 3D. Aussie filmmaker Cate Shortland's unnerving dramatic thriller Lore is so gorgeously well shot and naturalistically acted that we almost forget that it's set in Nazi Germany. The Argentine anthology Sexual Tension: Volatile is an intriguing collection of six shorts exploring unexpected attraction between men. And bringing things full circle, Muzaffer Ozdemir's loosely plotted Home (Yurt) is a deeply personal meditation on the effects of progress on nature in the mountainous wilds of Turkey.

Coming this week: Bruce Willis in A Good Day to Die Hard, the gothic teen romance Beautiful Creatures, Danny Dyer in Run for Your Wife, Elijah Wood in Maniac, Barry Levinson's found footage thriller The Bay and Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish.

Critical Week: Everyone play nice

It's been an odd week of screenings for London critics, with a variety of offbeat movies that probably have very specific audiences. The starriest one was A Late Quartet, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walker, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir play a long-time string quartet whose tenuous bond is shaken by a few unrelated events. It's beautifully made and acted, although a bit dull. And if you have a problem with actors pretending to play instruments, look away now. The other semi-mainstream offerings were the Halloween-themed Fun Size, a resolutely unfunny comedy romp, and the somewhat better For a Good Time, Call...,  an underdeveloped friendship comedy-drama. At least the films were livened up by Chelsea Handler and Justin Long, respectively.

Further afield, we had Shock Head Soul, an artful, ambitious but utterly impenetrable doc-drama about psychoanalysis, and London: The Modern Babylon, Julien Temple's dazzling look at the psyche of Londoners - it's utterly essential viewing for anyone interested in history or social culture. Or London, of course. And finally, I turned off all the lights in my flat and stayed in one evening all alone to rewatch Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which is being reissued in UK cinemas this week. I hadn't seen it in 32 years, and it was even scarier than I remembered!

Next week is another random collection of screenings, including Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, the British black comedy May I Kill U, the long-awaited award-winning Romanian film Aurora, the Indian drama The Pool,the musician doc Hit So Hard, and the photojournalist doc McCullin.