Critical Week: Brotherly love

There weren't many press screenings for me over the past week, as I was a bit busy with the London critics' awards. But I did manage to catch up with two coming-of-age dramas. Mid90s is Jonah Hill's writing-directing debut, an involving, realistic drama about a young teen (Sunny Suljic, above right, with Lucas Hedges as his thuggish big brother) who turns to skateboarding to find his place in life. The British film Old Boys has currents of comedy and slapstick as it follows a teen (Alex Lawther) at a posh boarding school caught in a Cyrano-style love triangle. It's a bit goofy, but engaging and inventive.

Even further afield, In Like Flynn is an Australian biopic about Errol Flynn's pre-Hollywood days. Thomas Cocquerel is dashing in the lead role, but the film is far too cliched and corny. The Polish drama Nina is set up as a lesbian coming-of-age drama for a married woman, but the elusive filmmaking leaves the audience on the outside looking in. And ParTy Boi: Black Diamonds in Ice Castles is a gritty documentary about the rise of crystal meth among America's black gay subculture. It's pretty harrowing, cautionary without shying away from telling the whole story.

This coming week we have screenings of the upcoming animated sure-fire hits The Lego Movie 2 and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, plus Christophe Honore's Sorry Angel, and the British independent dramas Lucid, He Loves Me and Wretched Things.

Critical Week: This is embarrassing

Big titles are starting to show up at press screenings again, although they're not being shown until very close to release dates, often with phones confiscated and embargoes to sign. One of the late screenings was for Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler's second reunion rom-com Blended, a tonally erratic combination of zany slapstick, offhanded comedy and shameless sentimentality. We got a bit more lead time with X-men: Days of Future Past, the busy double-whammy sequel to both the original trilogy and First Class. It's a bit frantic, but packed with great subtext and entertaining action and drama.

Embargoed until the UK release dates are my comments on Jon Favreau's delicious foodie comedy Chef and Jean-Paul Jenuet's stylised American road movie The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivot. Then there's Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo, another heavily stylised romp by a French filmmaker. It stars the relentlessly charming Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou in a visually manic but thematically moving romance. And Dan Fogler's kaleidoscopic comedy Don Peyote is perhaps even more trippy, with an equally surprising serious edge to it.

This coming week we'll be catching up with Angelina Jolie in Maleficent, Nicolas Cage in Joe, the Oscar-nominated Palestinian drama Omar and another Duris-Tautou rom-com Chinese Puzzle. And of course the Cannes Film Festival comes to its conclusion this weekend with a barrage of awards for movies that I will suddenly need to see with some urgency...