Critical Week: Sucker punch

There were three big movies screened to critics this week. Liam Neeson takes on the lead role (as the son of Leslie Nielsen's iconic character) for the reboot/sequel The Naked Gun, which is flat-out hilarious. And as wonderfully stupid as we hoped it would be. Pedro Pascal leads the action reboot The Fantastic Four: First Steps, alongside Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bacharach. Groovy visual stylings and superbly character-rooted comedy make it thoroughly engaging. And Sam Rockwell is back for the animated sequel The Bad Guys 2, which is just as funny and action-packed as the first movie. With some terrific new characters and bigger set-pieces. 

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Further afield, Fiona Shaw and Katherine Waterston are as good as expected in the mother-daughter drama Park Avenue, which is involving but elusive. Even more the evasive, Gazer is a stylised mystery thriller that intrigues but never quite pays off. Slovenian drama Little Trouble Girls is also somewhat slippery in its coming-of-age story about a teen choirgirl. 

Much more gripping is Love, the second chapter in the Oslo Stories Trilogy, which features fascinating characters on offbeat journeys. I also loved watching the 100-year restoration of Eisenstein's silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, with a new score by the Pet Shop Boys. I'd never seen it on a big screen, and it looks and sounds gorgeous. It also feels thoroughly modern. Finally, I attended a special 3D premiere of the new trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash, which looks properly epic. The film itself comes out in December.

This coming week I'll be watching the horror thriller Bring Her Back, British road movie The Ceremony, Dutch coming-of-age drama Young Hearts, the final chapter of the Oslo Stories Trilogy, Sex, and the Ukrainian documentary 2000 Meters to Andriivka. I'll also attend the premiere of the second season of the Netflix show Wednesday.

Critical Week: Field of dreams

UK critics were this week finally shown Clint Eastwood's new film Trouble With the Curve, and the delayed screening was probably due to the fact that baseball-themed films never do well here. The bigger problem though is that the film is only superficially dramatic and sentimental. More interesting was the overwrought and very dark British neighbourhood drama Broken, starring Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy. Speaking of overwrought, Bernard Rose's latest modernisation of Tolstoy starring Danny Huston is Boxing Day, a clever but relentlessly pushy drama.

Further off the beaten path was the American Christmas comedy Walk a Mile in My Pradas, with a clever variation on the body-swap genre as two men trade sexualities. It's too silly to say much, but is enjoyable enough. And there were two documentaries: a chilling exploration school-bullying in a beautifully made, heart-wrenching Bully, and the official film of the 2012 Olympics, First, which plays like a corporate promotional video but contains some genuinely inspiring stories.

This coming week I'll finally catch up with awards contender Life of Pi as well as the not-so-acclaimed The Man With the Iron Fists. And then there's the documentary Ballroom Dancer and the festival favourite Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Plus a few other things as they come....