Critical Week: Ignite the light

My work schedule on a TV crew was a bit lighter this week, so I was able to see a few screenings. These included the documentary Will & Harper, attended by Will Ferrell, Harper Steele and director Josh Greenbaum. It's a gorgeously involving film focussed on a long-term friendship, and its topicality makes it important as well. Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Keegan-Michael Key and director Josh Cooley came along to a screening of Transformers One, the hugely entertaining animated origin story that's packed with comedy and action.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Substance • Will & Harper
Transformers One
Girls Will Be Girls
ALL REVIEWS >

Filmmaker RaMell Ross creates a stunning visual style for Nickel Boys, a powerful drama about a teen reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. It's also beautifully played, unusually vivid and involving. From Britain, Portraits of Dangerous Women is a light-hearted multi-strand drama about a group of people whose lives intersect unexpectedly, while Inherit the Witch is a bonkers horror thriller that enjoyably evokes freaky classics. And Notice to Quit is a likeable but rather too-busy comedy starring Michael Zegen as a single dad at the end of his rope. 

This coming week, I'm planning to see Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, Joseph Gordon Levitt in Killer Heat, Alice Lowe's Timestalker, Hellboy: The Crooked Man and the documentary Rez Ball, plus anything else I can find time to see while working long days. 

FrightFest: London scares me

And the 25th FrightFest comes to a close on this bank holiday Monday with Demi Moore's Cannes hit The Substance, after five days of colourful movies, filmmakers and cast members in Leicester Square. The festival also has events that run through the year. Here are four final highlights...

EUROPEAN PREMIERE
Scared Sh*tless
dir Vivieno Caldinelli; with Steven Ogg, Daniel Doheny 24/Can ****
Witty and gleefully gruesome, this comical horror movie revels in its practical on-set effects, as a creature causes all manner of grotesque nastiness as it emerges through toilets in an apartment block. Brandon Cohen's riotous script and Vivieno Caldinelli's amusing direction are packed with surprises that keep us both laughing and squirming, more than delivering on the promise of that rude title. And as outrageously ghastly as it gets, the tone remains amusingly offbeat.

ENGLISH PREMIERE
The Substance
dir-scr Coralie Fargeat; with Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley 24/Fr ****
A parable about body image, this stylish film gently introduces its fantastical premise, then cranks things way over the top. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat may hit the themes a bit forcefully, while indulging in outrageously excessive imagery, but there's a knowing method to this madness. Even the movie's most bonkers moments come with both pointed commentary and emotional undercurrents. Frankly, more movies need to wake audiences up like this... FULL REVIEW >

INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE
The Dead Thing
dir Elric Kane; with Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen 24/US ***.
Moody and mysterious, this dramatic horror opens as an introspective exploration of yearning before shifting into something much darker. It's beautifully shot and edited to evoke emotions that remain very deep under the slick, serene surface, and the increasingly creepy plot goes in directions that create some cool physical acting and effects trickery, plus echoes of big ideas as well. So as things begin to get scary, director-cowriter Elric Kane has already drawn us into the story.

WORLD PREMIERE
Members Club
dir-scr Marc Coleman; with Dean Kilbey, Perry Benson 24/UK ***
Camp, messy and outrageously grisly, this British working-class horror comedy starts as a silly riff on The Full Monty and quickly descends into bonkers hellish mayhem. While it's consistently witty and gleefully nasty, the story feels somewhat simplistic, which leaves the pacing rather slack. It doesn't help that the story is flatly ridiculous. But there are very funny touches along the way, and some cool character-based thrills as well... FULL REVIEW >

Full reviews of these and other festival films will be linked at the site's FRIGHTFEST PAGE >
For festival info, FRIGHTFEST >

Critical Week: You look marvellous

After a few days in France, I'm back in action in London, with a mercifully relaxed screening schedule for a change. Raindance Film Festival started here this week, but I'm observing that from a distance this year. Meanwhile, it looks like we're finally in line for some summery weather, so I hope to get out a bit more too! As for the films I've watched, easily the most unforgettable was the Cannes sensation The Substance, which stars Demi Moore as an actor in search of eternal youth in the most nightmarish road imaginable. It's unflinching, crazy and rather brilliant. Russell Crowe is back in demonic mode for The Exorcism, an oddly unscary horror movie that never takes advantage of its witty film-within-a-film premise. And the animated adventure The Imaginary is gloriously hand-drawn, with a wonderfully involving, emotional story, even if it feels a bit old fashioned.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Green Border • Kinds of Kindness
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Exorcism
ALL REVIEWS >

I also watched the Aussie war drama Before Dawn, which stars Levi Miller as a young guy who travels from the sunny Outback to muddy World War I France. It's skilfully well-made, but not particularly inventive. From Canada, Queen Tut is a hugely involving and strikingly well-played drama about a young guy from Egypt who finds his voice through Toronto drag queens. And Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash'at put his life on the line to make the stunning doc Hollywoodgate, in which he observes Taliban leaders taking back power. It's unmissable. I also spent a few days at the Annecy Film Festival, where I spent time with the creative team who are making The Wild Robot (MY REPORT IS HERE), and I managed to see two films in my "spare" time...

Rock Bottom
dir-scr Maria Trenor; prd Alba Sotorra 24/Sp  ***.
A Spanish-Polish coproduction in English, this animated musical drama is based on the life of singer-songwriter Robert Wyatt and his partner Alfreda Benge. It's animated in a hand-drawn style using rotoscoped movement from actors, which gives it an eerie real-world feel even as things get rather psychedelic. The story traverses from a drug-infused party in early 1970s Manhattan back to swimming naked amid the rocks around Majorca, hinging on a momentous moment that completely changed Wyatt's life. Writer-director Maria Trenor creates a lovely music-infused vibe that pulls us in, augmented by vivid visual flourishes that are often dazzlingly colourful and imaginative.

The Birth of Kitarō: The Mystery of GeGeGe
dir Go Koga; voices Toshihiko Seki, Hidenobu Kiuchi 23/Jpn ***
Based on the darkly fantastical manga, this prequel story tells a bizarre story set in the 1950s as a businessman heads to a strange isolated village to settle a complex issue, but finds himself in the middle of a wildly bonkers mystery involving supernatural beings. While the animation is artfully rendered with a staggering attention to detail, the story is tricky to follow for the uninitiated, and things move so briskly, with so many colourful characters and inexplicable goings-on that it's not easy to keep up. Fans on the other hand will love the complexity of the storytelling, especially as it tackles some big social issues in rather bleakly inventive ways.

This coming week I'll be watching Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One, Julianne Nicholson in Janet Planet, the Indian action thriller Kill, and the art film Dance Revolutionaries, plus the stage show Standing in the Shadows of Giants. I also have a lot of TV to catch up on before Dorian Awards ballots are due on Monday.

Critical Week: Heat and dust

Screenings are only just starting up in the new year, so I've only seen a few things this week. Although much of the attention for film critics centred around reacting to Sunday's rather odd line-up of Golden Globe winners and Wednesday's just as bizarre collection of Bafta nominations. Meanwhile, I saw Love Sonia, a powerful Indian drama about a 17-year-old (Mrunal Thakur, above) who is trafficked from her small village to Mumbai and beyond. It's pretty harrowing, but strikingly well made and urgently important. Instant Family is a rare comedy with a more serious, meaty theme, as Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play a couple that fosters three siblings. It's played for laughs, but also remembers that the events carry weight as well.

Jellyfish is a small British drama about a feisty 15-year-old (the amazing Liv Hill) who takes care of her two younger siblings as well as her clearly unwell mother. It's superbly well written and directed, with a bracing realism that brings out the deeper themes. Robert Guedigian's ensemble drama The House by the Sea is very French: lots of people sitting around agonising about their lives, relationships, the changing world. But it's beautifully assembled and full of moving moments.

The screening schedule is picking up now, and over the next week I have M Night Shyamalan's Glass, Tom Everett Scott in I Hate Kids, the sinkhole horror The Hole in the Ground, the acclaimed Italian drama Happy as Lazzaro, and the coming-of-age drama Pond Life. I'm also in the final week of prep as chair and chief organiser of the 39th London Critics' Circle Film Awards. So it'll be a busy one!