Critical Week: Don't throw in the towel

Press screenings are still a bit thin in London, mainly because we saw most current releases at film festivals in the autumn. One new entry was the British movie Jawbone, starring Johnny Harris and Michael Smiley (above), along with Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. It's a remarkably thoughtful boxing drama with a proper emotional kick. The German drama Jonathan centres on a teen caring for his dying father and finally discovering why there's a rift in his family. It's also thoughtful and moving, and beautifully filmed. From Israel via London, Who's Gonna Love Me Now? is a startlingly honest documentary that meaningfully grapples with themes involving family, sexuality and life purpose. And I had a chance to revisit the 1969 classic Easy Rider, with sharply restored imagery and sound. A remarkably loose movie that has a lot to say about American culture, plus terrific performances from the young Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. Finally, I also caught up with a TV series being released on video in the UK this week...

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Feral
dir-scr Morgan Jon Fox
with Jordan Nichols, Seth Daniel Rabinowitz, Jacob Rickert, Leah Beth Bolton, Ryan Masson, Chase Brother 
16/US Dekkoo 1h56 ***
There's an artistic sensibility to this web series that makes it worth a look, as creator Morgan Jon Fox uses swirling photography and non-linear editing to follow the emotional lives of his characters rather than create coherent plotlines. The problem is that this leaves everything feeling a bit thin and wispy, as events and characters are undefined even though they are going through some big emotions. The premise centres on two young artists in Memphis: Billy (Nichols) has an inexpressive boyfriend (Masson) with depression issues, while Daniel (Rabinowitz) wants to run off to the big city. They get a new housemate (Rickert) and have some personal crises, but while a lot happens to them, the filmmaking approach is so loose and mopey that there isn't much proper emotional impact. Frankly, the title of this series is a mystery. The relationships are written, never quite lived-in or believable, and only vaguely sexy. And some of the writing and acting isn't terribly convincing. But it looks great, the cast is likeable and the idea is clever enough to sustain itself through eight brief episodes.

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Films coming up this week include The Lego Batman Movie and the acclaimed British drama Lady Macbeth. I'm also getting ready for a trip to Los Angeles to visit my family and friends - I'll be there for both Bafta and Oscar, as it happens. Watch this space...

Critical Week: Groovy baby

One of the more anticipated films of the year is Jimi: All Is By My Side, a biopic about Jimi Hendrix written and directed by 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley. The film actually premiered in Toronto last year (alongside 12 Years a Slave), but it was only shown to the UK press this past week. It's bold approach is bound to get an intriguing response when it opens, and not just because the then-25 Hendrix is played by 40-year-old Andre Benjamin.

The other big-name film screened this week was A Walk Among the Tombstones, a gritty mystery thriller starring Liam Neeson an Dan Stevens (comments are embargoed for now). We also caught up with two more festival films: Mr Turner is Mike Leigh's astonishingly fresh and inventive painter biopic starring the Cannes-winner Timothy Spall, and '71 is an episodic but riveting Northern Ireland thriller that's also the latest in Jack O'Connell's full-on assault on cinema, following Starred Up and preceding Angelina Jolie's Unbroken.

With London's FrightFest coming this weekend, there have also been a few horror movies to watch. Life After Beth is a superb comical twist on the zombie genre starring Aubrey Plaza as a teen who doesn't know that she's come back from the dead. Allelulia is a chillingly involving take on the Lonely Hearts Killers from Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz starring Lola Duenas and Laurent Lucas. And Found is an unnerving and oddly moving hybrid between the coming-of-age and slasher horror genres. Finally, as part of the terrific Dennis Hopper photographic exhibition at the Royal Academy, we had a chance to catch one of his films on the big screen. So I of course chose his lesser-known The Last Movie (1971), a crazed collage set among a film crew shooting a Western in Peru. It's challenging and seriously worth a look for cinephiles.

This coming week we have a very late screening of Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Marion Cotillard in the Dardenne brothers' Two Days One Night, Helen Mirren in The Hundred-Foot Journey, the British football movie United We Fall and more horror in The Mirror, among other things.