Critical Week: Sibling rivalry

I'm working long days at the moment on a TV crew, so haven't had time for many films. But I still managed to see quite a handful over the long weekend. His Three Daughters is a sharp, involving drama starring Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne as estranged sisters dealing with their fading father. Dennis Quaid takes on the biopic Reagan with an intriguing performance. But the film is far too simplistic to do this complex man justice, relentlessly painting him as a saint.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Mandoob (Night Courier)
Black Dog
PERHAPS AVOID:
Reagan
ALL REVIEWS >

British political comedy The Whip is an enjoyable bit of low-key wish-fulfilment as a group of scrappy underdogs take on the government. Mandoob (The Courier) is a beautifully made film from Saudi Arabia about a guy trying to make ends meet and getting into some trouble on the way. And I saw the first two movies in the Quinn Armstrong's Fresh Hell horror trilogy: The Exorcism of Saint Patrick is a thoughtful, provocative, clever exploration of conversion therapy, while Wolves Against the World is a choppier, more experimental take on racism. These of course sat well with the FrightFest movies I watched last weekend!

This coming week, I'm watching Ian McKellen in The Critic, Alicia Vikander in Firebrand, Matt Smith in Starve Acre, Emile Hirsch in Dead Money, comedy-drama Off Ramp and the final Fresh Hell movie Dead Teenagers. 

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: Man's best friend

Press screenings went to the dogs, literally, this week as critics were invited to bring their pets to the screening of A Dog's Purpose. They were surprisingly alert audience members, actually. And the humans enjoyed it too, especially since it wasn't the expected schmaltz-fest. Louder thrills were had at the Imax press screening of The Fate of the Furious (or Fast & Furious 8, as it's known in the UK). Loud and flashy, funny and preposterous, it's exactly what you expect from this franchise: mindless entertainment.

Off the beaten path, there was the sensitive, resonant indie drama Bwoy, starring Anthony Rapp as a married man in New York who gets into an internet relationship with a guy in Jamaica; the cleverly inventive true story The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki, about a Finnish boxer trying to balance romance with his career; and Nick Broomfield's strikingly well-made documentary Whitney: 'Can I Be Me', which has its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this month.

It's a very short week ahead (with a four-day weekend in it!), so there are only a few films in the diary at the moment, including Rachel Weisz in My Cousin Rachel, Katherine Heigl in Unforgettable and Michael Shannon in Salt and Fire. Happy Easter!

Critical Week: My head hurts!

I caught up this week with Will Smith's new film Concussion, a true drama that's very well shot and acted, and also relentlessly "Important!" Hopefully it'll finally give traction to the dangers of brain injury in America's favourite sport, which has suppressed medical findings for decades. Long delayed here in the UK, Ramin Bahrani's 2012 film At Any Price will be released in the wake of the filmmaker's 2014 drama 99 Homes. This is a similar story of the American dream gone sour, and it gives Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron (astutely cast as father and son) unusually meaty roles.

Vincent Cassel is terrific as the patriarch in Partisan, an elusive drama about a commune in an isolated country (it was shot in the Georgian Republic) where one of his children begins to doubt the nature of this created reality. It's clever and startlingly involving. And from Denmark, A War cross-cuts between life at home and on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Shot like a documentary, the film feels rather derivative (see Restrepo for the real thing) but carries a strong kick in the moral dilemma of the final act. I also caught up with two previously released awards contenders:

Hard to Be a God
dir Aleksey German; with Leonid Yarmolnik, Aleksandr Chutko 13/Rus ****
With a virtually plotless structure and nearly three-hour running time, this Russian epic will test the patience of even the most ambitious moviegoer. But there's so much going on in every extraordinary frame that it's never boring. Violent, silly and utterly bonkers, the premise is that a group of scientists has travelled to help a distant planet that's stuck in its middle ages, unwilling to move into a renaissance. Shot in vivid black and white, the film follows one of these men, Don Rumata (Yarmolnik), through an odyssey of mud and blood. Details are observed in long takes by the bravura camerawork and jaw-dropping production design. It may ultimately be a meandering and bleak look at the tenacity of human ignorance, but it's utterly dazzling. (Nominated for Foreign-Language Film of the Year by the London Critics' Circle.)

Radiator
dir Tom Browne; with Richard Johnson, Gemma Jones, Daniel Cerqueira 14/UK ****
A beautifully played three-hander, this astutely written, shot and acted film centres on Daniel (Cerqueira) who finds that he needs to travel more often out of London to visit his parents as their eccentricities increase. Leonard (Johnson) has confined himself to the sofa, while Maria (Jones) keeps herself unnecessarily busy. In very different ways, both are extremely demanding, and Daniel struggles to adapt to this new paradigm in which he is their primary caregiver. Each scene is packed with astute observations, played to perfection by the sharp cast with an offhanded sense of humour. And the emotional kicks, when they come along, are potent. (Nominated for Breakthrough British Filmmaker by the London Critics' Circle.)

I still have a few more screeners to watch before I cast my final votes in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards and make my nominations in Galeca's Dorian Awards. And I also need to finalise my own year-end lists, which I'm planning to post on Thursday.