Critical Week: We will rock you

With Oscar night on Sunday, all eyes are on how Hollywood wraps up this year's surprisingly unpredictable season. There are very few sure winners for this ceremony, so let's hope for lots of upsets. My predictions will be posted on Saturday as usual. Meanwhile, movies keep arriving in cinemas. Woody Harrelson has a lot of fun in the inspiring remake Champions, about a lively young basketball team. Yes, it's full predictable, but director Bobby Farrelly adds some spark. Scream VI takes the franchise to New York for another meta-horror with comical touches. This one's unusually grisly, and also sometimes properly scary. And there's also the clumsy horror pastiche Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, set up as a sequel to the iconic tale. Except that this is mindlessly misogynistic and sadistic.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
Lonesome • Sound of Silence
PERHAPS AVOID:
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
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Further afield is Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer's offbeat Canadian drama The Middle Man, a stylised story about grief that's moving but rather bleak. Lola is a fiendishly inventive British thriller about two sisters in 1941 who build a device that receives future broadcasts, changing their lives and then some. Also inventive, Italian ghost story Sound of Silence is packed with visual panache, although the story feels thin. From Australia, Lonesome is a powerfully honest drama about a runaway who makes a connection in the big city. And the documentary Brainwashed astutely explores the impact of the gender-bias that's ingrained in moviemaking. It should be essential viewing at film school.

Films this coming week include the superhero sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 80 for Brady, Alec Baldwin in Supercell, Mike Faist in Pinball and the British drama Rye Lane. There's also The Stroll, the opening night film at BFI Flare, plus three theatre press nights (reviews here soon).

Critical Week: Gone fishing

The heatwave continues, although perhaps as Londoners get tired of the sunshine we're being driven back into air conditioned cinemas! Box office figures for Thor last weekend didn't seem to suffer. Meanwhile this week, I've seen another eclectic collection of films both in cinemas and in my rather sweltering flat. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in Deep South melodrama Where the Crawdads Sing, which seems deliberately designed for teen girls. Others are likely to find it contrived, even if the actors are excellent. Winona Ryder stars in the offbeat horror thriller Gone in the Night, as a woman looking for answers. It's involving, even if what she discovers is rather silly.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Good Boss
The Gray Man • Poppy Field
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And then there was Sally Phillips in How to Please a Woman, a very gentle Australian sex comedy that's packed with clever insight even if it's too subtle for its own good. Alan Cumming takes on a superbly offbeat role in My Old School, an inventive and fascinating documentary about a Glasgow classroom scandal. The Jordanian drama The Alleys is a visceral multi-strand journey into the Amman suburbs, with unusually complex morality. And telling the story of a trans activist icon, Donna is a warm fly-on-the-wall doc that maintains a clear-eyed focus.

Films to watch in the coming week include Russell Crowe in Prizefighter, Katie Holmes in Alone Together, the comedy-drama The Shuroo Retreat, the romantic drama You Are My Sunshine and the shorts collection Girls Feels: Skin Deep.

Critical Week: Take a load off

Bigger movies continue to turn up at the box office each week, signalling a return to the pre-lockdown pattern of one blockbuster per week. And press screenings are also getting a bit more colourful as a result. We had two big screenings this week, starting with the Nicolas Cage pastiche action comedy bromance The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which is even more fun than expected. Going full-method as himself, Cage and up-for-it costar Pedro Pascal dive fully into the ridiculous story, and they keep the audience right with them. There was also Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the third chapter in the whizzy but oddly uninvolving Harry Potter prequel franchise. This one is much more momentous, and the actors (notably Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen) make it worth a look. I also caught up with Michael Bay's latest over-the-top action thriller Ambulance, a choppy but very entertaining ride through Los Angeles with the superb Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen and Eiza Gonzalez.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Compartment No 6 • Small Body
Poppy Field • Cow
PERHAPS AVOID:
Agent Game • Sonic the Hedgehog 2
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Further afield were the by-numbers spy thriller Agent Game, which has a strong cast (Dermot Mulroney, Jason Isaacs, even Mel Gibson) but rarely rises above its cliches. French actor-filmmaker Valerie Lemercier's Aline is a fictionalised biopic about Celine Dion, and it's as bonkers as you hope it will be. From Ireland, You Are Not My Mother is a stylish dramatic horror that properly gets under the skin. And from France, Anais in Love is a sunny, chatty comedy-drama that recounts an awkward coming of age.

For this coming week I have no press screenings in the diary, but I do have some links to watch at home, for films including Eva Longoria in the comedy Unplugging, James Duval in the comedy I Challenger and the Japanese triptych Sexual Drive. I also hope to see Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman, most likely buying a ticket for a regular cinema.

Critical Week: Scary monsters

It's a third short week this spring here in Britain, so there have been fewer than usual screenings. But I did manage to catch up with Colossal, the genre-defying movie starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis. It's funny, scary, harrowing and very well-made. And then there was Sleepless, an almost painfully predictable cop thriller livened up by an adept cast that includes Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney and Scoot McNairy.

A hybrid crime thriller and arthouse drama, Away is a small British drama starring Timothy Spall and Juno Temple as two desperate people who meet in Blackpool. It's nicely shot and acted, but jarringly edited. And Last Men in Aleppo is the prize-winning documentary about the White Helmets, rescue workers in war-torn Syria. Skilfully shot on the ground during the fighting, it's utterly devastating to watch, and urgently important.

Screenings coming up this week include Ridley Scott's Prometheus sequel Alien: Covenant, the comedy The Big Sick, the action movie Stratton, the road movie Folk Hero & Funny Guy, the period drama Interlude in Prague and the animated adventure Spark.