Critical Week: Dancing in the aisles

Being awards season, there are quite a few screenings that include a Q&A with the cast and crew - all held virtually this year. I had three of these this past week: Promising Young Woman is a vicious, blackly comical thriller with a terrific Carey Mulligan (pictured above with Bo Burnham). It's sharply pointed and darkly entertaining. The Prom is a glittery musical concoction from Ryan Murphy starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden, Andrew Rannells and Kerry Washington, among others. It's over-the-top in many ways, but has nicely serious undercurrents. And Pieces of a Woman is a very dark drama starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf. It's involving and beautifully put together, but rather grim.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Red, White and Blue
Nomadland • Ammonite
Falling • Black Bear • Host 
PERHAPS AVOID:
Buddy Games
Love, Weddings & Other Disasters 
FULL REVIEWS>

Otherwise it was the usual eclectic bunch. Drew Barrymore has both lead roles in The Stand In, a comedy that's not as silly as it looks, knowingly skewering show business myths. This week's Small Axe movie by Steve McQueen is the breathtaking Red, White and Blue, starring John Boyega as a young cop with a conscience. Viggo Mortensen writes, directs, stars in and composes the score for Falling, a pungent drama about a man dealing with his senile, increasingly bigoted father (a terrific Lance Henricksen). Parallel is a crowd-pleasing sci-fi concoction with a twisty plot and a hint of thematic depth, while Muscle is a gritty British drama that takes an unsettling dive into toxic masculinity. There was also Jack and the Beanstalk, a deliciously hilarious traditional British panto shot in back gardens during the pandemic. And The American Boys is a collection of six sensitive coming-of-age shorts, all very well made.

I have a lot to watch over the coming week, including the final two Small Axe films Alex Wheatle and Education, Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal, Tessa Thompson in Sylvie's Love, Sienna Miller in Wander Darkly, Laura Dern in Trial by Fire, and acclaimed foreign titles Funny Boy, The Weasel's Tale and Cocoon. I also have an actual physical catch-up screening of the British horror Saint Maud. Yes, cinemas are open again, again.

Critical Week: Just hanging around

I took a few days off around the weekend, so had a quieter screening week than usual - but I greatly enjoyed the chance to spend four days doing basically nothing in the countryside. Before and after that, I caught a couple of big movies, including the Maze Runner sequel The Scorch Trials, another clunkily contrived teen-dystopia thriller that has energy and a sharp young cast, but never feels remotely engaging. Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore play lifelong best pals in the London-set comedy-drama Miss You Already, a deeply resonant film that refreshingly dodges cinema's male-centred rules thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke and writer Morwenna Banks.

I also caught up with this year's Woody Allen's movie Irrational Man, a meandering but thoughtful and smart comedy-drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone in a lighter variation on Allen's iconic Crimes and Misdemeanours. A little further afield, Mark Strong and Vera Farmiga star in the Romanian drama Closer to the Moon, based on a fantastic true story but told with an odd mix of jaunty farce and dark tragedy. And the sharp, thoroughly entertaining British indie comedy SuperBob looks at the personal life of a hapless superhero.

This coming week, we have Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan in Life, Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley in Everest, Kevin Costner and Maria Bello in McFarland, Rhys Ifans and Charlotte Church in Under Milk Wood and the American indie festival hit Tangerine.

Critical Week: This is embarrassing

Big titles are starting to show up at press screenings again, although they're not being shown until very close to release dates, often with phones confiscated and embargoes to sign. One of the late screenings was for Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler's second reunion rom-com Blended, a tonally erratic combination of zany slapstick, offhanded comedy and shameless sentimentality. We got a bit more lead time with X-men: Days of Future Past, the busy double-whammy sequel to both the original trilogy and First Class. It's a bit frantic, but packed with great subtext and entertaining action and drama.

Embargoed until the UK release dates are my comments on Jon Favreau's delicious foodie comedy Chef and Jean-Paul Jenuet's stylised American road movie The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivot. Then there's Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo, another heavily stylised romp by a French filmmaker. It stars the relentlessly charming Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou in a visually manic but thematically moving romance. And Dan Fogler's kaleidoscopic comedy Don Peyote is perhaps even more trippy, with an equally surprising serious edge to it.

This coming week we'll be catching up with Angelina Jolie in Maleficent, Nicolas Cage in Joe, the Oscar-nominated Palestinian drama Omar and another Duris-Tautou rom-com Chinese Puzzle. And of course the Cannes Film Festival comes to its conclusion this weekend with a barrage of awards for movies that I will suddenly need to see with some urgency...

Requisite Blog Photo: On safari