Critical Week: Run away and join the circus

The lockdown continues to slowly ease in Britain, with most museums and cinemas reopening this week. Watching a movie in a mask isn't great, but it's great to see movies on a big screen again. And in addition to a press screening (with others coming up), I also attended a press launch for a museum exhibition. Even so, it's about time we had a silly animated circus adventure to take our mind off all of this. Animal Crackers isn't a great movie, but it's lively, colourful and wacky enough to do the trick.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Shadow of Violence • Casting
Summerland • The Vigil
PERHAPS AVOID:
Unhinged
FULL REVIEWS >

There were also some mid-range movies punching above their weight. Dave Franco's directing debut The Rental is a ripping thriller about a weekend getaway gone very wrong. Survive the Night is a clunky home invasion horror with a stone-faced Bruce Willis. Summerland is a skilfully made exploration of unexpected human connections with a terrific Gemma Arterton. And Life With Music is a rather sudsy drama about nostalgia starring Patrick Stewart and Katie Holmes.

Further from the beaten path, The Vigil is a stunning horror thriller rooted in Hasidic Jewish tradition, while Casting is an inventive improvised German comedy-drama about an attempt to cast a movie. There were also two docs: Pornstar Pandemic is an unstructured collection of footage in which adult actors talk about how they're coping with lockdown, while 2015's Scrum looks at the lives of players on Sydney's gay rugby team. And there's also a collection of four superb football-themed shorts from the UK, Germany and France called The Male Gaze: Strikers & Defenders.

I have one press screening in the diary this coming week, for Seth Rogen's An American Pickle. And on my list to watch at home, there's Roberto Begnini in Pinocchio, Gillian Jacobs in I Used to Go Here, the ensemble thriller What We Found, the horror fantasy Peripheral, the fantasy adventure Mortal, the Algerian memoir Papicha and the dark Guatemalan's drama La Llorona.

Critical Week: Don't call me angel

It was another mixed bag of movies for me this week, with awards-worthy movies jostling for attention with the usual weekly releases. We had Elizabeth Banks' new take on Charlie's Angels, an entertaining but slightly off-balance mix of comedy and violence. Edward Norton wrote, directed, produced and stars as a detective with Tourette's in Motherless Brooklyn, a beautiful film that's also a bit indulgent. Chadwick Boseman stars in the cop drama 21 Bridges, which looks great but really needed a much better script. And Ophelia retells the story of Hamlet as a teen romance with great performances and production values, but little point.

Aaron Eckhart toplines the cop thriller In the Line of Duty, which is gritty and a bit predictable. Daniel Isn't Real is a fascinating psycho-thriller that never quite finds something to say about mental illness. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary is a riveting look into the comical magician's fatal heart condition and rather slippery life. And I was able to rewatch the beautifully made British independent drama Into the Mirror on a big screen at a cast and crew screening - great to see it projected instead of on a small screen at home, and really nice to meet the director and writer-actors.

This coming week I have a line-up of acclaimed arthouse movies to see, including Sterling K Brown in Waves, Jennifer Reeder's Knives and Skin, Helen Hunt in I See You, the Chinese thriller Long Day's Journey Into Night, the Brazilian drama Greta and Steven Berkoff in The Last Faust. I also have some more theatre, a special film archive event and the London Critics' Christmas party!

Critical Week: Stardust memories

It's been another random week of screenings, topped by a surprise Netflix release and a starry film premiere. The surprise was The Cloverfield Paradox, the latest loosely connected film in JJ Abrams' franchise. This one's a sci-fi thriller with some nicely deranged touches but a general air of randomness about it. The premiere was for Black Panther, Marvel's latest game-changer, a thumpingly entertaining adventure with a properly African sensibility and some wonderfully pointed themes. It's also swamped with too much digital extravagance.

Clint Eastwood's new film The 15:17 to Paris stars the actual three heroes who thwarted a gunman's attack on a train in 2015. They have presence, but the film feels meandering and pointless apart from the momentous 10 minutes. Becks is a beautifully written and performed story about a musician trying to rebuild her life, although it kind of chickens out in the final act. Just Charlie is a gorgeous British drama about a pre-teen who begins a male-to-female transition that's never simplistic or preachy. Revenge is a gleefully blood-soaked thriller about a woman turning the tables on three tough guys, although it kind of mixes its messages by fetishising her. The Canadian drama Sebastian has some charm, but is undermined by inexperienced filmmaking. And Ingmar Bergman's underrated, remarkably complex 1971 romantic drama The Touch gets a stunning digital restoration. And then there were these two...

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Fifty Shades Freed
dir James Foley; scr Niall Leonard; with Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson, Eloise Mumford, Rita Ora, Luke Grimes 18/US *.
Shot back-to-back with the second movie, this trilogy finale features the same dopey writing and directing, remaining resolutely superficial as a preposterous thriller without even a hint of suspense. It's a bit sexier, structured like a soft-porn romp as our heroes can't keep their hands off each other whenever the music kicks in. But the characters are so limp that the actors look like they were drugged and forced to speak this laughably awful dialog. The film opens as Christian and Ana (Dornan and Johnson) have a fantasy wedding, then bicker on honeymoon about going topless on a French beach. As a married couple, their biggest challenges are Ana's hot security guard (Brant Daugherty) and Christian's flirty architect (Arielle Kebbel), before Ana's surprise pregnancy causes some overwrought his-and-her melodrama in between the belt buckles, bubble baths and Ben & Jerry's. Meanwhile, Ana's psychotic ex-boss (Eric Johnson) launches a series of attacks that get increasingly ludicrous until a climactic showdown. All of this is so flimsy that it's difficult to remember why EL James' books created such a fuss in the first place. There's certainly no sense that these two people are in any sort of real-world relationship. In the original film, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Kelly Marcel captured a zing of tension and a bit of deranged fun in the characters. But these sequels are wet noodles.

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Dropping the Soap
dir Ellie Kanner; with Paul Witten, Jane Lynch 16/US ****
The nutty backstage comedy is set among the cast and crew of the camp soap opera Collided Lives, and features as much bickering off-camera as on it. New producer Olivia (Lynch) is rattling everyone, manly lead actor Julian (Witten) is so deep in the closet that his leading lady (Suzanne Friedline) thinks they're engaged. The show's other female star (Kate Mines) is plotting to out him, but everyone is so caught up in their own worries that they barely notice. The scripts for these 10 episodes (each around 10 minutes long) are hilarious, packed with witty verbal gags and riotous interplay between the actors and their soap characters. It's also made with a snappy pace, a steady stream of funny cameos and a refreshing willingness to under-explain everything that happens. It's out on DVD/VOD, and well worth a look.

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There aren't many screenings next week, but I will catch up with Owen Wilson in Father Figures, the British horror The Lodgers, the Brazilian drama About Us and the documentary Saving Capitalism. It's also the run-up week for the Baftas on Sunday 18th February.

Critical Week: Join the jet set

Diane Kruger and Bryan Cranston are terrific in The Infiltrator, based on the true story of federal agents infiltrating the Colombian drug trade in the mid-80s. And then there's Jonah Hill and Miles Teller getting involved in the illicit arms trade in War Dogs, a lively and too-violent comedy from the director of The Hangover. The week's other heavy hitter was also a true story, although it's from the 1860s. Free State of Jones is a long, important and perhaps too-earnest drama starring Matthew McConaughey as a southerner who rebelled against the Confederacy.

And then there was the British post-apocalyptic thriller The Girl With All the Gifts, a terrific premise with an excellent cast that includes Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close, Paddy Considine and talented newcomer Sennia Nanua. The third film in the series, The Purge: Election Year continues the rather anachronistic anti-violence preachiness alongside gratuitous grisly horror. 400 Days is an uneven low-fi thriller starring Brandon Routh and Caity Lotz as astronauts preparing to go to Mars but ending up somewhere entirely different. And Liebmann is an involving, offbeat German drama set in France, as a guy moves to a rural town to escape his past, but it of course catches up with him.

This coming week I have screenings of Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, the animated adventure Kubo and the Two Strings, the action mayhem of Kickboxer: Vengeance, the arthouse thriller Under the Shadow, the acclaimed festival film The Clan and the horror romp We Are the Flesh.

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.

Critical Week: Life of the party

Chris Rock's comedy Top Five had great reviews in America last year, and has finally screened to UK critics ahead of its opening here this week. It's thoroughly hilarious, if a bit of an inside joke. Blake Lively stars in the fantasy-drama The Age of Adaline, very well-made but ultimately rather corny. Gugu Mbatha-Raw gives another thunderous performance in Beyond the Lights, a simplistic but engaging drama about the music industry costarring Nate Parker and Minnie Driver. And the mystery-thriller remake The Loft is packed with twists, turns, surprises and revelations, even if it never amounts to much and doesn't offer too much depth for fine actors like James Marsden, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eric Stonestreet, Karl Urban or Wentworth Miller.

Further afield, there was a screening of the long-shelved feature animation Dino Time, a lively story with substandard imagery and a starry voice cast that includes Jane Lynch, Melanie Griffith and Rob Schneider; Albert Maysles' beautifully made doc Iris, about 93-year-old eccentric fashion icon Iris Apfel; and the murky and sexy but obtuse apocalyptic Argentine love triangle What's Left of Us.

Coming up this week are screenings of Tom Hardy in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, the comedy A Royal Night Out, Idris Elba in Second Coming, the indie drama Everyone's Going to Die, British horror Unhallowed Ground, Oscar-nominated animation Song of the Sea and Spanish serial killer thriller Marshland. There's also a special press screening of the Orson Welles doc Magician to launch the BFI's Welles season, and an art gallery screening of Eleanor starring Ruth Wilson.

Critical Week: Inappropriate touching

At press screenings in London this week, one of the most anticipated films was In Secret, a new version of Emile Zola's 19th century romance novel Therese Raquin starring Elizabeth Olsen and Oscar Isaac. It's lavishly produced but almost overpoweringly bleak. Both actors have other films coming out in Britain on Friday: Isaac costars in The Two Faces of January, which we saw a few months ago, while Olsen is in the new Godzilla movie, which first screened on Monday. Gareth Edwards (Monsters) has managed to create a fresh spin on the genre: more character based, more moral complexity, grittier use of effects. It'll be a monster hit.

Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon lead the strikingly detailed true-crime drama Devil's Knot, Atom Egoyan's slightly too-meticulous dramatisation of the story already documented in West of Memphis and the Paradise Lost trilogy. John Turturro and Woody Allen lead the cast of the extremely gentle comedy Fading Gigolo, which is spiced up by Sharon Stone, Vanessa Paradis and Sofia Vergara. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is terrific as Belle, the true story of a mixed-race woman in 18th century London, with solid support from the extraordinary Tom Wilkinson.

A bit further afield, Leo Gregory headlines the underwhelming East End crime thriller Top Dog. Dinosaur 13 is a massively involving narrative documentary about the nasty seven-year battle for the most complete T-rex fossil ever found. And I caught up with two reissued films: Wet Hot American Summer is a hilarious summer-camp spoof starring Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler and others who went on to more accomplished comedies. And the horror-comedy Theater of Blood is a classic, unmissable romp starring Vincent Price at the peak of his powers. He's a hammy actor who takes Shakespearean-style grisly revenge against dismissive critics. Genius!

This coming week kicks off with Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and pretty much everyone else in X-men: Days of Future Past, Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler reunited for Blended, Jon Favreau's food-based comedy Chef, and more...