Critical Week: Up against the wall

London is gearing up for Sunday night's Baftas (aka the British Academy Film Awards), which sends awards season into its final lap before Oscar night in three weeks. I still have a few nominees to catch up with (namely documentaries), and I will be rooting for underdogs while watching the ceremony on TV on Sunday ... then congratulating them in person at the after-party. As for movies watched this past week, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is an energetic and very scrappy sci-fi action comedy starring Sam Rockwell as a man from the future trying to recruit a team of sceptics to prevent an AI apocalypse. It's a lot of messy fun even if it doesn't quite hang together.

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Even messier is the crazy alien invasion mayhem of Jimmy and Stiggs, which was home-made by actor-filmmaker Jeff Begos. It's riotously yucky. And then there were the slick thrills of Scare Out, a spy thriller from China that has too much choppy dialog for its own good. But Jackson Yee and Zhu Yilong are terrific leads. From North Macedonia, DJ Ahmet is a wonderfully involving comedy-drama about the collision between sparky youth and old world tradition. And the gorgeously shot documentary Underland explores human fascination with travelling below Earth's surface. Speaking of underground, I also attended an immersive premiere for the second season of the Disney TV series Paradise, elaborately held in a network of caverns under Waterloo station (see below). And I was at the programme launch party for the 40th BFI Flare, a favourite festival that I have covered for 30 years.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Neve Campbell in Scream 7, the Lithuanian drama The Activist, the acclaimed one-man psychological thriller Disremember and the documentary Palestine Comedy Club. I'll also attend Netflix's big party after the Baftas on Sunday night and a special screening premiering Bridgerton Season 4 Part 2.

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Critical Week: Hope floats

Things are slowly cranking back up after Christmas and New Year, although I haven't yet been to a screening room in 2018, as my films so far have all been at home on screener discs or links. Jupiter's Moon is a fiendishly clever drama from Hungary about a Syrian refugee who discovers he can levitate. Brad's Status stars Ben Stiller as a guy who is annoyingly overthinking his mid-life crisis, with the excellent rising star Austin Abrams as his teen son. Saturday Church is a sensitive, moving drama about a young teen (the superb Luka Kain) trying to balance who he knows he is with who he's expected to be. From Bulgaria, Glory is a clever, involving satirical adventure into the messy depths of publicity and bureaucracy. And I also caught up with this one...

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Columbus
dir-scr Kogonada; with Haley Lu Richardson, John Cho 17/US ***.
This extremely low-key drama gets under the skin with its vivid characters and lovely settings, beautifully shot with an architectural eye. Writer-director Kogonaga is exploring the delicate connections we have between each other and our surroundings, using formal camerawork that hones in on the characters, buildings and greenery around them. And it's anchored by a terrific central performance by Haley Lu Richardson as a young woman, only a year out of high school, who has decided to stay in Columbus, Illinois, to take care of her ex-addict mother (Michelle Forbes). Then she befriends Jin (John Cho), in town to look after his eminent architect father, who is in a coma. Their conversations swirl around expectations and dreams as they push each other to break free of the issues that are holding them back. It's a gentle film that never quite works up a head of steam, but its ideas are moving and provocative.

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This coming week there are only a few screenings in actual cinemas (things get started very slowly after the holidays), but I'm set to see Martin Landau's last film Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game, the migrant drama In Another Life, the musical doc Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars and the sporting doc The Ice King, among other things.

Meanwhile, awards season shifts up a gear with the Golden Globes, the Bafta nominations and more. Keep track of who's winning overall with my annual SHADOWS SWEEPSTAKES.