Critical Week: Team America to the rescue

London-based critics caught up with Michael Bay's Benghazi thriller 13 Hours this week. It's skilfully assembled with a strong cast, but bombastic and frustratingly simplistic. There was also a very late press screening for The 5th Wave, the latest teen-dystopia thriller. Starring Chloe Grace Moretz, it's a lot better than anyone expected. And then there was Ride Along 2, a lazy sequel reuniting Ice Cube and Kevin Hart for a new buddy-cop action-comedy in Miami.

Charlize Theron and Tye Sheridan are terrific in the creepy thriller Dark Places, which loses its way in melodramatic excess. Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room is one of the sharpest, most original horror thrillers in recent memory, propelling the audience into an unnervingly realistic nightmare. British filmmaker Stephen Fingleton is getting awards for his debut post-apocalyptic drama The Survivalist, a strikingly well-acted, inventive film that kind of gets stuck in its own rut. The Spanish animated moon-race adventure Capture the Flag makes up for its low-tech imagery with a quick-paced story and witty characters. And the understated Brazilian drama Aya Arcos makes up for its super-low budget with realistic, involving characters. I also caught up with a movie that doesn't seem to have a UK release planned at all...

Stonewall
dir Roland Emmerich; with Jeremy Irvine, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers 15/US *.
Director Emmerich really needs to stick to those big, tongue-in-cheek action movies he's so famous for (like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow or my personal guilty pleasure 2012). His last foray into "serious" filmmaking was the appalling revisionist Shakespeare bio Anonymous (2011), and now he has made this even more insulting drama about the roots of the gay pride movement. The film was criticised for not telling the whole story, but that's not the worst thing about it. The problem is that the movie is an endless stream of misguided cliches and trite moralising. There isn't a single scene that rings true, and it's not the fault of the actors (they're actually rather good, including Irvine in the focal role). Not only does Emmerich flatten each dramatic moment with awkwardly pushy direction, but Jon Robin Baitz's script rings false, trivialising what should be some darkly personal events and leaving real-life people lurking pointlessly around the edges of a narrative that tries to be the story of Everyman (or more accurately, every young white man). Please stick to blowing up the White House, Roland.

Coming up next week: Julianne Moore and Ellen Page in Freeheld, Adrien Brody in Backtrack, Blythe Danner in I'll See You in My Dreams, the animated romp Oddball and the Penguins, the cycling doc Battle Mountain, and the Israeli horror movie JeruZalem.

Critical Week: Not to be messed with

The most unforgettable performance in a press screening this week easily belongs to Kate Winslet's fierce Russian mobster in Triple 9, John Hillcoat's urban Western, which opens next month boasting a fierce cast that also includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Casey Affleck, Anthony Mackie, Woody Harrelson and Gal Gadot, to name a few. (Side note: it was fun to chat with Winslet about this film at the London critics' awards on Sunday - she hadn't seen it yet.)

We also reunited with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart for the rote action-comedy sequel Ride Along 2, a sequel even worse than the lacklustre original (part 3 is pretty much guaranteed after audiences in America flocked to see it last weekend). Much more challenging were William Monahan's desert thriller Mojave, a choppy dramatic thriller starring Oscar Isaac and Garrett Hedlund; the dark and deeply moving British drama Departure, starring the amazing Juliet Stevenson and Alex Lawther; and the unnerving, elusive drama Chronic, starring a terrific Tim Roth.

This coming week I have very, very late press screenings of J Blakeson's The 5th Wave with Chloe Grace Moretz and Dark Places with Charlize Theron (both open this Friday), plus Michael Bay's Benghazi thriller 13 Hours, acclaimed arthouse drama Green Room, animated adventure Capture the Flag, cycling doc Battle Mountain and shorts compilation Boys on Film 14: Worlds Collide.

Requisite Blog Photo: Another drive-by victim

Critical Week: Send up a flare

This past week, the British Film Institute staged its annual programme launch event for the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which kicks off its 28th edition on March 20th. But the big news this year was that the festival is changing its name to BFI Flare. The launch party was great fun, as always, attended by filmmakers, journalists and industry bods who become like a family this time of year.

As for screenings, we had Kevin Hart and Ice Cube in the occasionally entertaining action comedy Ride Along, Liam Hemsworth in the preposterous but sleek thriller Paranoia, the cleverly freaky indie revenge drama Blue Ruin, Del Shores' astute filmed play Southern Baptist Sissies, the marriage documentary 112 Weddings and the Canadian digital series Coming Out, watched in one go. I also saw a few films that will be at BFI Flare next month.

This coming week I will catch up just in time with three Oscar nominees: Hayao Miyazaki's acclaimed animated epic The Wind Rises and the buzzy docs 20 Feet From Stardom and Dirty Wars. (This leaves only one Oscar-nominated feature I won't have seen on Sunday night: foreign-language nominee Omar.) Also this week, we have the sequel 300: Rise of an Empire, the animated Wrinkles and three more docs: Bridegroom, Next Goal Wins and Errol Morris' The Unknown Known.