Critical Week: Reach out and touch me

There have been a flurry of screenings this week, as studios try to make sure critics see their films before the Cannes Film Festival gets underway next week. Two films opening this week were screened a bit late to the press. Billie Eilish's July 2025 Manchester concert has been filmed in 3D in Hit Me Hard and Soft, directed by Eilish herself, working with 3D aficionado James Cameron. The concert footage is stunning, remarkably immersive and intimate; the backstage doc material is rather thin. And then there's the videogame action sequel Mortal Kombat II, this time starring Karl Urban as fan-favourite Johnny Cage. He's hilarious, and helps non-fans get through two hours of dense mythology and astonishing grisliness. 

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PERHAPS AVOID:
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Wider audiences will enjoy the straight-to-streaming animated adventure Swapped, a colourful and very nutty body-swap romp with a terrific voice cast led by Michael B Jordan and Juno Temple. Leo Woodall puts his likeable charisma to fine use in Tuner, a mashup of drama, romantic comedy and crime thriller. Costars Dustin Hoffman and Havana Rose Liu help make it thoroughly entertaining. Sam Nivola ably leads the cast of the enjoyable teen road-trip comedy Driver's Ed, with ace support from Kumail Nanjiani and Molly Shannon. And Pedro Almodovar's new drama Bitter Christmas is another gorgeously layered tale about creativity. I also saw three live performances: the fabulous Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo at Sadler's Wells, the immersive dinner theatre Chat Noir at the Lost Estate, and Bullyache's challenging A Good Man Is Hard to Find at Sadler's Wells East.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Allison Janney in Miss You Love You, Sally Field in Remarkably Bright Creatures, Emilia Jones in Fairyland, Curry Barker's horror thriller Obsession and a live performance of Remachine at Sadler's Wells East.

Critical Week: Things are heating up

The big awards season screening this week was for James Cameron's sequel Avatar: Fire and Ash, shown to us in all of its 3D glory. It's certainly an epic experience, with eye-catching action and increasingly realistic motion-capture effects. Although the story felt a bit familiar, as if that matters. Michelle Pfeiffer leads the charge as a bedraggled mum in the Christmas comedy Oh. What. Fun., which enjoyably riffs on the full range of holiday comedy classics. There were two animated movies: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants is another frantic and very silly undersea romp, while the Japanese epic Scarlet uses distinctive imagery in its involving underworld twist on Hamlet.

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Merrily We Roll Along
It Was Just an Accident
La Grazia • Eternity • Folktales
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Other awards offerings included Jim Jarmusch's Venice-winning Father Mother Sister Brother, a lovely family-connections triptych with a superior cast including Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver. Fred Hechinger and Sebiye Behtiyar are excellent as young people who fall for each other in the warm, funny, emotional Preparation for the Next Life. Jonathan Majors goes very deep indeed as a bodybuilder in the delayed drama Magazine Dreams, impressively written and directed by Elijah Bymun. There were two documentaries: the chilling Cover-Up profiles journalist Seymour Hersh in a career exposing government misdeeds, while Folktales is a warmly involving look at a Norwegian high school that specialises in dog sledding.

Beyond film, I attended the outrageously lavish premiere of Fallout season 2, attended by the cast and crew (see below). And I also managed to fit in three seasonal stage performances: Ebony Scrooge at Sadler's Wells East, the panto Beauty and the Beast at Charing Cross Theatre and The Great Christmas Feast in West Kensington.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Jack O' Connell in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Joel Edgerton in The Plague, Rosamund Pike in Hallow Road, Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Josh O'Connor in Rebuilding, plus a live performance of The Fit Prince at King's Head Theatre, and probably a bit more, all before flying out to see my family in California for the holidays.

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Critical Week: Feeling grinchy

As movies get increasingly heartwarming, it can be a challenge to ward off that inner Scrooge. Thankfully I have been watching quite a few more disturbing arthouse movies alongside the more warmly emotional wide-audience titles. And then there's A Man Called Otto, the engaging forthcoming Tom Hanks comedy that's a sentimental remake of the much edgier Swedish hit A Man Called Ove. Blockbuster sequel Avatar: The Way of Water also adds an undercurrent of emotion to its visually stunning action violence, as James Cameron creates another epic that entertains on various levels. 

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Rimini • The Silent Twins • Lynch/Oz
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
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More offbeat movies contending for awards included, appropriately, the UK's international film entry Winners, an enjoyable romp set about an Oscar statuette that takes its own mini-adventure in rural Iran. Ulrich Seidl's Rimini is a riveting pitch-black comedy about a desperate has-been singer in an off-season seaside resort town. Lukas Dhont's moving drama Close traces a pre-teen's harsh coming-of-age through the disruption of his relationship with his best friend. The hugely involving Polish odyssey EO follows a loveable donkey on an incredible journey that's sweet, challenging and often scary. And last year's crowd-pleasing Oscar nominee Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is set in a gorgeous isolated corner of Bhutan. And outside awards contention were two indie titles: the Italian comedy-drama Marscapone, a warmly intimate look at maintaining your identity within a relationship, and American drama Peridot, an intriguingly loose portrait of a street hustler.

There are still a lot of movies to catch up with as year-end voting deadlines approach, including Will Smith in Emancipation, Lea Seydoux in One Find Morning, Toni Collette in The Estate, Christian Bale in The Pale Blue Eye, the animated adventure The Amazing Maurice, the war epic All Quiet on the Western Front and the David Bowie doc Moonage Daydream.

Critical Week: Body issues

Cinemas are now absolutely jam-packed with awards movies, leaving people unsure what they should watch. The box office is always ruthless, rarely rewarding the films that actually deserve it. And the awards are skewing populist as well this year. After the producers (PGAs) and actors (SAGs) went all over the place, all eyes are on the directors (DGAs) this weekend to restore a sense of order before Bafta and Oscar arrive. But could Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star Is Born and Green Book knock the more ambitious, accomplished films out of the spotlight?

Press screenings this week included the much-anticipated Akita: Battle Angel, which James Cameron developed before handing off the directing job to Robert Rodriguez. It's a big, action movie, with lots of action, flashy effects, some cool themes and, erm, bashing robots. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part has huge shoes to fill, and is thankfully relentlessly hilarious as it rockets through its insane plot with engaging, silly characters, outrageous storytelling, inventively crazed visuals and a nonstop peppering of references to everything, including itself.

A little off the beaten path, Untogether is an artful romantic comedy-drama starring Jamie Dornan, Jemima Kirke, Lola Kirke and Ben Mendelsohn. It's sharply made, observant and a little mopey. Lucid is an independent British thriller about a young guy who learns to control his dreams, sort of. It's intriguing and visually stunning. Wretched Things tells three stories linked by themes about sex and morality. It's inventive and beautifully shot and performed, if a little on the nose. He Loves Me is a fiercely artful Greek drama with no dialog (there's a voiceover) about two men on a beach holiday trying to save their relationship.

And finally, I managed to watch the recent American TV production of Rent: Live, which turned out to be the dress rehearsal, and it showed in the low-energy performances and uneven technical quality. But it was also far too frantic, busy and even a bit dated. Surely a stripped-down update would give new life to this awesome musical.

This coming week, I'll buy a ticket to see How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, as I was unable to attend the only press screening. I also have screenings of Liam Neeson in Cold Pursuit, Penelope Cruz in Everybody Knows and two docs: The Gospel of Eureka and The Sunday Sessions.