Critical Week: A big bromance

I've been taking it a bit easier this week, catching up after the film festival. But there have been a few screenings to attend. First there was the mammoth sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, screened to the press in Imax. Essentially a cartoon with a few humans running around in the margins, this is a movie that will make die hard fans happy, but others might be wise to steer clear. Meanwhile, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway have a lot of fun layering on insinuating intrigue in Mothers' Instinct, a Hitchcock-style slow-burn thriller that's thoroughly entertaining.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Beautiful Game
Disco Boy
PERHAPS AVOID:
Godzilla x Kong
ALL REVIEWS >

Even better is the British feel-good drama The Beautiful Game, about a homeless football team. Thankfully, the on-pitch action is kept in check for more character-based comedy and drama. Liam Neeson and Kerry Condon are terrific in the gritty thriller In the Land of Saints and Sinners, set during the Troubles in 1970s Ireland. And the French drama Ama Gloria takes a child's eye view for a slice of life with a couple of momentous moments along the way.

This coming week I'll continue catching up on things, and I have screenings of Scoop, The First Omen, Woody Allen's Coup de Chance, If Only I Could Hibernate and Someone Like You.

AFI Fest: True stories

Travelling home to visit friends and family, it's helpful that I was born in Los Angeles! Not only does this offer a chance to escape to the sunshine during London's drearier seasons, but I can also catch up on film industry stuff while I'm out here. This trip coincided with AFI Fest, which is held at the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, so I booked in to see five films (there were about 15 that I wanted to see!). Four of them had cast and crew Q&As, and as three of the films are based on true stories, the real people participated as well, which added huge emotions to the screenings. Photos are on the Insta feed (see below). Here are some comments, with full reviews to come...

Society of the Snow [La Sociedad de la Nieve]

dir JA Bayona; with Enzo Vogrincic, Agustin Pardella 23/Sp ****
Taking on another momentous true story (see The Impossible), Spanish filmmaker JA Bayona finds a visceral, authentically immersive path through a retelling of the 1972 plane crash that stranded Uruguayan rugby players high in the Chilean Andes. Through a series of harrowing events, the film pulls the audience into the emotional complexity of a situation far beyond what we can imagine. It’s bracingly involving, riveting and ultimately cathartic.

Me Captain
[Io Capitano]

dir Matteo Garrone; with Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall 23/It ****.

Taking a bracingly naturalistic approach, Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone traces the immigrant journey from West Africa to Europe, drawing details and perspective from real-life experiences. Intensely personal, the film finds global resonance in its specific story of a 16-year-old whose innate hopefulness is beaten and battered but never extinguished over the course of an astonishing odyssey. This gives the film a soaring humanity.

Lee

dir Ellen Kuras; with Kate Winslet, Josh O'Connor 23/UK ***.

Noted photographer Lee Miller is the subject of this detailed biopic, which centres on a pivotal period in time to deliver an emotional punch. Director Ellen Kuras approaches the story skilfully, finding clever resonance in several intense set-pieces, even if the script is never particularly ambitious with the material. And Kate Winslet delivers another powerfully invested performance as a complex woman who plotted her own course through life.

Memory

dir-scr Michel Franco; with Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard 23/US ****

Enormous issues ripple through this warm, complex romantic drama, adding unusual depth of feeling as characters confront the past and future. Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco never takes the easy route through the material, cutting in and out of scenes with an edgy style that leaves space for questions and contemplation. It’s unusually vibrant storytelling, rooted in the way experience and memory define our sense of identity, and not always in the most helpful way.

Evil Does Not Exist

dir-scr Ryusuke Hamaguchi; with Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa 23/Jpn ****

Both beautiful and challenging, this Japanese drama cleverly draws the audience in with an astute eye for details and characters that are hilariously deadpan in their interaction. Expanding on the evocative music of Eiko Ishibashi, writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi observes scenes with skill and insight, drawing out deeper meanings without us even realising it. So while the film feels somewhat enigmatic, it gets under the skin and lingers.

Also screened at AFI Fest and previously reviewed: ALL OF US STRANGERS (Haigh, UK); FINGERNAILS (Nikou, US); TIGER STRIPES (Eu, Mys); TOTEM (Aviles, Mex); MAESTRO (Cooper, US); THE BIKERIDERS (Nichols, US); 20,000 SPECIES OF BEES (Urresola, Sp); SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD (Hints, Est); ANSELM (Wenders, Ger).

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C R I T I C A L   W E E  K

There aren't many films on general release here that I'm interested in, and I prefer to spend time with my friends and family rather than watching screening links. So these are the only five movies I've seen all week, and I have no plans to watch anything in the coming week either. But you never know - I think Alexander Payne's The Holdovers might be on somewhere...

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Critical Week: We don't need another hero

October is a fairly insane month for a film critic in London, with several overlapping festivals at any given time, plus the onslaught of awards season screenings. The London Film Festival ended on Sunday night, and on Wednesday I was on-stage at the opening ceremony of the London East Asia Film Festival, where I'm heading up the jury. This means I have 16 East Asian movies to watch over the next 10 days, plus the usual releases. 

This past week's big movies included the darker-than-usual superhero adventure Black Adam, starring an unusually violent Dwayne Johnson. It's skilfully made, but everything else about the film feels familiar. Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne have meaty roles in The Good Nurse, a wrenching true story that's riveting and very disturbing. And Billy Eichner stars with Luke Macfarlane in Bros, a gay romcom that's a bit smug but also very funny and refreshingly honest about issues of insecurity and self-loathing. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Decision to Leave • Piggy
The Banshees of Inisherin
ALL REVIEWS >

Kicking off LEAFF was the brisk, adrenaline-pumping Korean thriller Hunt, starring Squid Game's Lee Jung-Jae, who also makes an impressive directing debut (I helped present him an honorary award at the opening ceremony). And then there was Voodoo Macbeth, a fascinating drama about Orson Welles' groundbreaking 1936 all-Black stage production of Shakespeare's Scottish play. Made by a crowd at USC Film School, it's an entertaining romp packed with pointed sideroads. Finally, Eternal Spring documents Chinese activists who audaciously hijacked state TV using eye-catching animation and powerful first-hand interviews.

Coming this next week are the horror hit Barbarians, the British drama Enys Men, animated adventure The Amazing Maurice and quite a few films from East Asia.

Critical Week: Killer heels

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Amid growing covid-related issues in the UK, London-based critics have had our first press screening of 2022: a masked-up full house enjoying pre-film cocktails, popcorn and photo ops before watching the globe-hopping action movie The 355 on a huge Leicester Square screen. The movie has its moments, thanks to the far above-average cast (above are Penelope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o and Diane Kruger), although the lazy script and choppy-shaky action scenes let it down rather badly.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A Hero • Writing With Fire
Licorice Pizza • Ailey
Munich: The Edge of War 
ALL REVIEWS >

Other films seen this week were an eclectic bunch. Minyan is a thoughtful, insightful drama set in 1980s Brooklyn as a teen struggles with the tension between his tight Russian-Jewish family and his newfound homosexuality. From Kosovo, Hive is a superbly understated true story of a woman taking on her sexist society. Mads Mikkelsen is terrific as a burly soldier in Riders of Justice, an unusually smart and engaging Danish variation on the Taken vengeance formula. Quentin Dupieux is back with another endearingly bonkers adventure, Mandibles, about two chuckleheads who find a gigantic housefly. And from Spain, More the Merrier is a multi-strand comedy set around a club for swingers. Sometimes very sexy, the film struggles to escape from the usual prudish attitudes.

This coming week I'll finally catching up with Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, Shawn Ashmore in Free Fall, the Swiss drama La Mif, and the documentary Taming the Garden.

Critical Week: The eyes have it

Screenings are beginning to crank up as awards season begins. I'm a member of three groups of critics that give out year-end awards, and there are quite a few films I still need to catch up with before ballots are due, starting in mid-December. I managed to see one this week, the biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, adapted from a favourite documentary of mine (from 2000), now starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as tele-evangelists Tammy and Jim Bakker. Even if it feels a bit satirical, it's a strikingly well-made, even-handed film with a strong emotional kick. Samantha Morton stars in the Welsh comedy-drama Save the Cinema, based on a true story about a community trying to save their local theatre, with a little help from Steven Spielberg. It's perhaps too warm, but thoroughly engaging.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Power of the Dog • The Feast
Petite Maman • C'mon C'mon
Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
PERHAPS AVOID:
Hide and Seek
ALL REVIEWS >

Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars in Hide and Seek, a thriller remade from a Korean movie. It's slick, but seems to have lost much of its oomph in the translation. Celine Sciamma continues to surprise with the wonderful Petite Maman, an inventive look through a young girl's curious eyes. The Spanish drama Isaac bristles with nostalgia in a knowing story of old friends reconnecting. And the documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time unpicks the life of one of my favourite authors with lots of wit and some seriously amazing archival footage, plus the personal story of a long friendship.

Coming up this week, I'll be watching Nicole Kidman in Being the Ricardos, Lady Gaga in House of Gucci, Keira Knightley in Silent Night, Lea Seydoux in France, Disney's animated musical Encanto, the animated sequel Sing 2, the double collection of shorts The French Boys and the Nazi legacy doc Final Account. I also have a few stage shows to watch.

Critical Week: Secret admirerer

Lockdown continues to loosen here in Britain, with more people taking advantage of the government's August half-price eating out bargain. I even took a three day trip out of London. But the big news (for me at least) was the first major studio blockbuster coming to cinemas in five months: Christopher Nolan's Tenet. I saw the film at a press screening at the BFI Imax on Monday, and then went again to a multiplex on Wednesday with a friend - my first public screening since March. The film isn't the knock-out masterpiece we were hoping for, but it's hugely entertaining and made on a gloriously ambitious scale. For the record, the picture was of course better in Imax, the sound was better in the multiplex, and the movie itself is even more fun the second time around.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Garden Left Behind • Tenet
She Dies Alone • Away
Breaking Fast • Nomad
FULL REVIEWS >

I also saw some films on streaming links. The moody teen drama Chemical Hearts, with Lili Reinhart and Austin Abrams (above), looks great but falls apart. The One and Only Ivan is a Disney family movie with above-average effects and a surprisingly witty script. Jessica Chastain turns to action as an assassin in Ava, which is let down by a barrage of cliches. She Dies Tomorrow is a fiercely clever horror movie that plays on some very deep human fears. A Latvian filmmaker working almost on his own reveals impressive talent with Away, an evocative animated fable. And from Greece, the dark fairy tale Entwined is intriguing but somewhat uneven. I also got to attend an online reading of a new play...

Star Man
by James Cole • with Jasper William Cartwright, Harry Edwin, Kim Tatum, Neil Summervile, Jaymes Sygrove, David E Hull-Watters

A hugely emotional drama told with some properly inventive storytelling tricks, James Cole's darkly powerful play centres on Ben (Cartwright) and his step-brother Tony (Edwin), who's also his boyfriend. Ben is struggling to recover from a past trauma, and the audience follows him as he interacts with a variety of people who trigger memories in painful ways. It's a remarkably effective exploration of the reverberations of abuse on the victim as well as everyone around him. Watching this in a zoom performance makes everything feel very serious indeed, leaving us to imagine what sounds like some intricate and very clever staging (described by narrator Hull-Watters). So I'm really looking forward to seeing this in a real theatre at some point.

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No press screenings in the diary this week, but I will probably buy a ticket to see the X-Men spin-off The New Mutants in a cinema this weekend. Streaming films to watch include Disney's epic remake of Mulan, Hugo Weaving in the Shakespeare riff Measure for Measure, the British fantasy Undergods, the Spanish thriller Unknown Origins and the short film collection Right Beside You.

Critical Week: If looks could kill

Yes, it's been yet another eclectic week in the screening rooms, as film critics scavenged for press previews of movies so we could write about them. Films this week were relatively low-key, a gasp of breath between the summer blockbusters and the early trickle from the autumn film festivals. There was the moody police procedural Night Hunter, starring Alexandra Daddario and Henry Cavill (above) as cops, along with Ben Kingsley as a vigilante. The week's biggest movie was screened to us in nearly three hours of Imax, namely It: Chapter Two. The original kids are back in flashbacks with the likes of James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain and Bill Hader playing them as adults. It's grislier than the first film, and a bit more grown-up in its themes, but more fun than scary. And Sarah Hyland stars in the rom-com The Wedding Year, which feels fluffy and genuinely witty as it mixes some deeper ideas into the usual formula.

Off the beaten path there was the sleek, low-budget thriller Empathy Inc, shot in black and white and full of big ideas, some of which go somewhere. Seeds is a brainy freak-out in which yucky monsters menace a flawed man in his old-money family home. Bathroom Stalls & Parking Lots is a lively, raucous night in the streets with two gay buddies. It feels scruffy and a little unfinished. From Argentina, Rojo is a strikingly clever drama exploring 1970s politics with a very dark story. And ee also had the programme launch for next month's London Film Festival, which as always will be a glut of great movies across the city's cinemas.

Coming up this next week, awards contenders are starting to rear their heads, as well as some autumn crowd-pleasers: Renee Zellweger is Judy, Brad Pitt goes into space for Ad Astra, the entire Downton Abbey cast reassembles on the big screen, Jennifer Lopez leads a pack of Hustlers, and Sea of Shadows documents environmental issues surrounding fishing.

Critical Week: Feel the roar

I've hit the cinemas in California this week trying to catch up on press screenings I missed while away from London. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a deeply unsatisfying follow-up to Gareth Edwards' 2014 reboot. Millie Bobby Brown (above) is terrific in the best role, but the script is choppy and simplistic. The effects are also rather murky, as they are in Dark Phoenix, the fourth in the X-Men First Class cycle. It feels oddly melodramatic, with a superb cast that livens up a dull script that never quite connects the dots. By contrast, Brightburn is another superhero genre twist from James Gunn (see also The Specials and Super). It's a rare horror movie that's scary and involving, because it takes time to build the characters and situations. And these two documentaries are released this week...

The Lavender Scare

dir Josh Howard; with David Johnson, Lillian Faderman, John D'Emilio, Frank Kameny, Jamie Shoemaker
voices Glenn Close, David Hyde Pierce, Cynthia Nixon, Zachary Quinto, TR Knight
release US 7.Jun.19 • 17/US 1h17 ****

After taking office in 1954, President Eisenhower ordered the firing of all homosexuals working for the government. The worry was that they could be seduced by Russian spies, even though there wasn't a single documented case of this happening. FBI agents aggressively uprooted every aspect of a suspected gay employee's life in invasive investigations, often on the basis of one informant. The accused had no recourse: they were threatened and then fired as "undesirable" by the tens of thousands, their careers ended, often driven to suicide. All of this came as a shock, as society before this had been much more open and accepting. The film carefully traces how this came about, a perfect storm combining McCarthy's communist witchhunt and a fear of homosexuality sparked by Kinsey's report. Director Howard uses a snappy combination of expert interviews, firsthand accounts and archival material. This includes a number of strikingly involving personal stories, including Frank Kameny, the first person who didn't go quietly after he was fired. He formed an activist society in the early 1960s, which led to a series of protests against discrimination and abuse, including the Stonewall riots at the end of the decade. This continued into the 1990s, when Kameny finally saw President Clinton overturn Eisenhower's law. This is a remarkably important documentary, covering an angle of the civil rights movement that is rarely explored with such honesty. The intimate approach, accompanied by a terrific range of archival material, makes it deeply involving and often powerfully moving. It almost ends on a note of triumph, as if all of the nastiness is in the past, which already feels eerily optimistic and perhaps a bit naive in the face of renewed bigotry and persecution around the world. But this also reminds us that there will always be people willing to stand up for what's right.

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This One’s for the Ladies
dir Gene Graham; prd Gene Graham, Paul Rowley
with Momma Joe, Raw Dog, Tygar, Fever, Blaze, Satan, Mr Capable, Young Rider, Poundcake, C-Pudding
release US 7.Jun.19 • 18/US 1h23 ***.

There's an intriguing depth to this documentary, which tackles some big issues using firsthand commentary rather than research or expert opinions. The topic is the urban struggle, encompassing racial injustice and poverty, and the filmmakers simply observe people who speak about an unexpected way they've found to escape the cycle of criminality. The setting is Newark, where beefy black men (and one muscled woman) strip down to a, well, single sock for lively audiences. Filmmaker Graham interviews several members of the New Jersey Nasty Boyz, as well as their loyal fans and family members. They speak a lot about their shared childhoods in the projects and their respect for the community, which is expressed through charity work and fundraising shows. They avoided a life of crime by staying in education and relying on their faith and close relationships, tapping into their African tribal roots as they do erotic dance. The film takes a simple, unfussy approach, letting the sassy attitudes emerge in both captured conversations and sweaty, lusty dance routines. "It's not about sex," says Momma Joe, whose sons Raw Dog and Tygar perform as a double act. "It's the illusion of having sex!" When the filmmakers are focussing on the dancers and their work, the energy is riveting. So the film kind of drags when it drifts gently into the larger themes. But the stories these people tell are powerful, as is the insight they can offer into a society that never gave them a chance due to inadequate schools and below-poverty wages. No wonder it's so difficult to avoid crime. And no wonder stripping offers both the dancers and the audience members an escape, a chance to control their fates. "It's therapy," one guy says. "It's our way out."

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I'm heading back to London this weekend, so will be in catch-up mode on films opening over the next few weeks. I have Julianne Moore's Gloria Bell to watch on the plane. And back in London, my diary over the next week includes Danny Boyle's musical Yesterday, the reboot Men In Black International, the indie British drama Bait, and the documentary Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love...

Critical Week: Face the music

As awards season begins to get serious (less than two weeks until my nominations deadlines begin in three groups), screenings are getting tricky to schedule in amongst the holiday parties! Yes, life is tough! This week's most mainstream offering was Jessica Chastain's drama Miss Sloane, an entertainingly twisty look at Washington DC lobbying. Kelly Reichardt's much more challenging Certain Women focuses tells three separate, very subtle stories about intriguing women (Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern). And the much more low-brow Office Christmas Party is also essentially female-centred, led by Jennifer Aniston, Olivia Munn and scene-stealing genius Kate McKinnon alongside costars Jason Bateman and TJ Miller. It's not quite as awful as it looks.

The most serious contenders were two docs with linked subject matter relating to race and justice. Ava DuVernay's 13th is a passionate, powerful exploration of America's prison system, exploring how it was essentially designed to continue slavery based on a clause in the 13th Amendment. And at nearly eight hours, O.J.: Made in America will stretch most viewers' patience, but it's a riveting exploration of a fallen superstar told in parallel with the checkered history of the LAPD and the weaknesses in the American judicial system. Both films are must-sees.

Films coming up this next week include this year's most anticipated blockbuster Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Martin Scorsese's Silence, Ben Affleck's Live by Night, Taraji P Henson in Hidden Figures, Michael Keaton in The Founder and the thriller The Eyes of My Mother.

Critical Week: A secret friendship

This week, London-based critics finally got to see the latest Studio Gibli film When Marnie Was There, which is getting a very late release in the UK (it came out in 2014 in Japan). It's another complex animated film that refuses to talk down to children - deep, intriguing, no easy answers, gorgeously visualised without any gimmicks.

Obviously, the biggest film of the week was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, screened to critics just a day before it opened for obvious reasons (this film doesn't need reviews, it's about fans buying lots of tickets). It's big, loud, simplistic, annoying and worth the price of the ticket. The other big movie for us was The Huntsman: Winter's War, a prequel/sequel to 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman that basically gives fans what they expect, plus two more divas (Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain, joining Charlize Theron).

Much more fun was Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship, a faithful adaptation of the surprisingly sharp-tongued Jane Austen novel Lady Susan, packed with terrific characters, hilarious dialog and delicious performances from Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny and Xavier Samuel. And we also caught the improv British comedy Black Mountain Poets, a rather meandering, pointless bit of fluff starring the wonderful Alice Lowe, Dolly Wells and Tom Cullen.

Coming up this week: Don Cheadle's Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, Helen Mirren in the drone thriller Eye in the Sky, Rebecca Ferguson in the Cold War thriller Despite the Falling Snow, Kevin Costner and Gary Oldman in the thriller Criminal, and more.

Critical Week: What's up, Tiger Lily?

Several big movies have been screened to London critics this week, including Joe Wright's Peter Pan prequel Pan, a flashy, big-scale adventure starring Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard, Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily (above), Garrett Hedlund as Hook and newcomer Levi Miller as Peter. It's a lot of fun, but aimed squarely at young children.

Of three just as generically titled blockbusters, the best is Ridley Scott's The Martian, a thrilling space adventure with a terrific central role for Matt Damon, plus a weighty supporting cast who breathe some life into the film's edges. A lack of this is the only problem with Robert Zemeckis' The Walk, a whizzy, visually impressive dramatisation of the amazing story of Philippe Petit, which was documented memorably in the Oscar-winning Man on Wire. Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings cheeky mischief to the title role, but everyone else fades into the spectacular digital backdrops. And Anne Hathaway and Robert DeNiro are likeable in Nancy Meyers' warm, sentimentally manipulative comedy The Intern.

As for films from the upcoming London Film Festival, I caught up with the outrageously entertaining Bone Tomahawk, a Western starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson and a fantastic Richard Jenkins that shifts from comedy to horror. Terence Davies' Sunset Song is a gorgeous period epic with a lovely sense of the time and place (WWI Scotland) and the connection between people and the land. Pablo Larrain's The Club is a riveting, strikingly inventive drama taking on the Catholic Church's inability to tackle its paedophile problem. And Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room is another typically manic, stylistically sumptuous pastiche, this time telling stories within stories within stories.

Most screenings this coming week are films that will also be showing at the London Film Festival, including Carey Mulligan in the opening movie Suffragette, Lily Tomlin in Grandma, Mads Mikkelsen in Men & Chicken, and the Indo-Canadian crime thriller Beeba Boys. There's also the American comedy This Is Happening, the British comedy Convenience, and the multistrand holiday offering A Christmas Horror Story.

Critical Week: Under the sea

Before I left London last Thursday, the biggest film screened was Kevin Macdonald's submarine thriller Black Sea, starring Jude Law as an unemployed guy trying to reclaim some dignity by salvaging Nazi gold out from under the Russian fleet. It's fast-paced and enjoyably ludicrous. Horrible Bosses 2 is a sequel no one asked for, and the writers haven't bothered to be even remotely clever, but there are some decent gags and a solid cast (Chris Pine steals the show, randomly). Much better, JC Chandor's A Most Violent Year is a clever vice-grip of a drama set in 1981 New York starring the excellent Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. An inventive, soft-spoken spin on the mob thriller, the film is clammy and haunting.

And on the flight over to Los Angeles, I caught up with the enjoyable doc Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, following the indefatigable showbiz veteran through her paces in both TV and theatre (the film was completed before her death in July). I also revisited Moulin Rouge, as you do, one of my all-time favourites and one of those rare films that I can get caught up in completely every time I see it. And once here I  rewatched The Theory of Everything, marvelling even more at Eddie Redmayne's astonishing performance as Stephen Hawking.

Here in California for a couple of weeks, I am hoping to catch up with the animated spin-off Penguins of Madagascar,  the idiotic sequel Dumb and Dumber To, the all-star musical Into the Woods, Mark Wahlberg in The Gambler, Bradley Cooper in American Sniper and the civil rights drama Selma.

Critical Week: Shake your money maker

It feels like months since I've done a regular weekly blog entry! (It was 7th October.) After the one-two punch of London and Abu Dhabi film festivals, I'm back to normal for three weeks. In the three days since flying home from the UAE, I've only seen four films....

Get On Up is an ambitious biopic about James Brown starring the seriously talented Chadwick Boseman, although the film is a bit too fragmented to properly convey much insight into Brown's own genius. One of the year's most hotly anticipated films, Interstellar is Christopher Nolan's trip into space to seek a future for humanity, featuring strong performances from Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and others but a plot that wobbles badly in the middle. Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey?! is the latest instalment in the silly British Christmas musical series, as another new teacher (Martin Clunes) is tormented and ultimately won over by Marc Wootton's Mr Poppy and his ludicrously adorable students. And X+Y is a remarkable little British drama anchored by a powerhouse performance from Asa Butterfield as an autistic maths-whiz teen.

This coming week, I'll be watching the year's next blockbuster The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, plus Tommy Lee Jones' starry Western The Homesman, Wong Kar-wai's much delayed award-winning film The Grandmaster, the German drama Diplomacy, the French drama Eastern Boys, the Swiss drama The Circle and the Arab Spring documentary We Are the Giant.

Critical Week: Eek! A mouse!

London critics caught up this week with the clever black comedy Life of Crime, based on an Elmore Leonard novel and starring Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def). It's offbeat and very funny, but not quite as hilarious as the week's biggest movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, a riotously entertaining sidestep in the Marvel universe that may be the comic studio's best film yet.

Other high-profile films this week included Dwayne Johnson and Brett Ratner's new take on Hercules, a surprisingly enjoyable adventure that's a lot smarter than it looks. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman's final performances lifts the slow-burning political thriller A Most Wanted Man into something rather amazing. And random cast members from a range of the previous four films are back for Step Up: All In, another corny story punctuated by great dance numbers.

Further afield, we had the terrific small-town drama Tiger Orange, about estranged brothers who both happen to be gay. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden is a riveting documentary about a shocking event from the early 1930s. You'll want to read more about it, and hopefully someone will make a dramatic thriller. And Al Pacino offered two movies: Salome is his film of his recent staging of the scandalous Oscar Wilde play, while Wilde Salome documents the process of doing the play and film, as well as tracing Wilde's life. The mesmerising staging of Salome is oddly stilted and over-the-top at the same time, with Jessica Chastain riveting in the title role. The doc is even more interesting, a bit padded out but packed with remarkable observations.

This coming week we'll be subjected to Sylvester Stallone and crew in The Expendables III, Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover, Nat Wolff and Selena Gomez in Behaving Badly, the indie drama 4 Minute Mile, Leo Leigh's ping pong hustler doc Fact or Fiction, the episodic architectural doc Cathedrals of Culture, Agnes B's road movie My Name is Hmmm, and Secret Cinema's immersive Back to the Future event.

Critical Week: Nicole's on fire

London critics had a double bill of Nicole Kidman this week, as she vamped her way through both Lee Daniels' The Paperboy and Park Chan-wook's Stoker. Both are the kind of movie you talk about - full of style and passion, colourful characters and controversial situations. And costars on fine form too: Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack in one, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode in the other.

The other big films included the funny-cruel British anti-romcom I Give It a Year, starring Rafe Spall, Rose Byrne, Stephen Merchant, Minnie Driver and everyone else they could rope into it. An even more outrageous cast populates the harshly unfunny Movie 43, which wasn't shown to the press (I bought a ticket Friday morning with all the other critics) and which is being sold on its Oscar-calibre cast alone. More likeable were the low-budget British films Papadopoulos & Sons and Do Elephants Pray, both of which yearn for simpler times by undermining a workaholic businessman. Neither is a classic, but the former is at least likeable.

We also had a trilogy of terror in Mama, a cleverly creepy horror starring Jessica Chastain; Chained, some effectively grisly nastiness from Jennifer Lynch; and Crawl, a twisted pitch-black comedy from Australia. More artful freakouts were had in the bracingly well shot and edited Danish ship-board thriller A Hijacking and the darkly artful Korean animated bullying drama The King of Pigs.

This coming week we have Ben Affleck in Terence Malick's To the Wonder, Al Pacino and Christopher Walken in Stand Up Guys, Nicholas Hoult in the zombie romance Warm Bodies, the undersea animation Sammy's Great Escape, the 3D crazy-stunt movie Nitro Circus and the Turkish drama Home (Yurt).

Critical Week: Moonshine boys

John Hillcoat's neo-Western led the charge for London-based critics with press screening of his Cannes hit Lawless, a 1930s bootlegging drama featuring screen-shredding performances from Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce and Gary Oldman, plus a decent turn from Shia LaBeouf and another meaty role for Jessica Chastain. We also finally caught up with Disney-Pixar's terrific new adventure Brave, featuring an unusually strong female protagonist and gorgeous Scottish landcapes. And we also saw Dax Shepard's energetic action rom-com Hit & Run, with he wrote and co-directed as well as starring alongside Kristen Bell, Bradley Cooper and Tom Arnold.

Less mainstream screenings included two genre-bending low-budget films: the emotionally potent British drama My Brother the Devil, and the intriguingly offbeat American rom-com Shut Up and Kiss Me. There were three docs: the astonishingly animated "untrue" story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman in A Liar's Autobiography, a more standard bio-doc from obviously family-approved sources in I Am Bruce Lee, and Chris Paine's intriguingly people-centric sequel Revenge of the Electric Car. Finally, I finally caught up with Luis Buñuel's surreal 1972 classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which is not only pure genius, but looks great after a digital restoration for its 40th birthday.

This coming week we have Meryl Streep in Hope Springs, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Hysteria, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Premium Rush, Dakota Fanning in Now Is Good, the British music-scene ensemble rom-com Turbulence and the year's most anticipated film, Chris Nolan's final Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.


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S H A D O W S   O N   T H E   T U B E
I'm only watching three television shows at the moment... 

• Episodes finished its second series with a bit of a wimper. This season wasn't nearly as sharp as the first, although it had its moments, and is still watchable thanks to engaging performances, mainly from Tamsin Grieg, Matt LeBlanc and a sometimes slightly too-clownish Stephen Mangan. If they return for a third series, let's hope the writing gets much edgier. And that they replace that awful opening title sequence.
• True Blood is charging ahead in its fifth year, throwing as much madness at the screen as possible. The whole premise is a bit stale now, but it's still hugely entertaining thanks to the beautiful, often naked cast members. It's also becoming fun to try to guess which new supernatural being will be introduced next - this week's "fire demon" was pretty hilarious, in a grisly sort of way. And while we always knew they'd being back Russell, his reappearance draws a genuine chill of dread, which is rare for TV.
• The Newsroom is typical Aaron Sorkin: smart dialog that's deeply overwritten but thoroughly enthralling. The show kind of cheats by being set a couple of years in the past, where it can merrily revise news-reporting history with the same kind of wish-fulfilment that The West Wing provided about the White House. While the backstage melodrama is kind of corny, the newscast scenes are genuinely thrilling. And this week's appearance from Jane Fonda was simply fantastic.