Critical Week: Follow that star

Even though this is a relatively quiet time in the cinematic calendar, with the odd blockbuster arriving in the run up to the Cannes Film Festival, I've had screenings every day and night this week. This has been a bit of a challenge with tube strikes in London, but I've found ways around them. The big movie this week was the Michael Jackson biopic Michael, starring his nephew Jaafar Jackson, who gives a stunningly physical performance (Juliano Valdi also deserves praise as the young Michael). The film is very smooth around the edges, with only the great Colman Domingo allowed to inject some dark complexity into his role.

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This week's crowd-pleaser was the festival favourite Power Ballad, a new music-infused comedy-drama from Irish filmmaker John Carney (Once, Sing Street). It stars Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, and has a lot to say about generational music industry issues. It's also packed with great music. John Magaro is excellent in Omaha, a rather downbeat drama about a man who takes his two kids on a grim road trip across the American West. It's beautifully played, and has a strong emotional kick. 

Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Mads Mikkelsen lead the Danish black comedy The Last Viking, as brothers who have repressed their past trauma in very different ways. It's another terrific reteaming with writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen. And Kazunari Ninomiya stars in the claustrophobic Japanese thriller Exit 8, as a man trying to get out of a maze-like metro station. It's utterly riveting and ripples with underlying ideas. I also caught two live dance performances: The Center Will Not Hold at Sadler's Wells and We Caliban at Sadler's Wells East.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching two films with Anne Hathaway: alongside Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada 2 and with Michaela Coel in Mother Mary. There's also The Last Spy,  a doc about 100-year-old CIA spymaster Peter Sichel. And I'll travel up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a live performance of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the RSC's Swan Theatre.

Critical Week: Soak up the sun

London critics had a chance to catch up with John Carney's long-awaited follow-up to Once, and Begin Again turns out to be essentially the same story retold with starrier actors in New York. It's also disarmingly enjoyable, with wonderful songs and nicely offhanded performances from the entire cast, which includes Keira Knightley (who can truly sing), Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levine and James Corden. Richard Linklater's ambitious and utterly amazing Boyhood is nearly three hours long, was shot over 12 years, and stars Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as parents of young actors who grow up before our eyes.

We also caught up with the British indie Love Me Till Monday, a charming and somewhat thin romantic comedy that's mainly notable for its clever refusal to indulge in any formulaic rom-com plotting. And there were also two docs: Children 404 is an eye-opening look at children in Russia who identify themselves with the LGBT community and hate the way their government is sidelining them while making it acceptable to be targets of homophobic hatred (it's the closing film at the Open City Docs Fest). And The Final Member documents the world's only penis museum, which is located in northern Iceland, and its founder's tenacious attempt to complete his collection of mammals with a human specimen. It's dryly hilarious and rather telling too.

This week, I'm taking my first no-email/no-film holiday in six years and won't resurface until Sunday, 29th June. The first screenings on my return will be Melissa McCarthy's zany (sigh!) comedy Tammy, Philip Seymour Hoffman in God's Pocket, Noel Clarke and Ian Somerhalder in The Anomaly, and the Scandinavian crime-thriller The Keeper of Lost Causes. And I'll also be looking to catch up with things I missed while away, including How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Transformers: Age of Extinction. So until then, bring on the sunshine...