Critical Week: Fooling no one

It's been a busy week in the press screening rooms this week, and I saw a few films that have been among my favourites of the year so far. Sundance award winner American Animals (above) is a stunner, a true heist thriller that happily breaks genre rules. Performances are terrific, and Bart Layton's direction is masterful. And Mission: Impossible - Fallout was a very pleasant surprise, easily the best in this six-film series, and the most satisfying action blockbuster of the summer. Tom Cruise even manages to deepen the iconic character he first played 22 years ago.

Playing on our social media culture, Searching is an inventive thriller that is viewed on various screens, yet is also taut, moving and packed with superb performances. Jon Hamm is excellent in The Negotiator (aka Beirut), a gritty and very well-made thriller set in the chaos of early-80s Lebanon. Hot Summer Nights features another solid turn from Timothee Chalamet, but the film itself is too hyperactive and grim to be the pastiche it seems to want to be. And the documentary King Cohen is a joy for movie fans, especially lovers of cult movie guru Larry Cohen.

There were also three small British films: Apostasy is simply excellent, a fair-minded depiction of a crisis within a family of Jehovah's Witnesses that makes us think about our own belief systems. Strangeways Here We Come is an uneven black comedy about a group of neighbours who concoct a murderous plan. And Possum is a somewhat pretentious arthouse thriller about a man with the creepiest ventriloquist dummy in movie history. Finally, the American web-series Paper Boys has been compiled into an involving, nicely flowing little feature about young people trying to start their lives in San Francisco.

This coming week I'll finally catch up with Ant-Man and the Wasp, plus the comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me, offbeat WWII adventure The Captain, coming-of-age drama Brotherly Love, horror comedy Fanged Up, French WWI epic The Guardians, Italian mystery A Sicilian Ghost Story, Portuguese horror The Forest of the Lost Souls, anime fantasy Mirai, and the doc The Eyes of Orson Welles.

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.