Critical Week: Founding fathers

It's my birthday week, so I've been a bit off-schedule, spreading celebrations over three days (as you do!). But I still managed to watch a number of films, including two on the big screen. On Netflix, America: The Motion Picture is a wacky animated mash-up of US history and pop culture silliness. It's utterly idiotic, but the barrage of gags means that some of them elicit laughter. On Prime, The Tomorrow War is a bloated action epic thankfully starring the hugely watchable Chris Pratt as a biology teacher (of course with special ops training) sent to the future to save humanity from spike-shooting aliens. It's utterly idiotic, but cheesy enough to keep us entertained. And on HBO Max, No Sudden Move is a gritty mob thriller expertly directed by Steven Soderbergh, with an superb ensemble led by Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro and Jon Hamm. It's snaky and involving, but holds onto its best thematic kick too long.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Man With the Answers
Another Round • Summer of Soul
Freaky • No Sudden Move
PERHAPS AVOID: Voyagers
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As for cinema screenings, there were The Last Bus, an involving and never sentimental drama with Timothy Spall as a very old man travelling the length of Great Britain on public busses, and Jumbo, an inventively well-made French romance based on a provocatively offbeat true story. I also watched The God Committee, a dark morality drama starring a serious Kelsey Grammer; the Argentine dramatic horror Rock, Paper and Scissors, which scarily pits siblings against each other; and the glorious Summer of Soul, beautifully documenting a shamefully forgotten Harlem concert series from 1969.

I also returned to a West End theatre to finally catch up with the musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie, a triumphantly engaging story about a teen who wants to be his colourful self. It has properly great songs too, which bodes well for the film adaptation that's due in the autum.

This coming week, I am looking forward to in-cinema screenings of Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh, and The Duke with Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent. Other films to watch include Emile Hirsch in Son and Nicolas Cage in Pig. I'm also taking a couple of days off, getting out of London for the first time in a year.

Critical Week: School daze

Well, Britain didn't reopen as planned on Monday, as the mishandling of new variants meant any lightening of regulations has been delayed. Thankfully, the accelerated vaccination programme seems to be making headway, so fingers crossed for any steps we can take back to normality. Cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars and clubs particularly depend on this. In the meantime, big films are beginning to appear again, some with enormous press screenings. This past week's main offerings included the teen comedy-horror mashup Freaky, an uneven but witty concoction in which serial psycho Vince Vaughn swaps bodies with cute high schooler Kathryn Newton. And those vrooming speedsters were back on the Imax screen for F9 (aka Fast & Furious 9), which is an unusually joyless instalment in the saga but pushes the spectacle to new (ahem!) heights.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Supernova • I Carry You With Me
The Man Standing Next • Bare
ALL REVIEWS >

Smaller movies this week included Harvey Keitel as Lansky, a finely made but familiar biopic tracing the fascinating life of the notorious gangster. The intriguing but never quite provocative The God Committee stars Kelsey Grammer in a serious role, exploring the people who decide who receives an organ transplant, and who doesn't. From Spain, the silly animated romp Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds brings the 1980s 2D cartoon characters to 3D imagery, with mixed results. And the horror comedy Vicious Fun is a snappy and rather cartoonish play on horror movie tropes, centred around a film critic.

Coming up this next week I have Channing Tatum as George Washington in the action pastiche America: The Motion Picture, Timothy Spall in The Last Bus, the fantastical romance Jumbo and the shorts collection Upon Her Lips: Heartbeats. I'll also be heading to a West End theatre to finally catch Everybody's Talking About Jamie ahead of the movie adaptation in the autumn.