Critical Week: I've got a bad feeling

It's been another unusually busy week for this time of year in the screening rooms, with a steady stream, of movies to watch. I'd been hoping to get a break after awards season, but we are powering forward at full speed. So any down time will have to wait. Big releases are screening late these days, with three that are coming out this week: Ayo Edebiri leads the cast of Opus, a blackly comical horror film that isn't very scary. But Edebiri makes it very watchable, as does a scene-chewing John Malkovich. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender sizzle in the snaky, intelligent thriller Black Bag, which refreshingly isn't about what you think it's about. And Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt lead an offbeat ensemble in The Electric State, a retro sci-fi adventure that's watchable but also forgettable.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Last Breath
Black Bag • Throuple
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Day the Earth Blew Up
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Other films included the perhaps too-emotional drama The Life of Chuck, with a superb ensemble led by Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan. The Parenting is an amusing meet-the-parents horror pastiche with Brian Cox, Edie Falco and Lisa Kudrow. It's funny and grisly, but never frightening. Infused with music, Throuple is an offbeat indie romance that knowingly bends the rules. And there were two Chinese films: the epic animated sequel Ne Zha 2 is visually dazzling, while the blackly comical thriller Brief History of a Family is riveting and surprising.

There were also two festival films. From South by Southwest, there was the sharply made teen comedy She's the He, and from WatchAUT, I enjoyed the offbeat drama of Peacock, starring the superb Albrecht Schuch. And I also caught two stage shows: Dear Martin at the Arcola Theatre and Drum Tao: The Dream at the Peacock Theatre.

This coming week I'll be watching two films with Pedro Pascal, the adventure Freaky Tales and the comedy-drama The Uninvited, plus Disney's live-action Snow White, Michel Hazanavicius' animated The Most Precious of Cargoes, Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia and the artificial intelligence doc The Thinking Game. In addition, the remake of The Wedding Banquet, starring Bowen Yang, opens BFI Flare film fest on Wednesday.

Critical Week: Cinematic royalty

Pretty much everything in London this week is centred around Saturday's big coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla. I'm avoiding the crowds, and will catch it on TV. Meanwhile, movie queens Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenbergen return for Book Club: The Next Chapter, a much funnier, more engaging sequel to the corny 2018 hit. An even larger ensemble returns for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, which has had better reviews than it deserves. It's funny, and fans will love it, but there isn't a single exciting or thrilling moment.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Pamfir • The Blue Caftan
Chile '76
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Jim Parsons stars in the involving romantic drama Spoiler Alert, which infuses real-life humour into a sad story. BlackBerry stars Jay Baruchel as the man who first combined email and mobile phones. It's a fascinating story, skilfully told. Two decades in the making, the witty and rather overlong autobiographical comedy 5-35-77 traces Patrick Read Johnson's journey into filmmaking, via a preview screening of Star Wars. And Still is a gorgeously well-made documentary chronicling Michael J Fox's acting career as well as his experiences with Parkinson's. 

I also covered two stage shows this past week: the inventive, insightful Supernova at Clapham Omnibus, and the fiendishly entertaining musical comedy Eurovision: Your Decision at Wonderville

This next week I'll be watching Jennifer Lopez in The Mother, Finnish action film Sisu, 1970s British thriller Dead Shot and Anton Corbijn's doc Squaring the Circle. I also have a couple of catch-up movies to watch.

Critical Week(s): Lights, camera, action!

I've rather enjoyed stepping out of my usual routine over the past month or so, with a long catch-up break visiting friends and family after two years, then two weeks of film festival capped by the all-night mayhem of this year's Oscar ceremony. Whether I'll return to my usual schedule is still up in the air, but I'm definitely re-thinking how I spend my time. For example, I was unable to attend the only press screening of Marvel's latest epic Morbius, and I was fine with that. It's the first one I've missed, and I feel that if the studio doesn't want me to see a movie, that's going to be OK from now on. This post is catching up on about two weeks of regular-release movies I watched between festival films... 

BEST NEW FILMS:
The Worst Person in the World
Poppy Field • Jump, Darling
Mothering Sunday • Down in Paris
PERHAPS AVOID:
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
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The most starry of these films was The Bubble, which being a Judd Apatow movie is of course far too long for what it is: a comedy about making a movie during the pandemic. It has its moments, and the cast is up for it, but tighter editing and sharper writing never go amiss. Much more fun was The Lost City, a relentlessly silly romp in the jungle with Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and Daniel Radcliffe. On the other hand, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 merely honed in on the most irritating things about the likeable 2020 movie, so this one feels painfully unfunny and manages to waste Jim Carrey as well.

Further afield, Jennifer Reeder's offbeat horror Night's End is witty and very clever, creating a terrific sense of gnawing fear, plus some big jolts. Francois Ozon's expertly made French drama Everything Went Fine is based on a true story about dying with dignity, but manages to avoid politics for something more engagingly personal. The Shakespeare Sisters adapt William Shakespeare's iconic romance into the present-day comedy Much Ado, making the most of a low budget and talented cast. Antony Hickling's thoughtful odyssey Down in Paris is a fascinating night of earthy soul-searching. And the British horror comedy Followers finds a new way to use video-screen imagery to create tension, even if the film feels a bit thin.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching the blockbuster sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Jake Gyllenhaal in Ambulance, Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Dermot Mulroney in Agent Game, the French comedy Anais in Love, the Irish thriller You Are Not My Mother and the quirky biopic Aline.

Critical Week: Who runs the world

It's been another busy week at the movies. As the Cannes Film Festival continues in the South of France, there have been plenty of screenings, events and films to watch online here in London. Warm weather is coming back too, which won't be great for cinemas that are reopening to full capacity next week - but people may want to escape the heat and get back to big-screen movies after such a long break. There were two big movies to watch this past week: on a screening link, I enjoyed the stylised chaos of the female-powered action thriller Gunpowder Milkshake, featuring the starry lineup of Carla Gugino, Lena Headey, Karen Gillan, Angela Bassett and Michelle Yeoh (above). On a big screen, I only mildly enjoyed the stylised chaos of Space Jam: A New Legacy, which looks amazing but feels rather random and cynically packaged. But fans will love it.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Summer of Soul • Two of Us
Gunpowder Milkshake
Deerskin • Toofaan
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Birthday Cake
Space Jam: A New Legacy
ALL REVIEWS >

Another starry lineup populates the offbeat mob thriller The Birthday Cake, which stars Shiloh Fernandez alongside Ewan McGregor, Val Kilmer, William Fichtner and Lorraine Bracco. But the plot doesn't hang together. An eclectic cast featuring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong and Bill Skarsgard leads Nine Days, an existential fantasy that's intriguing and only sometimes moving. In an uneven French comedy, Isabelle Huppert has a lot of fun as Mama Weed, a police translator turned drug kingpin. Bollywood megastar Farhan Akhtar goes for a full body transformation in the thrilling and enjoyably soapy boxing epic Toofaan. And the acclaimed French farce Bye Bye Morons throws three random people together for a madcap quest that turns out to be unsettlingly bleak.

As a member of the UK Critics' Circle council, I also attended a lunch to present our top honour for distinguished services to art to playwright-novelist Michael Frayn. And I had a press night for a lively pub garden production of Love's Labour's Lost as well. It's great to see live theatre coming back.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Matt Damon in Stillwater, M Night Shyamalan's Old, Mark Wahlberg in Joe Bell, Ben Platt in Broken Diamonds, offbeat French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux's Mandibles and the French horror thriller Kandisha.

Critical Week: Nose to nose

I've had a line-up of events and stage shows this week, rather than movies, which makes a very nice change. I only saw three films: The Call of the Wild is based on the Jack London novel about a dog's adventure in the Yukon, with a human cast including Harrison Ford, Omar Sy (pictured) and Dan Stevens. There is no dog cast, as that's Terry Notary in digital motion capture. The film is a lovely adventure but you can always tell that it's not a real dog.

There are actual horses in Dream Horse, based on the true story of a syndicate in a small Welsh village that raised a thoroughbred champion against the odds. Toni Collete leads an eclectic cast in an earthy, crowd-pleasing charmer. And Rosamund Pike stars as Marie Curie in the biopic Radioactive, which recounts the earth-changing scientist's life with some ambitious but distracting flourishes. And because I had the time, I revisited Parasite in a cinema packed-out with a paying audience, and loved it all over again. I originally saw it at a small press screening in September.

Outside the cinema I had the fringe theatre play Undetectable at the Kings Head (already reviewed) and the extremely starry press night for Message in a Bottle (review incoming), a thrilling dance performance staged to Sting's memorable songs and pointedly themed around the refugee experience. There was also a lively launch event for the new production of the Hairspray musical, which opens in April at the Coliseum starring Michael Ball and Paul Merton. I attended the Critics' Circle National Dance Awards, which was a terrific ceremony packed with luminaries from the dance world, including Cats star Francesca Hayward, who was named Best Female Dancer for her work with the Royal Ballet. And finally, the British Film Institute hosted the launch of the 34th edition of BFI Flare, London's LGBTIQ+ film festival, another lineup of great cinema that runs 18-29 March at BFI Southbank. The event included the lively annual launch party, complete with a seriously yummy cake designed to match the festival artwork (see below). This is my 22nd year covering this festival.

There's a bit more stage to come this week too, plus press screenings of The Invisible Man with Elisabeth Moss, Colour Out of Place with Nicolas Cage, Villain with Craig Fairbrass, Scott Graham's drama Run, the noir thriller Blood on Her Name and the romcom Straight Up.

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It’s the annual #BFIFlare cake! A particularly delicious one, I should add. Tonight’s was the programme launch for the festival’s 34th year.

A post shared by Rich Jack Cline (@ukcline) on Feb 18, 2020 at 2:53pm PST

Critical Week: Just sit right back...

London critics had a bit of glamour this week at the press screening of Halston, a new documentary about the iconic 1970s designer. It's a beautifully made film, although it essentially skips his personal life. At the other end of the spectrum is Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, the new live-action action-comedy based on the Japanese game. It's energetic and silly, and rather good fun.

Emma Thompson gets yet another fabulous character in Late Night, as a long-time chat show working with a new staff writer (Mindy Kaling, who also wrote the screenplay) to save her show. And Ethan Hawke chomps the scenery superbly as a hapless bank robber in the comical thriller The Captor (aka Stockholm), based on the true story that coined the term "Stockholm syndrome".

There were also a wide range of indie films this week. The sweet, involving and ultimately wrenching Only You stars Josh O'Connor and Laia Costa as a young couple trying to start a family against the odds. Karen Gillan and David Dastmalchian are terrific in the haunting, emotional road movie All Creatures Here Below. Lin Shaye stars in Room for Rent, a low-key horror about a landlady who becomes scarily obsessed with her tenant. Thunder Road is a seriously offbeat Texas drama about a cop with multiple issues, underscored with dryly pitch-black comedy. Beats is a scruffy, energetically engaging Scottish film about young people trying to get to their first rave. The colour-drenched LA social media romance Daddy Issues takes some offbeat, inventive twists and turns. And there was this unusual doc, which is now streaming everywhere...

The Gilligan Manifesto
dir-scr Cevin Soling; with Sherwood Schwartz, Dawn Wells, Russell Johnson, Don Ostrowski , Loren Graham, Dan Albright; narr Rennie Davis 18/US 1h25 ***

The premise of this rather academic documentary is that the classic TV sitcom Gilligan's Island was created with a specific underlying message about communism to counter Cold War fears. Filmmaker Soling takes a sparky approach, mixing in extensive archival footage and witty music along with interviews, all of which bolster his thesis to a degree. The film opens with rather long and lively outline of the Cold War and the fear that grew in the wake of the atom bomb. A year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, production began on the sitcom, which Solving describes as a story of seven disparate people trying to rebuild society in a virtual post-apocalyptic wasteland using Marxist communism as a template. (Soling observes that only the two working class characters are introduced by name in the famed title song.) As series creator Sherwood Schwartz says, there was a deep philosophy beneath the show's premise, bringing different people together and forcing them to help each other. While most movies addressed the Cold War using tragedy or disaster, he decided to use comedy instead. And stars Johnson and Wells (the Professor and Mary Ann) chat about how they understood that there was something serious under the resolutely silly surface. This doc is a terrific collection of period movie clips and anti-commie propaganda reels, plus overlong sideroads into things like the McCarthy hearings. This makes it feel like a jokey college essay about the nature of Marxism, making a series of rather spurious arguments about a 1960s sitcom. Clips from the show remind us that it was a satirical critique of all kinds of human ideologies (not just capitalism and democracy) and an escape from the rat race. The characters also reveal uncomfortable, often ridiculous truths about ourselves. That's what makes it so indelible. But this doc has other things on its mind.

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It's another long weekend in Britain (I could get used to these), but the weather isn't supposed to be quite as nice as the last one. Film screenings in the diary over the next week include Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson's comedy The Hustle, Russell Crowe in The Professor and the Madman, Peter Strickland's In Fabric, the teen drama Just Say Goodbye, the 1970s Welsh drama Last Summer and the Chelsea Manning doc XY Chelsea.

Critical Week: Guns out for spring break

Virtually every genre taste was catered to for London critics this past week. We caught up with the Jonah Hill/Channing Tatum sequel 22 Jump Street this week, a raucous comedy that has very little plot but keeps the audience in spasms of laughter all the way through, mainly as it pokes fun at sequels and franchises. There was a very late screening of Edge of Tomorrow, the time-loop alien invasion thriller with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. (No one quite knows why a sharply well-made film as entertaining as this was only screened the day before it opened in the UK, but word of mouth should build for this one.) And we only had one more day's notice for Seth MacFarlane's comedy-Western A Million Ways to Die in the West, a relatively amusing vanity project saved by Charlize Theron, superb supporting actors and cameo turns.

Nicole Kidman does what she can with Grace of Monaco, a corny and heavily fictionalised account of one year in the life of the actress-turned-princess. The stylish and intriguing dark thriller Anna stars Mark Strong as a memory detective tasked with investigating a very troubled teen (Taissa Farmiga). A bracingly original twist on the haunted house movie, Oculus stars Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites as siblings confronting an evil mirror. And the terrific Rosamund Pike and David Tennant are upstaged by three gifted child actors in the surprisingly solid British black comedy What We Did on Our Holiday.

This coming week, we have Kevin Costner in 3 Days to Kill, the Scottish musical drama God Help the Girl, the horror movie Home, the French rom-com A Perfect Plan, the Iraq War protest doc We Are Many and quite a few other documentaries that are coming to festivals around Britain this month.

Critical Week: Going gaga

Yes, London critics were treated to the B-movie spoof Machete Kills this past week. The film essentially places Danny Trejo amid a flurry of wacky star gags including Lady Gaga, Mel Gibson, Charlie Sheen, Sofia Vergara, Antonio Banderas, Cuba Gooding Jr, Jessica Alba, Amber Heard, Vanessa Hudgens and so on. At least they all look like they had fun. We also finally got a look at Naomi Watts as Diana in a film that's sure to spark snide criticism even though it's not actually that awful. It's not that good either. Much better, but equally likely to receive cynical reviews due to its open-handed sentimentality, is Philomena. Based on an extraordinary true story, the film features awards-attention performances from Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.

A little off the beaten path, we also had the gritty, especially well-made care-home drama Short Term 12 with Brie Larson, the strained Scottish rom-com Not Another Happy Ending with Karen Gillan, the cleverly constructed mock-doc The Conspiracy, and the eye-opening athletics doping doc 9.79*.

This coming week, we'll be watching Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners, Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in The Railway Man, James Gandolfini and Julia Louis Dreyfus in Enough Said, Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Family, Zac Efron and Marcia Gay Harden in Parkland, the festival winner Leviathan and the animated sequel The Reef 2: High Tide.