Critical Week: Run for your life

The 69th London Film Festival kicked off last night, so things will be very busy over the next 10 days, with pretty much wall-to-wall screenings, meetings and parties. And already, first two days have been pretty glamorous. George Clooney, Adam Sandler and filmmaker Noah Baumbach turned up to present their new film Jay Kelly. It's a smart, witty and moving look at legacy, relationships and regret. And the opening night film on Wednesday was Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunit Wake Up Dead Man, attended by the entire starry ensemble (see below). It's a wonderfully entertaining film, funny and spooky, with serious underlying themes too.

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And then there was the heart-stopping A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow's smart, complex multistrand nuclear thriller starring Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson. Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez star in the musical remake of Kiss of the Spider Woman. The tone is a bit uneven, but the film is powerful. Hunter Doohan stars in The Wilderness, an outdoor experience drama that feels a bit overly pointed, but has a strong message. And from France, Souleymane's Story is a vividly honest exploration of the challenges facing a young asylum seeker over two momentous days. I also attended a live performance of Ghost Stories at the Peacock Theatre

Reviews of London Film Festival movies are linked to this page: SHADOWS @ LFF >

Films I'm watching this coming week at London Film Fest include Emma Stone in Bugonia, Bradley Cooper in Is This Thing On, Daniel Day-Lewis in Anemone, Julia Roberts in After the Hunt, Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein, Brendan Fraser in Rental Family, Tessa Thompson in Hedda, Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams, . There's also a live performance of Theatre of Dreams at Sadler's Wells.

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Critical Week: Against the law

The big movie screened this week for London critics was Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit, a powerfully riveting drama that, like last week's Dunkirk, unapologetically immerses the audience in a historical event. Plus noteworthy performances from British actors John Boyega (above) and Will Poulter. Lighter fare included the raucous comedy Girls Trip, which is very funny and has a surprisingly soft centre, and the Jack the Ripper style horror whodunit The Limehouse Golem, which is overfamiliar but very well-played.

Slightly outside the mainstream, we had the conceptual underwater horror of 47 Metres Down, which nerve-wrackingly traps two young women at the bottom of the sea surrounded by sharks; Gerard Butler trying to emote in the rather painfully obvious work-life balance drama A Family Man; Michael Winterbottom struggling to find a balance between documentary and fiction in the band tour movie On the Road (Wolf Alice fans should love it); and a sensitive doc tracing a likeable young musician's gender transition in Real Boy.

Coming up this week are the animated comedy The Emoji Movie, Tom Holland in Pilgrimage, Toni Collette in Fun Mom Dinner, Francois Ozon's L'Amant Double, Sundance hit Beach Rats, Berlin winner On Body and Soul, the dark comedy Kept Boy, and the tense drama Insyriated.

Critical Week: Taking aim

London critics finally caught up with the last of the season's awards contenders this week, mainly because the deadline for nominations in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards is this Friday night. The biggies included: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, an entertaining and very pointed Western starring Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx; Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty and troubling military drama; and Christopher McQuarrie's Jack Reacher, a smart and entertaining mystery thriller starring Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible mode.

We also got to see Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, projected for us in 3D and 48 frames-per-second, which essentially turned one of the biggest cinema screens in Europe into a gigantic flat-screen TV. But it's our eyes that aren't used to the staggering realism - and the film is an enjoyable beginning to an epic journey (OK, so it wasn't quite this epic in the book).

Finally, two smaller films: the harrowing documentary The Central Park Five, which skilfully traces a vile miscarriage of justice in the American legal system; and Carlos Reygadas' surreal collage Post Tenebras Lux, which explores the human animal with artistry and emotion even if it makes little logical sense.

Later this week I'm heading to Los Angeles for the holidays with family and friends. Films I hope to catch out there include the Seth Rogen/Barbra Streisand road comedy The Guilt Trip, Billy Crystal and Bette Midler in Parental Guidance and the David Chase drama Not Fade Away. I'll comment on those and others (I still have screeners to watch) as I see them. And I'll post my Best of 2012 - aka the 32nd Shadows Awards - in the first few days of January.