Critical Week: Say cheese

Covid restrictions are lifting in Britain, but I haven't had many press screenings this week, mainly because many of the films opening this month are ones I saw at a festival last year. Thankfully, this gives me some extra time to work on the forthcoming London Critics' Circle Film Awards - there are less than three weeks to pull everything together for that, even as a virtual event. Bigger films this week included A Journal for Jordan, a sentimentalised true drama starring Michael B Jordan and Chante Adams, directed by Denzel Washington. It's a good story, but feels too gentle and worthy. And then there's the silly fantasy fairy tale The King's Daughter, in which Pierce Brosnan plays Louis XIV, whose daughter (Kaya Scodelario) befriends a mermaid (Bingbing Fan) and refuses to fall for the suitable man. It's ridiculous but fun.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Belfast • Cicada • Torn
Nightmare Alley
ALL REVIEWS >

And then there's the jaunty Spain-set comedy Rifkin's Festival, which has some terrific touches but is another uneven film from the troublesome Woody Allen. From Brazil, The Pink Cloud is eerily prescient, shot in 2019 but expertly capturing the feeling of lockdown in its story about a toxic cloud that traps a new couple in a flat for years. Buzzy Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi skilfully tells three separate stories in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and their thematic angles dovetail beautifully. And in the documentary Torn, filmmaker Max Lowe recounts the involving, twisty story of his mountain-climbing superstar father and his legacy.

This coming week I have mainly documentaries to watch, including The Real Charlie Chaplin, Taming the Garden, Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster and awards contenders Procession and The Rescue.

FrightFest: Don't look now

The 20th FrightFest takes place in London over the long weekend, filling cinemas with scary movies. It kicked off on Thursday with Come to Daddy starring Elijah Wood (above), and will close on Monday with the terrific British thriller A Good Woman Is Hard to Find starring Sarah Bolger. In between there is a full range of nastiness - comedy, drama, action, Western, sci-fi, adventure and downright evil. I've caught a number of titles this year, and here's the first batch, linked to reviews where possible (other full reviews will appear closer to the release dates)...

Come to Daddy
dir Ant Timpson; with Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie 19/Can ****
With a visually stylised, blackly comical approach, director Ant Timpson and writer Toby Harvard spin a cleverly insinuating freak-out. A striking setting and full-bodied performances help the film continually wrongfoot the audience as it spirals in unexpected directions. And each scene is peppered with telling details and amusing touches that deepen both the themes and the film's deranged sense of humour. But the real surprise is how moving it is... FULL REVIEW >

Crawl
dir Alexandre Aja; with Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper 19/US ***.
Not much about this bonkers action thriller makes sense, but it's so much fun that it's easy to just go with it. Filmmaker Alexandre Aja knows how to freak out an audience by building suspense, adding an extreme gross-out, providing a big jolt and layering in an undercurrent of psychological tension. He throws all of this and more at this ridiculous premise, and the film is an entertaining scream... FULL REVIEW >

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
dir Andre Ovredal; with Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza 19/US 1h48 ***.
More yucky than scary, this enjoyable horror movie skilfully juggles a range of iconic images and themes. Slickly put together in the inimitable style of producer Guillermo del Toro, the film is briskly directed by Andre Ovredal to keep the audience on edge. There's never much of a question about where it's heading, but there's a lot of gruesome fun to be had along the way... FULL REVIEW >

Dark Encounter
dir-scr Carl Strathie; with Laura Fraser, Mel Raido 19/UK ***.
Both a gritty family drama and an outrageous home-invasion thriller, this British film set in rural America pulls the audience in with its offbeat approach to sci-fi horror. The characters are vividly played by a gifted ensemble, and filmmaker Carl Strathie reveals the narrative with skill, using snaky long-takes and superbly atmospheric settings to maximum effect. The film often feels gimmicky, especially when it's trying to push the emotions, but it's powerfully involving.

The Wind
dir Emma Tammi; with Caitlin Gerard, Julia Goldani Telles 18/US ***.
Artfully shot and edited, this whispery thriller reveals its story by crosscutting between two timelines. Set on an isolated 1880s homestead, it's a slow-building atmospheric freak-out that unnerves the audience from the start with its disparate images, enigmatic characters and expansive setting. And as a story of a woman's mind in turmoil, it's also provocative and haunting. Director Emma Tammi is definitely one to watch... FULL REVIEW >

Harpoon
dir-scr Rob Grant; with Munro Chambers, Emily Tyra 19/Can ****
Brett Gelman delivers a knowing narration that establishes this horror thriller's comical tone right from the start, adding snide commentary as he describes a strained relationship between three longtime friends who are at sea literally and metaphorically. The film is strikingly shot, writer-director Rob Grant layers in strong undercurrents that keep the story staggeringly tense, and the three lead actors are terrific.

I Trapped the Devil
dir-scr Josh Lobo; with Scott Poythress, AJ Bowen 19/US ***
Dark and insinuating, this gloomy horror thriller has a clever set-up and a strong cast, although writer-director Josh Lobo can't resist trying to heighten everything with gimmicks like perplexing visuals or pushy sound and music. Confined to a creepy house, the movie has a superb claustrophobic tone, both visually and psychologically. But the pace is slow as it churns along in between some atmospherically freaky moments... FULL REVIEW >

Links:
• Official FRIGHTFEST site
• Shadows' FRIGHTFEST homepage

Critical Week: See you later alligator

With the 20th FrightFest coming this weekend, it's feeling a bit like Halloween around London. In addition to watching four FrightFest horror movies (more about those next time), I also saw two freak-outs that are both at the festival and in UK cinemas this weekend. Crawl stars Kaya Scodelario (above), trying to survive a mob of massive alligators in her family home as hurricane floodwaters rise. It's relentlessly terrifying and a lot of fun too. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark comes from producer Guillermo del Toro, and features teens who find a haunted book that begins killing them one by one with new stories. It's dark and enjoyably yucky.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and her actor husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson wrote the script themselves for A Million Little Pieces, adapting James Frey's controversial memoir detailing his time in rehab. It's beautifully made, raw and wrenching. Set in the late 70s and early 80s, Driven recounts the story of John DeLorean (Lee Pace) through the eyes of his shifty neighbour (Jason Sudeikis). It's uneven, but lively and very entertaining. And French filmmaker Francois Ozon shifts gears again for By the Grace of God, a powerful, sharply well made fact-based drama about men taking on the Catholic Church because they were abused as boys.

I also caught up with Adam, a New York-set drama that's been generating controversy because it dares to have a central character who makes a terrible mistake and learns from it. Since it's dealing with trans and queer issues, it's understandably touchy. But the film is also important, and very nicely made. And from Mexico, the 80s-set drama This Is Not Berlin is a sharply observant, skilfully shot and acted coming-of-age journey with vividly resonant themes. By contrast, the offbeat British crime thriller Killers Anonymous is a choppy mess, so it's a mystery how they lured Gary Oldman, Suki Waterhouse and Jessica Alba to be in it (albeit clearly filmed apart from the main plot).

This is a long weekend in London. I'll be blogging about FrightFest, and since the weather looks good I may brave the Notting Hill Carnival as well. Screenings include Henry Cavill in Night Hunter, Matthias Schoenaerts in The Mustang, the Norwegian drama Phoenix and the Argentine drama Rojo.

Critical Week: Size matters

There were two rather underwhelming sequels to see this past week, neither of which came with very high expectations. Kickboxer: Retaliation is the middle part of a rebooted trilogy starring Alain Moussi and the original star Jean-Claude Van Damme, plus assorted massive meatheads. It looks great, so it's a shame so little attention was paid to characters or story. And then there's the Maze Runner trilogy finale, The Death Cure, with its somewhat messy mythology and bland characters. The film has its moments, but never quite comes to life.

Two small British films at least tried something original. Lies We Tell is a rather choppy crime thriller set in Yorkshire starring a mopey Gabriel Byrne. And Gholam is a riveting, slow-burning London thriller starring the excellent Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini. Even further afield, I enjoyed seeing a big-screen press preview of the restored version of Ingmar Bergman's witty film of Mozart's The Magic Flute. And I watched all of the episodes for the snappy, clever web series Dropping the Soap, which is out soon on dvd. As the title suggests, it's a backstage soap opera spoof. And I also greatly enjoyed this doc, which I needed to see for awards voting purposes...

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Bombshell
dir-scr Alexandra Dean; with Diane Kruger, Robert Osborne 17/US ****
Based around the discovery of a lost interview recorded on cassette tapes in 1990 when she was 76, this documentary traces the extraordinary journey of movie siren and brainy inventor Hedy Lamarr from her childhood in Austria to her reclusive old age in America. Along the way, she shared the screen with all of Hollywood's biggest stars as the most beautiful woman in movies. But she was always aware that no one took notice of her intelligence. "Any girl can look glamorous," she said famously. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid." And now it emerges that Lamarr had a secret life of curiosity and scientific ambition, including a working friendship with Howard Hughes and conceiving the idea that would lead to modern communications systems like wifi and bluetooth (the US government never paid her for her patent, which the doc claims would amount to some $30bn today). She also built the first ski resort in Aspen, which was stolen from her by a vindictive ex-husband. Filmmaker Dean assembles this beautifully, using Lamarr's own voice and a wealth of footage and stills. It's a gripping film, packed with emotional kicks and an inspiring final message from Lamarr herself, reminding us that when the world treats us badly, we should give our best anyway.

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Much of my time has been spend working on the impending Critics' Circle Film Awards on Sunday night - I'm the chair, so haven't had much spare time to catch up with press screenings. Maybe next week. I've got the Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon in the diary, as well as the Helen Mirren ghost story Winchester.

Critical Week: Just hanging around

I took a few days off around the weekend, so had a quieter screening week than usual - but I greatly enjoyed the chance to spend four days doing basically nothing in the countryside. Before and after that, I caught a couple of big movies, including the Maze Runner sequel The Scorch Trials, another clunkily contrived teen-dystopia thriller that has energy and a sharp young cast, but never feels remotely engaging. Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore play lifelong best pals in the London-set comedy-drama Miss You Already, a deeply resonant film that refreshingly dodges cinema's male-centred rules thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke and writer Morwenna Banks.

I also caught up with this year's Woody Allen's movie Irrational Man, a meandering but thoughtful and smart comedy-drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone in a lighter variation on Allen's iconic Crimes and Misdemeanours. A little further afield, Mark Strong and Vera Farmiga star in the Romanian drama Closer to the Moon, based on a fantastic true story but told with an odd mix of jaunty farce and dark tragedy. And the sharp, thoroughly entertaining British indie comedy SuperBob looks at the personal life of a hapless superhero.

This coming week, we have Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan in Life, Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley in Everest, Kevin Costner and Maria Bello in McFarland, Rhys Ifans and Charlotte Church in Under Milk Wood and the American indie festival hit Tangerine.