Critical Week: Joy to the world

Happy Christmas from locked-down London! I had a barrage of timed awards-consideration screening links this week that changed what I was planning to watch. This meant that I saw quite a few contenders, and the common adjective to describe highbrow movies this year seems to be: "dour". Thankfully, each has something to recommend in it, usually strong performances that lift the tone. And some of these films have been wonderfully upbeat too.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK: 

One Night in Miami • Soul 

Promising Young Woman 

News of the World • AK vs AK 

The Dissident • Luz 

ALL REVIEWS >

Hugh Bonneville stars in the Roald Dahl biopic To Olivia (above), a downbeat film that's beautifully played by its cast, including Keeley Hawes as Dahl's wife, the actress Patricia Neal. Tom Hanks gives yet another wonderful performance in Paul Greengrass' earthy Western News of the World, matched by a fierce turn from the wondrous Helena Zengel. Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston yearn for each other in the aching period drama The World to Come. Jude Law and Carrie Coon find cracks in their high-flying life in the insidious 1980s drama The Nest. Sophia Loren shines brightly in the terrific Italian comedy-drama The Life Ahead. Diane Lane and Kevin Costner have a happy life in Let Him Go, until they really, really don't.

There were also a few guilty pleasures this week. Gerard Butler stars in the catastrophic comet strike thriller Greenland, which is far more entertaining than expected. Hilary Swank is downright nasty in Fatale, a dopey noir-style semi-erotic thriller. And Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor takes on director Anurag Kashyap in the clever pastiche action comedy AK vs AK.

Indie movies included Steven Yeun leading a terrific ensemble in the acclaimed drama Minari, about a Korean family in Arkansas; Boaz Yakin's swirling gender-bending dance-infused drama Aviva; the naturalistic, finely observed immigrant drama Farewell Amor; and the fiercely artful surreal thriller The One You Feed. From Colombia, Luz: The Flower of Evil is a wonderfully stylised horror packed with bonkers touches. And there were two seriously intense documentaries: The Dissident traces the horrific assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudis in Turkey, while the thriller-style Welcome to Chechnya following activists trying to rescue young gay people hunted down in Russia.

I'm taking a few days off from movies around Christmas. Then I'll dive in and watch Judi Dench in a new all-star version of Blythe Spirit, Michelle Pfeiffer in French Exit, the comedy Freshman Year, the Greek drama Apples and the Italian documentary The Truffle Hunters. Others are bound to pop up before voting deadlines close in soon.

Critical Week: Monkey business

The onslaught of family-friendly movies continued at press screening this week, and I think we might have seen everything now in this particular wave. The biggest movie is Dora and the Lost City of Gold, starring Isabela Moner, Eva Longoria and a scene-stealing Michael Pena as the explorer family on the hunt for a legendary Inca city. It's very, very silly, but also a lot of fun. The Art of Racing in the Rain, by contrast, takes the heartwarming approach to a story about a dog and his race-driver master (Milo Ventimiglia). It's even sillier. As for animation, there was UglyDolls, a lively and engaging if relentlessly corny fable about misfit toys. And Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion is finely animated and quite sophisticated in its humour, even it if it's also thoroughly ridiculous.

More serious fare included the offbeat drama The Peanut Butter Falcon, an involving and gorgeously shot and performed road movie starring Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Johnson. Halle Berry and Daniel Craig star in Kings, an uneven but audacious experiential take on the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The British drama The Last Tree is a strikingly beautiful coming-of-age drama that's emotionally resonant but never feels terribly deep. Also from Britain, Wicked Witches is a very cheaply made but thoroughly nasty horror about female vampires (not actually witches). And the American indie Ecco is an ambitious thriller that struggles on various fronts.

This coming week's screenings include Julianne Moore in After the Wedding, Naomi Watts in Luce, Lupita Nyong'o in Little Monsters, the pre-teen drama Good Boys, the rom-com One Last Night and the Iranian drama Permission. I'm also watching films that will feature at this year's FrightFest, later this month in London.

Critical Week: Mr Cool

Don Cheadle's passion project Miles Ahead was screened to UK critics just as it was released in the US. It's a strikingly impressionistic biopic, avoiding the usual structure for a more kaleidoscopic approach that's visually impressive and emotionally tricky. Natalie Portman is terrifically steely in the Western Jane Got a Gun, which kind of loses track of its characters as it becomes more focussed on the action violence. Oddly, both films costar Ewan McGregor.

Also this week, Kevin Costner stars in Criminal, a fiendishly entertaining bit of high-concept action set in London. Rebecca Ferguson is solid in two roles in the rather moody Cold War romance Despite the Falling Snow. And Nicolaj Lie Kaas and Fares Fares are back for another cold case in the astutely well-made if oddly un-resonant The Absent One.

Even more interesting was the lunch I attended on Thursday at which the Critics' Circle presented Maggie Smith with our annual award for Services to the Arts, voted on by all six sections of the circle (film, theatre, music, dance, art, books). It was a lively event, and a very rare chance to hang out with the national treasure that is Dame Maggie, who was on great form. Alas, I didn't get up the nerve to tell her that I first saw her in person on-stage at a taping of The Carol Burnett Show when I was only 13!

Coming up this week: Disney's live-action remake of The Jungle Book, the British thriller Hard Tide, the British comedy Adult Life Skills, Peter Greenaway's Eisenstein at Guanjuato, the Bollywood blockbuster Fan and the American politician documentary Weiner.

Critical Week: A dog's life

One of the quirkier press events critics face is the presentation of footage from an unfinished film. Sometimes this involves chatting with filmmakers and cast members while watching scenes that aren't quite complete, other times they show us essentially an extended trailer. Usually we don't want to see snippets and scenes before we have a chance to see the whole film, but Disney's upcoming animated adventure Big Hero 6 is rather interesting, and they lured us along with promises of a San Fransokyo breakfast (turns out that sushi is rather delicious at 10am) as well as a screening of the completed short film Feast (above), which will accompany the feature. Producer Roy Conli had so much energy that he easily whipped us into a frenzy of anticipation for the movie. The footage we saw (about 30 minutes total) was seriously impressive, and Feast is simply amazing. The film opens in November in the US and January in the UK, so who knows when UK critics will see the whole thing.

As for regular screenings, we were shown two big films just days before they opened in Britain: Magic in the Moonlight is a warm and funny rom-com from Woody Allen with Colin Firth and Emma Stone, while The Giver is yet another teen dystopia thriller with a potent cast including Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep and Brenton Thwaites. Kevin Costner is terrific in Draft Day, an NFL variation on Moneyball that's likely to struggle to find an audience outside America. The Babadook is a fiercely clever horror film from Australia, layering the terror with deeper meaning. Not Cool is a silly comedy that has a bit of unexpected substance. And there were two dreamy and ultimately rather cold freak-outs: The Scribbler dips into mental illness, while You and the Night touches on sex-obsession.

Press screenings are also underway for the 58th BFI London Film Festival (which runs 8-19 October). I've caught up with a few, including Jason Reitman's Men, Women and Children, Christophe Honore's Metamorphoses, the period Maori action movie The Dead Lands and a new documentary about Hockney. Comments will come during the festival.

Coming this week along with the LFF screenings: Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl, Dakota Fanning in Emma Thompson's Effie Gray, Susan Sarandon in The Calling, Ira Sachs' Love Is Strange, Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy, Michael Bay's take on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and more...

Critical Week: Play nicely

Among the bigger movies screened to London press this past week, Disney's Million Dollar Arm is the latest baseball-themed movie that will make a valiant attempt to crack the UK box office when it opens here in August (they rarely do well). It helps that the film stars Jon Hamm, and that it includes a cricket element. It's also a thoroughly engaging little film - never as edgy as it should be, but with a very strong script and cast.

We also saw Clint Eastwood's Jersey Boys at a screening introduced by a few Four Seasons numbers from the West End stage show cast, including a couple of the film's stars. The movie is a bit too gritty and dry to really take off, but the songs are great. Meanwhile, Kevin Costner gives a wonderfully wheezy performance as a washed-up CIA hitman in 3 Days to Kill, which turns into a marvellously silly Taken-style thriller just as he's finally bonding with teen daughter Hailee Steinfeld. A nice guilty pleasure.

Further afield, the British horror-thriller Keeping Rosy stars the excellent Maxine Peake as a woman who does something unthinkable, then struggles to undo it. Cool, tense and involving. Laura Michelle Kelly stars in the musical-comedy Goddess, which is far too contrived to properly engage the audience, even with decent performances and ok songs. Wakolda is a superbly insinuating thriller from Argentina about a young teen girl in 1960s Patagonia who befriends a German doctor who just might be Josef Mengele. And The Man Whose Mind Exploded is a wonderful doc about Drako Zarharzar, a colourful eccentric in Brighton who's unable to form new memories and has a lot to say about ageing and memory.

Coming this week: Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo in Begin Again, Richard Linklater's Boyhood, the British rom-com Love Me Till Monday and the penis museum doc The Final Member. And then I'm taking a no-films-allowed holiday for a week!