Critical Week: To the stars

It's been nice to see new films coming into cinemas for a change, alongside the continuing trickle of festival gems from last year. Perhaps the biggest movie yet, Project Hail Mary is almost a one-man show for Ryan Gosling, and it's enormously entertaining on several levels: as a comedy, thriller and outer space adventure. Include Sandra Huller back on earth and a genuinely charming friendship with a rock-like alien. Glen Powell leads How to Make a Killing, a remake of the classic black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets that starts well but struggles to find a consistent tone. And Pixar's first film this year is Hoppers, a colourfully amiable romp with adorable critters and a wacky sci-fi twist in the premise.

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Further afield, I caught a big-screen presentation of the inventive Chinese epic Resurrection, with an on-screen Q&A with filmmaker Bi Gan. It's fiercely original, visually stunning, thematically a bit bewildering. The French drama Wild Foxes is a beautifully assembled drama about teen boxers, exploring machismo with a remarkably light touch. Also from France, the rather talky but beautifully animated biopic A Magnificent Life traces author and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol's life as a history of cinema itself. And from Japan, the anime crime drama The Last Blossom gets under the skin with its quietly involving storytelling. I also attended the European premiere of the emotionally intense TV series The Madison, with the entire cast in attendance, including Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell (see below).

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Jesse Buckley in The Bride (buying a cinema ticket tomorrow because I couldn't attend the one press screening), Maika Monroe in Reminders of Him, Ferzan Ozpetek's Diamonds, Japanese/British drama A Pale View of Hills, Oscar-nominated doc Cutting Through Rocks, and quite a few movies in the BFI's Cinema Made in Italy season. I'll also attend a live performance of Sugar Daddy at Underbelly Boulevard.

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Critical Week: Into the night

Screenings continue to slow down in the run-up to Cannes. But there are things we need to see! It was great to watch Tye Sheridan continues to prove himself as an actor with the lead role in Detour. It's a clever, tricky thriller with an inventively fractured narrative. Of course the big movie this week was the highly anticipated sequel Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, which reunites the team for a bigger adventure that lacks the free-spirited tone of the original but is still a lot of fun.

From Scotland, Whisky Galore is a remake of the 1949 classic about residents of a remote island who lay claim to the cargo of a wrecked ship during WWII. It's a gentle comedy, amusing but never very exciting. Further afield, Slack Bay is an oddly comical period romp from controversy-courting filmmaker Bruno Dumont. It stars Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini in an enjoyably farcical story involving snobbery, crime and religion. Much darker, The Student is a Russian drama about a teen who becomes a Christian fundamentalist and begins manipulating everyone in his school. It's chilling and very sharp. And from Greece, Suntan follows a shy middle-aged doctor who falls headlong into the hedonistic summer tourist season. It's well-made and involving, but a little too pointed.

Oddly, I have no screenings in the diary over the next seven days. It's the long weekend this month in London, and things always go quiet at this time of year (call it pre-Cannes gloom). I do have screeners to watch at home, and we are awaiting word of press screenings for the soon-arriving Alien: Covenant, Snatched and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, among others.

Critical Week: A winter's tale

Quentin Tarantino's latest epic The Hateful Eight has finally bowed to critics, and it's an oddly uneven film - an intriguing idea with moments of skilful inventiveness and a solid cast, but the nagging sense that it's all rather pointless and indulgent.

Also screening this week: Robert DeNiro and Zac Efron in the rude road comedy Dirty Grandpa, Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie in the enjoyably edgy rom-com Sleeping With Other People, Matthias Schoenaerts in the fiendishly clever and unsettling Belgian PTSD drama Disorder, and the irritatingly fragmented Romanian sculptor biopic Brancusi From Eternity.

Meanwhile, I still have a bunch of films to watch before the next round of voting in critics awards. Since I have no more press screenings until January 4th, I should have time to catch up with screeners of awards-worthy movies, plus binge-watching TV series I've been saving up. I'll also be finalising my year-end lists over the next week. So it should be a nice Christmas! Hope yours is good too...

LFF 4: Strike a pose

The 59th London Film Festival forges ahead with more red carpet mania (that's Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren and John Goodman out last night, for Trumbo). It's only Day 4 and I'm already suffering from burn-out, so tonight I'm taking a break and heading to the theatre! That should help me face the coming eight days, even with those nasty 8.45am press screenings. Thankfully the films have been good enough to (mostly) keep me awake. More highlights...

Bone Tomahawk 
dir S Craig Zahler; with Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson 15/US ***.
A fresh take on the Western genre, this film combines dark drama with snappy wit and grisly horror to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. So while it's riveting and unpredictable, with strikingly bold performances from the entire cast, it's also vaguely ridiculous in its grotesque exaggeration of frontier fears about Native Americans.

The Program
dir Stephen Frears; with Ben Foster, Chris O'Dowd 15/UK ***. 
With a quick pace and steely tone, this drama traces Lance Armstrong's career in a strikingly lucid way. Never simplistic, it sees the events through the cyclist's own perspective, acknowledging the moral issues while carefully exploring why a sportsman would cheat his way to success. Anchored by a bracing performance from Foster, this is also one of the edgiest movies in Frears' eclectic filmography

Couple in a Hole 
dir Tom Geens; with Paul Higgins, Kate Dickie 15/UK **. 
Like something from the Greek new wave, this film takes a surreal look at fundamental human emotions through a premise that feels both fantastical and eerily realistic. On the other hand, this particular parable is far too on-the-nose, never quite coming up with anything very insightful. Still, it's packed with unexpected twists and characters that defy expectations.

Men & Chicken 
dir Anders Thomas Jensen; with Mads Mikkelsen, David Dencik 15/Den **** 
A wickedly grotesque look at family connections, this Danish black comedy is both hugely entertaining and utterly bonkers. A mixture of scientific creepiness and Three Stooges-style slapstick, the film defiantly refuses to fit into a genre. Which makes it gloriously entertaining in all the wrong ways.

Aligarh
dir Hansal Mehta; with Manoj Bajpai, Rajkummar Rao 15/Ind ****
It would be easy to write off this true drama as something that could only happen in India, but the film has striking layers of global resonance. Not only is it a vivid depiction of the struggle for human rights, in this case relating to sexuality, but it's also a subtle indictment of how Western media have created a need for everyone to be put into their appropriate box. And it's written, directed and acted with remarkable sensitivity and insight.