Critical Week: Dress to impress

With another long weekend, it's been a shorter than usual week of screenings. But I still kept pretty busy. The biggest release screened to the press, barely before it opened, was The Hustle, a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. As a comedy it's rather weak, but has some funny moments all the way through. There were also two British period biopics. Tolkien is an impeccably produced look at the early life of JRR Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult), although it's a bit dry since it takes place before he wrote anything. The Professor and the Madman follows the tenacious work of James Murray (Mel Gibson) to define the English language and produce the first Oxford English Dictionary, with the help of an in-patient at Broodmoor asylum (Sean Penn). Despite the troubled production, it's a fascinating story, strikingly well acted.

Further afield we had the moving, dark British indie drama Last Summer, about young teens in small-town Wales dealing with a wrenching community crisis. And the even darker American indie drama Just Say Goodbye takes on teen suicide with a perhaps too-provocative story about friendship and parenthood. We also caught the superb documentary XY Chelsea, which closely follows whistleblower Chelsea Manning between two incarcerations. It's involving and even inspiring, taking on those who label her a traitor. And since it's finally out for streaming/etc in the UK, here's a longer take on this doc I saw a few weeks back...

Fahrenheit 11/9
dir-scr Michael Moore; with Michael Moore, Timothy Snyder, Jenifer Lewis, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg 18/US 2h08 ****

Michael Moore was one of the only pundits who predicted the Trump presidency. So this long but watchable and important doc opens with the massive upset of election night 2016, from Clinton supporters' pre-voting revelry turning into gloom to the shocked faces of Team Trump, which clearly didn't expect to win. From here, Moore spins back to look at how Trump accidentally got into the race while trying to increase his profile in contract negotiations with NBC. His racist comments backfired (NBC fired him), but he touched a nerve with a segment of the American public. Masterfully manipulating the media, which was making a fortune from covering his antics, Trump had a long history with Russian mobsters and the media leaders taken down for abusing women. Moore also documents his overt racism and misogyny over many decades, all of which was public knowledge. Similarly, his treasonous behaviour since taking office has also been out in the open.

As usual, Moore connects this to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder (a Trump buddy) declared a fake emergency to essentially privatise the poor, black city, callously poisoning it then covering up the escalating disaster. This takes up a good chunk of the film, and rightly so. Back to the main topic, Moore's dissection of the US electorate is fascinating: the truth is that liberal '60s values reflect the average American today; the Republicans have only won the popular vote in one presidential election in the last 30 years ("You can't call it a democracy if the person who wins the most votes doesn't win"). Moore also covers the fraud among the Democrats, such as how anyone who breaks from the centrist line is suppressed (as was Bernie Sanders), and how in many ways Obama paved the way for Trump. So it was no wonder people were willing to break the system with a protest vote.

Finally, Moore dives into gun control in the wake of the Parkland shootings an teens who refused to sit quietly and accept "thoughts and prayers". The salient point here is that candidates are representing their donors, not the voters. And Moore's most powerful message is that we need to ignore attempts to divide us against each other, rise up and create the government we deserve. History tells us that the US is becoming less democratic and more despotic by the day. So this film's carefully documented conclusions should chill us to the bone.

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This coming week, we'll be watching Keanu Reeves in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, Julianne Moore in Gloria Bell and the documentaries Apollo 11, General Magic, The Lavender Scare and Nomad. Plus a couple of stage shows, just for a change of scenery.

Critical Week: Your biggest fan

I caught up with one of my most-anticipated films of the year this week, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Not only am I an unapologetic Julianne Moore fan, but films by David Cronenberg have been thrilling and tormenting me since I started writing about movies (starting with Scanners and Videodrome). Maps to the Stars challenges audiences with a glamorous and gruesome trawl through Hollywood's inbred underbelly. Cannes Best Actress Moore is of course amazing, as is another favourite of mine, Olivia Williams. There are also offbeat, clever performances from Mia Wasikowska (above), Robert Pattinson, Evan Bird and John Cusack.

It was a busy week, as I got back up to speed after five days off. Big movies included Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua's slick but formulaic The Equalizer, loosely based on the 1980s TV series; the rather off-putting British posh-university drama The Riot Club, which has a terrific rising-star cast including Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Douglas Booth; and Claflin in rom-com mode opposite Lily Collins in Love, Rosie.

There were also two foreign films: the Brazilian drama The Way He Looks, which won the Teddy at Berlin, is an utterly charming coming-of-age movie expanded from the award-winning short I Don't Want to Go Back Alone; and Human Capital is a strikingly bold Italian film that kind of bungles its central theme but thrills with its twisty plot. And there were four docs: Filmed in Supermarionation is the lively and witty story of Gerry Anderson (best known for Thunderbirds); Born to Fly features the goosebump-inducing work of Elizabeth Streb's acrobatic dance/circus group; I'm a Porn Star gets up close and very personal in the gay adult-movie business; and Dick: The Documentary is pretty much what it says on the tin: a group of men photographed from the neck down as they talk about their, ahem, masculinity.

This coming week we have Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight with Colin Firth and Emma Stone; Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children with Adam Sandler and Emma Thompson; The Giver with Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges; the Pittsburgh comedy Not Cool; the Aussie horror movie The Babadook; the multiple-personality thriller The Scribbler; and the British painter documentary Hockney. We're also cranking up for the 58th London Film Festival, which runs 8-19 October - press screenings start next week.

Critical Week: Tell no one

There are a handful of films screened to London critics this past week that we're not allowed to review yet. Insidious: Chapter 2 reunites Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and director James Wan for more ghostly/demonic horror. Riddick reunites Vin Diesel with director David Twohy for a third instalment in the series, 13 years after Pitch Black. And The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones brings a new young-adult franchise about vampires, werewolves and demons to the big screen. That last embargo ends today, and I also attended a press conference yesterday that was much more entertaining than the film, thanks to lively stars Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Robert Sheehan and director Harald Zwart.

There was no embargo needed for the late-in-the-day screening of the entertaining but disappointing sequel Kick-Ass 2, which features original cast members Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz and Christopher Mintz-Plasse with a new writer-director. Luke Evans plays a shady unnamed guy in No One Lives, a high-energy horror film that gleefully entertains fans with a series of grisly deaths.

After all of that, it was nice to have a few grown-up films: Le Week-end is a marvellously written and played drama starring Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan and Jeff Goldblum. Gloria is a strongly engaging Chilean drama about a middle-aged single woman trying to find love. Call Girl is a strikingly well-made Swedish drama about political corruption and a prostitution ring. And Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant cleverly re-interprets Oscar Wilde's story as a gritty tale of hapless tearaway kids in Yorkshire. I also revisited Rene Clement's gorgeously restored 1960 thriller Plein Soleil and Gregg Araki's rather nutty teen sci-fi comedy-drama Nowhere. Both still feel eerily contemporary.

This coming week we have Richard Curtis' About Time, Jennifer Aniston in the comedy We're the Millers, Aubrey Plaza in The To Do List, the British internet thriller Uwantme2killhim?, the Cuban adventure Una Noche and a chance to revisit Terry Gilliam's fantastic Time Bandits, restored for a re-release.