Critical Week: Here kitty kitty

With the summer blockbuster season now winding down, films screened this week have been a little less mainstream. First, there was the Australian horror thriller Bring Her Back, which stars Sally Hawkins as a foster mother with terrifyingly grisly intentions (pictured are Jonah Wren Phillips with the cat Junkman). It's extremely violent rather than suspenseful, skilfully made by the Philippou brothers to make the audience squirm. And then there's Oh, Hi!, a very dark spin on the romantic comedy starring Logan Lerman and Molly Gordon. It's funny, sexy and surprisingly nasty too.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
2000 Meters to Andriivka
The Naked Gun • Late Shift
Dreams • The Bad Guys 2
ALL REVIEWS >

Even further afield, there was the British drama The Ceremony, which follows two immigrant workers on a mission into the wintry, rainy Yorkshire moors, beautifully shot in black and white with an edgy and somewhat elusive story. Young Hearts is a seriously charming coming-of-age story from Belgium, using a youthful point of view to explore both first love and endemic prejudice. The final chapter of the Oslo Stories Trilogy is Sex, which is a conversation-based drama full of naturalistic performances and pointed insights into connections. And the documentary 2000 Meters to Andriivka, by Oscar-winner Mstyslav Chernov, is a stunner, embedding the audience with a group of young soldiers who are fighting Russians in the Ukraine. It's essential viewing. I also attended the world premiere of the second season of the Netflix show Wednesday, a lavish event attended by Tim Burton, the creators and the entire cast (Insta post below).

This coming week I'll be watching Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freakier Friday, Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson in the action comedy The Pickup, the horror thriller Weapons, French comedy Les Musiciens, the naturalistic Bambi: A Tale of Life in the Woods, and a live performance of Lost Watches at Park Theatre.

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LFF: Tell your story

Aside from watching everything online, another major difference in this year's London Film Festival is that there isn't that usual nagging feeling that somewhere else in the city there are parties and filmmakers and actors hanging out having fun without you. This year everyone's joining in from home, aside from a precious few actual screenings. Here are two more highlights, plus this week's non-festival roundup...

Shirley

dir Josephine Decker; with Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg 20/US **.

A fictional story involving iconic author Shirley Jackson is told with inventive style by director Josephine Decker, who infuses the screen with imagery and sounds that play on Jackson's work, using wildly colourful flourishes and nods to murky horror tropes. The actors are superb as people who become twisted around each other. But the story never quite clicks into gear, so it's only the creepy tension that keeps us watching.

The Painter and the Thief

dir Benjamin Ree; with Barbora Kysilkova, Karl-Bertil Nordland 20/Nor ****

Playing out as a fascinating dramatic narrative, this documentary unfolds its story using found footage, surveillance cameras and remarkably intimate fly-on-the-wall sequences. Filmmaker Benjamin Ree is following the extraordinary story of an unexpected friendship, two people who shouldn't be able to see each other with such remarkable clarity. Perhaps they recognise that they're both survivors of difficult situations. And in many ways they're still struggling to get through.

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C R I T I C A L   W E E K

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Black Box • Kajillionaire
Song Lang • Yes 
PERHAPS AVOID:
The War With Grandpa 
FULL REVIEWS >

In between the festival films, I managed to watch the amusing but badly underpowered slapstick comedy The War With Grandpa, the guilty pleasure twisty sci-fi thriller Black Box, the provocative black comedy Yes, the warm midlife crisis comedy From the Vine, the scruffy road movie Making Tracks, the bonkers Turkish parable The Antenna, the meandering French odyssey The Wanderings of Ivan, and the moving Vietnamese drama Song Lang.

And this coming week I need to fit these in around LFF screenings: Paul Bettany in Uncle Frank, the horror films Evil Eye and Nocturne, the mystery Don't Look Back, and a doc called JR "Bob" Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius.

Critical Week: Dress to impress

Lockdown rolls on, with another random batch of movies to watch this week. I'm always hoping there will be a gem hidden in there somewhere. The weather has been glorious in London, so I ventured out for a picnic one day, seeing friends (at a safe distance) for the first time in two months. It kind of gives you hope that this will all end someday. Meanwhile, one of this week's movies, the action comedy The Lovebirds, offered some ideas about how to dress to spice up those Zoom meetings. It's a dopey bit of fluff, but kind of just right for these times, and Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae make a unexpectedly terrific duo.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
I'm No Longer Here • Snowpiercer
Only the Animals • End of Sentence
The Man Standing Next

John Hawkes and Logan Lerman are another solid double-act in End of Sentence, an engaging father-son road movie set in Ireland. Mario Van Peebles makes the B-movie crime drama A Clear Shot almost worth watching, plus the fact that it's based on a real hostage event. But it's very cheesy. There are no big-name actors in the sweet romance Angelfish, but it's charming enough. The French mystery thriller Only the Animals is expertly directed by Dominik Moll with an excellent ensemble cast and a twisty, involving plot. From Korea, The Man Standing Next is a riveting, exceptionally well-made thriller about the real-life assassination of the Korean president in 1979. From Thailand, Krabi 2562 is a moody experimental doc about the collision of past and present in a tourist city. And The Uncertain Kingdom is a collection of 20 short films addressing current issues in Britain (nine of them were screened to the press in January, and I saw the other 11 this week). Specially commissioned, the fascinatingly varied clips were made to explore the wake of Brexit, and have an additional resonance amid the pandemic chaos.

I have a rather long list of movies to watch over the next week, so we'll see how many of these I get around to: Dakota Johnson in The High Note, Sebastian Stan in The Last Full Measure, Luke Wilson in Guest of Honor, Willem Dafoe in Tommaso, the small-town drama To the Stars, the horror thriller The Dinner Party, the German drama The Collini Case and the documentary Homosaywhat.

LFF 10: At the end of the war

Brad Pitt invaded London to wrap up the 58th London Film Festival tonight with his World War II batttle epic Fury. He was accompanied by his entire tank team (around Pitt above: Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal) as well as filmmaker David Ayer, and their press conference following the morning screening was a combination of reverence for veterans and brotherly camaraderie developed over the shooting process.

Meanwhile, journalists feel like we've been through a war since press screenings started in mid-September - averaging three or four movies a day since - but it's all over now, and hopefully we can get back to full nights of sleep. Although on Wednesday, I'm heading to Abu Dhabi to serve on the jury of their film festival 23-31 October. But that will feel like a holiday compared to London! Until then, here are some final highlights....

Fury
dir David Ayer; with Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf 14/UK ***
Writer-director Ayer makes no attempt to update the rah-rah bombast of the WWII genre, indulging in big action, the usual plot points, faux heroism and "war is hell" rhetoric. The film is sharply assembled and very nicely acted by a terrific cast, but it ultimately feels oddly pointless.

3 Hearts
dir Benoit Jacquot; with Benoit Poelvoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg 14/Fr 1h46 ***.
A twisty love story shot and edited as if it's a dark thriller, this odd film is utterly riveting mainly because it's impossible to predict what the characters are going to do next. At its core, this is a love triangle. But the film is assembled with attention to the most insinuating, creepy detail, confident enough to allow the characters to slip in and out of sympathy along the way.

Second Coming
dir Debbie Tucker Green; with Nadine Marshall, Idris Elba 14/UK **
Beautifully shot with an attention to internal intensity, this low-budget British drama should carry an emotional wallop. But filmmaker Tucker Green infuriatingly refuses to fill in any details, leaving dialog incomplete, the plot blurry and the characters' feelings as mere hints of something bigger. The acting feels raw and very personal, but without having a clue what's happening the film remains maddeningly elusive.

President

dir Mohsen Makhmalbaf; with Misha Gomiashvili, Dachi Orvelashvili 14/Geo 1h45 ****

Now based in London, exiled Iranian filmmaker Makhmalbaf pulls no punches in this blackly comical political adventure. Set in an "unnamed country" (it was filmed in Georgia), it's a story of political oppression told from perspectives that are rarely represented on screen with this much honesty and warm humour, forcing the audience to consider the themes from unthinkable angles.

Critical Week: I've got your back

Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington provided some muscle for British critics this week in the action-comedy 2 Guns, which surprisingly is more skilfully written, directed and acted than most of this summer's action options. A pumped-up Wahlberg turned up to meet the press, right off the plane from the set of Transformers 4, charming us with his chatter. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa turns out to be another above-par action-comedy - it's a hilariously well-written and impeccably played romp bringing Steve Coogan's iconic 1990s radio/TV character to the big screen. The week's other big movie was the sequel no one really asked for, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. It's pacey and perfectly thrilling for its target pre-teen audience.

More high-brow fare came with Julianne Moore in What Maisie Knew, a strikingly astute family drama costarring Steve Coogan (again!), Alexander Skarsgard and astonishing newcomer Onata Aprile. We also had the trashy delights of Paul Shrader's The Canyons, starring a frazzled Lindsay Lohan alongside swaggering porn-icon James Deen; the fiercely clever and not quite as bleak conclusion to Ulrich Seidl's trilogy Paradise: Hope; the impeccably made but far too long girl-gang drama Foxfire; Ferzan Ozpetek's latest clever mix of present-day Italy with the ghosts of WWII in A Magnificent Haunting; and the involving true story of a gender-bending scandal at the Olympics in Berlin '36.

Coming this week: Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, Paul Rudd in Prince Avalanche, Keri Russell in Austenland, Bryan Cranston in Cold Comes the Night, Kristen Scott Thomas in Looking for Hortense, the Austrian-Turkish drama Kuma, Rikki Beadle Blair's bigotry drama Bashment and Lucy Walker's snowboarder doc The Crash Reel.

Critical Week: Pick a card, any card

In a very busy screening week in London, we finally caught up with the magician heist thriller Now You See Me, which starts as an enjoyable romp with a terrific cast (including Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman) before turning very silly indeed. From here we move through the genres: romance came with Stuck in Love, a slick ensemble film (Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Lily Cole) in which relationships are all very tidy; terror came from Ethan Hawke in the thoughtful and genuinely scary dystopic horror The Purge and the derivative but ultimately enjoyably nutty The Last Exorcism Part II; and topical thrills came from the oddly involving eco-terrorism drama The East and the darkly inventive human trafficking drama Eden.

Off the beaten path, we had the deeply charming coming-of-age drama The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom, the controversially explicit but darkly thoughtful gay drama I Want Your Love, and Ulrich Seidl's chilling and blackly comical sex-tourism drama Paradise: Love. And finally, there were three docs: Sarah Polley's staggeringly inventive and moving exploration of her own family history in Stories We Tell, Shane Meadows' beautifully assembled exploration of a rock band in The Stone Roses: Made of Stone, and a somewhat indulgent but fascinating look at Johnny Cash's manager in My Father and the Man in Black.

This coming week we have Brad Pitt in the zombie blockbuster World War Z, the prequel Monsters University, Tina Fey in Admission, the second part of Ulrich Seidl's trilogy Paradise: Faith, the Indonesia massacre documentary The Act of Killing, Irish filmmaker Pat Collins' aural documentary Silence, a special BFI presentation by James Franco of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and the lavish restoration of Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra up on the big screen where it belongs.