Critical Week: Beach weather

The heatwave continues to bake Britain, with the promise of thunderstorms to cool things off this weekend. Cinemas are open to full capacity, and their air conditioning is a great way to escape the stickiness. Although there's still a sense that people are looking to stay safe from this new surge in the pandemic. Critics have been wearing masks at screenings, including M Night Shyamalan's new thriller Old, starring Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff and Gael Garcia Bernal. It's an enjoyably head-spinning freak-out. Matt Damon stars Stillwater, which recently screened at Cannes. It's a big movie, overlong and a bit contrived, but beautifully performed by Damon, Camille Cottin, Abigail Breslin and especially little scene-stealer Lilou Siauvaud.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Night of the Kings • Kandisha
The Man With the Answers
PERHAPS AVOID:
Joe Bell
ALL REVIEWS >

Mark Wahlberg stars in Joe Bell, a solidly made true drama that kind of misses the central point of its homophobia theme. Nicolas Cage is terrific in the above-average offbeat drama Pig. Ben Platt and Lola Kirke are both strong in Broken Diamonds, a slightly too-gentle look at mental illness. The solid horror thriller The Boy Behind the Door has two excellent young teen stars and some properly nerve-jangling suspense. The Pebble and the Boy is a slightly awkward British road-trip drama infused with Mod culture. And the superb French thriller Kandisha puts a multi-cultural community at risk from a demon, while filling scenes with nuance.

Sundance Film Festival London returns to Picturehouse Central next week, and I have 12 in-person press screenings in the diary for that, plus Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in Jungle Cruise, the drama Lorelei and horror The Offering.

Critical Week: Plot your escape

I caught up this week with three films that are circling in awards season this year, but are only just now being screened for London critics. The documentary Minding the Gap is a provocative look at three childhood friends in Rockport, Illinois. It's relaxed, entertaining and darkly moving. A more artfully poetic doc, Hale County This Morning, This Evening explores similar themes, focussing on young men who dream of escaping their close community in rural Alabama. It's sumptuously shot, and remarkably introspective. And the Italian drama Happy as Lazzaro is a masterful fable about how humanity hasn't really changed with modernisation. This is told through the magical tale of an engaging young farmhand who simply never has a mean thought in his head.

The one big movie I saw this week was M Night Shyamalan's Glass, which brings together two of his earlier films (2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split) to deconstruct superhero mythology. It's creepy and almost startlingly serious, with meaty performances from leads James McEvoy, Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. Tom Everett Scott stars in the high-concept comedy I Hate Kids, which is amusing but never very funny. James Franco has a brief role in Don't Come Back From the Moon, an elusive but compellingly well-made drama set in the California desert. The Hole in the Ground is an Irish horror movie that's scary but a bit thin. And Pond Life is a lushly shot British drama featuring a superb ensemble of teen actors over a summer of yearning.

I attended the event at which the British Board of Film Classification announced its new guidelines this week. Every five years they canvas more than 10,000 people around the country to update what people expect from the UK's film ratings system. The changes are intriguing, with harder lines taken toward sexual violence and discriminatory language and imagery.

This coming Sunday is the 39th London Critics' Circle Film Awards, which I chair. I've been rather swamped with organising that over the past few months, and especially this week. Look for a report with pics next week. I also have some screenings lined up, including Jonah Hill's Mid90s, Alex Lawther in Old Boys, the Polish drama Nina and a doc called ParTy Boi.

Critical Week: Looking for the right mix

It's been another eclectic week of press screenings for London-based critics. We Are Your Friends is an engaging L.A.-set drama starring Zac Efton as a DJ looking for his voice. Straight Outta Compton has already stormed the American box office, and comes to Britain next week - it's the gripping, gritty story of NWA's rise to fame in the 1990s. And even though it stars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, and is written and directed by Cameron Crowe, Aloha was so wobbly in America that it's going straight to video in the UK. It doesn't really work, but it isn't that awful either.


We also had two films costarring the wonderful Kathryn Hahn: M Night Shyamalan's new film The Visit (comments are embargoed until closer to the release), and Jack Black and James Marsden in the surprisingly bold and thoughtful comedy The D Train. And there was also: Owen Wilson and Lake Bell in the seriously suspenseful chase thriller No Escape; Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston in the amazing, arty friendship drama Queen of Earth; and the amusing B-movie vampire-mayhem workplace comedy Bloodsucking Bastards.

This coming week we've got Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van, Kevin Bacon in Cop Car, Nicholas Hoult in Kill Your Friends, Cary Elwes in A Haunting in Cawdor, the Sundance winner Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, the South African comedy-drama Leading Lady, and the activism doc How to Change the World. And it's a long weekend, so I should be able to catch up on some screeners at home.