Critical Week: Ready, aim, fire

Things are definitely cranking up in London as awards season takes over screening rooms across the city. Many of the big hitters from recent festivals are being screened for those of us who vote in various awards. There's not a free evening in my diary for a few weeks. After a clash prevented me from attending the only press screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, they made public showings available, so I was able to watch it in glorious VistaVision this week. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall and Chase Infiniti (above) and is a thrillingly entertaining rollercoaster ride.  

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Urchin • The Smashing Machine
The Lost Bus • The Shadow's Edge
Scared Sh*tless
PERHAPS AVOID:
Him • The Ice Tower
ALL REVIEWS >

I also caught up with Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, in which Ethan Hawke gives a superb one-man-show kind of turn as legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart. Riz Ahmed and Lily James are excellent in David Mackenzie's nerve-jangling and smartly twisty thriller Relay. Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers give it their all in the horror thriller Him, but it never amounts to much. And Malcolm McDowell turns up in The Partisan, the intriguing but dryly told true story of a female Polish spy (played by Morgane Polanski) working for Britain during WWII. I also attended live performances of the disco-tastic KC and the Sunshine Band musical Get Down Tonight at Charing Cross Theatre and Andrea Peña's rather elusive Bogotá at Sadler's Wells East.

Films this coming week include George Clooney in Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, Idris Elba in Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite and Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in Kiss of the Spider Woman. The 69th London Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday with Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunit Wake Up Dead Man. And there's a live performance of Ghost Stories at the Peacock Theatre.

Critical Week: And I feel fine

By far the most enjoyable press screening of the past week was the apocalyptic comedy This Is the End (with James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride, above). Reviews are embargoed for a couple of weeks so I can't say any more. We also had screenings of Baz Luhrmann's lavishly entertaining version of The Great Gatsby, which sharply captures the hollowness under the hedonistic excess. Then there was the underwritten British spy thriller The Numbers Station starring John Cusack, and Marlon Wayans' ghost-movie spoof A Haunted House, which is better than it looks but still a missed opportunity.

Further off the beaten path we had the fragmented British romance/drama/romp Spike Island, a choppy story about teen Stone Roses fans in 1990; the topical and deeply involving low-budget German drama The Visitor; and a 50th anniversary restoration of John Schlesinger's timeless British comedy Billy Liar, starring the fabulous Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie. It's simply wonderful - get your hands on a copy.

Just before it opens, the press will finally get to see the end of the trilogy with The Hangover Part III. I also have screenings of Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, the thriller Black Rock, Studio Gibli's From Up on Poppy Hill, the Canadian comedy The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mum and the French drama Atomic Age. And it's another long weekend here, so maybe I can carry on catching up with my stack of DVD screeners.