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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Festival Days: It's a conspiracy

Another film in both the Edinburgh and East End film festival is the eco-terrorism thriller The East, which also opened in UK cinemas this weekend. It's an intriguing cinematic experiment, playing with issues we usually only see in documentaries while also merging arthouse filmmaking sensibilities with some suspense-based thrills. In other words, there's something for everyone here!

As for screenings this week, I caught up with the East End Film Festival closer Lovelace, a someone straight-laced biopic of the world's most famous porn star. It's sharply well made and is packed with strong performances and amusing cameos. Daniel Radcliffe plays Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, a true story set in his pre-writer days when he was in school with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac (Ben Foster and Jack Huston). My comments on the film are embargoed for now, even though there are reviews all over the internet after its screenings at various film festivals, including Sundance in January. I also saw the film of Neil LaBute's play Some Girl(s), a provocative, thoughtful, slightly stagey drama starring Adam Brody. And there was also Emperor, a fictionalised take on how General MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) dealt with Emperor Hirohito after the war - plus a bit of romance and drama featuring Matthew Fox.

And I also saw a couple of other East End Film Festival titles: the hilarious mock-doc Discoverdale, which is like an Irish version of This Is Spinal Tap, although the band at the centre is a real one. And In the Name of is a wrenching drama from Poland about a priest struggling with his personal yearnings. Both are highly recommended.