Critical Week: Don't even think about it, punk

As many of London's critics decamp to Venice for the next 10 days, I'm kind of wishing I was there again this year, but glad I can relax just a little. Although the month is pretty busy with screenings and theatre press nights. The summer blockbusters are behind us, and now we have the usual oddball mix of autumn movies. A bigger one this week was Denzel Washington's return to his vigilante character in The Equalizer 3, which is well made enough to be watchable, but it's still a celebration of brutality. Much higher brow was the festival favourite Past Lives, a simply gorgeous debut for writer-director Celine Song and one of the best films I've seen all year. Then somewhere in between we had Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, an entertaining 1930s-set British comedy based on a bonkers true story and starring Simon Pegg and Minnie Driver,

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More offbeat fare included Jennifer Reeder's stylised horror Perpetrator, which inventively explores femininity and gender issues with rather a lot of bloodletting. From Japan, The First Slam Dunk is flat-out one of the best films of the year, an animated basketball drama with great characters and thrilling action. From France, another terrific animated adventure in the lively, music-infused sequel Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia. And I also finally caught up with the 1945 British classic romcom I Know Where I'm Going, which was simply heaven to watch on a big screen. There were also lots of FrightFest films.

This coming week I'll be watching the sequel My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, the Armenian drama Amerikatsi, the British doc A Life on the Farm, and the festival films Big Easy Queens and Summer Qamp.

Critical Week: Follow your nose

In the New Year so far, there have been no actual press screenings, so my movies have been on the small screen. This includes a couple that were made for TV. Benedict Cumberbatch was back for Sherlock: The Six Thatchers, an enjoyable mystery that continued this sporadic series' drift into insufferably smug tricksiness. This includes Sherlock's obsession with Twitter, swiftly abandoned when the plot needs to move. Let's hope upcoming episodes are more focussed on solid storytelling and character development. I also finally caught up with the pilot for The Get Down, directed by Baz Luhrmann. It's a hugely engaging movie set amid the burgeoning rap scene in 1977 New York. There's plenty of whizzy style, as expected, but also a clever depth of character that developed nicely through the following five episodes. I also caught the financial thriller The Crash, which has a starry ensemble cast good enough to make the film watchable despite a startlingly dull script.

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My Scientology Movie
dir John Dower; with Louis Theroux, Marty Rathbun, Marc Headley, Andrew Perez, Rob Alter 16/UK ***.
British journalist Louis Theroux seems to fall into the Twilight Zone as he tries to make a balanced and open-minded, sympathetic documentary about Scientology. Despite never setting out to be combative, he keeps running into bizarre roadblocks, inexplicable reactions and aggressive resistance. Even the ex-members he talks to seem to be less than forthcoming. Some elements of this film don't work very well (such as all of the repetitive driving around or hiring actors to play prominent church members like Tom Cruise), but the film paints an intriguing portrait of an organisation that doesn't want any scrutiny at all - friendly or otherwise. And while Theroux goes out of his way to find the positive aspects of their beliefs and practices, Scientology's rather comically intimidating, incessant meddling ultimately makes it impossible for the audience to remain objective. Which of course ends up being the point.

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Before the Flood
dir Fisher Stevens; scr Mark Monroe; with Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama, Ban Ki-Moon, Pope Francis, Elon Musk, Alejandro Inarritu 16/US ****
This documentary may be rather pushy, but then it's about what should be the most important issue facing humanity at the moment: climate change. The film follows DiCaprio as he travels around the world for two years as a United Nations messenger of peace, asking questions, talking with leaders and experts, exploring the situation from devastated boreal forests to melting ice caps to burnt-out jungles to the flooded streets of Miami. Scientists have almost never so wholeheartedly agreed on any issue, including what needs to be done to slow the changes and avert catastrophe. And yet idiots (most of whom are paid off by oil company lobbyists) continue to deny that this is taking place, unforgivably jeopardising future generations. This isn't about ignorance, it's about evil. And there's plenty we can do if we can muster up the will. This clear-eyed, beautifully assembled documentary is a bit gimmicky, but it carefully highlights the issue for anyone who wants to know the truth.

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Screenings start up again on Monday, and I have the James McAvoy thriller Split in the diary. There's also Ben Affleck's mobster drama Live by Night, the 60s-style thriller The Love Witch and a German drama called Jonathan.

Critical Week: Life of the party

Chris Rock's comedy Top Five had great reviews in America last year, and has finally screened to UK critics ahead of its opening here this week. It's thoroughly hilarious, if a bit of an inside joke. Blake Lively stars in the fantasy-drama The Age of Adaline, very well-made but ultimately rather corny. Gugu Mbatha-Raw gives another thunderous performance in Beyond the Lights, a simplistic but engaging drama about the music industry costarring Nate Parker and Minnie Driver. And the mystery-thriller remake The Loft is packed with twists, turns, surprises and revelations, even if it never amounts to much and doesn't offer too much depth for fine actors like James Marsden, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eric Stonestreet, Karl Urban or Wentworth Miller.

Further afield, there was a screening of the long-shelved feature animation Dino Time, a lively story with substandard imagery and a starry voice cast that includes Jane Lynch, Melanie Griffith and Rob Schneider; Albert Maysles' beautifully made doc Iris, about 93-year-old eccentric fashion icon Iris Apfel; and the murky and sexy but obtuse apocalyptic Argentine love triangle What's Left of Us.

Coming up this week are screenings of Tom Hardy in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, the comedy A Royal Night Out, Idris Elba in Second Coming, the indie drama Everyone's Going to Die, British horror Unhallowed Ground, Oscar-nominated animation Song of the Sea and Spanish serial killer thriller Marshland. There's also a special press screening of the Orson Welles doc Magician to launch the BFI's Welles season, and an art gallery screening of Eleanor starring Ruth Wilson.

Critical Week: Backstage antics

The most enjoyable film I watched this past week was Stage Fright, the musical-comedy horror drama set in a performing arts camp. It's actually a skilfully made film that works on most of those levels while poking straight-faced fun at each genre. (That's Minnie Driver above in the film's witty Phantom-pastiche opening.) By contrast, the comedy Bad Johnson was painfully under-developed, wasting the charisma of leading man Cam Gigandet as a womaniser whose penis leaves him to live as a lowlife jerk (Nick Thune) until he learns his lesson. More of a moralising sermon than the promised gross-out comedy.

Further afield, the clever but slow-burning Norwegian thriller In Order of Disappearance has a bone-dry blackly comical tone as the always terrific Stellan Skarsgard inadvertently sparks a violent drugs war. A multi-national present-day adaptation of Joseph Conrad's shipboard story, Secret Sharer starts very nicely and builds a strong sense of characters and the setting, but struggles to come together in the final act. Truth is a gay romance that slips into a quietly unnerving thriller as both men lie to each other about their pasts, which adds an unnecessarily moralising tone. And Patema Inverted is a gorgeously animated and surprisingly involving Japanese adventure about teens from two societies with opposite gravitational pulls.

Things are generally slow for critics in May unless you go to Cannes (which I don't), but I have a few filsm to see over the coming week. There's Belle, the British period drama starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, based on true events that took place just up the road from where I live. Devil's Knot is the true crime/courthouse drama starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon. In Secret is a retelling of Therese Raquin with Elizabeth Olsen and Oscar Isaac. Don Peyote is a comedy with Josh Duhamel and Jay Baruchel.  Top Dog is a British crime thriller directed by Martin Kemp. A Touch of Sin is the latest from Chinese maestro Jia Zhangke. And then there's a little blockbuster called Godzilla...