On the Road: Family time

Love the Coopers [UK title: Christmas With the Coopers]

dir Jessie Nelson; with Diane Keaton, John Goodman, Alan Arkin 15/US ***.

Marketed as a wacky holiday comedy, it's rather surprising that this film strikes a more serious tone right from the start, with Steve Martin's warm, wry narration introducing us to each member of the sprawling Cooper clan as they reluctantly approach a Christmas Eve dinner together. There are plenty of hilarious moments along the way, but the issues each of these people are dealing with are anything but flippant: this is a film about how life is only very rarely like the happy-glowing images we surround ourselves with at the holidays. And things are beefed up by the powerhouse cast swirling around the terrific Keaton and Goodman in the central roles as a couple at the end of their tether after 40 years of marriage. Olivia Wilde and Ed Helms have strong scenes as their conflicted children, Arkin finds some new nuances in his usual patriarchal role, Marisa Tomei gets the film's most complex role as Keaton's drifting sister. With the multistrand approach, the film feels eerily similar to Love Actually, except with everyone directly related to each other (plus outsiders nicely underplayed by Amanda Seyfried, Anthony Mackie and Jake Lacy). And the large cast kind of spreads the depth around between them, never quite pushing any single character too far. But there's something to engage with in each of them, and the nostalgic emotional surge is meaningful and thankfully not overly sentimental.

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CRITICAL WEEK
I'm still out in California for a few more days - hope to catch a couple of films this weekend, including Secret in Their Eyes (a remake of a favourite film, but the top-notch cast makes it look unmissable) and The Night Before (which looks like it might be mindless fun).

Critical Week: One last shot

Yes, UK critics saw another of the year's most anticipated films this week, the final instalment in the franchise: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. The A-list cast and Suzanne Collins' terrific source material continue to make this a superior series, with a epic-sized conclusion that's packed with strongly emotional moments in between the action mayhem. Jennifer Lawrence's usual costar Bradley Cooper leads the cast of the super-chef drama Burnt, which never quite sells either the story or the too-fancy food, but it's watchable enough.

Also this past week, we had a look at two prestige films going for awards-season attention: Tom McCarthy's Spotlight is a superb investigative drama about a news team (led byMark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton) looking into Boston's abusive priest scandal; Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies is a stately period thriller starring Tom Hanks as a negotiator navigating the tricky waters of Cold War Berlin.

At the other end of the spectrum, the nonsensical South African action movie Momentum stars a plucky Olga Kurylenko being chased by a scene-chomping James Purefoy. Somewhere in the middle, The Queen of Ireland is a fabulous, inspiring doc about Rory O'Neill and his iconic drag alter ego Panti Bliss; and the earthy, honest Mexican drama Velociraptor centres on two teens exploring their sexuality as the world is about to end.

I'll be in America over the next two weeks, so hope to catch up with several things that are out there but haven't screened here, including The Peanuts Movie, The 33, By the Sea, Love the Coopers and Secret in Their Eyes. We'll see how that goes! Watch this space...

Critical Week: Bump in the dark

London critics caught up this week with the freak-out sequel The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, set 40 years after the first film, so it has an all-new cast (including Jeremy Irvine and Helen McCrory) facing that eerie ghost at Eel Marsh House. Honestly, why would anyone ever go in there?

The biggest screening this week was for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, the thrilling third film in the series starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Elizabeth Banks and so on. It captures the book's intensely grim tone almost too well and is also a terrific exploration of the birth of a leader, setting things up for the more battle-intensive final part, a year from now. The only other starry movie this week was Tommy Lee Jones' The Homesman, a gruelling Wild West road movie in which he stars in alongside Hilary Swank and a number of superb A-list cameo players (Meryl Streep!). It's extremely straight-faced and rather bleak, but always involving.

Further afield there were four foreign films: essentially a filmed stage play, the drama Diplomacy chronicles the touchy negotiations between German and French officers at the end of WWII, hinging on terrific performances by Andre Dussolier and Niels Arestrup; also from France, Eastern Boys is an uneven but intriguing drama about the strange relationship between a businessman and a Ukrainian working the streets for money; from Switzerland, The Circle uses documentary and drama to reconstruct the relationship between two men in a rapidly closing free society; and Snails in the Rain is a darkly thoughtful but ultimately simple Israeli drama about a young man whose girlfriend notices that something is up.

This coming week, we have the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, the Jim Carrey-Jeff Daniels sequel Dumb and Dumber To, the black comedy The Mule, the holiday comedy Home for Christmas, the Mexican drama Four Moons, the Roger Ebert doc Life Itself, and the French foreign-student doc School of Babel