Critical Week: Run for your life

The 69th London Film Festival kicked off last night, so things will be very busy over the next 10 days, with pretty much wall-to-wall screenings, meetings and parties. And already, first two days have been pretty glamorous. George Clooney, Adam Sandler and filmmaker Noah Baumbach turned up to present their new film Jay Kelly. It's a smart, witty and moving look at legacy, relationships and regret. And the opening night film on Wednesday was Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunit Wake Up Dead Man, attended by the entire starry ensemble (see below). It's a wonderfully entertaining film, funny and spooky, with serious underlying themes too.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A House of Dynamite • Urchin
Roofman • I Swear • Plainclothes
ALL REVIEWS >

And then there was the heart-stopping A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow's smart, complex multistrand nuclear thriller starring Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson. Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez star in the musical remake of Kiss of the Spider Woman. The tone is a bit uneven, but the film is powerful. Hunter Doohan stars in The Wilderness, an outdoor experience drama that feels a bit overly pointed, but has a strong message. And from France, Souleymane's Story is a vividly honest exploration of the challenges facing a young asylum seeker over two momentous days. I also attended a live performance of Ghost Stories at the Peacock Theatre

Reviews of London Film Festival movies are linked to this page: SHADOWS @ LFF >

Films I'm watching this coming week at London Film Fest include Emma Stone in Bugonia, Bradley Cooper in Is This Thing On, Daniel Day-Lewis in Anemone, Julia Roberts in After the Hunt, Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein, Brendan Fraser in Rental Family, Tessa Thompson in Hedda, Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams, . There's also a live performance of Theatre of Dreams at Sadler's Wells.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rich Jack Cline (@ukcline)

Critical Week: Driving home for Christmas

I seen many films this week, largely due to work required prior to the announcement of the London Critics' Circle Film Awards nominations yesterday. This involved compiling my own ballot, then counting all the others that came in, tabulating the results, giving nominees a heads-up, working on a press release and preparing the announcement event, which was hosted by young actors Ellie Bamber (Willow) and Fionn O'Shea (Handsome Devil) at the May Fair Hotel as a low-key Christmas party. The nominations are listed HERE if you're interested in comparing them with all the other awards spiralling around at the moment.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Living • Corsage • Women Talking
ALL REVIEWS >

Now things are calming down for the holidays. Whew! Of the films I saw this past week, the most ambitious was Noah Baumbach's White Noise, a busy and somewhat unfocussed comedy-drama about a family dealing with a range of big issues. The cast is excellent, led by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, and it ends with a fabulous burst of choreography. Will Smith plays a real-life historical icon in Emancipation, set at the end of the Civil War as an escaped slave faces brutal trackers and ends up fighting on the battlefield. It's ambitious and admirable, but the themes get a bit lost. Christian Bale leads the cast of Scott Cooper's moody period mystery The Pale Blue Eye, playing a detective who works alongside a young Edgar Allan Poe (a superbly wide-eyed Harry Melling) to investigate a murder at West Point in 1830. It's mesmerising but ultimately a bit thin. And the animated adventure The Amazing Maurice, based on the Terry Pratchett novel, has some wonderful thematic depth beneath the usual slapstick wackiness and slick digital imagery.

This coming week I will continue to catch up with movies before writing up my year-end lists. There's quite a pile-up of these, and I have a list of about 10 priority titles, plus eight more if-time ones. A couple of them are forthcoming releases, such as Kore-eda's film Broker and the documentary Wildcat.

Critical Week: La dolce vita

There was a nice break from bleak drama, rude comedy and apocalyptic blockbusters this week with Noah Baumbach's wonderfully upbeat comedy Frances Ha, in which Greta Gerwig held her quirkiness in check to play a memorable character trying to get her life going in the right direction. OK, it's shot in black and white, as a clear homage to everyone from Federico Fellini to Woody Allen. But it's a sheer delight compared to the admittedly enjoyable post-apocalyptic blockbuster Oblivion, a well-made sci-fi film starring a nicely haunted Tom Cruise. Even more derivative, The Words is another nicely made film with a terrific cast (including Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde), but it's never quite original enough to come together.

Off the beaten path, we had the small but important British drama Honour, an awkwardly structured message film about honour-killings starring the always terrific Paddy Considine; the shambolic comedy Bula Quo!, which sends the members of Status Quo on a crazy adventure in Fiji about 35 years too late; Rob Zombie's witchy horror The Lords of Salem, which mixes gonzo nuttiness with inventive freak-outs and some nostalgic filmmaking, all to great effect; the indie American drama Nate & Margaret, which is kind of a light Harold & Maude, tracing a gently involving and nicely played friendship; and the oddly unsexy documentary F**k for Forest, about the global movement to save the environment through sex.

I also caught up with two collections of short films: Bafta Shorts 2013 features seven of the eight shorts nominated for this year's Baftas, including the two winners: Lynne Ramsay's Swimmer and Will Anderson's animation The Making of Longbird. And Peccadillo's collection Boys on Film 9: Youth in Trouble features eight edgy shorts dealing with sexuality issues among teens and 20-somethings, with the highlight being Benjamin Parent's essential It's Not a Cowboy Film.

This coming week we have press screenings of 2013's next blockbuster Iron Man 3, Robert DeNiro and Diane Keaton leading the all-star cast of The Big Wedding, Olivier Assayas' Something in the Air, the Spanish drama The Sex of Angels (aka Angels of Sex in the US), the Russian historical drama In the Fog, and the Italian drama Shun Li and the Poet.

There are also two special events: First is the Barbican cinema's special season to tie in with the Critics' Circle's centenary celebrations, in which UK critics introduce "the film that changed my life" - which gives me a chance to catch David Gritten presenting the acclaimed 1966 war drama The Battle of Algiers. And finally, we also start press screenings for the second Sundance London Festival (25-28 April).