Critical Week(s): With a little help from my friends

I'm catching up on two weeks of film-watching here, since I took last week to write about theatre and TV instead, and also because screenings have been rather thin. There were two big sequels shown to UK critics: Finding Dory is an enjoyably colourful and slightly less satisfying follow-up to Disney/Pixar's 2003 hit, while Now You See Me 2 is an entertaining and somewhat convoluted continuation of the 2013 heist thriller about magicians. 

And then there are the pre-established properties: Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie brings the beloved sitcom characters to the big screen more than 20 years after they first appeared for a film that's better than anyone expected. And The Legend of Tarzan is an odd hybrid of a sweeping period epic and a silly action blockbuster, with an unusually strong cast. As for original stories, Ira Sach's Little Men is an exquisitely observed family drama, and Thomas Vinterberg's The Commune is a complex look at relationships in 1970s Denmark. I also caught up with the seriously stunning, unmissable Italian immigration doc Fire at Sea and the offbeat, segmented arthouse drama Like Cattle Towards Glow, exploring the link between lust, love and violence.

Coming up this week: the Ghostbusters remake starring Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, the animated sequel Ice Age: Collision Course, Dave Franco and Emma Roberts in Nerve, Pedro Almodovar's new drama Julieta and Michel Gondry's Microbe and Gasoline.

Critical Week: Pick a card, any card

In a very busy screening week in London, we finally caught up with the magician heist thriller Now You See Me, which starts as an enjoyable romp with a terrific cast (including Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman) before turning very silly indeed. From here we move through the genres: romance came with Stuck in Love, a slick ensemble film (Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Lily Cole) in which relationships are all very tidy; terror came from Ethan Hawke in the thoughtful and genuinely scary dystopic horror The Purge and the derivative but ultimately enjoyably nutty The Last Exorcism Part II; and topical thrills came from the oddly involving eco-terrorism drama The East and the darkly inventive human trafficking drama Eden.

Off the beaten path, we had the deeply charming coming-of-age drama The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom, the controversially explicit but darkly thoughtful gay drama I Want Your Love, and Ulrich Seidl's chilling and blackly comical sex-tourism drama Paradise: Love. And finally, there were three docs: Sarah Polley's staggeringly inventive and moving exploration of her own family history in Stories We Tell, Shane Meadows' beautifully assembled exploration of a rock band in The Stone Roses: Made of Stone, and a somewhat indulgent but fascinating look at Johnny Cash's manager in My Father and the Man in Black.

This coming week we have Brad Pitt in the zombie blockbuster World War Z, the prequel Monsters University, Tina Fey in Admission, the second part of Ulrich Seidl's trilogy Paradise: Faith, the Indonesia massacre documentary The Act of Killing, Irish filmmaker Pat Collins' aural documentary Silence, a special BFI presentation by James Franco of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and the lavish restoration of Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra up on the big screen where it belongs.