Critical Week: Too cool for school

Things have been a bit quieter for me this week, as I haven't had too many films to watch. Although while the weather has been warmer, we're still in complete lockdown, meaning it's impossible to met up with friends or go into town. So I've been catching up on things and watching what I can to get a little ahead of the curve.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Night of the Kings • The Mauritanian
The United States vs Billie Holiday
The Father • Song Without a Name
PERHAPS AVOID:
Crisis • Tyger Tyger
ALL REVIEWS >

The most mainstream film I saw this week was Moxie, the comedy directed by Amy Poehler for Netflix. It stars Hadley Robinson in a hugely engaging tale about girl power, and rather a lot more. I also enjoyed the black comedy Pixie, an engagingly messy road movie set in Ireland as young people navigate a brewing war between gangster priests (led by Alec Baldwin) and the local mob (Colm Meaney). 

Smaller films included the remarkable British drama Justine, a sensitive look at a troubled young woman, and Tyger Tyger, an enigmatic and artful film set on the outer fringe of Southern California society during a killer pandemic. And from Ivory Coast, Night of the Kings is a staggeringly involving prison drama that's well worth a look. There were also two strong short film collections exploring aspects of youthful masculinity: Boys on Film 21: Beautiful Secret and The Latin Boys: Volume 2.

We also had the virtual programme launch event for the British Film Institute's annual Flare LGBTIQ+ film festival, which next month will be held online for the second year running. The kind folk at the BFI sent me a small version of the annual logo cake to enjoy for the launch, a tradition I've enjoyed each year while covering this event over the past 23 years. (See my Insta post below.)

This coming week's collection of movies includes Disney's animated Raya and the Last Dragon, the award-winning Filipino drama The Verdict, the Japanese true drama Fukushima 50 and bonkers filmmaker Quentin Dupieux's Keep an Eye Out.

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Critical Week: It was all yellow

We had an early press screening this week of the Alan Bennett engaging comedy-drama The Lady in the Van, based on the true story of a homeless woman (Maggie Smith) who asked Bennett (Alex Jennings) if she could live in her van in his Camden driveway for a few months, and stayed for 15 years. Then there was Ed Skrein in The Transporter Refuelled, a reboot of the Jason Statham franchise that's oddly drier and cornier, and still a guilty pleasure. And the Sundance-winning Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a strikingly honest teen comedy-drama with a terrific cast and a snappy, slightly overwritten script.

A little further afield, we had the low-budget British thriller Containment, which is fiendishly clever in the way it traps a group of neighbours in a council block sealed by people in hazmat suits. Leading Lady is an awkward blend of comedy and drama from South Africa about a British actress (Katie McGrath) researching a role in the Transvaal, where she of course has a life-changing experience. And the fascinating doc How to Change the World uses extensive home movies and present-day interviews to trace the early years of Greenpeace, from a gang of Canadian hippies to a global movement.

There was also the launch event for the upcoming 58th BFI London Film Festival, with its flurry of big-name premieres and lots of smaller festival-winning movies. Press screenings for that kick off on September 21st, with the festival itself starting on October 9th. My most anticipated films include opening night's Suffragette, closing night's Steve Jobs, Todd Haynes' Carol, Jay Roach's Trumbo, Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash, Ben Wheatley's High-rise, Terence Davies' Sunset Song, and Cannes prize winners Son of Saul and Dheepan. I've already seen eight or nine of the 250 films.

I'm taking three days off around this coming weekend, so I have fewer screenings in the diary. Annoyingly, I'm missing the first two screenings of Everest, but I'll catch up with it in a week or so. What I am seeing are Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette in Miss You Already, Woody Allen's Irrational Man, the youth-dystopia sequel Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, the true Romanian drama Closer to the Moon and the British comedy Superbob.