Critical Week: Are you not entertained?

As we get stuck into November, the year's big titles are beginning to turn up at press screenings, and none is bigger than Ridley Scott's sequel Gladiator II, a mammoth epic set in Ancient Rome starring Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal. The script is flawed (Connie Nielsen's role is criminally underwritten), but the film is hugely entertaining. Another sequel might even be more anticipated: while not as magical as No 2, Paddington in Peru is a charming, funny movie that sees our heroic little bear on an Amazon adventure accompanied by Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas

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Another big one, Wicked: Part I stars Cynthia Erivo Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey (with added spark from Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum). It's gloriously assembled on a lavish scale, and we have to wait a year for Part II. Bill Skarsgard is imperious in Robert Eggers' profoundly horrific Nosferatu, costarring Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Willem Dafoe. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton find lovely textures in Almodovar's The Room Next Door, while Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson shine in the complex and powerfully provocative drama A Different Man. Meanwhile outside of awards contention, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans provide some sparky banter in the otherwise over-familiar Christmas action comedy Red One. And the quirky British comedy Time Travel Is Dangerous is packed with hilarious performances and local North London gags.

This coming week I'll be watching the long-awaited Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the acclaimed animated adventure Flow, Isabelle Huppert in A Traveler's Needs, the biopic Bonhoeffer and more awards contenders. I'm also travelling to Southern California to visit family for a couple of weeks, and I'm sure to see a few things out there before it's time to submit my ballots.

Critical Week: Take to the sky

It's been a very busy week here, as awards-contender screenings have started for the season and I'm getting ready to travel for a couple of weeks. Oscar-buzzy contenders have included Alejandro G Inarritu's astonishing Birdman, starring Michael Keaton as an actor trying to have a comeback; Paul Thomas Anderson's chaotic Inherent Vice, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin in a series of hilariously raucous scenes loosely connected by an impenetrable plot; and the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything stars a seriously stunning Eddie Redmayne.

We also saw two surprisingly good British family movies: Paddington and Get Santa both benefit from their smart-witty scripts, gifted directors and up-for-it casts including Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins and the voice of Ben Whishaw, and Jim Broadbent, Rafe Spall and Warwick Davis, respectively. It's rare that two decent holiday movies arrive in such close succession.

Off the beaten path, we had: Wong Kar Wai's gorgeously shot but oddly aloof biopic The Grandmaster; the rude Aussie drug-smuggling comedy The Mule; the corny British rom-com Home for Christmas (not actually a Christmas movie); the corny American rom-com Big Gay Love; and the involving Roger Ebert doc Life Itself, which shouldn't be missed by film fans. Finally, there were two collections of queer shorts: Boys on Film 12: Confession is Peccadillo's latest line-up of gay-themed films, this time looking at youthful longings; and Travis Mathews' In Their Room intimately explores the lives of men in San Francisco, Berlin and London.

Later this week I'm flying to California for the next couple of weeks, where I plan to catch up with several more awards contenders (plus Penguins of Madagascar). But the real question is whether there will be anything showing on the plane that I haven't seen or wouldn't mind watching again. I'll be blogging as I go...