Critical Week: Hey, bruv

I've been busy this week organising the forthcoming London Critics' Circle Awards, and also voting in both Online Film Critics Society awards and the Dorian Awards. And we also had the Bafta Film Awards nominations today, which is the biggest awards alongside the Oscars. Those nominations come next week. So there's been plenty to do along with watching a few movies... 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The End We Start From
The Holdovers • The Kitchen
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The British drama Gassed Up won the audience award at the London Film Festival, and is a stylish and impressively made film until it's taken over by a standard crime thriller. The cast is packed with rising stars, led by Stephen Odubola. Another British thriller was also very slickly made: Jackdaw stars Oliver Jackson-Cohen as a motocross rider who gets entangled with a crime boss who happens to be his estranged father. Strong performances make it enjoyable, including a tough Jenna Coleman and a scene-chewing Thomas Turgoose. 

More highbrow, the Swedish drama Opponent stars the always excellent Peyman Maadi as an Iranian refugee grappling with his inner demons. The charming Italian romance Fireworks gets very dark indeed as it explores prejudice in a 1980s small-town. And the offbeat comedy The Civil Dead playfully subverts the ghost story genre with its likeably sad sack characters

This coming week is also a bit slower than usual at the cinema, but I have a lot to do. I'll be watching three British films: Ian McShane in American Star, Diana Quick in Forever Young, and the offbeat drama-documentary hybrid This Blessed Plot. And I have two stage shows to cover as well.

Critical Week: Signature move

Awards season is in full swing now that the actors strike has ended, and I've had a couple of nice Q&A screenings this week (see Insta for pics). Big year-end movies are beginning to appear too. Zac Efron, Harris Dickinson, Jeremy Allen White, Lily James and writer-director Sean Durkin came along to present The Iron Claw, their astonishingly involving, powerfully moving true drama about a family of wrestlers. And Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby and Ridley Scott were on the red carpet for the Leicester Square premiere of Napoleon, a first-rate epic biopic about the French leader that looks properly amazing on the biggest screen possible. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Rustin • Saltburn
May December
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Meanwhile, Colman Domingo is excellent in the biopic Rustin, about the unsung Civil Rights organiser. Alexander Payne's The Holdovers is a 1970s-style wintry delight starring Paul Giamatti and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are fierce in the harrowing Aussie Outback thriller The Royal Hotel. Taika Waititi's true-life comedy Next Goal Wins is a gently witty story about the world's worst football team, starring Michael Fassbender. Jesse Eisenberg turns into a meathead for Manodrome, a very dark drama that doesn't always work but gets us thinking. From New Zealand, the drama Punch is thoughtful and moving. Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron is even more spectacular than expected. Godzilla Minus One is a beefy prequel set in post-war Japan. The doc American Symphony finds surprising emotion while following Jon Batiste as he composes an orchestral piece. And the Powell and Pressburger classic The Red Shoes is even more dazzling in a new restoration. I also caught up with this one...

Dance First
dir James Marsh; with Gabriel Byrne, Fionn O'Shea 23/UK ***
While director James Marsh adds considerable visual flourish to this imaginative biopic about Samuel Beckett, there's a nagging feeling that the story is incomplete, as if it is skipping across the surface of a darkly complex figure. So while the script and performances add nuance in the characters and relationships, everything feels eerily out of reach. Thankfully, superb performances as Beckett from Gabriel Byrne and especially Fionn O'Shea give the film layers of insight and context. 

Films this coming week include Disney's new animated feature Wish, Michael Mann's Ferrari, Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter (a full 15 months after I missed the screening in Venice!), Mexican thriller Lost in the Night, Australian drama A Stitch in Time, deep-fake doc Another Body and arthouse cinema doc Scala!!!, plus LoveTrain at Sadler's Wells and Connor Burns: Vertigo at Soho Theatre.

Critical week: The game's afoot

I've been deliberately avoiding movies over the Christmas and New Year break, but there's been plenty of television to distract me. The most anticipated holiday show was obviously the return of Sherlock on New Year's Day for a third series - it's been a long two-year wait. Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and Rupert Graves are back for another brain-bender that's as engaging as ever, but feels more like a standard TV episode than previous seasons' movie-style instalments. It's also rather gimmicky and indulgent, so let's hope they calm down a bit for Sunday night's second episode.

Meanwhile, there was the annual Downton Abbey Christmas special. Last year they used this as an opportunity to essentially ruin the holidays with a horrific fatality. This year was much less momentous, merely entangling the soapy story-strands further while having a bit of fun with American guest stars Shirley MacLaine and Paul Giamatti. Slightly more prestigious was The Thirteenth Tale, a moody ghost story that pitted acting veteran Vanessa Redgrave opposite the equally gifted Olivia Colman as a dying novelist and her suspicious biographer, respectively. A nicely made film, with another involving turn by Colman, but Christopher Hampton's script was undercooked.

I also finally got caught up with the American version of the rude comedy Shameless - I was behind by a whole season and managed to watch all of series 3 over the holidays. Superb writing, directing and acting from the entire cast pushed these characters much further than we ever would have imagined. Few TV shows can induce squirms like this one, bless it.

I'll be back on the screening circuit starting next week, with a number of interesting things in the diary, including Michael Cera in Crystal Fairy, the post-apocalyptic romp Bounty Killer, the British musical comedy Svengali, the horror romp Devil's Bargain, the Venice-winning thriller Miss Violence, the acclaimed documentary After Tiller and the Formula One doc 1: Life on the Limit.