Critical Week: In at the deep end

Passing the 100-day mark in the London lockdown, this week also included my birthday, so I took it a little easier as far as screenings were concerned. There was also continually shifting ground relating to the reopening of UK cinemas. Most are now waiting another month, and won't open until August, because both the cinemas and the distributors need as much capacity for seating as possible in order to pay the bills. Press screenings are much less likely, because these are usually tiny rooms with very few seats, so it's looking like online viewing links will be the only option for us for awhile. I miss going to the movies for a communal experience. But even film festivals are bypassing press screenings, moving everything to streaming. So this may become a permanent change, but I hope not.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
A White, White Day
Four Kids and It • Cut Off
PERHAPS AVOID:
The F**k-It List
FULL REVIEWS >

As for the films I watched this past week: The F**k-It List is a well-acted teen comedy-drama (Eli Brown, above, is particularly good), but it's full of badly contradictory messages that sound great but are actually very dodgy. Will Ferrell's passion project Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga really should be more sharp-edged than this. But as an homage to the annual competition, it has some iconic moments of its own, and a great soundtrack. And Four Kids and It is a lively family adventure with some quirky comedy that nicely subverts any sentimentality. It's not terribly complex, but is enjoyable while it lasts.

Further afield, Cut Off is a strikingly well made thriller from Germany with a superbly complicated plot and the always terrific Moritz Bleibtreu. Midnight Kiss is a strongly written slasher comedy about a group of friends on holiday in Palm Springs over New Year when a killer strikes. Black Magic for White Boys is a close-to-the-knuckle freeform comedy with some provocative racial overtones. And for my birthday I revisited a favourite from 1987, that gloriously snarky fairy tale for adults The Princess Bride. Bliss.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Charlize Theron in The Old Guard, Garrett Hedlund in Burden, Tobias Menzies in Carmilla, the romcom Desperados, the thriller Parallax, the comedy Saint Frances, the Japanese musical We Are Little Zombies and the doc Mucho Mucho Amor.

Critical Week: You shall not pass!

I took a break from screenings this past week, and the only one I attended was the massive Monday night 3D extravaganza of Warcraft, based on the videogaming universe. Alas, I'm not allowed to make any comments about the movie until next week! I'll try to do better at watching some of my backlog of screeners this weekend, although I have several projects to do around the flat.

I also saw three theatre pieces. Harold Pinter's The Caretaker was staged beautifully at the Old Vic, with razor sharp performances from Timothy Spall, George MacKay and Daniel Mays in a clever story about identity and social structure. Also at the Old Vic, Jekyll and Hyde is an astonishing dance-based thriller that tells a riveting story that's funny, sexy, violent and darkly emotional. It's stunningly choreographed, designed and performed. And The Chemsex Monologues at the King's Head tells its story through, yes, monologues from four characters as they trace a year on the drug-infused sex scene in London. It's bracingly honest, told from an intimate, engaging perspectives, and remarkably never preachy.

This coming week, I'll be watching the romance Me Before You, Anthony Hopkins in Misconduct, Billy Crudup in The Stanford Prison Experiment, Michel Gondry's Microbe and Gasoline, the indie British thriller Ghoul, and HBO's MLK/LBJ movie All the Way.