Critical Week: Smiles everybody

Screenings continue to be a mixed bag of current releases and awards contenders. Higher profile films this week include Javier Bardem in the Spanish film The Good Boss, a blackly comical satire about the tension between a boss and his employees. And the true World War II adventure Operation Mincemeat has a first-rate cast featuring Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Jason Isaacs and Johnny Flynn.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Flee • C'mon C'mon
The Hand of God
Boxing Day • Final Account
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The main reason why I saw so few films this week: I spend eight hours watching The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson's hugely engaging documentary made from footage unseen for 50 years. It's essential for fans. Also a bit off the beaten path were the thoughtful and provocative Canadian drama I Am Syd Stone, addressing issues of sexuality in show business; Andrea Arnold's experiential doc Cow, following the life of a farm animal in a way that's riveting; the World War II doc Final Account, interviewing Germans who were children when the Nazis came to power; and the shorts collection The French Boys features five very strong dramas.

Coming up this next week, I will be watching Steven Spielberg's remake of the musical West Side Story, Bradley Cooper in Nightmare Alley, Lea Seydoux in France, the horror thriller Agnes, the drama Famous, the pantomime on film Cinderella and the shorts collection The French Boys 2.

Critical Week: An odd couple

Returning from a film festival, it always takes awhile to catch up, not only writing up a backlog of reviews but also tracing down screenings that were missed. This week I've caught up with The Upside, the remake of the French drama Intouchables, starring Kevin Hart and Bryn Cranston. It's lively and entertaining, and of course overly slick. Carrying on the effects-heavy wizarding world, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald throws Eddie Redmayne in between Jude Law and Johnny Depp in a film that's an entertaining series of set-ups that leave us waiting for the next movie in the series.

Keanu Reeves does his usual slow-burn performance in Siberia, a stylish romantic thriller that's neither romantic nor thrilling. The British horror film Await Further Instructions has a clever premise and solid cast, but an unfocussed script. The documentary Three Identical Strangers traces the amazing story of triplets separated at birth, although the filmmakers indulge in some manipulative editing. And then there's this film, marking a century since the end of the First World War...

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They Shall Not Grow Old
dir Peter Jackson; prd Peter Jackson, Clare Olssen
release UK 9.Nov.18, US 17.Dec.18 • 18/UK 1h39 ****
Deploying the remarkable archive of film and audio recordings held by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC, Peter Jackson uses digital technology to tell the story of the Great War in a way we've never seen it. Most impressive is his transformation of vintage battlefield footage by adding colour and normalising the frame-rate, making it feel startlingly present. This is then edited together into a chronological narrative that pulls us right into the experience, starting with untouched news footage of the outbreak of war, enlisting, training, shifting to colour for the battlefield scenes and then returning to black and white for a pointed post-war sequence. This is adeptly accompanied by the moving first-hand reminiscences of soldiers on the soundtrack. The sense of detail, including vivid descriptions of sights, sounds and smells, puts us right in the trenches with these very young men, vividly experiencing events from a century ago. And their comments about how Britain reacted to them when they came home after the war gives the film a provocative kick. This is a notable achievement both for its technical and artistic skill and for how it honours more than a million British and Commonwealth men who died in this conflict. And with the voices of men who were there, it expresses a powerful view of pointless nature of such barbaric warfare.

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This coming week we have, among other things, Taron Egerton as a new take on Robin Hood, Michael B Jordan in Creed II, Steve McQueen's heist thriller Widows, Robert Redford in The Old Man & the Gun, Hirokazu Koreeda's Cannes winner Shoplifters and the performance art documentary Being Frank.

Critical Week: Let the race begin

Awards season officially kicked off this week with a flurry of accolades including the New York Film Critics and the British Independent Film Awards. I've been voting already, and have more to do in the coming weeks. In my last few days in California, I caught up with a few more contenders, including Angelina Jolie's biopic Unbroken, starring Jack O'Connell as Olympic runner Louie Zamperini, who later survived 47 days adrift at sea before being captured by the Japanese during WWII. It's a staggering story of resilience, made with unexpected subtlety. Tim Burton's Big Eyes is another gorgeously made biopic. It stars Amy Adams as Margaret Keane, who painted all of those sad-eyed children in the 60s and 70s while her husband (Christoph Waltz) took the credit. It may look sunnier than most of Burton's films, but it's just as gleefully deranged, and it carries a big emotional kick.

But of course the biggest film screened to the press this past week was Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, another enormous epic of a film, packed with lively characters, first-rate effects and huge, expertly staged action sequences. Frankly, until some engaging personal drama emerges in the second half, it's a bit exhausting. Somewhat smaller films included The Face of Love, a gimmicky, melodramatic romance starring Annette Bening and Ed Harris. And The Great Museum is a riveting fly-on-the-wall doc about the backstage workings of Vienna's national gallery.

Coming this week: Julianne Moore in Still Alice, Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Quevenzhane Wallis in a remake of the musical Annie, Christian Bale in Exodus: Gods and Kings, Aardman Animation's Shaun the Sheep Movie, the acclaimed Spanish anthology Wild Tales and the British drama Wasp. I'll also finally catch up with the sequel Dumb and Dumber To, although frankly I'd rather not.

Critical Week: Taking aim

London critics finally caught up with the last of the season's awards contenders this week, mainly because the deadline for nominations in the London Critics' Circle Film Awards is this Friday night. The biggies included: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, an entertaining and very pointed Western starring Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx; Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty and troubling military drama; and Christopher McQuarrie's Jack Reacher, a smart and entertaining mystery thriller starring Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible mode.

We also got to see Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, projected for us in 3D and 48 frames-per-second, which essentially turned one of the biggest cinema screens in Europe into a gigantic flat-screen TV. But it's our eyes that aren't used to the staggering realism - and the film is an enjoyable beginning to an epic journey (OK, so it wasn't quite this epic in the book).

Finally, two smaller films: the harrowing documentary The Central Park Five, which skilfully traces a vile miscarriage of justice in the American legal system; and Carlos Reygadas' surreal collage Post Tenebras Lux, which explores the human animal with artistry and emotion even if it makes little logical sense.

Later this week I'm heading to Los Angeles for the holidays with family and friends. Films I hope to catch out there include the Seth Rogen/Barbra Streisand road comedy The Guilt Trip, Billy Crystal and Bette Midler in Parental Guidance and the David Chase drama Not Fade Away. I'll comment on those and others (I still have screeners to watch) as I see them. And I'll post my Best of 2012 - aka the 32nd Shadows Awards - in the first few days of January.