Critical Week: Saluting the holidays

I only had three screenings in my final week of the working year, but then I was rather busy with getting the London Critics' Circle Film Award nominations announced - a terrific event. The films I caught included Pitch Perfect 3, which is being billed as the curtain call for the a cappella franchise, and definitely shows the strain in coming up with something for these talented women to do. It's a shame to go out with such a whimper after the seriously great first two movies. All the Money in the World is notorious for director Ridley Scott's last minute decision to scrub star Kevin Spacey from the movie and replace him with Christopher Plummer. But perhaps future viewers will be able to enjoy this superb true thriller without the baggage. It's one of Scott's best films, a taut drama with terrific performances from Michelle Williams, Charlie Plummer and indeed Christopher Plummer. And Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel also brings some baggage with it, but is notable for Kate Winslet's staggering performance as a desperate housewife in 1950s Coney Island. It's also shot and lit gloriously by veteran cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. And I also caught up with this little gem...

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Faces Places [Visages, Villages]
dir Agnes Varda, JR; with Agnes Varda, JR 17/Fr ****
This quirky documentary teams up 88-year-old filmmaking icon Agnes Varda with 33-year-old artist JR as they travel spontaneously around France taking large-format photos and wallpapering them onto various enormous structures. Watching this is a delight, as these two lively figures spar with each other and explore the nature of art and culture. Agnes talks about her life and friendships, and constantly teases JR about the way he hides from the world, obscuring his name and personal life, and even his eyes behind sunglasses. And the people they photograph along the way capture a spark of life in very clever ways that have a big effect on onlookers. Powerful pictures include workers on different factory shifts reaching out to each other, wives of dock-workers towering above them, and Agnes' eyes and toes on train cars. There is also a clever sense of history, with vintage images posted on appropriate surfaces. It's all a little meandering, and sometimes rather too clever to accept as just a random sequence of encounters. But the way it touches on French culture, the history of cinema and larger issues like globalisation is deeply involving.

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This coming week will be a chance to watch several screeners of films that were nominated in various awards I vote in. On my list are the docs Jane and The Work, the foreign films Raw and Aquarius, and late-in-the-year releases like Irish drama Sanctuary and German thriller In the Fade.

Critical Week: Pitch-slapped

The most raucous screening last week was for the musical comedy Pitch Perfect - it's rare to hear film critics laughing so loudly all the way through a film. It stars Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson as members of a very competitive a capella university singing group. Less hilarious was goofy infertility comedy The Babymakers, which has a terrific lead couple in Olivia Munn and Paul Schneider but gets lost in a lame caper subplot. The tense British horror-thriller Tower Block also has a terrific cast led by Sheridan Smith, Russell Tovey and Jack O'Connell, but falls apart due to a hole-ridden script.

Foreign-language-wise, we had Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or winner Amour, a staggeringly well-observed drama about a couple facing their mortality; Xavier Dolan's Toronto award winner Laurence Anyways, an ambitious gender-bender starring the terrific Melvil Poupaud and Suzanne Clement; and the genial Swedish political rom-com Four More Years. There was also one doc: Hungarian Rhapsody, which includes rare interviews with Queen followed by a gorgeously shot film of their 1986 Budapest concert. And I caught up with two classics: Pier Paolo Pasolini's stunning version of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Steven Spielberg's timeless adventure Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was simply fabulous to revisit on the Imax screen.

This coming week we have Mike Newell's take on Great Expectations, Liam Neeson in Taken 2, the Ferrell-Galifianakis comedy The Campaign, the Aussie crowdpleaser The Sapphires, the animated horror-comedy Hotel Transylvania, the Polish hip-hop drama You Are God and the British indie drama Love Tomorrow. And on Monday morning, press screenings begin for the 56th BFI London Film Festival (10-21 Oct), so I'll be catching up with the likes of the comedy Celeste & Jesse Forever, the Cannes-winner The Hunt, and the doc West of Memphis, among many others.