Critical Week: Say your prayers

After having virtually no spring at all, the weather in London has finally warmed up, just in time for the Cannes Film Festival in the South of France. I'm avoiding that crowded, chaotic festival as usual, and hoping for a couple of quieter weeks at home, and nicer weather will be a bonus. But the movies keep coming, and there were two films this week that take on religion: the drama Are You There God? It's Me Margaret adapts the classic 1970 novel into a nuanced coming-of-age drama starring Abby Ryder Fortson (above). Less textured is Jesus Revolution, which stars Kelsey Grammer as real-life pastor Chuck Smith, who brought hippies into his Southern California church in the late-1960s. It's preachy but watchable.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Butterfly Vision
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
ALL REVIEWS >

And then there's the blockbuster of the week: Fast X is the latest romp for Vin Diesel's car-crashing crew, which fans will love even though it's both ridiculous and predictable. The doc Being Mary Tyler Moore recounts the inspiring story of the iconic actress who had a major impact on culture. I also attended two theatre shows: Skid / Saaba at Sadler's Wells are two superbly physical pieces by a gifted Swedish company, and Once on This Island at Regent's Park Open-Air Theatre is an involving musical set in the Caribbean.

This next week I'll be watching Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, Ben Affleck in Hypnotic, the animated adventure Boonie Bears: Guardian Code, the British whodunit Medusa Deluxe and the documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. I'll also attend the press nights for The Misandrist at the Arcola and Corps Extremes at Sadler's Wells (reviews here soon).

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: Looking for the right mix

It's been another eclectic week of press screenings for London-based critics. We Are Your Friends is an engaging L.A.-set drama starring Zac Efton as a DJ looking for his voice. Straight Outta Compton has already stormed the American box office, and comes to Britain next week - it's the gripping, gritty story of NWA's rise to fame in the 1990s. And even though it stars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, and is written and directed by Cameron Crowe, Aloha was so wobbly in America that it's going straight to video in the UK. It doesn't really work, but it isn't that awful either.


We also had two films costarring the wonderful Kathryn Hahn: M Night Shyamalan's new film The Visit (comments are embargoed until closer to the release), and Jack Black and James Marsden in the surprisingly bold and thoughtful comedy The D Train. And there was also: Owen Wilson and Lake Bell in the seriously suspenseful chase thriller No Escape; Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston in the amazing, arty friendship drama Queen of Earth; and the amusing B-movie vampire-mayhem workplace comedy Bloodsucking Bastards.

This coming week we've got Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van, Kevin Bacon in Cop Car, Nicholas Hoult in Kill Your Friends, Cary Elwes in A Haunting in Cawdor, the Sundance winner Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, the South African comedy-drama Leading Lady, and the activism doc How to Change the World. And it's a long weekend, so I should be able to catch up on some screeners at home.

Critical Week: Out of the closet

That's Domhnall Gleeson emerging from a wardrobe in the time-travelling romance About Time, which was the surprise film at June's Edinburgh International Film Festival and has been screening to London press this past week. It's what you'd expect from writer-director Richard Curtis, including a terrific cast that features Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy and Lindsay Duncan. Tilting more toward the comical end of the rom-com spectrum, Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis star in We're the Millers, a rude drug-smuggling romp that's more amusing than riotous

We also had two indie comedy-dramas: Aubrey Plaza stars in the sex-focussed coming-of-age comedy The To Do List, which is much smarter than expected; and Kristen Bell gets a more serious role than usual in The Lifeguard, as a 29-year-old who reverts to her teen life in a moment of panic, complete with her old summer job and a 16-year-old boyfriend (the superb David Lambert). Both films are strongly involving, and likely to provoke different reactions in audiences.

A little further afield, Uwantme2killhim? is a chillingly clever British thriller based on a true story about an internet-based crime; Kon-Tiki is the spectacularly photographed Oscar-nominated epic about Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 raft journey proving that Incas populated Polynesia; and Una Noche is a disarmingly engaging drama about three young Cubans planning a dangerous journey to Miami. And I also revisited one of my all-time favourites: Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, which is getting a digitally restored release.

This coming week we catch up with the 3D doc One Direction: This Is Us just before its release. There's also Saoirse Ronan in the WWIII thriller How I Live Now, the Cannes-winning romance Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the British youth-crime comedy Borrowed Time, the British-Indian comedy Jadoo, and the restored final cut of the 1973 classic The Wicker Man.

Critical Week: Fields of gold

London-based critics finally had a chance to catch up with last year's Terrence Malick film To the Wonder, a deeply personal meditation on relationships and faith starring Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams (pictured), plus Olga Kurylenko. It's a swirling, virtually dialog-free drama that kind of spirals out of control in the final third, but leaves us thinking. The only real mainstream film last week was the enjoyable geriatric caper romp Stand Up Guys, with the all-star trio of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin. I also had the chance to catch up with Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, an unhinged style-over-substance comedy-drama clearly based on elements from the life of star Charlie Sheen.

Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral is an exercise in style and substance, a gleamingly yucky futuristic tale of fandom taken to life-threatening extremes. Sammy's Great Escape is a sequel to 2010's A Turtle's Tale, and keeps us entertained with a slightly deranged script and a gloriously excessive use of 3D. Aussie filmmaker Cate Shortland's unnerving dramatic thriller Lore is so gorgeously well shot and naturalistically acted that we almost forget that it's set in Nazi Germany. The Argentine anthology Sexual Tension: Volatile is an intriguing collection of six shorts exploring unexpected attraction between men. And bringing things full circle, Muzaffer Ozdemir's loosely plotted Home (Yurt) is a deeply personal meditation on the effects of progress on nature in the mountainous wilds of Turkey.

Coming this week: Bruce Willis in A Good Day to Die Hard, the gothic teen romance Beautiful Creatures, Danny Dyer in Run for Your Wife, Elijah Wood in Maniac, Barry Levinson's found footage thriller The Bay and Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish.