Critical Week: Take the call

Once again, I am avoiding the chaos of the Cannes Film Festival and enjoying the much lighter screening schedule in London these days. I know I'll catch up with the best from Cannes over the coming months. And I'm abandoning London myself next week until early June. Back to the movies, we had a lively themed screening of rising-star filmmaker Curry Barker's horror thriller Obsession. It's an unusually engaging scary movie, funny and moving. And hugely unnerving too.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Orphan • Diamonds • Obsession
High Tide • The Christophers
The Wizard of the Kremlin
ALL REVIEWS >

There were also several starrier movies to watch. The comedy-drama Miss You Love You is essentially an extended conversation between Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells. But they are so good that it's riveting, beautifully written and directed by Jim Rash. Sally Field and Lewis Pullman make a terrific duo in Remarkably Bright Creatures, a heartwarming tale about being open to the world around you, centring around an octopus. Scoot McNairy and Emilia Jones are excellent as a father and daughter in the sensitive memoir Fairyland, which skilfully captures the subculture of 1970s-80s San Francisco. And from Hong Kong, We're Nothing at All is an extraordinary blend of personal drama and riveting procedural thriller, circling around a bomb explosion on a bus. I also watched a live performance of Remachine at Sadler's Wells East.

Coming up this next week, I only have one press screening due to the Cannes slump, but it's the first Star Wars movie in seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu. I may see it twice. And of course it's the 70th Eurovision Song Contest live from Vienna on Saturday night. Another reason for so few screening is that I'm flying to California next week to visit family. I'll be sure to report back on my in-flight viewing and whatever else I get up to over there. 

Critical Week: Let it all go

I've been working very long hours on a TV crew these days, so haven't had a lot of time to keep up with film releases. So I only managed to see four movies in the past seven days! (But I am very much enjoying working on set each day.) One of the big releases this week, Speak No Evil stars Scoot McNairy and James McAvoy (above) in a hugely unsettling thriller that starts light and almost comical before twisting the suspense to nail-biting levels in the final act. And then Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield came along for a Q&A with director John Crowley for We Live in Time, a powerfully involving emotional drama that feels bracingly authentic. It's bound to get awards-season attention.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
My Old Ass • In Camera
Speak No Evil • Winner
My Favourite Cake
ALL REVIEWS >

The biopic Winner is the third movie in recent years to tell the story of the whisleblower Reality Winner, this time with a snappy comical edge. Emilia Jones is excellent in the title role, and the film properly gets under her skin. And Dead Teenagers is the third scary film in writer-director Quinn Armstrong's Fresh Hell trilogy, this time cleverly twisting the teenage summer movie into something meta and genuinely creepy.

I'll have a little more time to attend screenings this coming week, so I'm planning to see the animated adventure Transformers One, Will Ferrell's documentary Will & Harper, reform school drama Nickel Boys, British comedy-drama Portraits of Dangerous Women, New York comedy Notice to Quit and British horror Inherit the Witch, plus anything else I can find time to see. 

Critical Week: Scary monsters

It's a third short week this spring here in Britain, so there have been fewer than usual screenings. But I did manage to catch up with Colossal, the genre-defying movie starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis. It's funny, scary, harrowing and very well-made. And then there was Sleepless, an almost painfully predictable cop thriller livened up by an adept cast that includes Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney and Scoot McNairy.

A hybrid crime thriller and arthouse drama, Away is a small British drama starring Timothy Spall and Juno Temple as two desperate people who meet in Blackpool. It's nicely shot and acted, but jarringly edited. And Last Men in Aleppo is the prize-winning documentary about the White Helmets, rescue workers in war-torn Syria. Skilfully shot on the ground during the fighting, it's utterly devastating to watch, and urgently important.

Screenings coming up this week include Ridley Scott's Prometheus sequel Alien: Covenant, the comedy The Big Sick, the action movie Stratton, the road movie Folk Hero & Funny Guy, the period drama Interlude in Prague and the animated adventure Spark.

On the Road: Nice work if you can get it

Our Brand Is Crisis

dir David Gordon Green; with Sandra Bullock, Billy Bob Thornton 15/US ***.

Despite an uneven tone, this breezy political drama touches on several important themes as it freewheels through a scruffy story of American campaign strategists working for rival candidates in an election for Bolivia's president. Based loosely on real people, the film has an authenticity to it that holds the attention, even as it veers wildly between politics, comedy and even slapstick. Of course, Bullock can bridge these gaps effortlessly, and she's terrific as the burn-out reluctantly making a comeback against her fiercest rival, played by an underused Thornton. But then all of the supporting roles are thinly written. This is Bullock's show, and her performance makes the film worth a look. As does what it says about the American political system.  

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CRITICAL WEEK
There are several other films out now in America that I'm hoping to catch up with, including The 33 and By the Sea, and also - purely for work reasons of course, as they open later in the UK - The Peanuts Movie and Love the Coopers.

Critical Week: A song for Frank

London critics got a chance to catch up with this year's Sundance sensation, Lenny Abrahamson's Frank, starring Michael Fassbender wearing a giant papier-mache head. Yes, it's as offbeat and arty as it sounds, but also surprisingly warm and endearing, with terrific performances from Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Scoot McNairy. The other big movie was Hossein Amini's subtly involving and very twisty thriller  The Two Faces of January, starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristin Dunst and Oscar Isaac, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel.

Only slightly further afield, C.O.G. is a dark, introspective drama starring Looking's Jonathan Goff as a guy trying to run from his own shadow. Khumba is an engaging, colourfully animated South African feature, with a somewhat compromised plot about a geeky zebra. Cheap Thrills is an escalating exercise in finding the audience's breaking point - a very clever, hard-to-watch black comedy. Awful Nice is an awkwardly written comedy with some telling observations. And The Punk Singer is a lively, insightful doc about feminist punk, centring on the iconic Kathleen Hanna.

The big films screening this coming week are the Marvel sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the TV show reunion Veronica Mars and the black comedy A Long Way Down. There are two Irish films - Brendan Gleeson in Calvary and Andrew Scott in The Stag; the Indonesian action-sequel The Raid 2; Chiwetel Ejiofor in Half of a Yellow Sun; the black comedy How to Be a Man; the animated adventure Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return; and something called Patema Inverted.