Critical Week: Let's make a plan

I'm late with most things this week, including this post, for two reasons: firstly I'm organising the 44th London Critics' Circle Film Awards, a seriously complicated event that's coming up in just a week and involves a myriad of variables to sort out. And secondly, I am migrating everything to a new computer, My vintage iMac has been slowing down after 15 years of faithful service, so I finally took the plunge. This new one is another world entirely, outrageously nimble and I can open websites again! But I have to learn how to do pretty much everything in a new way.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Totem • Samsara
All of Us Strangers
PERHAPS AVOID:
Padre Pio
ALL REVIEWS >

I've also of course been watching films, although not as many as I should have. I caught up with Snoop Dogg's comedy The Underdoggs, which takes a true story and bends it into the usual formula involving the foul-mouthed coach of a scrappy team. Watchable but not very funny. Ian McShane plays a bored hitman in American Star, gorgeously shot in the Canary Islands. It's very snow and meandering, but full of intrigue. The offbeat British drama-documentary hybrid This Blessed Plot traces the witty journey of a filmmaker who can talk to ghosts. And there were two rather elusive South American films: from Chile, The Settlers is a bold, gorgeous trek across the continent with historic repercussions, while the Argentinian odyssey Eureka is even more ambitious, opening in the Wild West (with Viggo Mortensen) and ending in the Amazon, with a North Dakota police chapter in between. Perplexing but fascinating exploration of indigenous cultures.

This coming week I'll be watching Henry Cavill in the spy romp Argylle, animated adventure Migration, black comedy Club Zero, Australian drama Shayda, musician documentary Dalton's Dream and the dark drama Pornomelancholia.

Critical Week: This little piggie

The most striking film of the past week was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's notorious, acclaimed novel Filth, starring James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan, Jim Broadbent, Imogen Poots and Shirley Henderson. Comments on the film are embargoed pending the announcement of a release date (or perhaps a prominent festival slot?). Once the embargo is lifted, this is likely to become one of the most talked-about movies of the year.

Two films were screened very late to critics this past week: the fifth in the Bruce Willis franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard, was more of the same although slightly more coherent than the previous episode, and the teen-franchise launcher Beautiful Creatures caught us off guard when it turned out to be rather good, with strong rising-star performances from Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert. We also had Viggo Mortensen speaking Spanish as identical twins in the atmospheric Argentine thriller Everybody Has a Plan, Brady Corbet speaking French in the unsettling sociopath drama Simon Killer, an indie cast speaking Shakespearean English in Joss Whedon's enjoyable but awkward black and white version of Much Ado About Nothing, Mathieu Kassovitz marshalling the French military on a South Pacific island in the riveting thriller Rebellion, and the contrived but charming New York graffiti artist comedy Gimme the Loot.

There were also three documentaries this week, including Reincarnated, which follows Snoop Dogg's trip to Jamaica to reinvent his music and himself. It's a bit of a stoner comedy, but has some strong moments. And I caught up with two docs nominated for the Oscar on Sunday night: from Israel, The Gatekeepers is a brainy, inventive look at how the Israeli government tries to control Palestine, while The Invisible War is an urgent, stomach-churning exposé of the sexual assault epidemic in the US military.

This coming week we have Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper in the dramatic thriller The Place Beyond the Pines, another all-star Steven Soderbergh cast in the pharmaceutical thriller Side Effects, Richard Gere in the financial drama Arbitrage, Dominic Cooper in the art colony romance Summer in February, Michael Bay's found-footage thriller The Bay and two docs about Aids: Fire in the Blood and How to Survive a Plague, which is the final Oscar nominee for me to catch, just in time for Sunday's ceremony. Watch this space for my predictions as always...