Critical Week: Father knows best

It's been another odd mix of screenings in London this week, with the added distraction of sensational weather over the four-day Easter weekend. Among the films we saw the current No 1 box office hit in the US, The Curse of La Llorona. Made to a very high quality, with a better than necessary performance from Linda Cardellini, it's a rather standard entry in the Conjuring universe: freaky and jumpy but never actually scary. And then there's the film that will be No 1 at the global box office for the near future, Avengers: Endgame. Thrilling, funny and even emotional, it's a massively satisfying climax to the last decade or so of Marvel movies.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder reteam for the enjoyably offbeat romantic comedy Destination Wedding, adeptly playing two relentlessly grouchy cynics, the only speaking roles in the film. The involving Just Friends is a Dutch romantic drama gently dealing with a range of social issues, from race to homophobia. And I also saw a range of short films screening this week at Tribeca Film Festival. The best of a strong bunch were by Nick Borenstein: the mother-son zinger 99 and the exuberant lovelorn comedy Sweater.

Finally, I had a chance to catch up with Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, which is set out as a carefully researched look at Donald Trump, linked to the horrific water crisis in Flint, Michigan. No politicians get off lightly. And after watching the first few episodes of the new series Fosse/Verdon, and seeking tickets to the new London stage production, I watched Bob Fosse's stunning 1969 musical Sweet Charity, featuring a magnificent Shirley MacLaine. I also attended the opening of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at London's Design Museum - a seriously awesome collection of the filmmaker's notes, tools, props and sets that runs until September...

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A few teaser images from the Kubrick exhibition opening this morning. Serious treasure trove for movie fans #discoverkubrick

A post shared by Rich Jack Cline (@ukcline) on Apr 25, 2019 at 6:32am PDT

Films screening this coming week include Ryan Reynolds voicing the title character in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, Ethan Hawke in The Captor (aka Stockholm), Josh O'Connor in Only You and the new documentary about Halston.

Critical Week: Fight fire with fire

Since I'm not in Cannes with many of my fellow critics, I'm still catching up on screenings of films opening in cinemas at the moment. At least we're having Cannes-like weather in London! This week we had a very late press screening (just the night before it opens) for Breaking In, the home-invasion thriller starring Gabrielle Union as a tough-minded mother who isn't about to let a gang of violent thieves harm her children. This gender flip is very cool, and sharply played too, even if the script is rather standard fare.

Also rather standard, the British comedy Swimming With Men echoes The Full Monty in its story of a group of middle-aged men dealing with their issues as they form a male synchronised swimming team. The cast is so good that it makes it worth a look. And the American comedy Dating My Mother is somewhat awkward, but has a refreshing honesty to it.

There were also three documentaries. The first two have a showbiz slant: Filmworker is that riveting story of a British actor who gave up his career to be Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 30 years, and Always at the Carlyle is a star-packed look at the iconically elegant New York hotel. The third doc was something altogether different: Path of Blood uses acquired footage of Saudi security services battling local al Qaeda cells, including video seized from them. It's shocking, heart-pounding, eye-opening and, even though it's hard to watch, utterly essential.

Coming up this next week, we have press screenings of Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 2, Diane Keaton in Book Club, Sundance hit The Miseducation of Cameron Post, British thriller Welcome to Curiosity and the Mexican drama Boy Undone. I also plan to buy a ticket to see John Cameron Mitchell's How to Talk To Girls at Parties, as its distributor never let me know about screenings even though I asked. (Another distributor didn't screen Melissa McCarthy's Life of the Party for critics at all, but I don't feel the need to seek that one out.)

Critical Week: Everyone play nice

It's been an odd week of screenings for London critics, with a variety of offbeat movies that probably have very specific audiences. The starriest one was A Late Quartet, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walker, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir play a long-time string quartet whose tenuous bond is shaken by a few unrelated events. It's beautifully made and acted, although a bit dull. And if you have a problem with actors pretending to play instruments, look away now. The other semi-mainstream offerings were the Halloween-themed Fun Size, a resolutely unfunny comedy romp, and the somewhat better For a Good Time, Call...,  an underdeveloped friendship comedy-drama. At least the films were livened up by Chelsea Handler and Justin Long, respectively.

Further afield, we had Shock Head Soul, an artful, ambitious but utterly impenetrable doc-drama about psychoanalysis, and London: The Modern Babylon, Julien Temple's dazzling look at the psyche of Londoners - it's utterly essential viewing for anyone interested in history or social culture. Or London, of course. And finally, I turned off all the lights in my flat and stayed in one evening all alone to rewatch Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which is being reissued in UK cinemas this week. I hadn't seen it in 32 years, and it was even scarier than I remembered!

Next week is another random collection of screenings, including Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, the British black comedy May I Kill U, the long-awaited award-winning Romanian film Aurora, the Indian drama The Pool,the musician doc Hit So Hard, and the photojournalist doc McCullin.