Critical Week: Smile for the camera

I'm travelling these days, visiting friends and family in Southern California, where I was born. I've certainly been enjoying the sunshine and fish tacos! And of course the Christmas spirit. Work has taken a back seat, with no screenings and refreshingly few deadlines. And I'm working on those pesky year-end best lists. The only film I've watched was revisiting the Knives Out sequel Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix - still one of my favourite movies of the year, this is a smart, funny whodunit with some added insight into compassion and faith. The ensemble is fantastic too, led by the excellent Josh O'Connor and Daniel Craig, plus a fabulous scene-stealing Glenn Close.. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Is This Thing On? • Cover-up
The Voice of Hind Rajab
ALL REVIEWS >

On the plane flight over here, along with various TV episodes, I finally caught up with the guilty pleasure comedy Nonnas, a silly but warmly enjoyable true story starring Vince Vaughn as a guy opening a restaurant in Staten Island with a group of Italian grandmas as chefs. And Mariska Hargitay's documentary My Mom Jayne, is an intimate and involving exploration of her connection with her mother Jayne Mansfield. I also rewatched Frank Capra's classic It's a Wonderful Life somewhere over Greenland. This film never ages - it's just as entertaining and moving as ever. One of the best movies of all time.

Coming up this next week, I still have a few movies I need to watch for awards voting deadlines, but otherwise it's more likely that I'll see a few more holiday classics with friends and family.

Critical Week: Life's a beach

Awards season stuff continues to take up much of my time, with another flurry of nominations and winners released this week, including the biggest nominations of the season: the Oscars. As usual, the news was full of stories about surprise nods and angry snubs, as if this was something new. Meanwhile, I'm in the final 10-day push toward the London Critics' Circle awards, looking forward to having Michelle Yeoh at our ceremony to receive our top honour. It's looking like a properly starry event after two virtual years. Lots still to do to get ready for that!

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Close • The Fabelmans
Concerned Citizen
PERHAPS AVOID:
Maybe I Do • Shotgun Wedding
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Of course I've also been watching movies, and the Philippines was the main villain in two big Hollywood productions. Filmed in the Dominican Republic, Shotgun Wedding stars Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel as the bride and groom who plan a lush destination wedding that's interrupted by ruthless pirates. Filmed in Puerto Rico, Plane stars Gerard Butler as a pilot who crash-lands on a remote Filipino island overrun with a ruthless militia. Both movies require their stars to step in when the law fails to protect them. And both are plainly preposterous, although Plane just wins the battle by being a bit more fun.

The rest are an eclectic bunch: Maybe I Do has a super-starry ensemble cast that features Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, William H Macy, Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey. And yet the transition from stage to screen feels a bit dull and contrived. From China, the massive blockbuster sci-fi epic The Wandering Earth II takes the breath away with its enormous scale and vast cast of characters, and it's also deliberately funny, which is refreshing. From Australia, Seriously Red is an endearing drama about a woman who becomes a Dolly Parton impersonator to find herself. It's funny and edgy, like Muriel's Wedding. And from Israel, Concerned Citizen is a lovely naturalistic drama about a guy trying to decide whether to improve his Tel Aviv neighbourhood or just move away like everyone else.

Screenings are a bit scant this coming week, although that's because I've already seen the awards-contending films that are coming into cinemas now. Movies to see this coming week include Ryan Philippe in The Locksmith, Nick Moran in Renegades and some straggling awards contenders.

On the road: Bring it home

So here I sit in cold, rainy Southern California, all my plans derailed. I've seen some friends and family while I've been here, but not everyone I came out here to visit. And virtually everything has been cancelled due to covid-19, with cinemas and theatres closed, along with bars and restaurants. So as I distance myself socially, I have little to do. When not listening to music on hold, I've watched a few films. For example, out this week in the UK (perhaps!) is The Jesus Rolls, John Turturro's offbeat remake of the 1974 Les Valseuses featuring his Big Lebowski character Jesus Quintana. It's loose and perhaps too smiley.

I also watched, to review them, the engaging and creepy German arthouse thriller Darkroom, about a nice guy serial killer, and the adorable Swedish animated romance Top 3, about a guy with self-esteem issues. And exploring Netflix I found the warm Spanish film Live Twice, Love Once, an involving, very cleverly written and played drama about memory, as well as the concert video Steve Martin & Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life, which is as hilarious as you want it to be and leaves you wanting more.

I'll continue prowling around Netflix and, since cinemas are closing, I'll be covering more films released online over the next several weeks. The website will need to begin to reflect this new reality (this week's cover, right, replaces the planned one for A Quiet Place Part II). I'm still working out how this all looks, while I currently have review links for upcoming streaming movies titled: The Perfect Candidate, Hooking Up, The Other Lamb, Gold Dust, Just Sex Nothing Personal and, ahem, Butt Boy. So I have plenty to do whether I'm isolating in California or, hopefully, back home in London...

Critical week: Life of the party

Even as this year's condensed awards calendar rockets ahead (how about those dull Oscar nominations?), screenings are slow to kick off this year. I've only seen four films this week. (Full disclosure: I did not chase an invite to the one press screening of Bad Boys for Life, as I'm still scarred from Bad Boys II ... 17 years ago). There are plenty of releases in the cinemas, but these are films I saw during the autumn film festival and awards-qualifying seasons. New movies are coming up, so hopefully screenings will materialise soon.

In the meantime, I caught up with Xavier Dolan's The Death & Life of John F Donovan, which premiered to harsh criticism at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival and has since been re-edited. There are issues with the structure, but Dolan is such a fine writer-director that the characters come alive gorgeously. And what a cast: Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Thandie Newton, Michael Gambon! Another Brit, James Norton, stars in the true historical drama Mr Jones, which recounts a fascinating story just before the Second World War as a brainy journalist tries to get the British government to wake up to the threat of Hitler and the lies of Stalin. The British fact-based drama No Fathers in Kashmir is a moving and important story about two teens uncovering the truth in the nasty political situation in northern India. And then there was this one, already a contender for the worst film of 2020...

Jexi
dir-scr Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
with Adam Devine, Alexandra Shipp, Rose Byrne, Michael Pena, Justin Hartley, Ron Funches, Charlyne Yi, Wanda Sykes, Kid Cudi
release US 11.Oct.19 • 19/US 1h24 *. 

Opening as a playful satire of smartphone culture, it becomes quickly apparent that filmmakers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (The Hangover/Bad Moms) have nothing clever in mind, merely shouting the most obvious jokes rather than digging into the lively premise or characters. There was a chance to actually make a comedy that was cute and astutely pointed. But amid a flurry of strained in-your-face jokes that are actually embarrassing to watch, the plot is painfully predictable.

Working for a listicle website, Phil (Devine) is a loner whose phone is his only friend. One day he meets local bicycle shop owner Cate (Shipp), and in his excitement accidentally smashes his iPhone. The new one comes with an AI assistant called Jexi (voiced by Byrne) who takes over his life and issues instructions, ignoring anything he says. She bullies him into changing his diet, musical preferences and pretty much everything else. Then when his hugely unlikely romance with Cate begins to take off, Jexi gets jealous.

The idea is that Jexi is programmed to make Phil's life better in any way possible, but she does this primarily through foul-mouthed insults. Meanwhile, the filmmakers fill the brief running time with idiotic slapstick, wacky smut and unwarranted sentimentality. All of which makes it almost impossible to care what happens to Phil, even if Devine and Shipp have some genuine charm in between the lines. It's especially galling that after so much relentlessly inane stupidity, the filmmakers have the nerve to awkwardly try and create some sweet moments. And the simplistic finale is insulting.

13.Jan.20

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In the diary for this coming week, I have George MacKay in True History of the Kelly Gang, Kristin Scott Thomas in Military Wives, the Filipino political drama Quezon's Game and the acclaimed Sudanese documentary Talking About Trees.

Shadows on the Screen: Spring TV roundup

Here's what I've been watching on television over the past few months, simply to escape from the movies, which are of course work for me. This is fun...

Big Little Lies

An offbeat style of TV from Jean-Marc Vallee with a strikingly starry cast, this series may take a fairly standard approach (unpicking the brittle undergrowth beneath an outwardly perfect community), but the Northern California setting adds a bold visual touch, and the A-list actors bring their A-game. Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Adam Scott and Alexander Sarsgaard are all excellent as prickly, deeply flawed people trying to show their best sides to everyone around them, including their hilariously precocious children. The way the scripts teased us with a murder was very clever, leading to a seriously heart-stopping finale. So bring on the next season.

Feud

A lively exploration of the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, this series is so camp that it's hard not to love every moment. Whether it's all true is irrelevant, as the actors gleefully chomp on the scenery. Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon are superb in the lead roles, adeptly supported by Judy Davis, Alfred Molina and Stanley Tucci, plus Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kathy Bates in juicy side roles. It's a colourful romp through 1960s Hollywood, cleverly playing up the way the industry changed in the decades both before and afterwards. The Oscar episode was simply heavenly, and it'll be interesting to see if they can outdo that in the few episodes still left to go.

Taboo

Tom Hardy stars in (and with his father created and wrote) this series for the BBC, which takes a decidedly offbeat approach to the whole concept of the period drama. Dark and grimy, it's a clever collision of free-spirited adventure and cruel corporate greed in a very repressed early 19th century London. It's a period of history that's rarely depicted on-screen, so the entangled plot threads are genuinely fascinating, even if the show is relentlessly gloomy (it's virtually shot in monochrome). Hardy is excellent in the central role as the enigmatic explorer who takes on the system, with an imperious supporting performance from a dastardly Jonathan Pryce. A second series is coming.

Legion 

I've been turned off by all other superhero TV series this year, but was urged to take a look at this one. And the inventive approach of creator Noah Hawley (Fargo) certainly piqued my interest. These eight episodes were an action-packed rollercoaster of psychological thrills and more visceral nuttiness. Even so, the kaleidoscopic narrative fragmentation is a little off-putting, continually throwing the audience out of anything terribly engaging emotionally. And excessive gunplay always bugs me. But Dan Stevens is simply fantastic, giving a staggeringly textured performance at the centre. And any show that deploys the great Jean Smart and Aubrey Plaza to maximum effect gets my vote. 

The Get Down

Baz Luhrmann's dazzling series is a thrilling fictionalised drama using real people from the emerging hip-hop movement in 1970s New York. The characters are strikingly vivid, specifically a group of teens who find themselves caught between their parents, gangs, politicians and their love of music. As the central character Ezekiel, Justice Smith is magnetic - a rising star getting ready to go supernova. Luhrmann gives all of this an impressionistic mythological sensibility that feels earthy and authentic and also wildly fantastical. The first six episodes last summer were exhilarating, and six more are due this spring.

When We Rise 

Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black revisit Harvey Milk-era San Francisco in this eight-part series, which traces some 50 years in the gay equality movement. Shot with an almost documentary realism, the series centres on four survivors who served as consultants for the series: Cleve Jones, Roma Guy, Ken Jones and Cecilia Chung. This means that scenes are based on first-hand accounts, which makes the deeply personal storylines much more powerfully involving. It's all a bit earnest and worthy, but that's only because the themes are so big. Thankfully, everything is grounded in these real people, and the cast recreates them beautifully, especially Austin McKenzie and Jonathan Majors as the young Cleve and Ken (Guy Pearce and Michael K Williams adeptly play them in later years).

Insecure

This 8-part half-hour comedy series has a strong cast and terrific characters, although the series title is a big problem, as it perpetuates the stereotype of the seemingly strong woman who is actually crippled by insecurity. It also seems to portray turning 30 as some sort of magical moment of maturity or seriousness - another cultural myth that really needs to be debunked. Otherwise, this show is beautifully written and played with a snappy sense of humour. Relationship issues feel bracingly realistic, and the actors are all superb, especially creator Issa Rae and Jay Ellis.

Deep Water

This four-part Australian TV series centres on Bondi Beach detectives (Yael Stone and Noah Taylor) who discover inexplicable links between a present-day murder and a series of unsolved hate-crime killings from the late 1980s, which the police ignored at the time. The show has a soapy emotional flair that sidesteps authenticity in lieu of flashy plot points, hot potato themes and shifty suspects. So it's a rather standard television procedural, overloaded with characters and shocking revelations. But the underlying issues tough on things that haven't improved as much as we'd like to think they have in the past 25 years. And it's strikingly well shot, with engaging performances.

BACK FOR MORE

Sherlock: Series 4

With its sporadic episodes, this show has been drifting in an increasingly smug direction for awhile now. It's still strikingly well acted, and produced to a very high standard. But the inventive visuals are increasingly gimmicky, and the further the plots drift from the Conan Doyle stories, the less interesting or engaging they become. This incarnation of the detective won us over with clever adaptations of original stories to modern settings. But the mysteries in these episodes are merely tricksy and self-satisfied, and the show seems to be riding on Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman rather than deploying them as the characters. We'd like more, but please get back on track.

The Man in the High Castle: Series 2

I wasn't planning to return to this show, but there wasn't anything else on at the time. The cast is strong enough to maintain the intrigue, especially Luke Kleintank, hugely sympathetic as Joe, a young guy on a complex journey into his Nazi roots. And Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa beautifully underplays Tagomi's increasingly dark odyssey. But the plotting is increasingly cheesy, with lots of melodramatic revelations and ironic twists, plus an extension of the parallel timeline premise that never quite came into focus. By the end it was a bit difficult to get excited about much of what happened. So whether I watch the next season will probably again depend on alternative programming.

Tracey Ullman's Show: Series 2

The expert mimic continues to lampoon both modern culture and celebrity figures with this brisk sketch comedy. Some of the segments are inspired, mainly those that address some aspect of society that's flatly ridiculous anyway. Other things feel a bit tired; as clever as they are, the ongoing alternative sagas of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith should have been abandoned in lieu of new targets. As this season went on, it dragged badly. A few moments of sharp invention kept it moving, but without a complete reinvention, I doubt that I'll be back for a third series.

ONGOING

Girls: Series 6

The final season of Lena Dunham's groundbreaking series sends her character into yet another unexpected adventure: pregnancy. It's the bold writing and acting that make this show so exceptional, a willingness to go places movies and TV shows never go, with characters who are complex, flawed and often darkly unlikeable, and yet also easy to identify with. And laugh with. While Dunham quietly takes Hannah in some offbeat directions, there are more colourful arcs for Marnie (Allison Williams) and Elijah (Andrew Rannells) this year. Without ever being flashy or gimmicky, this has been a clever deconstruction of the sitcom. And with only a few episodes to go, it's impossible to predict where we'll leave these hot-mess characters.

Homeland: Series 6

Like some sort of reboot, this series cleverly threw a massive shift into the premise, bringing Claire Danes' Carrie back to America as a private citizen getting involved in a political mess involving her former CIA bosses (the great Mandy Patinkin and F Murray Abraham), her former colleague (Rupert Friend) and the president elect (Elizabeth Marvel). The last season in Berlin was thrilling, but this one has a whole new level of intensity to it, grounding the action in everyday reality, even as it echoes other shows like House of Cards and Scandal. And there's such a strong sense of righteous anger running through it that it's unmissable.

Mom: Series 4

Despite the too-enthusiastic live audience, this show is still worth watching simply for Alison Janney's impeccable characterisation, and Anna Faris is also excellent. Most surprising is that it's a silly comedy that indulges in the expected jokes and pratfalls surrounding family and friends, but underscores everything with seriously dark touches, mainly as it explores the central characters' various addictions. It doesn't seem like this was initially envisioned as a 12-step sitcom, but that's where it has ended up, and it's what makes it worth watching.

Jane the Virgin: Series 3

I came late to this bracingly well-written pastiche of Latin telenovelas, but I have since caught up to the present, travelling through the twisted knot of entwined narratives. It's broadly silly, and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious in its deliberately messy plotting, but the characters are allowed to deepen and evolve, which gives the show a surprising dramatic kick. It also lets actors like Gina Rodrigues, Andrea Navedo, Yael Grobglas and Justin Baldoni find unexpected edges in their characters.

Schitt's Creek: Series 3

Frankly, after the first season it was unclear how the writers could keep this comedy going, and there were times when it felt like a stretch. But Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara are so funny in the main roles, impeccably supported by Dan Levy, Annie Murphy and Emily Hampshire, that you'd watch them all sitting around chatting about the weather. So it's nice that the plot is actually going somewhere rather interesting, finding interesting things to say about a family of millionaires stranded in small-town America.

Coming up: I'm looking forward to more of Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Veep, Fargo, Grace and Frankie, House of Cards, The Get Down and hopefully some new discoveries.

Critical Week: A message from the desert

UK critics this week had an enjoyable press screening for Tom Hanks' new comedy-drama A Hologram for the King, complete with themed cuisine. And the film was enjoyable too - elusive and provocative. We also got to see Ricky Gervais' Netflix movie Special Correspondents on a big screen, and we laughed a lot more than some grumpy America critics did (perhaps because the film isn't very nice about the American media). And then there was the multi-strand ensemble drama Mothers and Daughters, a gentle series of interlinked stories livened up by an all-star cast and some nice observations.

Further afield, the Australian pre-apocalypse drama These Final Hours avoids thrills for a deeper, more emotional approach. Michael Moore's latest documentary Where to Invade Next is entertaining and very, very pointed as it looks at things Europe has done better than America has. And we also had the final chapter in Miguel Gomes' epic trilogy about Portuguese politics, the beautifully made and surprisingly moving Arabian Nights: The Enchanted One.

Screenings coming up this week include Zac Efron and Seth Rogen reuniting for Bad Neighbours 2 (aka Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising), the animated adventure The Angry Birds Movie, Ethan Hawke in Born to Be Blue, Penelope Cruz in Ma Ma and two docs: Author: The JT Leroy Story about the literary scam and The First Monday in May about the Met Gala.

Critical Week: Get out, girl!

London-based critics had a chance to catch a press screening of Effie Gray, the true story of a Victorian woman (Dakota Fanning) trying to get out of a sexless marriage so she can run off with a hot painter (Tom Sturridge). Written by and costarring Emma Thompson, it's refreshingly dark and female-focussed. Another bad marriage is at the centre of David Fincher's Gone Girl, although novelist Gillian Flynn's screenplay leaves no doubt who we're supposed to root for. At least both Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike give marvellously layered performances. Susan Sarandon stars in The Calling, a Fargo-style rural-cop mystery that gets surprisingly, and entertainingly, dark. And Steve Carell leads the family antics in the lively comedy Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day. 

A little further afield, John Lithgow and Alfred Molina are terrific as a long-time couple whose life takes a turn in the New York drama Love Is Strange; New Zealand comics Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi are hilarious in the reality-TV style vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows; and the American indie comedy-drama Believe Me takes a knowing jab at organised religion.

I also had several screenings as part of the run-up to the London Film Festival (which begins on 8th October): The Keeping Room is an American Civil War horror drama starring Brit Marling and Hailee Stainfeld; Queen & Country is John Boorman's post-war comedy-drama; The Duke of Burgundy is Peter Strickland's astounding exploration of a relationship; the drug-running thriller El Nino is Luis Tosar and Daniel Monzon's followup to Cell 211; A Girl at My Door is a cleverly unnerving Korean drama; and Bjork: Biophilia Live (codirected by Strickland) is a film of the last night in the Icelandic musician's concert tour.

This coming week we'll be watching Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, Bill Murray in St Vincent, John Cusack in Drive Hard, and Joan Allen in A Good Marriage, plus LFF screenings for Bypass, Charlie's Country, Next to Her, Wild Life, Dear White People and more...

Critical Week: It's just so hilarious

Judging by the poster image, Hollywood veterans Susan Sarandon, Robert DeNiro, Diane Keaton and Robin Williams clearly found their new movie The Big Wedding absolutely hilarious. And there was plenty of laughter at last week's UK press screening, although reviews are embargoed until next Friday. Reviews are also embargoed for Iron Man 3, which was screened to us on Wednesday night with director Shane Black and his cowriter Drew Peace on hand to do a stand-up style introduction. They certainly got us in the right mood for the film.

Off the beaten path: we also saw Olivier Assayas' ambitious but somewhat dry youth-in-revolt drama Something in the Air and the very nicely written and played Spanish drama The Sex of Angels (released this week as The Angels of Sex in the USA), which dares to take a complex and offbeat approach to romance. I also attended the opening night of "The Film That Changed My Life" at the Barbican Centre, which is celebrating the centenary of the Critics' Circle with 14 special screenings at which critics introduce a key film. Friday's launch film was Gillo Pontecorvo's urgent and stunningly relevant 1966 uprising thriller The Battle of Algiers, presented by David Gritten. And from the sublime to the ridiculous, I also had to watch nine episodes of the latest series Spartacus: War of the Damned, in all its ludicrous, bombastic, macho-posturing glory.

This coming week, we'll be seeing Jason Statham in Hummingbird and the Italian drama Shun Li and the Poet. And we also have press screenings all week as part of the Sundance London Film and Music Festival, including Lynne Shelton's Touchy Feely, Sleepwalk With Me, A.C.O.D., Upstream Color, In Fear, In a World, Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete, The Kings of Summer, The History of the Eagles (with an appearance by the band), Metro Manila, The Summit and God Loves Uganda. Full coverage of the festival starts here on Thursday....