Critical Week: Say what?

I was able to catch up with the London Film Festival gem Their Finest this week, a lightly handled drama about government-sponsored filmmakers during the Blitz. With a sharp cast anchored by Gemma Arterton, Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin and clever direction by Lone Scherfig, it's a telling story packed with engaging detail. Ben Affleck's Live by Night is a great-looking gangster movie, with another superb cast (including Chris Cooper, Sienna Miller and Zoe Saldana), but it's a bit too glacial to grab hold. And James McAvoy plays a man with multiple personalities in M Night Shyamalan's thriller Split. It's unnerving and sometimes full-on freaky, but rather messy.

Outside the mainstream, Bitter Harvest, a chronicle of the horrific Stalin-forced famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33, starring Max Irons, Samantha Barks and Terence Stamp. And Anna Biller's The Love Witch is a hilariously lurid 1960s-style pastiche of magic, romance and murder. Both films are clearly passion projects, and both feel rather overlong due to their choppy editing and in-your-face messages.

This coming week we have the 20-years-later sequel T2 Trainspotting, Woody Harrelson's real-time adventure Lost in London Live, the resurrected franchise XXX: Return of Xander Cage, the British/Indian drama Viceroy's House, the football icon doc Best and John Waters' long-lost Multiple Maniacs.

Critical Week: Man in the mirror

Michael Shannon held our attention at the press screening of his new thriller The Iceman, based on the true story of a mob hitman - a gritty, punchy film with superior performances. The other big movies this week weren't quite as smart: Fast & Furious 6 is the polar extreme, with idiotic action that's enjoyable but starting to feel stale; the animated adventure Epic is visually amazing, with some terrific comical moments and action scenes but an uneven, simplistic tone; and The Moth Diaries is a suitably gothic and creepy drama set in an isolated girls' school that struggles to reach a decent payoff.

From off the beaten path came the Austrian fable The Wall, a kind of female Robinson Crusoe in the mountains story that is too literary for its own good. Blackfish and We're Not Broke are two extremely well-made docs that get our blood boiling about psychological cruelty to animals and corporate collusion with politicians, respectively. And Pasolini's 1968 masterpiece Theorem is a challenging, surreal exploration of class and culture starring a strikingly young and seductive Terence Stamp.

Coming this week is a very late press screening of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (it's timed to coincide with the opening night screening at Cannes), Emma Watson in The Bling Ring, Seth Rogen and James Franco in This Is the End, Robert Redford's political drama The Company You Keep and the comedy A Haunted House.

And no, I'm not going to Cannes, staying in rainy London instead...

LFF 9: At the movies

I decided to take a day off from the 56th BFI London Film Festival today - it was supposed to be a catch-up day seeing a few films I'd missed, but honestly I can't see everything! Instead I've been home writing. Not sure that was a wise choice - probably should have gone out for a bit of exercise. Anyway,  the red carpet last night featured Gemma Arterton and Terence Stamp at the Song for Marion premiere (below). And today Omar Sharif will attend the special screening of Lawrence of Arabia. There's only one day left in the festival, and the buzzy questions are (1) who will win at tonight's awards ceremony and (2) what will be tonight's surprise film? In the meantime, a few more highlights...

Seven Psychopaths
dir Martin McDonagh; with Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell 12/US ****
Both a freewheeling crime comedy and an astute exploration of the creative process, this clever film teeters on the brink of absurdity. But it's so much fun, and so brilliantly well-played, that it wins us over... REVIEW >

Song for Marion
dir Paul Andrew Williams; with Terence Stamp, Vanessa Redgrave 12/UK ***
After London to Brighton and Cherry Tree Lane, you'd never expect this kind of heartwarming drama from Williams. Maybe he's just cleansing his palate, but at least he injects some dark shadows into a predictable story, even if it feels like a geriatric episode of Glee... REVIEW >

Sightseers
dir Ben Wheatley; with Alice Lowe, Steve Oram 12/UK ****.
As with both Down Terrace and Kill List, director Wheatley playfully bends genres in this romantic-comedy road movie so we never know what might happen next. because this is also a serial killer movie, which adds a jolt of adrenaline that's both entertaining and unexpectedly engaging... REVIEW >

Lawrence of Arabia
dir David Lean; with Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness 62/UK *****
Digitally restored for its 50th anniversary, this film looks jaw-dropping on the big screen with a bright 4K digital image. Yes, this is the epic of epics, a staggeringly big movie that tells a remarkably intimate true story... REVIEW >