Critical Week: Meet the neighbours

After nearly a year of on-off lockdown, it's beginning to feel like I'll never get to make a new friend again. Everyone is feeling the ongoing boredom of staying home all day during this third London lockdown, only getting out for a bit of exercise each day. This may be great for catching up on movies and binge-watching series, but it's also wearing us down. At least I'm keeping busy, which is perhaps much of the battle. But with a drastic reduction in work for self-employed people like me, the strain is getting much more serious.

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So it helps to watch mindless rubbish like The Croods: A New Age, the enjoyably bonkers sequel to the much more coherent 2013 animated romp about a caveman family, this time with added eco-farmers voiced by Peter Dinklage and Leslie Mann. Also disappointing was Nicholas Jarecki's ambitious opioid thriller Crisis, interweaving three important plots headlined by Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer and Evangeline Lilly. Doug Liman's Locked Down was also uneven, a cleverly made but over-egged British pandemic heist comedy with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway. 

I connected much more strongly with some films from off the beaten path. Sh*thouse (UK title: Freshman Year) is a scrappy university comedy, written and directed with offhanded charm by its young star Cooper Raiff. From Ivory Coast, Night of the Kings is a bracingly original prison drama with some stunning mystical touches. From Hong Kong, Twilight's Kiss recounts a sensitive, secertive romance between two fathers in their late 60s. And the shorts collection Boys Feels: Desire in the Dark features five intense European mini-dramas exploring angles on masculinity.

I have a list of films to watch over the coming weeks, including Dylan Sprouse in Tyger Tyger, Olivia Cooke in Pixie, Quentin Dupieux's comedy Keep an Eye Out, the British drama Justine, and two more collections of male-oriented short films: The Latin Boys Volume 2 and Boys on Film 21: Beautiful Secret. There's also the programme launch event for this year's BFI Flare film festival, which runs 17-28 March.

Critical Week: Spring break forever!

This week's most memorable press screening was for Harmony Korine's odd concoction Spring Breakers, which blends hedonistic antics with a gritty thriller, plus James Franco's astonishingly fabulous performance as a rapping gangster. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone stars Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi and Jim Carrey as flashy Vegas magicians in an amusing story pitting old-world values against shallow modern-day methodology. The animated prehistoric romp The Croods features much better than usual writing, voice work and animation to follow a caveman struggling to let his teen daughter grow up. And a father-daughter relationship is also at the centre of Michael Winterbottom's fascinating but uneven The Look of Love, a biopic about King of Soho Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan), the London strip club and publishing magnate who always hoped to pass his empire on to his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots).

In the artier corner, we had perhaps the most provocative film in recent memory in Compliance, a movie so cleverly concocted that it can't help but make you furious; Small Apartments, starring Matt Lucas and a variety of big-name cameo players, is a relentlessly wacky pitch-black comedy that has an odd ability to stir your emotions; and the bracing but controversial documentary Long Distance Revolutionary takes us into the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an astute journalist who's in prison for murder.

This coming week we have a very late screening of the latest fairy tale blockbuster Jack the Giant Slayer, Melissa McCarthy as an Identity Thief, James McAvoy in Danny Boyle's Trance, the remake of Sam Raimi's classic Evil Dead and Bertolucci's Me and You. Plus various other things I need to catch up with on disc, as always.

Requisite Blog Photo: Crood awakening

Slightly too early for a sugar-fuelled press screening this morning. But bring it on...