Critical Week: On a night like this

As Britain experiences a heatwave during the final week of Wimbledon and the start of the Euro-2022 women's football championship, it's perhaps a bit unlikely that people will be abandoning the sunshine for cinemas. Although Thor is likely to have some pull, smaller films will suffer. And the weather looks like it will continue like this for a couple of weeks (yay!). I saw two very big movies on the big screen this week. The riotously action-packed The Gray Man pairs the fabulous Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans as duelling, scene-stealing hitmen, while Ana de Armas (above) almost walks off with the whole film. Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson and Taika Waititi are back for Thor: Love and Thunder, Marvel's first slapstick action comedy. It's a lot of fun, even if the formula is as stale as ever.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Brian and Charles • Cop Secret
The Railway Children (1970)
ALL REVIEWS >

Adrien Brody is terrific in the redemption thriller Clean, although the script (which he cowrote) never has something original to say. The offbeat British drama All Is Vanity is very odd indeed, a great idea that struggles to have some impact. Alan Cumming leads the doc-drama hybrid My Old School, a fascinating and remarkably involving account of an epic deception. And two collections of short films explore issues of identity and sexuality in inventive, sometimes superbly provocative ways. Both Boys on Film 22: Love to Love You and Girls Feels: Into the Blue are well worth a look.

Coming up this week, I'll be watching Daisy Edgar-Jones in Where the Crawdads Sing, Juliette Binoche in Both Sides of the Blade, the Jordanian drama The Alleys, the trans activist doc Donna and the shorts collection Girls Feels: Force of Nature.

Critical Week: Sister act

It's been nice to only see three films in the three days after the film festival ended (rather than three or four a day). The main event was an epic press screening of Thor: Ragnarok, which is surprisingly funny all the way through while also being packed with eye-catching energy (especially the scene-stealing Cate Blanchett, above), even if the whole Marvel thing is feeling oddly stale, perhaps because there is no suspense left in the formula. But it's a lot of fun. I also caught up with The Snowman, Michael Fassbender's serial killer thriller based on the Jo Nesbo novel, which has deservedly had terrible reviews across the board. There is a huge range of talent on both side of the cameras, yet the script is a mess. And on the smaller side, I caught the British thriller B&B, which touches on some big topics (mainly bigotry) with strong characters and a genuinely unsettling plot. I also had some time for the theatre...

---

Young Frankenstein
at the Garrick Theatre
Mel Brooks adapts his own classic film (one of my all-time favourites) into this rather nutty musical, which opened in the West End last week. It's basically the movie with added songs that stretch out some of the more iconic moments, and the characters are all played by a skilled singing-dancing cast exactly like their big screen counterparts. Perhaps the film is so indelible that there's no other way to play these roles - they wouldn't be as funny it they didn't hark back to the great Gene Wilder, Madeleine Kahn, Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman. The material is robust enough to handle this transition - the film's best jokes are still funny on stage. And the emotional kick is here too, even if it's somewhat diluted by the extra razzle dazzle. I'll probably go see it again.

---

Graeme of Thrones
at the Charing Cross Theatre
The subject up for satire is obvious, but this fringe show takes an amusingly fresh approach that is actually poking fun at fringe shows themselves. The three-person cast is up for quite a lot of riotous silliness, with physical slapstick, wordplay and lots of sight gags. Their rendition of the series' opening titles is impeccably ridiculous. Fans of the TV show will get all of the jokes, which include spoilers right up to the latest season. And there are plenty of gems thrown in all the way through for a wider audience, especially the performance art pieces that come out of nowhere with their delirious absurdity. Some of the humour strains a bit, but most gags hit the target astutely. And by the end, the sloppy "let's put on a show" vibe means that we're rooting for all three of these scruffy actors (plus one game audience member) to claim the Iron Throne.

---

Coming up this next week, we have Nicolaj Coster-Waldau in Shot Caller, Domhnall Gleeson in Crash Pad, British thriller Palace of Fun and Aussie coming-of-age drama Teenage Kicks.

Critical Week: This year's Help

UK critics finally got their first look at Lee Daniels' all-star epic drama The Butler this week. While it plays out essentially a Civil Rights-themed variation on Forrest Gump, it's actually a true story. And an unusually slushy film for Daniels. We had a lot more fun watching the sequel Thor: The Dark World, an oversized blockbuster that's so ridiculous that you can't help but smile. But the best movie this past week was Ryan Coogler's Sundance-winning Fruitvale Station, a shocking true drama skilfully filmed without pushing any sort of message other than this kind of thing must never happen again.

Off the beaten path, there was the surreal adventure thriller Escape From Tomorrow, a fiendishly clever film shot guerrilla-style at Disney theme parks; the British gypsy drama Traveller, which isn't well enough made to overcome its cliches; and the dark gay thriller Triple Crossed, which makes up for its low budget with a twisty plot and intriguing characters. And we also had three documentaries: the rousing Milius exploring filmmaker John Milius' astounding life and work; the harrowing Pandora's Promise looking into the truth about nuclear power an how it's probably the answer to climate change; and the witty but dry Rough Cut remaking scenes from a fake 1980s slasher horror.

This coming week we have Jude Law in Dom Hemingway, the animated adventure Free Birds, the British comedy Breakfast With Jonny Wilkinson, the political thriller Exposed, and the Israeli drama Fill the Void.