Critical Week: The room where it happens

The weather has taken a dark, cool turn in London, which is perhaps for the best as lockdown eases further, with pubs and restaurants now open. I had my first professional foray into central London this week, as a guest on a BBC Radio programme, but the West End still feels very odd.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Prince • Mucho Mucho Amor
Spaceship Earth • Guest of Honour
We Are Little Zombies • Seahorse
PERHAPS AVOID:
The Beach House
Inheritance • Parallax
FULL REVIEWS >

There's no word on when press screenings will start up again, so we're still watching links. The big movie this week was Hamilton, a filmed version of the Broadway musical with the original cast. It's utterly electric - timely, engaging, important. I'll resume attempts to get a ticket for the stage version once theatres reopen. This week's action movie is The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron as head of a group of immortal mercenaries. There's a surprising depth to it. And Burden is the true story of a klansman (Garrett Hedlund) caught between his racist mentor (Tom Wilkinson) and a patient woman (Andrea Riseborough). It's a bit obvious, but powerful.

As for offbeat films, there were the gentle comedy Saint Frances, a coming-of-age tale about a woman in her mid-30s; The Spy, the fascinating true story of a Norwegian woman caught between Nazis and Swedes during WW2; The Beach House, a deliberately vague horror thriller that's not easy to connect to; Parallax, an over-ambitious Inception-like brainbender; We Are Little Zombies, a bonkers Japanese musical romp with deep undercurrents about grief and pop culture; and the documentary Mucho Mucho Amor, which movingly explores the life of iconic fortune teller Walter Mercado. I also watched the Netflix pandemic collection Homemade, 17 shorts shot during lockdown by some very high-profile international filmmakers. It's of course hit and miss, with highlights from Paolo Sorrentino, Pablo Larrain, Rungano Nyoni, Johnny Ma and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Films to watch this next week include Tom Hanks in Greyhound, Andy Samberg in Palm Springs, the cycling drama The Climb, the romantic thriller Fatal Affair, the Italian drama The Players, the musical Divos and the doc In Bright Axiom.

Critical Week: Inconceivable

Some personal comments are required this morning. I stayed up most of last night watching election results roll in from my home country, in disbelief at how it progressed: the majority of US voters have officially said that it's ok to be a white supremacist, a person who assaults women, or someone who hates people based on their gender, economic status, sexuality or ethnicity. This is a vote for hatred, division and inequality that effectively ends centuries of diplomacy and social progress. Although how that plays out is yet to be scene. After the banks crushed the world economy nearly 10 years ago, I knew a revolution was coming, but I never saw it going this way. In just the past few months, for example, voters in the Philippines have affirmed government-condoned vigilante violence and Colombia's people voted against peace there, plus of course the UK's referendum on the European Union, which has tripled the incidence of hate crimes across Britain. Anti-migrant sentiment is rife all over the world, even though every single bit of evidence points to immigrants as adding to society, never draining it. But then facts and compassion don't matter any more. My slim hope is that the rhetoric of the campaign season will be replaced by something more positive and rational. But I won't put my head in the sand.

So back to movies! It's perhaps appropriate that the biggest movie screened to London-based critics this week was Denial, a razor-sharp true drama starring Rachel Weisz, Timothy Spall and Tom Wilkinson about a Holocaust denier challenged in a London court. It's powerfully well-made, and a riveting film. Lighter fare included the amusing, enjoyable backstage Broadway musical-comedy Opening Night, starring Topher Grace and Anne Heche; the multi-strand holiday comedy Shared Rooms, a slightly clunky film with some nice touches; and the quietly moving Canadian indigenous drama Fire Song. And there was also the opening movie at the London Korean Film Festival (3-27 Nov)...

The Truth Beneath
dir-scr Lee Kyoung-mi; with Son Ye-jin, Kim Ju-hyuk 16/Kor ***.
Korean filmmaker Lee Yyoung-mi takes an unusual approach to the usual mystery thriller, getting under the skin of her central character while bringing out the inherent corruption in politics. The result is a tangled story that twists and turns, but keeps its focus on the internal shifts in attitude rather than the big surprises. And there are plenty of those. So even if the filmmaking is sometimes deliberately tricky, this is a slick, sharp and thoroughly gripping drama.

Coming up this week, I have the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Ewan McGregor's directing debut American Pastoral, Miles Teller in Bleed for This and the Argentine drama Esteros. There are also awards-consideration screenings of Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes romance Rules Don't Apply and Joel Edgerton in the civil rights drama Loving.