Critical Week: Say your prayers

After having virtually no spring at all, the weather in London has finally warmed up, just in time for the Cannes Film Festival in the South of France. I'm avoiding that crowded, chaotic festival as usual, and hoping for a couple of quieter weeks at home, and nicer weather will be a bonus. But the movies keep coming, and there were two films this week that take on religion: the drama Are You There God? It's Me Margaret adapts the classic 1970 novel into a nuanced coming-of-age drama starring Abby Ryder Fortson (above). Less textured is Jesus Revolution, which stars Kelsey Grammer as real-life pastor Chuck Smith, who brought hippies into his Southern California church in the late-1960s. It's preachy but watchable.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Butterfly Vision
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
ALL REVIEWS >

And then there's the blockbuster of the week: Fast X is the latest romp for Vin Diesel's car-crashing crew, which fans will love even though it's both ridiculous and predictable. The doc Being Mary Tyler Moore recounts the inspiring story of the iconic actress who had a major impact on culture. I also attended two theatre shows: Skid / Saaba at Sadler's Wells are two superbly physical pieces by a gifted Swedish company, and Once on This Island at Regent's Park Open-Air Theatre is an involving musical set in the Caribbean.

This next week I'll be watching Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, Ben Affleck in Hypnotic, the animated adventure Boonie Bears: Guardian Code, the British whodunit Medusa Deluxe and the documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. I'll also attend the press nights for The Misandrist at the Arcola and Corps Extremes at Sadler's Wells (reviews here soon).

Critical Week: Cinematic royalty

Pretty much everything in London this week is centred around Saturday's big coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla. I'm avoiding the crowds, and will catch it on TV. Meanwhile, movie queens Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenbergen return for Book Club: The Next Chapter, a much funnier, more engaging sequel to the corny 2018 hit. An even larger ensemble returns for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, which has had better reviews than it deserves. It's funny, and fans will love it, but there isn't a single exciting or thrilling moment.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Pamfir • The Blue Caftan
Chile '76
ALL REVIEWS >

Jim Parsons stars in the involving romantic drama Spoiler Alert, which infuses real-life humour into a sad story. BlackBerry stars Jay Baruchel as the man who first combined email and mobile phones. It's a fascinating story, skilfully told. Two decades in the making, the witty and rather overlong autobiographical comedy 5-35-77 traces Patrick Read Johnson's journey into filmmaking, via a preview screening of Star Wars. And Still is a gorgeously well-made documentary chronicling Michael J Fox's acting career as well as his experiences with Parkinson's. 

I also covered two stage shows this past week: the inventive, insightful Supernova at Clapham Omnibus, and the fiendishly entertaining musical comedy Eurovision: Your Decision at Wonderville

This next week I'll be watching Jennifer Lopez in The Mother, Finnish action film Sisu, 1970s British thriller Dead Shot and Anton Corbijn's doc Squaring the Circle. I also have a couple of catch-up movies to watch.

Critical Week: School daze

Well, Britain didn't reopen as planned on Monday, as the mishandling of new variants meant any lightening of regulations has been delayed. Thankfully, the accelerated vaccination programme seems to be making headway, so fingers crossed for any steps we can take back to normality. Cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars and clubs particularly depend on this. In the meantime, big films are beginning to appear again, some with enormous press screenings. This past week's main offerings included the teen comedy-horror mashup Freaky, an uneven but witty concoction in which serial psycho Vince Vaughn swaps bodies with cute high schooler Kathryn Newton. And those vrooming speedsters were back on the Imax screen for F9 (aka Fast & Furious 9), which is an unusually joyless instalment in the saga but pushes the spectacle to new (ahem!) heights.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Supernova • I Carry You With Me
The Man Standing Next • Bare
ALL REVIEWS >

Smaller movies this week included Harvey Keitel as Lansky, a finely made but familiar biopic tracing the fascinating life of the notorious gangster. The intriguing but never quite provocative The God Committee stars Kelsey Grammer in a serious role, exploring the people who decide who receives an organ transplant, and who doesn't. From Spain, the silly animated romp Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds brings the 1980s 2D cartoon characters to 3D imagery, with mixed results. And the horror comedy Vicious Fun is a snappy and rather cartoonish play on horror movie tropes, centred around a film critic.

Coming up this next week I have Channing Tatum as George Washington in the action pastiche America: The Motion Picture, Timothy Spall in The Last Bus, the fantastical romance Jumbo and the shorts collection Upon Her Lips: Heartbeats. I'll also be heading to a West End theatre to finally catch Everybody's Talking About Jamie ahead of the movie adaptation in the autumn.

BFI Flare: Thinking clearly

The 34th edition of BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival continues to run virtually, via the BFI Player, so I've been watching movies at home in isolation. There's only a very small selection of features from the festival available to review, so I hope the filmmakers have found other ways to get their work out there - I'm happy to give it a boost if I can! There are a lot of shorts online for press to cover, so I'll include a roundup of those in my final post on the festival, plus reviews on the website of everything. My usual Critical Week roundup of non-festival films is below (everything there is currently streaming!). But first, here are three more Flare highlights...

The Lawyer [Advokatas]
dir-scr-prd Romas Zabarauskas; with Eimutis Kvosciauskas, Dogac Yildiz 20/Lit ****
Set in Vilnius, Lithuania, this soft-spoken topical romance explores the nature of attraction with a collection of realistic characters and situations. Filmmaker Romas Zabarauskas never pushes things over the top, maintaining a tight sense of realism while digging into some provocative themes with honest complexity. At its heart, this is a properly touching love story, and as the story develops it works its way deeply under the skin.... FULL REVIEW >

Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story
dir Posy Dixon; with Glenn Copeland, Jeremy Costello 19/UK ****
There's a loose approach to this documentary, which approaches issues of race and gender from the striking perspective of a black trans man who survived the tumultuous cultural climate of the 50s and 60s and, after gaining experience as a musician, recorded his now-iconic eponymous album in 1986. With a fluid style, director Posy Dixon lets the story unfold in a way that's powerfully moving... FULL REVIEW >

Ask Any Buddy
dir-prd Evan Purchell; with Casey Donovan, Al Parker, Jack Wrangler, Peter Berlin 19/US ****
A feature based on the eponymous Instagram feed, this cinematic collage uses clips from 125 theatrical movies from 1968-1986, creating a fascinating depiction of gay life between Stonewall and the Aids epidemic. This isn't about realism, it's about how filmmakers depicted the lifestyle on-screen. Editing together pornographic films that were shot in real-life locations, filmmaker Evan Purchell creates an unusual documentary portrait of the subculture as it expressed its sexual freedom... FULL REVIEW >

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C R I T I C A L   W E E K

In the absence of press screenings, I've had a lots of films to watch while home-isolating this week. On the flight from Los Angeles to London, I watched The Wolf Hour, the dark and rather gloomy dramatic thriller starring Naomi Watts. Also this week, there was the Catherine Deneuve/Juliette Binoche drama The Truth, an expertly understated drama by maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda; the oddly muted remake Human Capital, starring Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei; the mindless guilty pleasure action of Bloodshot, with Vin Diesel as an indestructible operative; the surprisingly astute political satire The Hunt, which squares off Betty Gilpin against Hilary Swank; and the thin but enjoyable romcom Hooking Up with Brittany Snow and Sam Richardson.

In addition to the BFI Flare movies, arthouse gems included the German social services drama System Crasher and Saudi Arabia's astonishing The Perfect Candidate - both are entertaining, surprising and unmissable. And also on the flight, I watched the Bollywood action comedy The Man Who Feels No Pain starring the painfully likeable Abhimanyu Dasani (pictured). The title kind of explains it all, but it's solid corny entertainment.

BFI Flare continues through this weekend, and this coming week I'm hoping things aren't quite so busy. Films I need to watch include Billy Crystal in Standing Up Falling Down, Ben Affleck in The Way Back, Disney's remake of The Lady and the Tramp, the entertainment industry drama Tape, the thriller From Iceland to Eden, the black comedy Dogs Don't Wear Pants and the football doc The Australian Dream.

Critical Week: Into the night

Screenings continue to slow down in the run-up to Cannes. But there are things we need to see! It was great to watch Tye Sheridan continues to prove himself as an actor with the lead role in Detour. It's a clever, tricky thriller with an inventively fractured narrative. Of course the big movie this week was the highly anticipated sequel Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, which reunites the team for a bigger adventure that lacks the free-spirited tone of the original but is still a lot of fun.

From Scotland, Whisky Galore is a remake of the 1949 classic about residents of a remote island who lay claim to the cargo of a wrecked ship during WWII. It's a gentle comedy, amusing but never very exciting. Further afield, Slack Bay is an oddly comical period romp from controversy-courting filmmaker Bruno Dumont. It stars Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini in an enjoyably farcical story involving snobbery, crime and religion. Much darker, The Student is a Russian drama about a teen who becomes a Christian fundamentalist and begins manipulating everyone in his school. It's chilling and very sharp. And from Greece, Suntan follows a shy middle-aged doctor who falls headlong into the hedonistic summer tourist season. It's well-made and involving, but a little too pointed.

Oddly, I have no screenings in the diary over the next seven days. It's the long weekend this month in London, and things always go quiet at this time of year (call it pre-Cannes gloom). I do have screeners to watch at home, and we are awaiting word of press screenings for the soon-arriving Alien: Covenant, Snatched and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, among others.

Critical Week: Muscle power

There were two big decades-later sequels screened to critics in London this week. XXX: Return of Xander Cage returns Vin Diesel to his extreme-sports spy 15 years after he last played him. The movie is just as preposterous, but thankfully has a sense of humour about it. And T2 Trainspotting is a 20-year reunion for the cast and crew of the cinema-changing Scottish drama. Danny Boyle cleverly adapts the film's kinetic style to a new middle-aged vibe, with a resonant running theme about the nature of nostalgia and growing up. And Viceroy's House is Gurinder Chadha's personal account of the independence and partition of India in 1947 (more about the film closer to the release date).

We also got to see John Waters' "lost" 1970 black comedy Multiple Maniacs in a restored digital projection. It looks fantastic, and is jaw-droppingly unmissable - outrageous even after all these years. And I also caught up with a timely HBO documentary...

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Bright Lights
dir Alexis Bloom, Fisher Stevens; with Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher 16/US ****
Warm and intimate, this documentary traces the close relationship between mother and daughter Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Anchored largely by Fisher's wry ongoing commentary, the film traces the careers of both actresses, as well as their private lives. It reveals that these two were tight friends who supported each other through the ups and downs of their lives with earthy humour and a fascinating balance of realism and optimism. It's a beautiful portrait of both women, and it also offers a bracing look at the life of Hollywood royalty over the past half century or so. From Carrie's astonishing singing talent to Debbie's unrequited passion to protect Hollywood's legacy, there's plenty in this movie that makes it an important document. But it's also emotionally moving, especially poignant following their deaths. Notably, the film was completed more than six months earlier. A must see for fans of Hollywood's golden age, from Singin' in the Rain to Star Wars.

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This weekend I have been consumed with my role as chair of the 37th London Critics' Circle Film Awards, the fifth year I've organised the event. The star-studded ceremony is on Sunday at The May Fair Hotel and I'll have a full report with photos here as soon as possible. I also have screenings this coming week of Mindhorn, Spaceship, The Odyssey and Who's Gonna Love Me Now. I know nothing about any of them.

Critical Week: Beardy men unite!

That's Vin Diesel in the photo above. Yes, really. He's going a rather decent Tom Hardy impression in the olde worlde scenes in his new franchise hopeful The Last Witch Hunter, which was screened to London press on Monday only a couple of days before it opens in cinemas. Whether that franchise materialises depends on the audience's appetite for a batty supernatural thriller that mixes Game of Thrones with Underworld. But it got a lot of laughs from the critics!

Most of the films I watched over the previous week were London Film Festival offerings. Some of these have release dates coming up, including Danny Boyle's exhilarating Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet; Jack Black in the manic comedy-horror romp Goosebumps; Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in the true journalism drama Truth; the artful, surprisingly moving documentary The Fear of 13, about a man on death row; and Jafar Panahi's Taxi Tehran, his superbly mischievous third film as a banned filmmaker in Iran.

Tomorrow comes the first press screening of one of the year's most anticipated movies, Sam Mendes' Spectre, starring Daniel Craig as James Bond. I've also got the British comedy A Christmas Star in the diary, as well as Josh Duhamel in Lost in the Sun and the pre-apocalyptic Mexican buddy movie Velociraptor. I'm also planning to binge watch the entire old series of David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks in preparation for a press trip to The Owls Are Not What They Seem, a themed cafe-club night in a secret London location. Watch this space for a full report!

Critical Week: Purging the underworld

Aside from films I saw as part of BFI Flare, I caught up this past week week with Keanu Reeves' latest career boost movie John Wick, a rippingly stylish revenge thriller that's far better than it has any right to be. Also enjoyable, but not quite as artistically ambitious, Fast & Furious 7 (aka Furious 7) is a thunderously entertaining step in the franchise, including a lot more emotion than these actors have attempted before. And they just about get away with it. The action stuntwork looked pretty cool on the Imax screen.

Further afield there was the superb Cliff Curtis in the dark and intense true story The Dark Horse; the astonishingly grim and unnerving Belgian thriller The Treatment, which compares chillingly with The Silence of the Lambs and Seven (yes it's that good); and the raucous documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, a mist-see for movie fans tracing the Hollywood career of Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who produced an outrageous run of films over about 15 years.

We now have two short weeks with the four-day Easter weekend in between. Film screenings on the schedule include Anna Kendrick in The Last Five Years, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, Jack Reynor in the Sundance-winner Glassland, the German thriller The Samurai, the comedy Undocumented Executive and the documentary Lambert & Stamp.

Critical Week: Eek! A mouse!

London critics caught up this week with the clever black comedy Life of Crime, based on an Elmore Leonard novel and starring Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def). It's offbeat and very funny, but not quite as hilarious as the week's biggest movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, a riotously entertaining sidestep in the Marvel universe that may be the comic studio's best film yet.

Other high-profile films this week included Dwayne Johnson and Brett Ratner's new take on Hercules, a surprisingly enjoyable adventure that's a lot smarter than it looks. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman's final performances lifts the slow-burning political thriller A Most Wanted Man into something rather amazing. And random cast members from a range of the previous four films are back for Step Up: All In, another corny story punctuated by great dance numbers.

Further afield, we had the terrific small-town drama Tiger Orange, about estranged brothers who both happen to be gay. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden is a riveting documentary about a shocking event from the early 1930s. You'll want to read more about it, and hopefully someone will make a dramatic thriller. And Al Pacino offered two movies: Salome is his film of his recent staging of the scandalous Oscar Wilde play, while Wilde Salome documents the process of doing the play and film, as well as tracing Wilde's life. The mesmerising staging of Salome is oddly stilted and over-the-top at the same time, with Jessica Chastain riveting in the title role. The doc is even more interesting, a bit padded out but packed with remarkable observations.

This coming week we'll be subjected to Sylvester Stallone and crew in The Expendables III, Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover, Nat Wolff and Selena Gomez in Behaving Badly, the indie drama 4 Minute Mile, Leo Leigh's ping pong hustler doc Fact or Fiction, the episodic architectural doc Cathedrals of Culture, Agnes B's road movie My Name is Hmmm, and Secret Cinema's immersive Back to the Future event.

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...