Critical Week: Shop til you drop

The 34th Raindance Film Fest kicked off Wednesday night with April X, an enjoyably stylised near-future thriller starring Luly Krug and Connor Storrie. Indie films from around the world are on the programme over the next 10 days. Meanwhile, the biggest film in cinemas is Toy Story 5, the latest thoroughly entertaining sequel in the franchise that could easily have just ended years ago. Thankfully, the Pixar team doesn't rest on its laurels.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Cactus Pears • Toy Story 5
Rose of Nevada • Nino
Virginia Woolf's Night & Day
PERHAPS AVOID:
A Murder Between Friends
ALL REVIEWS >

I also saw Voicemails for Isabelle, a romcom that references classic romcoms shamelessly and still wins us over thanks to charming leads Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson. Virginia Woolf's Night and Day is a smart British period comedy-drama with Haley Bennett as a fiercely independent woman in 1910 London, Joan Collins leads the cast of the nutty whodunit A Murder Between Friends, which is watchable even if it's very corny. The British drama Ish is a staggeringly realistic slice of life that grapples meaningfully with big issues. And the American drama Blue Film is a fascinating and finely contained exploration of attraction and sexuality.

Coming up this next week, I'll be watching Milly Alcock in Supergirl and the Icelandic vampire movie Thirst. At Raindance Film Festival, I plan to see Think of England, Pescador, My Daughter's Hair and more, and then at Annecy Festival in France there's Minions & Monsters to start with.

Critical Week: All for one and one for all

I'm back in London today after a few weeks in Los Angeles visiting friends and family, celebrating Thanksgiving with them, and catching up with a few films there as well. Jet lag will make the next few days a challenge, as will Britain's icy cold snap, but I have too much going on during awards season to give in to that feeling that I should be sleeping. 

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Matilda the Musical
The Silent Twins
The Alleys • Hidden Letters
PERHAPS AVOID: The Leech
ALL REVIEWS >

The forthcoming sequel Puss in Boots: The Last Wish continues the lively antics of the swashbuckling cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, alongside Salma Hayek's Kitty Softpaws. It's hilariously entertaining, as expected. Less satisfying is Devotion, based on an inspiring true story about Korean War pilots that's told with far too much earnest reverence. There's enough to hold the interest and stir the emotions, but the film feels like it plays out in slow motion. And then there's the doc All That Breathes, which sneaks up on us with its bracing insights and vividly involving people who rescue traumatised birds in Delhi.

I also managed to catch up with two movies on the flight home. Infinite Storm, directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, stars Naomi Watts, Billy Howle, Denis O'Hare and Parker Sawyers in a contained, often silent story of survival on a snowy mountain. A jaw-dropping true story, it's spectacularly shot to put the audience in the situation with Watts' tenacious rescue worker. Ad The Outfit, directed by Graham Moore, stars Mark Rylance, Zoey Deutch, Johnny Flynn, Dylan O'Brien and the fabulous Nikki Amuka-Bird in a 1950s Chicago-set tale of a suit maker who becomes entangled with feuding mob bosses. The twisty plot is great fun, even if the film is rather uneven.

Movies this coming week include the blockbuster sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker, Ulrich Seidl's Rimini, Pakistani drama Joyland, the Iranian drama Winners, Italian comedy Marscapone, Spanish musical The Phantom of the Sauna and last year's surprise Oscar nominee Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.

Critical Week: Up in the air

It's been a nice quiet week following the end of the London Film Festival, with only a few screenings. The Eagle Huntress is a gripping, inspiring narrative documentary that was in the LFF, but I'd missed it. It's a stunningly shot story about a 13-year-old girl in Mongolia who takes on a man's world. By contrast, the dopey teen comedy Good Kids wastes its fresh cast with a script that pretends to be a gross-out romp but turns out to be prudish and corny.

There were also three independent dramas. Lazy Eye is a thoughtful, moving story of old lovers trying to reconnect, set in picturesque Joshua Tree, California. And there were the concluding two parts of a trilogy: made in 2013, The Falls: Testament of Faith never had a UK release, so I watched it to catch up on the events following the 2012 original before seeing this year's finale The Falls: Covenant of Grace. A bit over-serious but smart, honest and moving, the three films tell a story that explores the difficult balance between sexuality and religion (the lead characters are Mormons).

This coming week, the big movie is, obviously, Marvel's Doctor Strange starring Benedict Cumberbatch. We also have Idris Elba in 100 Streets, Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, the horror romp The Darkest Dawn, the military drama Burning Blue and Werner Herzog's internet doc Lo and Behold. Plus I have a bit of fringe theatre to take my mind off the cinema this weekend.