Tuesday 29 May 2012

Critical week: Do a little dance

Yes, even though it came out in America a month ago, London critics only this week finally caught up with The Five-year Engagement (which opens here a month from now). This reunion of the Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel is another overlong but thoroughly enjoyable rom-com for grown-ups. Segel has terrific chemistry with a particularly charming Emily Blunt. And it's very funny. For contrast, we also saw Simon Pegg's one-man pitch-black comedy A Fantastic Fear of Everything, which is still under embargo.

More high-brow fare came with Sarah Polley's second film as a director, Take This Waltz, an involving romantic drama starring Seth Rogen and the amazing Michelle Williams. Another film with a song title, Strawberry Fields is a slightly over-egged British drama about relationships and mental stabilty. Meanwhile from France, we had the breezily enjoyable social comedy The Women on the 6th Floor. But with London in the grip of gorgeous sunshine after a far-too-long break, everyone would rather be outside than watching movies. So my stack of review discs is getting perilously tall, and the only one I've managed to see has been Lovely Molly, a jumpy, unsettling but rather standard creep-out from one of the Blair Witch writer-directors.

In the next few days, I'll catch up with Ridley Scott's return to Alien territory with the prequel Prometheus, Tom Cruise singing through Rock of Ages, and hopefully some of these discs, including Tony Kaye's Detachment, Willem Dafoe in The Hunter, Chloe Moretz in Hick, and Kim Ki-duk's Arirang. On the other hand, if the weather is this good over the four-day weekend, let the stack grow.

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