IL’s Films Of The Year 2015

Overall, I thought it was a pretty good year, but probably only thanks to my membership of the wonderful Whirled Cinema Club near my flat. I hardly ventured to the multiplexes, partly due to laziness, but mostly due to a complete lack of interest in the usual blockbusters of the like of the interminable Star Wars marketing exercise (apparently there was a film too?), reboots of Mad Max and Terminator, or any of the superhero Ant/Bat/Spider/Iron/Whatever-Man franchises. So here they are, no apologies; these are genuinely my favourite films of the 35 I saw last year. But first…

Worst Film: As an unreconstructed grump, I’m going to have to disappoint some people by revealing that I don’t think I saw anything which I really hated last year. Certainly not anything which made by hackles rise like the ridiculous Gravity did in 2013. I guess I found Whiplash the most over-praised movie of the year, and actually rather dull, while a mention must go to the otherwise perfectly-fine remake of Far From The Madding Crowd for being a) utterly pointless; and b) fatally miscast in both Tom Sturridge as Troy (far too fey and completely lacking Terrence Stamp’s dangerous sexuality from the original) and Matthias Schoenaerts as Oak (way too brooding and hunky for the part of the boring but dependable stoic).

Honourable Mentions: I’m going with London Road for just being like nothing else. And Kingsman: The Secret Service was a lot of fun but flagged once (spoiler alert) Colin Firth was dispatched.

Top 10: Here we go…

10)  Trainwreck

This was billed as an ‘anti-rom com’; of course it was nothing of the sort, having all of the genre’s traditional structure, but differing to almost all rom coms from the past 30 years in managing to be actually really funny. This is almost entirely due to the presence and perfect timing of the wonderful Amy Schumer. It almost single-handedly rescues the form from years under the shadow of those dread words “starring Jennifer Aniston”. While we’re here, a mention too for both of Noah Baumbach’s couplet of comedies about people falling disastrously under the spell of people in different age brackets to themselves, While We’re Young and Mistress America, which were both good. Smile now, as from now on, it’s going to get grim.

9)  The Goob

Always knew there was something not right about Norfolk. This slice of British social realist drama derives a potent atmosphere from its flat unrelenting landscape and grinding rural poverty, and contains another terrifying performance from professional psycho Sean Harris. And could young Liam Walpole be the next Jack O’Connell?

8)  Amy

The mark of a truly great documentary is one that enlightens you on a subject in which you not only previously had very little interest, but also one where you know how it’s going to end. Director Asif Kapadia pulls off the same trick here which he did with Senna, presenting a moving, tragic, and engrossing look at Amy Winehouse’s rise and decline as her success took her somewhere she never wanted to go. It has a great piece of opening film of the young Amy’s talent revealing itself precociously at a birthday party, and just by the trick of reproducing her lyrics across the screen to accompany her music, made me realise finally what a great talent she was.

7)  The Falling

Making brilliant use of Maisie Williams’ otherworldly features, this defiantly odd and sexy film about fainting, incest and agoraphobia in a girls’ school in the late sixties almost seems to have come from another age. It’s distinctive, perhaps a little exasperating, but unpredictable and mesmeric.

6)  Ex Machina

Along with Channel 4’s excellent Humans, novelist Alex Garland’s directorial debut taps into the growing fear in 2015 that the robots might be about to take over. All three leads give impressive performances in a cat and mouse game that played out like a hi-tech version of Sleuth, while delivering some intellectual chills wrapped in properly sciencey science fiction.

5)  Carol

Beautiful, touching, absorbing and lacking some of kitsch archness of Todd Haynes’ earlier homages to fifties ‘female’ films, this kicks off the Top 5 largely due to a stunning career-best performance from Cate Blanchett. Meanwhile, Rooney Mara effortlessly channels the ghost of Audrey Hepburn. It all looks ravishing and sexy in a smouldering understated way, as subtlety wins the day over melodrama.

4)  45 Years

One of two 2015 films where, bizarrely, families are rent asunder by alpine accidents (see also Force Majeure), this also shares something in common with Carol: an outstanding female performance culminating in a long, lingering shot of a face which speaks a thousand words. Charlotte Rampling makes you feel the pain of everything crumbling around you as you realise you can never really know someone, even after a life together. Desperately sad and a huge improvement from Andrew Haigh on his earlier film, Weekend.

3)  Blind

Completing a trio of portraits of damaged women, this Norwegian drama stars the glacial Ellen Dorrit Petersen as Ingrid, a newly-blind woman, stuck in her Oslo apartment with too much time on her hands. Her marriage appears to heading into troubled waters, but how much of what we are seeing is actually happening, and how much is happening in her own head? The film makes you work hard to piece it all together, but as it starts to make sense, you understand how the alienation of a sensory disability must affect far more than that single sense.

2)  The Tribe

Talking of which: from blind, to deaf. And this one really makes you work hard. Set in a Ukrainian school for deaf children in which the pupils have become almost feral, and performed entirely by non-professional deaf actors in sign language, the film has no dialogue, no subtitles, and pretty much no sound apart from some grunting and background noise. It’s grim and extremely violent, but undeniably a unique experience. It also has at least two scenes so disturbing which I found almost unwatchable (and I’m not squeamish). An utterly unforgettable film, it left a big impression on me, and might have been film of the year, except I picked a grim and violent film last year and I don’t want you all to think I’m a total nihilist. So…

1)  The Dance Of Reality

I’ve been a fan of Alejandro Jodorowsky ever since I somehow got into the Australian post-premiere party of his film Santa Sangre in 1990 while living in Sydney. His first film in over 20 years has all his usual tropes (circuses, marches, freaks, vivid colours), whilst eschewing much of the violence and craziness he is known for to tell a much more heartfelt semi-autobiographical tale of his childhood at the mercy of his bullying Stalinist father, and a mother who communicates only via operatic singing. So it’s still a bit bonkers. It was filmed in his own home town and stars his own son as his father, and seems to want to give grant the family a happier ending than they apparently had in real life. Reportedly, a sequel is on the way this year, but this will be hard to beat for richness of the imagination. It also occasionally features the 86-year old director as himself now, comforting his childhood self, telling him everything will turn out alright. And who wouldn’t have loved that.

And finally:

Best Actor/Actress:  I’ve got to say that this year, it’s all about the women. In a close run thing, Rampling just beats Blanchett in a smackdown, but Blanchett gets up again with perfect hair and lipstick.

IL’s Films Of The Year 2014

Here we go then (and I deliberately haven’t read anyone else’s first so as not to be unduly influenced). First, the stats. I saw 39 films this year, 34 of which are 2014 UK releases and therefore eligible for consideration. This compares to 42 and 32, respectively, for 2013, so a very similar sized pool. But that’s where the similarities end. Whereas last year I was scrabbling around to find 10 films I actually liked, this year, there were at least 15 which simply had to be in the Top 10. And I couldn’t find anything in 2014 which I hated anywhere near as much as the ludicrous Gravity and the execrable Silver Linings Playbook from the year before. Even Interstellar was alright. I must be going soft….

Before leaving 2013 behind, I should note that The Great Beauty would have been challenging for the film of the year if I had only seen it before Jan 2014. And whilst we’re on the subject, the wonderful How We Used To Live was a 2014 release, but I saw a preview in 2013, so I discounted it. Without such rules, surely anarchy would prevail.

So I think we’ve established it was a pretty damn good year, but into each life some rain must fall, so as is traditional, we’ll start at the bottom of the barrel and work up.

Worst Films of 2014

The absurdly overpraised and actually rather dull Dallas Buyers Club just misses the list, but I’m afraid a couple of other big hitters are due my opprobrium.

3) The Double

After 2011’s Film Of The Year Submarine, I’m afraid Richard Ayoade’s follow-up is a terrible misfire. An incoherent mess, stylistically all over the place, and hamstrung by Jesse Eisenberg giving that performance he always gives. Again. But not as irritating as…

2) The Grand Budapest Hotel

I’ve always been agnostic re Wes Anderson, but I did like Moonrise Kingdom. Here however, he turns the twee dial up to twelve to teeth-grating effect, while managing to be boring at the same time. And now the film is being showered with awards and nominations, I find my stance hardening against this one.

1) Bad Neighbors

OK, I was off sick and desperate for something to watch, and this had been generally favourable reviewed. But it just seemed like the same old fratboy comedy nonsense really, topped off by Seth Rogen and particularly Rose Byrne giving performances akin to the proverbial fingernails scraping down a blackboard. Nice acting by Zach Efron’s pecs though.

 Phew, that’s better. On to nicer things. This year’s honourable mentions start with Pride, for generally being nice and avoiding the worst excesses of Brit working class hero films (see The Full Monty, Billy Elliot et al), and for resisting the temptation to frame the whole shebang with a pointless love story. Then there was the riveting Locke, 85 minutes of Tom Hardy in a car, but like piecing a jigsaw together. ’71 was also a tense and gripping watch; possibly a touch far-fetched though? Inside Llewyn Davis was a return to form by the Coen Brothers, that odd bit in the middle with John Goodman being cancelled out by the prodigious use of a cat. And finally, I really don’t know what to say about Under The Skin, a film I found intensely pretentious when I saw it, but haven’t been able to get out of my head since. Startlingly original, it almost made the journey from the worst list to the best list in the time since its initial viewing. But not quite.

Best Films of 2014

Here they are then….

10) Leviathan

I’m not sure ‘enjoyed’ is the right word, but I did admire this hulking great slab of vodka-soaked Arctic misery. The stark but majestic landscape was beautifully photographed, contrasting with the relentlessly depressing portrait of Putin’s Russia, rotten to the core like the titular beast on the beach.

9) Stranger By The Lake

The French gay cruising murder mystery is a genre I feel we really have been missing prior to this film. The whole timbre of this movie was unnerving, sexy and slightly queasy-making all at the same time. Another distinctive piece rendered slightly surreal by the sun-blasted cinematography. Probably wouldn’t have worked if set on Clapham Common.

8) Frank

There’s probably still room for a biopic of Frank Sidebottom’s real life, but until then this will do. In some ways it’s as lightweight as a papier mache head, but works as a defiant defence of people and their general oddness, which makes its heart at least entirely genuine.

7) The Drop

I wasn’t convinced by Tom Hardy before this year, but now he’s proved me wrong twice in two completely different roles. He certainly convinces here as a moody but outwardly good-hearted Brooklyn bar owner (more pet-loving used to indicate benevolence, but minus points for it being a dog this time), but the power of this movie is that it really doesn’t play out like you think it will. Best last line of the year too.

6) The Wolf Of Wall Street

Scorsese’s epic has everything we fete him for, a delirious and woozy momentum which somehow Leonardo DiCaprio can harness, despite Hollywood’s persistence in miscasting him in alpha male roles (he still looks too boyish, I think). Worth it for the attempt to get home on Quaaludes alone, and if not up with Goodfellas, it still deserves to go down as some great American film-making.

5) Boyhood

Brilliant concept, superbly executed, and I know it’s going to win this poll and probably the Oscar too. I did love it, but felt my attention wandering slightly towards the end; could have done with 20 minutes shaving off it IMHO. Patricia Arquette gets my best actress nod though for her beautifully-judged performance (or should that be performances, given that she must have given a whole bunch of them over the twelve years).

4) Calvary

I didn’t have a clear winner this year, so once we hit the Top 4, really any of these films could take the title on a different day of the week. This droll but dark meditation on the fate of a good priest is a great ‘who’s gonna do it’. And why don’t we saw more of the wonderful Dylan Moran in films and on TV these days?

3) Lilting

Some found this rather too slight, but I was genuinely moved by the tale of beautiful but bereaved Ben Whishaw and his attempt to reach out to ex’s mother. The sadness is as much in the isolation felt by the first-generation immigrant who finds herself alone in a country she hasn’t ever understood, as much as in the romantic relationship cruelly cut short.

2) Two Days, One Night

A mildly-depressed Marion Cotillard spending a weekend stomping round bland Belgian suburbs trying to persuade her co-workers to forego their bonus so that she can keep her job really doesn’t sound too promising on paper. But this actually works like a thriller, with each encounter effectively a cliffhanger, as you’re never sure of the reaction she will get from each of her colleagues. The denoument looked like it could only be cheesily uplifting or horridly downbeat, but the film pulls it off in a way which is neither, and above all, feels true.

1) Starred Up

What a great year for my future husband Jack O’Connell (we’ve been together since Skins, dontcha know); even Angelina Jolie couldn’t ruin it. He’s incredible (and frequently super-hotly topless) in this powerful prison drama that’s not in any way easy to watch. I saw it just before Xmas and am still trying to get the fingernail dents out of my sofa. But it seared itself on my psyche as well as my soft-furnishings, so gets my douze points for ’14.

Right, I’m off to read everyone else’s lists now and prepare not only my bouquets and brickbats, but probably also a great long list of 2014 films I still need to catch. Happy viewing for 2015 all. Xx

DM's Films of 2013

So here are my film picks of 2013. A little late, but here nonetheless.  First up, I was very remiss in my film viewing last year. I guess you could call it a fallow year and I wasn’t into cinema as much as previous years. I have already turned this around and seen a couple of crackers already in 2014. I have also caught up with a few 2013 films over January.

Like Ian, I found it easy to find films that I did not enjoy, were disappointing or distinctly average. Here are the worst of them:

Worst Films of 2013

Oblivion – I’m not sure why I even went to see this film (I blame PG!). Absolute dross and a complete rip-off of several other much better films. Offensively so. Somebody should stop Tom Cruise or advise better script selection.

The Paperboy – A mess of a film that failed to deliver for me (boom boom). Trashy, but not in a good way.

Les Miserables – worst film for me by far. So long, so boring. Poor direction with lots of close-ups of actors’ faces being sad and emotive whilst singing. This purposeful thrusting of melodrama upon me resulted in me feeling quite the opposite. I wanted them all dead so that the film would be over. I would actively avoid having to see this film ever again.

Top films of 2013 (in no particular order, but I shall pick out my favourite 3)

Side Effects – An enjoyable, cleverly constructed and thought provoking thriller. Successfully steered itself the right side of ridiculous with great pay-offs.

Compliance – A cracking little film from the “truth stranger than fiction” genre. Well acted with relationships subtly built to a chilling climax.

Behind the Candelabra – Interesting biopic. I knew little about Liberace. He seems to me almost mythical…like unicorns! How could something like that exist? Great acting from Matt Damon who surprised and delighted me.

Gravity – Utterly ridiculous plot: Check. Sandra Bullock: Check. Schmaltzy back-story with faux emotions to explain our heroine’s plight: Check. BUT despite all these negative points this still makes it on my list due to my pure exhilaration and the genuine breath-taking moments caused by the direction and special effects. The best 3D I’ve seen to date. I’m not usually taken in by all by that but that is exactly what made it for me.

In A World – Entertaining comedy from writer/director Lake Bell about a female voice-over artist for movie trailers trying to make it in Hollywood (and therefore outshining her dad). Sounds crappy from that description but it was fun. This was classy comedy…more “Bridesmaids” than “Bride Wars” if you get my drift.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa – I was wary going into this but so so relieved at the end. Alan superbly made the transisiton to the big screen maintaining all that I love about the TV character. It felt like a proper film rather than an overextended TV episode…Jurassic Park!

3. Before Midnight – A welcome return instalment from my favourite on-screen couple. Are they too middle class and self-indulgent? Most probably. But the on-screen chemistry is great and utterly believable. Essentially a conversation that lasts for 2 hours but had me gripped throughout. I look forward to catching up with them again in a few more years.

2. Blue Jasmine – A film not entirely without faults but a great film. A woman’s emotional breakdown is documented with pathos, style and a few laughs along the way. Great structuring and use of flashbacks. Cate Blanchett turns in some of the best screen acting I have ever seen and the whole film hangs beautifully around her barnstorming performance. The final scene is a classic.

1. Django Unchained - Slick, almost effortlessly cool and an absolute joy to watch. A relatively simple plot played out chronologically. Great performances from Leo, Waltz and Jackson but the real star (as in all of Tarantino's films) is the dialogue. Another classic from a classic director.