UK RE-RELEASE REVIEW: NAPOLÉON

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Sandy Connell

The Film: ★★★★ The Score: ★★★★

On 11th November 2016 the British Film Institute will release a new digital restoration of Abel Gance’s stupendous portrayal of the early years in the life of Napoléon Bonaparte. Ahead of the official release, I was fortunate enough to attend the first of several concerts at London’s Royal Festival Hall in which the film was presented with a live performance of Carl Davis’ score – a moving and thrilling cinematic experience that simultaneously transported its audience through time to the French Revolution and to the heyday of silent cinema.

Napoléon Bonaparte makes a heroic escape with the tricolour as his sail.

Napoléon (a.k.a. Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, 1927, France – restoration: 2000/2016, France/UK) written, produced & directed by Abel Gance / starring Albert Dieudonné, Gina Manès, Nicolas Koline, Edmond van Daële, Alexandre Koubitsky, Antonin Artaud / cinematography by Jule Kruger & Joseph-Louis Mundviller / restoration: edited by Kevin Brownlow / music by Carl Davis

Clocking in at no less than five and a half hours, British editor Kevin Brownlow’s restoration of Napoléon is the most complete version of this epic biopic to date. What is so special in 2016 is that the British Film Institute is now releasing the digital restoration of Brownlow’s reconstructed cut in cinemas, on DVD, on Blu-Ray and online. In so doing the BFI finally makes this daring, spectacular poem of silent cinematic language available to the masses, whereas it only previously existed on a handful of 35mm prints. The release of this digital restoration was given an appropriately grand gala at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 6th November, where Carl Davis conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra in a live performance of his score for this near-definitive version of a film so huge that it belittles even D.W. Griffith’s magnum opus, Intolerance (1916).

A single image commanded me to see Abel Gance’s silent epic. The trailer for the 2016 re-release features an outstanding wide shot of a cloaked rider and his steed galloping across a hilltop, silhouetted against the shimmering, moonlit sea. Such a grand, dynamic image grabbed me in the same way as the image of a land speeder trundling past a crashed star destroyer in the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) did. It is the sort of image with which the filmmakers (and editor of the trailer) make a promise to the audience: this film is going to be MASSIVE. The action sequence in which the moonlit image features is one of many crown the jewels in a film the roars with outstanding action filmmaking and technical innovation – from mounting the camera of the back of a horse, to expressionistic montage on a triptych of three screens at the film’s finale! Projected on the big screen with the full power of Davis and his orchestra underneath yielded one of the most memorable cinematic experiences I have ever had.

Planned as the first of six films charting Bonaparte’s life, Napoléon was the third (but by no means the longest) film by Parisian writer-director Abel Gance, which was made with the support of Charlés Pathé and released to great critical acclaim (and no small amount of political controversy) in France in 1927. Notably, this was the same year that Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer electrified the film industry with the introduction of sync sound. Though the silent era birthed many more of its greatest works over the coming years, such as Metropolis (1927), Sunrise (1927), La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and City Lights (1931), it became clear that sound was the future of cinema. Even if the talkies had arrived much later, it is unlikely that Abel Gance would have had the opportunity to realise his complete vision: a definitive history of the life of Napoléon Bonaparte on film. The costs incurred by the massive scale of Gance’s production, from its technical innovations to the many thousands of extras needed for its breath-taking sequences depicting the French Revolution and Napoléon’s invasion of Italy, were too great, too unwieldy to make further entries in the series possible. The un-commercially long run time of the film did not help matters, and Napoléon was a flop abroad, where the mangled two-hours cuts released by British and American distributors were largely savaged by critics. What a shame it is that this should have been the fate of Gance’s vision. One can only imagine the heights that future instalments might have reached, had Gance been able to build upon the technical innovations and grand spectacle laid out in this entertaining, patriotic, if uneven first chapter.

The unwashed masses of the French Revolution sing Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle's anthem, 'La Marseillaise.' — The unwashed masses of the French Revolution sing Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s anthem, ‘La Marseillaise.’

Approaching a far more focussed timeframe than its 330-minute run time would suggest, Napoléon covers Bonaparte’s life from his adolescence as a cadet at the military academy in Brienne, up to his appointment as the commander of the French forces invading Italy to oust the Austrians in 1796. The story that follows Napoléon’s proud and fiery resistance of the boys that bully him at Brienne College takes him from the bloody streets of Paris during the French Revolution; to a thrilling escape from traitors in his native Corsica; to his first victory against the British on the muddy battlefield of Toulon; to his imprisonment during the Reign of Terror; to his marriage to Joséphine de Beauharnais; to his successful defeat of the Royalist uprising; and eventually to his march over the Alps, into Italy, with the tricolour waving at the head of a column of soldiers and the eagle of destiny soaring overhead.

Albert Dieudonné’s virtues as a performer in the role of Napoléon are the same as those virtues that Dieudonné and his director decided Napoléon should impress upon the other characters. Dieudonné’s affectation of the stern, heavy body language with which this “stump of a man” dominates his opponents is both comical and genuinely convincing as a commanding presence. Dieudonné manages to nail the hard stare that neuters the over-inflated egos of arrogant generals and effects people in much the same way as Jesus Christ’s gaze on the Roman soldier in Ben Hur (1959). But the filmmakers are not ignorant of the silliness inherent in such a relentlessly serious character and they permit some fun at the expense of their hero’s preternatural authority. It is worth mentioning that Abel Gance and his cast take every opportunity to make Napoléon funny. From cute insert shots, such as a kitten hiding in the barrel of a rusty cannon, to dry banter, to the gallows humour of a seven-year-old drummer boy at the battle of Toulon cheerfully proclaiming that he must have at least six years left to live if the famous drummer boy, Viala, was thirteen when he was killed. Gance habitually disarms the audience and cuts his huge historic figures down to size with comic flourishes. Though largely humourless, and suffering from the same bland aloofness that has afflicted countless heroic leaders on screen, Dieudonné’s Napoléon knows how to deliver a joke when it is required of him. With the help of Gance’s exquisite visual stylisation, how could he not? In one of his earliest conversations with Joséphine (Gina Manès), Napoléon (and the audience) cannot help but be conscious of the black fan that Joséphine waves back and forth in the lower half of the frame. Joséphine asks the military man, “Which weapons are the most dangerous, monsieur?” Napoléon replies, “Fans, madame.”

Gance’s cast all have big shoes to fill, and often fill them with big performances. The boisterousness of the supporting characters, much in keeping with the acting style of the time, is infectious, but the real treat here is in the cast of villains. The so-called Three Gods of the revolution are introduced as a triptych, composed of perversion (Antonin Artaud as Jean-Paul Marat), zealotry (Alexandre Koubitzky as Georges Danton) and calculating inhumanity (Edmond van Daële as Maximilien Robespierre). This formidable trio is later joined by Abel Gance in the role of the Louis de Saint-Just, who Gance plays with great restraint as a cold-hearted dandy revolutionary – still craving blood, even as Robespierre’s conscience creeps up on him. Besides these four figureheads of the revolution, few of the villains get much in the way of dimensionality, which is hardly surprising in a film trading mostly in archetypal characters – some fascinating, some quite peculiar, but all performing in service of a story that aims to do justice to mythological figures, rather than social realism. But the talent that a film such as this attracts will inevitably yield memorable moments, even in fleeting roles. The wonderful Jean d’Yd stands out with his quiet comic performance as La Bussière, the self-appointed “eater of documents,” who saved the lives of countless victims of the Reign of Terror by consuming pages from the dossiers assembled against Saint-Just’s prisoners. In another display of understated grace, Percy Day as Admiral Hood sets a precedent for the universal trope of the dry English villain by calmly sipping tea from a China cup as he orders the French fleet to be set alight at Toulon.

Vladimir Roudenko as the adolescent Napoléon.

Dieudonné’s on screen prowess and nobility represents the hagiographic nature of this depiction of the anti-tyrannical hero to whom Ludwig van Beethoven once wished to dedicate his third symphony. Sadly we can never know how Dieudonné’s rigorously researched portrayal of Napoléon would have changed in future instalments of Gance’s series, as Napoléon transformed from a hero of the people to a tyrant in his own right. A particularly poignant but also troubling scene arrises in the final act, in which Napoléon stops his carriage at the vacant National Assembly building, to contemplate the history of the revolution before he rides to invade Italy. Standing in the vast, empty room, Napoléon envisions a conversation with the ghosts of Saint-Just and the Three Gods of the revolution. He tells them of his dream of a Europe without borders, where any man can roam freely and say that he finds himself still in his fatherland. The speech inspired laughs, cheers and a rousing moment of spontaneous applause at the Royal Festival Hall from an audience, who found out earlier this year that their country will soon leave the European Union. Napoléon’s reverie for the spirit of the revolution and his vision of a liberated Europe is true to the character but emotionally confusing in this scene. Narrative conventions and the real-life atrocities committed in the name of the revolution necessarily cast Saint-Just and the Three Gods as villains, yet here Napoléon looks to them as sanctified figures. It is not wholly inappropriate, especially given Gance’s conscious emphasis through-out the film on the bloody hands that forged the greatness of the French Republic. Still, one cannot help but feel that these revolutionary figureheads were ultimately underserved by the filmmakers. This is to say nothing of the irony that is imposed upon this scene by the ignominious history that follows the early chapters in the life of Napoléon Bonaparte.

As a fan of heroic mythology and admirer of the techniques of cinematic storytelling I was constantly moved by Gance’s boundless invention. In many ways, Napoléon is a key text in the creation of modern cinema, and the action genre in particular. It begins in the heat of battle, where teen-aged military cadets range across a snow-covered landscape, engaged in a full-scale snowball fight. The young Napoléon (Vladimir Roudenko) commands a paltry ten boy soldiers against forty aggressors, while the monks and schoolmasters of the military academy look on with great interest. Even from this early age, Napoléon does not let overwhelming odds snatch victory away from him. Rather than cower behind the walls of his snow fort, Napoléon commands his tiny army to rush at the enemy. Mere minutes into the film, Gance is already challenging and broadening the conventions of cinematic technique with handheld camerawork and iconoclastic imagery of Napoléon’s tenacious id, driving him towards victory. Gance’s use of cross-faded images, rapid cutting and point-of-view shots throws the audience into the chaos and visceral thrill of something as laughable as boys playing at war in the snow. As the sequence sets up the boy, who will become France’s greatest hero, it also throws open the doors to the sequences of battles and marching armies yet to come, as well as revolutionising the practice of montage in cinema. Gance does not rest for long. As the proud but isolated Corsican cadet fights against the bullies tormenting him, Gance again takes the delightful chaos of a childish brawl as a spring board for further technical experimentation and splits the screen nine ways during a pillow fight in the boys’ dormitory. Seeing such an audacious and original assault on the visual language of cinema, all in service of an emotional narrative of mythological proportions, moved me to tears. I can only liken the thrill, dynamism and visceral impact of the sequence to that of a Jackson Pollock painting. To witness it in a vast auditorium with the rousing fanfare of Davis’ score beneath the flickering screen absorbs the viewer in the same way as seeing a Pollock painting in a gallery. Often it is silent cinema, more so than any other, that demands to be seen in a “live” performance.

POLYVISION: Abel Gance's three-camera, three-screen method for vastly expanding the scope of Napoléon's  final act. — POLYVISION: Abel Gance’s three-camera, three-screen method for vastly expanding the scope of *Napoléon’s* final act.

Sadly the film’s latter half cannot live up to the impact of the first two acts. The third act sags terribly as a love-stricken Napoléon courts Joséphine in a drawn-out romantic comedy. The tonal shift here does not undermine the film’s cohesion but kills the film’s pace. In a similar way, Napoléon’s arrival at the French camp in Italy retreads the thrust of Naopléon’s arrival in Toulon: the army is poorly supplied, undisciplined and commanded by arrogant generals, who Napoléon must bend to submission through the strength of his personality alone. But it is reasonable to suspect that Gance was aware of this and so took the opportunity to vastly expand the scope of Napoléon’s triumph as a leader by adding two more screens! By using three cameras and three projection screens to create a super-wide triptych of images, Gance created what he called “Polyvision”, an early forerunner to Hollywood’s Cinerama system. Watching the vast expanse of the army rise as one to stand to attention for Napoléon amplifies the emotion of the sequence in a way that is unique to the vast canvas of cinema. Scenes such as these are rarely used tools in today’s blockbusters, belonging to an older age of dramatic staging. Witnessing the effect of thousands of extras performing a single gesture en masse makes the crumbling skyscrapers and explosive space battles of today’s big-budget entertainment seem hollow and dispensable by comparison. In this final act, as Napoléon stokes the fires of his army with the spirit of patriotism for France and a united Europe, Gance uses his Polyvision to layer cross-faded images of lands conquered and lands soon to be conquered over vast images of Napoléon’s army marching towards victory. The final coup de théâtre, using the Polyvision technique, is the creation of the tricolour through different colour tinting in each of the three frames. The resulting emotions are a testament to the power of cinema to stir up patriotism for the revolution, even in the hearts of France’s oldest enemies: the tea-sipping English! But all of this imagery would lack for lasting impact without music to accompany it, especially the unbeatable patriotic anthem of ‘La Marseillaise’, which Gance features prominently in the film and Carl Davis uses to maximum effect in his meticulously researched score.

The importance of Davis’ score to this restoration must not be underestimated – without it, the experience loses its authenticity and the film loses its spirit. Like the composers and conductors of the silent film era, Davis draws upon the beloved classics of composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn to create a montage of his own, which reaches back in time to the romantic history of 18th Century Europe. Davis also ensures that the score possess a heritage of French folks songs and classical compositions. But Napoléon‘s reliance on particular folks songs, marching songs, Corsican melodies and anthems of the period is pronounced in a way that is reflected on screen. The filmmakers have left composers-cum-cinema-historians various cues, which are easily interpreted by using Wagner’s principals of thematic musical narrative – principals which govern the composition of our best modern orchestral film scores. The inspiring spirit of the revolution is present and correct on screen whenever variations on ‘La Marseillaise’ can be heard. When the eagle of destiny is present at the climax of key moments in Napoléon’s ascent to greatness, the grandiosity of Beethoven can be heard. Throughout, Davis draws heavily from Beethoven’s third symphony, ‘Eroica’, which Beethoven initially wished to dedicate to Napoléon as a hero of the people in Europe – that is until Napoléon crowned himself Emperor of France in 1804. Davis is an seasoned composer and conductor of silent film scores, and a diligent scholar of the conventions of silent scoring in the early 20th Century. As one can imagine, comedy and action are among the toughest genres for which an orchestra can perform, and Davis and the Philharmonia deliver deft comic timing by pre-empting Abel Gance’s jokes, rather than reacting to them. The diametric opposites of the French Revolutionaries, the British, are ripe targets for mockery throughout the film, and the audience is primed for a good laugh by the orchestra’s introduction of pompous variations on ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Rule Britannia.’

But ‘La Marseillaise’ is the anthem around which the characters on screen and their audience must rally. It is key to inspiring patriotism for the ideal that the French Revolution represented, to which Napoléon once dedicated himself. Davis’ composition of the complex and rousing collage of anthems for the spectacular final montage sells us the dream in a way that is effortlessly emotional and un-esoteric, as all good anthems are wont to be. I suspect that this musical power is what Abel Gance was reaching for with his three-screen triptych, cross-faded montage and massive imagery. In this respect, Gance’s efforts were successful but, unlike Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, he could not have marched towards the future of cinematic storytelling without the might of Europe’s musical history behind him.

Napoléon comes out in limited cinematic release in the UK and on DVD, Blu-Ray and BFI Player on 11th November 2016.

Carl Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra celebrate the stars and director of Napoléon  at the Royal Festival Hall on 6th November 2016. — Carl Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra celebrate the stars and director of *Napoléon* at the Royal Festival Hall on 6th November 2016.

Watch the trailer for the BFI’s re-release of Napoléon below.

London Film Fest Reviews 2016

Posted on October 14, 2016 by Sandy Connell

The BFI London International Film Festival is always a valuable opportunity for Londoners to discover little-seen gems from around the world and to get an early look at some of the films most likely to be essential viewing in cinemas early next year. The number of films I’m able to see at this year’s fest represents only a tiny portion of the programme of 248 titles offered in the festival’s 60th edition and I’ve found it hard to resist the impulse to mostly programme myself around the highlights from this year’s Cannes and Venice lineups. Next week I will be recording a special episode of the Films Of Every Colour podcast, in which we will be joined by some new voices and discuss the highlights of LFF. For now, here are reviews of the seven titles that I managed to catch in the first few days of the festival, ranked in order of preference.

Toni Erdmann ★★★★★ (2016, Austria/Germany – dir. Maren Ade)

Maren Ade’s third feature, Toni Erdmann, was the critical favourite by a country mile at the 69th Cannes Film Festival but received no awards in the official competition. Whether or not you value thumbs-up from critics or laurels from a festival jury, it is difficult to argue against Toni Erdmann as a particularly stimulating and fascinating film, that never sacrifices entertainment value for depth or vice versa.

Sandra Hüller plays a stern, driven career woman, working in Bucharest as a consultant to an international oil company. When her estranged father, played by Peter Simonischek, pays a visit to Bucharest, her cold rebuffing of his attempts to reconnect with her have unexpected consequences. Rather than scurry back to Germany with his tail between his legs, the prank-loving father creates the persona of Toni Erdmann, a classless but gregarious image consultant with a goofy overbite and a brown wig. Through sheer moxie Toni is accepted by the white-collar expats of the consultancy firm as a quirky lifestyle guru with desirable clients, whose names he has pulled from the list of the local corporate figure-heads. As the Toni persona invades the high-pressure corporate environment, both father and daughter begin to articulate a shared emotional vocabulary, which both had previously ignored.

It is easy to picture the crass, mainstream Hollywood remake of Toni Erdmann. On paper, the synopsis reads like a high-concept family comedy, similar to the likes of Mrs Doubtfire. But Maren Ade doesn’t set out to make a heart-warming comedy, she sets out to tell a story that analyses and criticises her characters’ actions. The film’s hilarity is a symptom of the tension inherent in its characters using humour to confront the subjects most likely to harm their self-esteem, such as deficient self-image, the cruelties of ambition, abandonment by their families, and sexual discrimination at work. Hüller’s character is desperate for control in all aspects of her life and the presence of her father’s bizarre alter-ego in the background of her daily life challenges that desperation to great comedic and emotional effect. Like its eponymous character, Toni Erdmann can be many things to many people, and changes its disguise throughout, from a cheeky but abrasive critique of corporate exploitation and expat lifestyles in developing countries, to a sensitive domestic drama, to a door-slamming farce, to an observational comedy of manners. So far it is the film that has lingered most in my mind from this year’s fest, and I can only hope that its selection as Germany’s contender for the Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film will draw wider attention to it as an outstanding example of what is happening at the forefront of contemporary European cinema.

The Red Turtle ★★★★★ (La Tortue Rouge, 2016, Belgium/France/Japan – dir. Michaël Dudok de Wit)

This year I anticipated no other film at LFF more highly than The Red Turtle. Something about the simple story, the total absence of any dialogue and the collaboration between European animators and Isao Takahata of Studio Ghibli got me giddy inside. I went into The Red Turtle expecting a full-spectrum of emotions, delivered in a way that only animation can achieve, and I came out with my expectations surpassed by the pleasant surprise that The Red Turtle was not merely the story of one man’s survival on a deserted island, but also a fairytale.

The film opens with a breath-taking sequence of a man fighting through giant waves to reach a capsized dinghy in a mighty storm at sea. He is washed up on a small tropical island and sets about planning his escape on a raft. But escape eludes our hero as each raft that he makes is destroyed at sea by pommeling from a giant red turtle. Flummoxed, the castaway despairs at his situation: condemned to live the rest of his life alone on this island, a prisoner of the red turtle. When the turtle comes onto the beach to lay her eggs, the castaway sees his opportunity to escape. What happens next lies in the realm of fairytales – a realm with the same governing principles and opportunities as animation. One of the reasons that I have always loved animation is its ability to deliver any combination of emotions, be they complex or elemental, with such economy and impact. To watch an animated character struggle and fail or succeed is to be immediately hooked by an empathy, which is divorced from any of the prejudices or emotional caution that can sometimes prevent viewers from connecting with flesh-and-blood actors on screen. The same can be said of simple objects in animation, and Michaël Dudok de Wit (making his feature debut after a long career of successful animated shorts) has clearly learned a great deal from the meticulous real-world detail that Japanese animators bring to their films. But this director is not in the habit of aping the Japanese style, and The Red Turtle distinguishes itself as an especially unique, universal story of life, love and death. Aesthetically the film benefits in particular from the use of tangible textures in the land and sky to evoke the grain of celluloid or the roughness of cartridge paper. The simple but consistently exciting story, the silent interactions of the characters and the richly detailed but not over-complicated animation has a cumulative emotional effect that is on-par with the best work of animation’s heaviest hitters, Studio Ghibli and Pixar. For animation fans it is absolutely essential viewing. For everyone else, it stands to be a revelatory experience of the power of animation and fairytales to portray the essential elements of mankind’s existence.

The Handmaiden ★★★★ (아가씨, 2016, South Korea – dir. Park Chan-wook)

Luscious, surreal, romantic and grotesque, The Handmaiden delivers, delivers and delivers again on expectations as another high-calorie banquet of sensual delights from Park Chan-wook. As always, Park blends Western genre sensibilities with East Asian narrative conventions, and a glutinous helping of his own kinks and aesthetic hang ups to deliver a tactile pulp storybook for grownups with a taste for the finer things in life – finer things both respectable and tawdry.

Wrapped as tightly, elegantly and with as many folds and patterns as a silk kimono, Park’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel ‘Fingersmith’ transposes the action from Victorian Britain to Korea under the Japanese occupation. Two con-artists commence a plan to insinuate themselves into a wealthy Japanese household, marry the lady of the house and then jam her in a mental institution, leaving her fortune free for the taking. That all does not go to plan is hardly worth mentioning, unless things going to plan can be inclusive of the way that plans have a habit of changing under pressure from sexual desire. Told in an appropriately intricate three-part structure, that jumps back and forth in time and replays prior events with new light cast upon them, The Handmaiden will infuriate fans of thrillers in which the viewer is invited to speculate and partake in solving the mystery. For anyone willing to sit back and let themselves be swept along by the coyness and cheekiness of Park’s storytelling, the experience is beguiling, and yields the same satisfaction as watching the mechanism of a pocket watch click into place.

I have always been a huge fan of Park’s penchant for heightened drama at every moment in the story, be it a turning point in the narrative, or a character caressing a piece of fabric. His use of violence and eroticism to augment the melodrama and sadism of his characters’ lives is perversely enticing for its visceral power and its sheer cartoonishness. In this respect, and with respect to the erotic particulars of the plot, this is a film that only an East Asian director could make. Made in the UK or the US, this film would be laughed out of cinemas as steamy, melodramatic pap. In the hands of a provocative master with an understanding Korean and Japanese storytelling traditions and those countries’ traditions of high-brow erotic art, The Handmaiden is a smutty luxury item of the most enjoyable kind.

Souvenir ★★★★ (2016, Belgium/France/Luxembourg – dir. Bavo Defurne)

The second feature from Belgian director Bavo Defurne is, in the director’s own words, a movie for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Gentle, sweet and straightforward, Souvenir is an ideal example of a film that knows what it wants to be and how to deliver the goods without a shred of pretence. Opening with the drab daily routine of a single woman in her sixties, who works at a pâté factory, Souvenir teases its central romance with the arrival of a handsome young boxer to the factory. Sporting a decidedly old-fashioned moustache and haircut and a pair of sparkling baby blues, Kévin Azaïs’ boxer, is immediately taken with our leading lady, played by Isabelle Huppert, whom he recognises as a former Eurovision contestant from the 1970s. As a tentative romance blossoms between them, the boxer coaxes the forgotten pop starlet into reviving her career and, eventually, to compete in the selection of Belgium’s next submission to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Defurne has said that he wrote the screenplay for Souvenir with Isabelle Huppert in mind. To cast Huppert as an ageing alcoholic chanteuse seems completely counterintuitive in such a camp story as a romance between an ageing Eurovision contestant and a boxer, who meet in a pâté factory, but the results prove this casting coup to be a wonderful piece of outside-the-box thinking. Huppert sings all of her numbers and her voice is as smoky and seductive as one might expect. As one of the single greatest actors working today, Huppert is quite comfortable in the role of a character capable of slipping from a private persona into a mysterious pop alter-ego as soon as the stage lights come on, and Defurne and Huppert create a nuanced personality for both sides of her character. The determination of the jaded singer to keep other people at arm’s length is sold effortlessly by Huppert’s signature iciness, which melts so convincingly under the warmth of Kévin Azaïs’ earnest enthusiasm and naïveté as a young man, who is convinced that the affection he feels for his lover will translate to public adoration.

A great deal of the film’s aesthetic is owed to the evident influence of Pedro Almodóvar, and one can hardly blame Defurne for referencing the cinematic grandmaster of tactile, intimate camp romance – especially as the Almodóvarian influence never overshadows the film’s own unassuming identity. The unavoidable cheesiness of the retro Europop songs (composed with great conviction by Pink Martini) may prove off-putting to fans of Isabelle Huppert’s more abrasive films but, to its credit, Souvenir is not nearly as nugatory and inoffensive as any association with the Eurovision Song Contest would suggest.

Voyage of Time – feature version ★★★★ (2016, USA – dir. Terrence Malick)

Frequently spellbinding, occasionally hurried and clunky, inspiring and a little infuriating, often transportative but never quite achieving a transcendental grace, Terrence Malick’s long-gestating opus on the creation of the universe is a mixed bag for the better. Reportedly in development since the late seventies and shot over a period of several years, Voyage of Time takes the creation of the universe segment from Tree of Life and blows it up to feature-length, taking the viewer on a journey from the Big Bang to the destruction of the universe. Even without the poetic narration (delivered in the feature-length cut by Cate Blanchett) the film would be unmistakably Malickian in its impressionistic construction. Malick mixes spectacular footage of the natural world with galactic landscapes created in tanks of water, CGI imagery of microscopic organisms, and media-res mini-DV footage of the contemporary world and the chaotic human creatures, who struggle and writhe upon the Earth’s surface.

Malick’s intuitive editing style can result in a few jarring cuts between different formats, which is more of a criticism of the quality of the CGI images than it is of the editing. Still, Voyage of Time is a testament to the power of editing of images and music. The movements and angles captured by cinematographer Paul Atkins provide the ideal palette from which Malick and his editors Rehman Ali and Keith Fraase can assemble a thrilling rhythmic progression through the creation of the natural world. Atkins’ underwater photography yields the most impressive imagery in the film, not least because it manages to capture extraordinary aquatic animal behaviour of a level that one would only ever expect to see in the very best of the BBC’s documentaries on the natural world. Malick’s sequences on land are almost as striking and recall the similar cinematic triumphs of Ron Fricke’s Baraka and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, but falter slightly with the introduction of early man. A sequence of early humans exploring their brave new world is marred by the obviously American landscapes, which act as unconvincing stand-ins for Africa, the seat of mankind. Overall, the sequence fails to grasp the sublime qualities of Malick’s elemental depictions of human life and interaction in The Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven. Similarly, the sparse, plaintive voiceover, in which the narrator converses with Mother Earth, never achieves the same impact as Malick’s previous voiceovers. This is due largely to the impact that these voiceovers created in the context of human stories. Voyage of Time goes far beyond any human story and, as such, renders the voiceover largely redundant.

Despite its smattering of shortcomings, Voyage of Time does exactly what it says on the tin. It follows the life of the universe from start to finish, discovering astonishing, moving images along the way. As always, Malick’s use of classic music, ranging from Gustav Mahler to Arvo Pärt, is effective in steering the audience towards a transcendental experience but the film as a whole lacks the overall finesse needed to achieve such a result. It is very difficult not to compare Voyage of Time to Baraka, as it covers a great deal of similar ground, but at no point does Malick’s film lose its own identity or sense of purpose and it is absolutely worth experiencing this journey on the big screen, be it in the feature-length cut or the truncated IMAX cut.

Wolf & Sheep ★★★ (2016, Afghanistan/Denmark – dir. Shahrbanoo Sadat)

Using non-professional actors from the mountainous Afghan region in which it is set, the debut film from Iranian director Shahrbanoo Sadat tells the story of a small, remote shepherding community and the children, who are coming age within it. The boys obsess over making slings to hurl rocks across the gorge in which they drive their sheep. The girls are in the process of crossing over from playing at being grown-ups to simply being exactly the same as the mothers and grandmothers, whom their games impersonate. Only Sediqa shuns the trivial interests of the other girls in favour of a more responsible and pragmatic approach to tending her flock, and she seems content to be a loner. Behind the day-time world of the shepherds lurk the local myths of the Kashmir Wolf and the Green Fairy, both of whom haunt the landscape while the villagers are sleeping.

On the one hand, this is a promising debut, in which Sadat shows a talent for composition, pacing and, crucially, an ability to elucidate themes and ideas in the words and behaviour of her child cast. The arresting, eerie mythical imagery also gives the nebulous narrative a shot in the arm – but only to a certain extent. Sadly, the film (and the viewer) suffer greatly for want of a story. Wolf & Sheep unfolds like a morality play about young people on the cusp of adulthood, each of whom is unwittingly choosing which kind of person they are going to be in this brusque, unforgiving society. But, unlike a conventional morality play, conflict and conundrum are conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, any and all events in the narrative happen off-screen, leaving us with one interminable day after another in the life of an adolescent shepherd. When night falls and folkloric creatures walk the ghostly mountain landscape, one’s imagination cannot help but respond to the stimulating, dreamlike imagery with a growing sense of anticipation that something surely must now happen! That is until sunlight floods the screen and we awake to another day of herding goats and sheep from one side of the gorge to the other.

In spite of the frustrating experience of watching Wolf & Sheep eschew dramatic tension, I will be first in line to see Shahraboo Sadat’s next feature. Her talents for narrative storytelling and striking imagery are apparent, and she clearly has an interest in telling old stories in new ways. I only hope that next time, she will apply her talents to a narrative story, rather than an opaque thematic exploration that seems determined to keep the mechanisms of storytelling at arm’s length.

Elle ★★ (2016, Belgium/France/Germany – dir. Paul Verhoeven)

For the first time in a long while I am completely stumped by the critical reaction to a film – in this case, the wide-spread approval of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. It has been hailed as an outstanding and empowering depiction of a woman’s reaction to rape, and the plaudits for Isabelle Huppert’s strong central performance are well deserved, as anyone familiar with Huppert’s formidable performances might expect. But the film is so muddled and poorly shaped that I can’t help but wonder how anyone can interpret what the filmmakers are actually trying to say about their subject matter.

Elle opens halfway through a brutal rape scene. A masked man has broken into the home of our heroine, the CEO of a video game design company. He is there for the sole purpose of beating and raping her and he makes a swift exit, once his objective is accomplished. Rather than report the assault to the police, the victim covers up any evidence of what happened to her and calmly returns to her daily life. The reasons behind this can be guessed at, as it is revealed that she is the daughter of a famous mass murderer. Media coverage of his killing spree in the late 60s heavily implied that she was somehow involved in those crimes, aged only twelve. An affair with her best friend’s husband, jealousy over her ex-husband’s new squeeze, the exploitation of her son by his unhinged girlfriend, and sexist office politics all underscore our heroine’s secret investigation to uncover the identity of her rapist. So far, so fascinating, yet Verhoeven’s apparent apathy towards exploring the psychology of his characters is disturbing and frustrating. When the identity of the rapist is uncovered and Huppert enters into a tense courtship with her attacker, it seems that Elle is finally getting to the meat of its central premise: what if a rape victim actively pursued a relationship with her attacker? But even at this point Elle does not cohere because it does not have the insight or the guts to delve deeper into the motivation of either character in the equation. No stimulating comment is offered on the nature of control in any part of our heroine’s life, nor is the psychological fall-out from her father’s crimes explored. Instead we are forced to endure the infuriating and downright stupid behaviour of one horrible person after another, be they the string of useless male characters or the callous and manipulative female characters. Though the abject worthlessness of the men around Huppert is clearly a deliberate and effective choice on the part of the filmmakers, none of this ugliness progresses towards a deeper understanding of what is going on in anyone’s head, let alone any actual exploration of the empowerment of victims against men obsessed with dominating women.

Despite my affection for Starship Troopers and recognition of that film’s basic cerebral qualities, I have never subscribed to the view that Paul Verhoeven is a particularly gifted satirist or a filmmaker with much insight into his characters’ motivations. Though Verhoeven crafts Elle into an engaging piece of blunt entertainment, his lack of interest in psychology and realism simultaneously ruins the film’s entertainment value and thwarts any loftier ambitions inherent in its premise. The fact that Huppert plays the CEO of a games company preparing to launch a sexually violent game (complete with gruesome tentacle porn sequences) is a mere coincidence. Gaming culture is just an area of interest for Verhoeven and screenwriter David Birke, not territory they feel they should explore. Several critics have hailed this as a timely comment on the 2014 Gamergate controversy but any film so unwilling to engage with the issues that it depicts is undeserving of the argument that it has something to say about the issues of misogyny in the gaming community or is making any deliberate reference to Gamergate, in which several women in the video game industry were repeatedly harassed by gamers through social media with threats of rape and murder. The visceral impact of the rape scenes (of which there are several) is severely undercut by the lack of realism in the results of the beatings that Huppert endures. Struck repeatedly with the considerable force depicted in the film, any person’s face would be so damaged that it would be impossible for them to avoid a trip to the hospital emergency room, yet Huppert’s face emerges from each assault with little more than a single bruise, which swiftly disappears. This is not nit-picking, not in the context of a film that sets-out to turn the tables on male domination of women. Part of the dominance that any attacker exerts upon their victim is the leaving of scars and bruises that cannot be covered up. The physical effects of assault expose the victim to the world and humiliate them. This is the disturbing central objective of the increasing practice of acid attacks on women, a subject conspicuous by its absence in cinema. Mainstream filmmakers across the world have consistently shied away from honestly portraying the physical effects of abuse on women, and Elle does not buck this trend. How, then, can the film claim any sort of integrity in its attempts to confront and upend depictions of violent abuse in mainstream entertainment? The end result is little more than slick sensationalism, just barely pulled through its over-long run time by a compelling performance from a world-class actor – one who has trodden similar ground in the past to far greater effect.

UK RELEASE REVIEW: THE NEON DEMON

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Sandy Connell

★★★

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Nicolas Winding Refn reaches a new level of preciousness with this grisly poison pen letter to the fashion industry.

Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon. — Elle Fanning in *The Neon Demon.*

The Neon Demon (2016 – Denmark/France/USA) directed by Nicolas Winding Refn / written by Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws, Polly Stenham / starring Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee / cinematography by Natasha Braier / music by Cliff Martinez / companies: Bold Films, Gaumont, Space Rocket Nation, Vendian, Wild Bunch

The Neon Demon opens to the haunting pulse of synthesisers and the morphing of a spectrum of deep colours on frosted glass. Textured, vibrant and seductive, we are now in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Los Angeles, where sixteen-year-old Jesse has just arrived from Georgia to become a model. Played by Elle Fanning, Jesse is immediately noticed by make-up artist Ruby (Jena Malone), high-end fashion photographer Jack (Desmond Harrington) and fellow models Gigi and Sarah (Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee), not to mention top fashion agent Roberta (Christina Hendricks), who signs Jesse up right away. Jesse has that intangible but essential quality that allows natural beauty to stand on a pedestal above the synthetic charms of industrialised beauty. Beauty is all that Jesse has – even money is a problem for her, as evidenced by the shitty, dangerous motel in which she has a room. But everyone who is anyone in fashion will happily tell her that beauty is all she needs. The only people more aware of the need for “The Thing” are those women who once had it and now want it back. Jesse’s rapid ascent past models whose beauty has already been strip-mined by the fashion industry awakens in her an ultimate level of narcissism and inhumanity. One warning after another appears, telling her to leave this place and return to the world, but she is content to rely on the kindness that her beauty seems to inspire in strangers. But her beauty also inspires a perverse level of avarice in men and women and Jesse’s downfall is the result of her willful ignorance of what lies at the thin end of the wedge, where possession meets desperation.

As someone who is prone to flurries of self-indulgence (this review is 1200 words long), I am willing to give a lot of rope to directors with a penchant for navel-gazing, as long as they are such consummate visual stylists as the man behind modern-day classics like Bronson and Drive. But with The Neon Demon, the rope has gone out so far that it has slipped from my fingers and completely disappeared up Nicolas Winding Refn’s anus. The stylisation of NWR’s initials in homage to the logo of Yves Saint Laurent is charming until it becomes apparent that NWR’s lampooning of the fashion industry has crossed into self-parody. I can think of few directors better suited to putting the current aesthetics of the fashion industry on film and NWR does a fine job of delivering a rare beast: a satirical horror film. But to satirise the fashion industry is to risk alienating your audience with the sheer vacuousness of the setting. NWR frequently keeps his audience at a distance but the most problematic aspect of the experience of this film is that for all its visual splendour and its outstanding soundtrack, The Neon Demon is no more effecting than most fashion editorial photography. Millions of kilojoules of energy are pumped in the direction of a single model and what radiates back at the viewer is an aesthetic, rather than something human. This seems to be of little concern to NWR but it casts an unflattering light on the simplicity of the story, instead of utilising the tremendous energy inherent in that story to create a film that moves forward and looks good doing it.

In NWR’s Drive Ryan Gosling radiated seething potential energy from underneath his super-cool scorpion jacket. Tom Hardy’s performance in Bronson could have provided the world with a new source of green energy if only it had been properly harnessed. In The Neon Demon Elle Fanning has only a handful of moments in which to radiate anything at all before she is smothered in NWR’s overwrought stylisation. The vacuum in which NWR’s characters live is more oppressive than liberating, and while this can be subtle and artful in conveying a distinct lack of trust in human interaction, it dampens the drama in the script and the actor’s performances. As with Only God Forgives, NWR seems more interested in making his protagonist inert and letting the supporting players carry the story by reacting to the protagonist’s very inability to actually do anything.

At his best, NWR can construct drama through atmosphere almost as ably and with as much flair as David Lynch, whose greatest film, Mulholland Drive, exerts tremendous influence over NWR’s portrayal of Los Angeles as a shiny bauble that lures purity and things of incalculable value towards the jaws of corruption. In The Neon Demon, NWR seems adamant that drama is best conveyed in a vacuum, while energy and atmosphere should have their own separate space in which to run wild, preferably to the strains of Cliff Martinez’s outstanding electro-creep score.

The cast navigates NWR’s grizzly fashion world with aplomb, particularly Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee as the three women, who most covet Jesse’s powerful natural beauty. Each actor has her moments served up to her on a platter, sprinkled with gold dust, but each of them also forms a persona within the constraints of their hard-edged outlines. Elle Fanning is more than capable of this, as well, and displays flashes of brilliance when placed in one of NWR’s constructions of energy and atmosphere. That she has “The Thing” is of no doubt, but NWR permits no flourishes or embellishments of “The Thing.”

The Neon Demon is more thematically coherent than NWR’s other ponderings on the inertia of the protagonist, namely Valhalla Rising and Only God Forgives, yet more incoherent than either in its construction. Frequently, the film feels like a series of music videos interspersed with excerpts from a stage play. But what is most alarming, besides the film’s hair-raising final act (it’s worth mentioning that this is decidedly not a date movie), is the way that NWR suddenly doesn’t seem to know what to do when he has two characters talking face-to-face. Put two girls on a bed or a whole bunch of them in a huge, empty space and NWR will deliver the most sublime montage of arresting, gently beautiful images. Stand two characters in front of each other and make them talk and NWR is suddenly a first-time filmmaker with little or no sense of spatial relationships. It is as if so much effort has gone into choosing the right lens and the right angle for one particular frame that no thought at all has gone into staging the conversation, let alone how to cut it together. Given that this is a film about fashion, one could argue that this is oddly appropriate but the film’s slow and deliberate pacing and its draconian emphasis on restraint makes it so that the montage cannot afford to be so sloppy. Even during the less important scenes between Keanu Reeves as a scuzzy motel manager and Karl Glusman as the doe-eyed hunk trying to protect Jesse from the nastiness of LA, one would expect a filmmaker of NWR’s level to show more finesse.

The Neon Demon is a luxurious feast of morbid scenarios and atmospheric dread, worth a look for hardcore NWR fans and fans of the stylish directors he admires, such as Dario Argento and Brian de Palma. But by dousing the verve and dynamism of his own storytelling style in gold paint, NWR has sadly cheapened a film that would be dripping with an eternal beauty of its own if it didn’t reflect the disposability of the fashion industry so well.

Gareth Evans’ Welsh Chanbara flick

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Sandy Connell

Have you ever seen a Welsh samurai film? Well now you can! Gareth Evans, writer-director-editor of British-Indonesian martial arts action hits The Raid: Redemption (2011) and The Raid 2: Berandal (2014), has posted a five-minute-long test sequence in the style of a mini-samurai movie.

Along with the test video, Evans also posted details of the work that went into the five-minute film and the reason for making it. Known for bone-crunching bloodbaths, Evans and his Indonesian martial arts performers use Pre Vis Action (2016) to prove that they can keep the violence family-friendly, in order to achieve a 12A/PG-13 rating, without compromising their style of fighting and filmmaking. Gareth Evans’ regular choreographer, Yayan Ruhian (Mad Dog from The Raid and the vagrant hit man from The Raid 2), and Cecep Arif Rahman (the knife-wielding assassin from the Raid 2) chase down newcomer Hannah Al Rashid in this meeting of the trappings of Japanese fencing and Pencak Silat, the Indonesian martial art, which Evans, Ruhian and Iko Uwais popularised with The Raid series.

In a time of civil war, a young warrior is given the task of delivering a treaty between two rival lords. During her journey through the woods however, she finds herself hunted by two assassins intent on intercepting her message of peace in a bid to maintain the fear, instability and violent rule of their leader.

Watch the video below and enjoy…

Evans shot this test himself in South Wales’ Cynon Valley. Watching the film without this knowledge reveals just how great an effect the choices of shooting, casting, costume and music have on the viewer’s perception of any film. Even though this is merely low-budget test footage, shot in temperate woodland with overhead power lines in the background and Crocs on the actors’ feet, the good storytelling sells itself. Good storytelling makes the viewer take all the hard work behind the scenes for granted and look past continuity errors. In fact, nowhere is this more important than in action genre narratives, where disbelief needs the most elastic suspension.

The backstory Evans wrote could be just enough to motivate the elegantly composed short story needed for the gang’s choreography test or it could be a piece of a larger plot. Who knows what Evans might have bubbling away for future martial arts mayhem? To see Evans and co. take a run at a feature-length samurai period piece is an enticing prospect for the future, but the fact is that Evans has been entrenched in the style of Japan’s samurai action genre, Chanbara, for his entire career. The Raid and its sequel exemplify the very particular kind of suspension of disbelief required for the Japanese Chanbara flicks from which Pre Vis takes its cues.

Iko Uwais vs. Cecep Arif Rahman in The Raid 2: Berandal (2014) — Iko Uwais vs. Cecep Arif Rahman in *The Raid 2: Berandal* (2014)

Chanbara literally means “sword fighting” and the genre typically includes period-set action stories about samurai, such as Yojimbo (1961), Samurai Assassin (1965), Sword of Doom (1966) and Samurai Rebellion (1967). As popular in 20th Century Japan as Westerns once were in the United States, the Chanbara genre also gave birth to massive film series, like the Lone Wolf & Cub series, two series about real-life samurai Musashi Miyamoto and the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman series; not to mention modern-day genre riffs, like Takashi Miike’s Seven-Samurai-meets-The-Wild-Bunch mash up, 13 Assassins (2011).

Though his feature films are Indonesian martial arts actioners, set in modern-day Jakarta, Gareth Evans’ work with Yayan Ruhian and Iko Uwais stick by the structural principles of pure Chanbara. Even the nightmarish bloodbath that he contributed to V/H/S/2 (2013) is constructed from Chanbara’s same principal rhythmic blueprint of tension, which invariably begins with a long build-up, in which we gain widely spaced, valuable plot and character information. Then our characters enter an increasingly tense, interminable moment of initial confrontation, in which each weighs the possible consequences of every decision they could take. Finally, we arrive at an explosive, on-going fight scene, containing separate emotional and narrative climaxes, as well as a final, unifying climax (a thematic climax). Key to the success of any number of cinema’s finest Chanbara flicks and to all of Evans’ films, from the modest Pre Vis to the epic Raid 2, is modulation. No single fight scene builds to its climax without allowing the fight to slow down momentarily, while the balance of power is adjusted, and one character shifts from the front foot to the back foot.

Tatsuya Nakadai is the psychotic badass at the centre of Sword of Doom (1966) — Tatsuya Nakadai is the psychotic badass at the centre of *Sword of Doom* (1966)

It’s especially generous of Evans to post his own mini-Chanbara flick online, not only as a short piece of violent entertainment for lunchtime viewing, but also as an insight into the process that he and his performers go through in working out the astonishing action sequences that make them the most innovative action filmmakers working today. Shooting Pre Vis required a crew of one (Evans) and three days near his home town of Hirwaun with his three performers. Doubtless, the broad strokes of the choreography had been worked out in advance, but it isn’t until the performers and their cameraman are in the final location that the real work can begin. It’s like building a piano: sure, you can build it anywhere, but you can’t do the fine tuning until it has reached the concert hall.

The third and final part in The Raid series isn’t expected until 2017 (if we’re lucky). If you like what Evans’ films have to offer, then why not break up the anticipation on the way to The Raid 3 by exploring the Chanbara classics from which Evans has taken the rhythms and structural tension of the samurai showdown and re-applied it (with minimal alterations) to the finest martial arts action of today. Below is a three-step introduction to the elegant, action-packed world of Chanbara. Anyone concerned about spoilers may want to skip the last two trailers below, and just take my word for it that these three films are among the greatest actioners ever made and well worth seeing!

MUST-SEE FILMS IN 2016

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Sandy Connell

Read my picks for the most exciting films coming to British and American cinemas in 2016! Hit the links to go to FOEC Prime for 15 English Language Films for 2016 and 15 Foreign Language Films for 2016.

Heightened Anticipation: 15 Foreign Language Films for 2016

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Sandy Connell

It should be clear from my list of English language releases to look forward to this year that 2016 is already shaping up to be proof (if proof was needed) that we live in a golden age of cinema. More filmmakers have access to funding than ever before, and a wider range of film distributors make more and more diverse and exciting films available to the viewing public with every passing year. So what have we to look forward to from the new year’s foreign language output?

New films are expected on the 2016 festival circuit from Belgium’s premiere social realists the Dardenne Brothers, the maddeningly young Quebecois prodigy Xavier Dolan, Iranian maestro Asghar Farhadi and the incredible Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, one of my favourite filmmakers of all time. Not to mention the latest from Lav Diaz and Mia Hansen-Løve, which will premiere in Berlin next month. I’m also still holding out hope that Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer’s latest half-animated, half-live-action oddity will emerge from its chrysalis this year. But I have no room on this list for speculation, so (apart from one notable exception) I’m sticking with titles already slated for release in 2016, either in the UK or the US.

Let’s get to it.

ARABIAN NIGHTS VOLUMES 1 – 3 (a.k.a. AS MIL E UMA NOITES, Portugal/ France/ Germany/ Switzerland, dir. Miguel Gomes)

Do you have room in your life for a six-and-a-half-hour Portuguese epic? If your answer is ‘Yes’ then this year you will have the pleasure of a UK release for Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, a grand political statement on the state of modern-day Portugal, structured around the skeleton of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’. Gomes’ lyrical magnum opus was keenly awaited by critics after his 2012 success Tabu, and promises an unforgettable experience. The film was already released in three parts in the US, all of which will play in the UK in the spring. After the ginormous Russian epic Hard To Be A God last year, I’d say I’m ready for another challenging, absurdly long film. Mercifully, this one will be presented in bite-sized chunks: Vol. 1 – The Restless One (UK release on 22nd April) Vol. 2 – The Desolate One (UK release on 29th April) and Vol. 3 – The Enchanted One (UK release on 6th May).

THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (LE TOUT NOUVEAU TESTAMENT, Belgium/ France/ Luxembourg, dir. Jaco van Dormael)

Jaco van Dormael’s fourth film is a high-concept comedy that posits that God is not dead — he lives in Brussels with his daughter. On top of that, he is a complete arse. When God’s daughter tires of his ill treatment of her and of humanity at large, she takes it upon herself to sabotage his cruel torture of the human race. God is played as a mean-spirited schlub by Benoît Poelvoorde, the charismatic, mugging psychopath at the centre of Belgian classic Man Bites Dog, and Catherine Deneuve hops into bed with a gorilla. Colour me intrigued. The trailer over-eggs the film’s broad comedy a little too much for its own good, but the promise of Van Dormael’s film is that it doesn’t begin and end merely as a series of crazy gags: beneath the surface is a story about a young girl challenging the behaviour of her father and forging her own sense of morality à la une farce majeure. UK release on 25th March / US release TBA

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR (a.k.a. RAK TI KHON KAEN – LOVE IN KHON KAEN, Thailand, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethacul)

First, watch the trailer above — WOW. Thailand’s premiere cinematic auteur, nicknamed ‘Joe’ for the sake of the foreign press, follows up his Palme D’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives with another mysterious story rooted in the spiritual mythology of Thailand. Atmospheric, stimulating and layered with narrative and psychological meaning, Weerasethacul’s work stirs thoughts and feelings that few filmmakers can reach. Jenjira Pongpas stars as a woman caring for soldiers afflicted by sleeping sickness, who falls in love with one of her charges. Lyrical, sinister and peculiar in all the right places, if the trailer is anything to go by, then this is likely to be a contender for my best of 2016 list (if someone would just hurry up and set the UK release date). UK release TBA / US release on 4th March.

EL CLAN (Argentina, dir. Pablo Trapero)

Pablo Trapero has the Ricardo Darín Stamp of Approval (the director and star worked together on critical hits Carancho and Elephante Blanco). Frankly, that’s good enough for me, but Trapero is also one of Argentina’s most celebrated living filmmakers and it is comforting to see that his work is returning to UK cinemas. El Clan is based on the true-life crimes perpetrated by the Puccio family, who became serial kidnappers in 1980s Buenos Aires. Beyond extorting money from wealthy families, the Puccio family’s crimes extended to murdering their victims after the ransom was paid. A strong cast of Argentinian stars and a stylish, politically vocal writer-director like Trapero make this yet another enticing release from Latin America’s largest film industry. (Sorry, no English subtitles on the trailer above). UK release on 27th May / US release on 29th January.

EL CLUB (Chile, dir. Pablo Larraín)

Also on its way from Latin America is the first of four forthcoming films from Chilean provocateur Pablo Larraín. The success of his knock-out 2012 film No and TV series Prófugos for HBO Latin America has clearly paid dividends by leading Larraín to two new productions in Chile (El Club and Nerruda, which will hopefully pop up on this year’s festival circuit), as well as attention from Hollywood in the form of the Natalie-Portman-starring Jackie Onasis biopic and the modern-day remake of Scarface. Admittedly these last two films sound a bit dodgy, but there can be no doubt that any new release from a talented left-wing firebrand like Larraín is a must-see, and El Club has a particularly great hook. Four priests have been hidden away by the church in a remote community in Southern Chile to ponder their quite considerable sins, which include child abuse and baby-snatching. Into this group comes a fifth man, who forces the priests to relive the past and assess whether or not they are truly repentant. Larraín is an uncompromising filmmaker and a master of suspense in scenes that pit adversaries against each other with only words as weapons and no armour whatsoever. Though it is modest in its scale, it would probably be sensible to brace yourself for El Club. UK release on 25th March / US release on 5th February.

CROCODILE GENNADIY (USA/Ukraine, dir. Steve Hoover)

Much to my disappointment, this is not a big-screen outing for the characters of Roman Kachanov’s delightful Cheburashka (Чебура́шка) shorts, but a documentary about the controversial Ukrainian pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko. The pastor does indeed compare himself to the wise crocodile, Gena, who befriends the peculiar little creature Cheburashka, and there is an obvious significance in this metaphor, given that Gennadiy Mokhnenko is known for his uncompromising methods of rehabilitation for teenaged drug addicts in Ukraine. These methods enter vigilante territory with the abduction of homeless youths from the streets of Mariupol and their forced enrolment in the pastor’s rehabilitation programme. Crocodile Gennadiy debuted to glowing reviews at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and comprises years of footage shot by documentarian Steve Hoover. Executive Produced by Terrence Malick, scored by Atticus Ross and examining Mokhnenko’s activities from a close vantage point, Hoover’s documentary is sure to be a thought provoking portrait of a remarkable public figure, but let the title serve as a warning. “Crocodile” does not merely refer to a cartoon character known to children throughout the former USSR, it is also the street name for the flesh-eating designer drug Desomorphine, that has spread like wildfire through Russia and Ukraine, and is the substance that Mokhnenko is attempting to help many teenagers kick by any means necessary. Delightful, it ain’t. UK release on 10th June / US release TBA

DHEEPAN (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)

Antonythasan Jesuthasan is a celebrated playwright and novelist in France, where he found political asylum in 1993. In his first leading film role Jesuthasan draws on his own experiences as a child soldier with Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers for the story of an ex-militant, who moves to the Le Pre-Saint-Gervais housing project in northeastern Paris. In order to do this he must adopt the identity of a dead man, Dheepan, and take with him a woman and a girl, whom he barely knows, in the roles of Dheepan’s wife and daughter. In the concrete jungle of Le Pre, Dheepan finds himself compelled to encourage peace by the introduction of no-conflict zones, where the criminal gangs of the deprived community are forced to tolerate each other. Dheepan took home the Palme D’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, a gratifying success for Jacques Audiard, whose highly regarded crime classic Un Prophète (one of my most egregious cinematic blindspots) received the Grand Prix (second place in the main competition) in 2009. Reviews have been almost universally positive for Dheepan, and praise for Audiard’s highly cinematic depiction of Le Pre certainly whets my appetite for a dynamic slice of contemporary French social realism. UK release on 4th March / US release TBA

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (EL ABRAZO DE LA SERPIENTE, Colombia, dir. Ciro Guerra)

I have been singing the praises of this film ever since I saw it at the London Film Festival last October (you can read my full review here) and it is worthy of inclusion on this list, not only as a film that I believe every self-respecting cinephile should see, but also as a film certain to reward its audience with repeat viewings. I could care less about seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the cinema again, whereas Embrace of the Serpent is a film I am anxious to mark on the calendar (no UK release date is yet set). Quite deservedly the film is also on the shortlist of candidates for the Best Film in a Foreign Language Oscar category and it would be a crime for the Academy to overlook this incredible cinematic achievement. Interpreting the true-life story of two scientists, who travelled to the Amazon jungle in search of the sacred yakruna plant, Embrace… takes as its protagonist a native shaman, who encounters both scientists at different stages in his life and is compelled to help each of them in their quest for the yakruna. Embrace of the Serpent confirms Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra as one of the most distinctive film artists working today, on par with Roy Andersson, Werner Herzog, Yorgos Lanthimos and Lucretia Martel. UK release TBA / US release on 17th February.

GOODNIGHT MUMMY (a.k.a. ICH SEH, ICH SEH, Austria, dir. Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala)

This nasty-looking barb from Austria opened in the US in September last year to strong reviews and much praise as a creepy, nightmarish horror. The trailer does a lot to support this, setting up the concept of a horror film about two identical twin boys, whose mother returns from cosmetic facial surgery and begins to display unhinged behaviour. As she becomes increasingly cruel and threatening towards her children, the two boys begin to suspect that she is not, in fact, their mother. Boasting not one, but two kinds of creepy masks, plus creepy twins, plus creepy-crawly insects, plus creepy head shaking antics in the woods, Goodnight Mummy looks like a vile treat for horror fans. UK release on 4th March.

JULIETA (a.k.a. SILENCIO, Spain, dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar is back in the rich dramatic territory of films about women. Shot in Madrid and multiple locations in Andalucia and Galicia, Almodóvar’s twentieth film charts thirty years in the life of the titular heroine, Julieta, played as a young woman by Adriana Ugarte and as an older woman by Emma Suárez. According to Almodóvar’s recent interview with the Financial Times the film was originally titled Silencio “because that’s the principal element that drives the worst things that happen to the female protagonist.” In November Almodóvar retitled the film in order to avoid confusion with Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming film Silence, an interesting peccadillo that draws attention to the joyous fact that we have new films from A-list auteurs Pedro Almodóvar and Martin Scorsese likely to drop in the same year! (Sorry, no English subtitles on the trailer above). UK release on 26th August / US release TBA

MUSTANG (Turkey/France, dir. Deniz Gemze Ergüven)

Turkish director Deniz Gemze Ergüven’s debut film is another must-see from Cannes 2015, which has already garnered plaudits from critics on its Stateside release. Beginning with an incident drawn from her own adolescence, Ergüven’s film tells the story of five sisters, whose deeply conservative family punish them for an afternoon’s innocent tomfoolery with some school boys by locking them away and confiscating any objects likely to “pervert” the girls, such as mobile phones, make up and revealing clothing. From there the family begins the process of forcing each girl into an arranged marriage. Praised for the performances of its five unknown young stars, who shared the Sarajevo Film Festival Award for Best Actress among them, Mustang is pitched as a vibrant depiction of adolescent sexuality and educated young minds being literally imprisoned by the arcane morality of religious conservatism. As the only debut film on my list this year, Mustang will hopefully announce the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker to European cinema. UK release on 13th May.

NO HOME MOVIE (Belgium/France, dir. Chantal Ackerman)

On 6th October 2015, French newspaper Le Monde made an unconfirmed report that the sudden death of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman, aged 65, was suicide. Ackerman’s death is undoubtedly a profound loss to the world of cinema, as her career encompassed groundbreaking films like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), I, You, He, She (1976) and Nuit et Jour (1991) and influenced the work of filmmakers like Todd Haynes and Michael Haneke. Her last film, No Home Movie, is the product of several recorded conversations between Ackerman and her mother, Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor from Poland, who settled in Brussels after World War II. Ackerman’s film unfolds on consumer-grade video, navigating conversations both banal and revealing. The film was booed by some members of the press during its premiere at last year’s Locarno Film Festival (surely continental Europe is the only place where booing is a part of the festival experience) but has since gained traction among many critics’ circles. In a film that is bound to be reminiscent of her portrait of housewife Jeanne Dielman, Ackerman has chosen to pay tribute to her mother, who died aged 86 in 2014, and it seems inevitable that Ackerman’s own sudden death will lend a new contextual dimension to the experience. UK release TBA / US release on 1st April.

RAMS (HRÚTAR, Iceland/Denmark, dir. Grímur Hákonarson)

I freely admit that an Icelandic black comedy about two elderly shepherds is going to be a hard sell, but hear me out. Rams won top honours in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is pitched as a dry comedy about two estranged brothers, who must help each other to prevent the slaughter of both their flocks of sheep by the local health authorities. Scandi/Nordic region films that make the crossover to British and American theatres often represent the finest work from a region blessed with a history of exceptional filmmaking, where what might at first appear to be a quirky deadpan comedy is often only the upper layer of a far deeper, richer experience. UK release on 5th February / US release on 3rd February.

SON OF SAUL (SAUL FIA, Hungary, dir. László Nemes)

The most talked about foreign film of 2015 is finally coming to UK cinemas. It would seem that the next Oscar for Best Film in a Foreign Language is Son of Saul’s to lose after a run of overwhelmingly strong reviews that began with the film’s premiere in competition at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix last year. Son of Saul also received accolades from Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah and Last of the Unjust, who praised the film’s accuracy in depicting the living hell of the Jewish Sonderkommandos — inmates of concentration camps, who were forced by the Nazis to dispose of the bodies of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. Son of Saul adopts the viewpoint of a Sonderkommando, who believes that he has found his dead son, and spirits the body away so that he might find a rabbi willing to give the boy a proper Jewish burial. Critics of all stripes have drawn attention to the way in which director László Nemes and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély use the camera to simultaneously lock the audience in with the emotional numbness of their protagonist and comment on the very inexpressibility of the inhumanity that took place during the Holocaust. It would seem that a film such as this simply has no need of a trailer, and yet, somehow, one exists. UK release on 1st April.

**WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (a.k.a. 思い出のマーニー OMOIDE NO MĀNĪ, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Japan)**

The Secret World of Arrietty, Studio Ghibli’s adaptation of Mary Norton’s book ‘The Borrowers’, announced the arrival of Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who would supposedly succeed Hayao Miyazaki as the principal creative force in Japan’s most beloved animation studio. The future of Studio Ghibli has been in doubt for some time now, and its founders, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, both retired on high notes with The Wind Rises and Tale of the Princess Kaguya, respectively. It is uncertain whether or not Yonebayashi’s second film as director is going to be Studio Ghibli’s swan song or the first step towards a new era, but it is a comfort to know that there is at least one more Ghibli film coming to UK screens. When Marnie Was There adapts one of Hayao Miyazaki’s favourite children’s novels, written by Joan G. Robinson, and tells the story of Anna, an orphan, who is sent to the coast in the hope that the sea air will soothe her asthma (a strong parallel with the human boy in Arrietty). There she strikes up a friendship with Marnie, an otherworldly girl, whose absent parents leave her in the care of their unkind servants. IMDB lists the film as having an unspecified limited release in the UK and Ireland in 2016. I have included this film here by way of proffering a plea to the powers that be: let us, the great unwashed of Britain and Ireland, see this film in the cinema! Please! For fuck’s sake! Why films from one of the most respected animation studios in the world are not released to British theatres in the same year as they are in Japan is beyond me, and highlights the short shrift given animated films by UK distributors. If When Marnie Was There interests you at all, and appears at a cinema near you, then vote with your pounds and go see it in the cinema! Take a friend, for that matter — perhaps one who doesn’t mind you blubbing on their shoulder. UK release TBA

Click ‘Older’ below to go to my list of 2016’s most promising English language releases and, as always, say ‘YES!’ to going to the cinema in 2016!

Heightened Anticipation: 15 English Language Films for 2016

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Sandy Connell

Another year, another 600-700 cinematic releases in the UK and US. Oh, what to watch? It simply isn’t possible to see every worthwhile film that comes out in any given year, and 2016’s release schedule is already filling up. I am certain that I will reach 2017 with dozens of movies from this year still languishing on my “To Watch” list. At the very least I would like to catch each of the English language releases mentioned here, whether for the pedigree of the director, the consistently sound choices of the stars involved or the novelty of an unbroken 140-minute take.

To make my selection for this list a little easier, I’ve only chosen films that have a release date scheduled for British or American cinemas (if not both). Werner Herzog, John Michael McDonagh, Kelly Reichardt, Martin Scorsese, Taika Waititi, and Nicholas Winding Refn all have films heading to festivals this year, but there can be no way of predicting whether or not these films will receive distribution in 2016. Bearing this in mind, I’ve decided to stick with those films already placed on the calendar and I’m picking up the calendar from February.

A MONSTER CALLS (Spain/USA, dir. Juan Antonio Bayona)

Between the trailer for A Monster Calls and the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of The BFG, it would seem that the film industry has a warning for children that like to hang out by open windows. Novelist-turned-screenwriter Patrick Ness adapts his own book, in which a lonely young boy is told three stories by a monster that lives nearby his house. In exchange for these three stories the boy must tell the monster about the nightmare he has each night. A psychological fairytale that recalls the tradition of spoken fables, A Monster Calls comes across as a dark fantasy drama that should pique the curiosity of gothic genre fans. The presence of Spanish genre maestro J.A. Bayona behind the camera and an all-star cast, led by the gravelly baritone of Liam Neeson, inspires a great deal of confidence in this left field piece of family programming. UK release on 21st October / US release on 14th October.

ANOMALISA (USA, dir. Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson)

Already given a limited release in the US and expanding wider this month, Charlie Kaufman’s return to the director’s chair has been greeted with giddiness and swoons by American critics. Based on a play that Kaufman wrote for a series by composer Carter Burwell (who provides the score here) Anomalisa is a stop-motion animation directed by Kaufman in collaboration with seasoned animator Duke Johnson. Character actor Tom Noonan voices the entire supporting cast, whilst David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh voice the two leads, and the result is reportedly an astonishingly humane story about the nature of being human. This is partly what animation exists to achieve. It sometimes takes a certain remove from the characters on screen for us to see facets of ourselves in their actions (hence the enduring popularity of anthropomorphised animals in film and literature) and if ever there was a humanist that could maximise the potential of synthetic humanity, it’s Charlie Kaufman. UK release on 11th March.

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME (USA, dir. Richard Linklater)

After twelve years shooting a child coming of age for Boyhood, fifteen years making the Before… trilogy with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, and releasing roughly one film each year since he turned forty, you would think that Richard Linklater had earned himself some time off. Apparently not, but at the very least he’s earned himself the right to make a bawdy campus comedy. Returning to a world of vintage cars and baseball diamonds, Linklater’s 18th film follows a gang of college freshmen as they negotiate keg stands and hazing ceremonies in the 1980s. It doesn’t exactly look like high art – more like a playful cross between Dazed & Confused and National Lampoon’s Animal House. In other words, it looks like a shitload of fun. UK release on 13th May / US release on 15th April

GHOSTBUSTERS (USA, dir. Paul Feig)

Director Paul Feig scored himself seemingly bottomless good will from critics and audiences alike with the surly, women-behaving-badly comedy Bridesmaids (2011), which launched Melissa McCarthy to stardom. Columbia Pictures’ re-tooling of the beloved Ghostbusters series with an all-female crew will be the toughest test yet for Feig and McCarthy’s reputation as shining lights of American comedy. The principal draw here is not the revival of the Ghostbusters concept but the prospect of seeing four very funny female comedians run riot in a film world built on pithy one-liners, cartoon shocks and funky special effects. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones will be donning the proton packs as the titular crew of blue collar heroes, and fans of the original films will be treated to appearances from original cast members Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver. The real question in my mind is not how reverent this film will be to the nature of the 1984 original, but what the filmmakers will do with the theme song. Do you remix Ray Parker Jr’s original tune or come up with a new song that might run the risk of not being as joyously catchy? UK/US release on 15th July.

GREEN ROOM (USA, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

Jeremy Saulnier’s pensive, touching and extremely nasty revenge thriller Blue Ruin quite rightly scored near-universal critical acclaim in 2014. His follow-up, Green Room, confirmed Saulnier as a critical favourite after its debut in Cannes last May. Breaking out the fake blood and viscera once again, Saulnier stages a siege thriller in a Portland music venue, where a hardcore band must battle for their lives against a violent crew of local white supremacists, led by none other than Patrick Stewart. Seeing Stewart in a rare bad-guy role is enticing enough and the cast is made all the more attractive by young stars-in-waiting Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots (the woman with the best goddamned name in show business). UK release on 13th May / US release on 15th April.

HAIL, CAESAR! (USA, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)

Screwball comedy has always been a significant part of the Coen brothers’ filmography and the characters they have created. From Raising Arizona to The Big Lebowski to O Brother Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, the Coens have been the only American filmmakers to consistently work within this genre and Hail, Caesar! could be their most manic, purely entertaining screwball comedy since The Hudsucker Proxy in 1994. Josh Brolin leads as a studio fixer in 1950s Hollywood, who is trying to locate a matinée idol (George Clooney) after he is abducted from the set of the studio’s latest epic. The ensemble cast is made up of performers with an excellent comic pedigree and includes the welcome return of Scarlett Johansson to Coenland, fifteen years after they launched her career with a plum role in The Man Who Wasn’t There. UK release on 4th March / US release on 5th February.

HIGH-RISE (UK, dir. Ben Wheatley)

Anticipation is running high for Ben Wheatley’s first American film, the Boston-set crime drama Free Fire, which is expected to surface on the 2016 festival circuit. But let us not forget that Britain’s premiere director of dark thrillers has an even more highly anticipated film coming to UK theatres this year: the long gestated adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. Starring Tom Hiddleston (who else?) as an upper-middle-class doctor, who moves into a self-contained ecosystem for London’s elite, High-Rise received mixed reviews after festival screenings last year. Nonetheless, who can deny the allure of seeing a talented director like Wheatley working with his biggest budget yet to adapt a beloved classic of anarchic, extreme literature? If the trailer is anything to go by, this will be a film that requires a towering screen and broad, luxurious seats in which to squirm about. UK release on 18th March / US release TBA.

KNIGHT OF CUPS (USA, dir. Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick’s latest cinematic poem premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival to mixed reviews, but the fact that there’s a new film from one America’s greatest living storytellers coming to the unwashed masses (hopefully a UK release date will soon be set) is always cause for celebration. Malick was completely absent from filmmaking for twenty years and since 2005’s The New World he has steadily approached something like a prolific output. Fuck the plot, fuck the all-star cast – we’re getting a new Malick film every two to three years! Jump for joy! Not only does Knight of Cups see its release in 2016, but it looks more than likely that Malick’s next film Weightless, which was shot partly on-the-fly in the milieu of the Austin music scene, may appear at one of the major film festivals this year. UK release TBA / US release on 4th March.

KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS (USA, dir. Travis Knight)

Travis Knight, the co-founder and CEO of LAIKA Inc. takes to the director’s chair for the beloved stop-motion animation studio’s fourth feature film, a fairytale adventure set in ancient Japan. Kubo is a young boy, who must find his father’s magical suit of armour to help him fight back against the monsters and spirits that are pursuing his family. The all-star voice cast and luscious design suggest that, at the very least, this will be a sold piece of family entertainment. Given LAIKA’s pedigree as one of the world’s premiere animation studios (rivalled only by Aardman in the stop-motion field), Kubo and the Two Strings may well transcend the trappings of the animated blockbuster genre to be a fantasia par excellence. UK release on 9th September / US release on 19th August.

LA LA LAND (USA, dir. Damien Chazelle)

Damien Chazelle, the 30-year-old writer-director of Whiplash, has made a new film and it’s a musical. That’s all you need to know. BE EXCITED! You need more? Alright, it stars Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and JK Simmons, who won an Oscar for his terrifying performance as an abusive band leader in Whiplash. Excited yet? You should be. It will surely be a pleasure to watch Chazelle try to clear the impossibly high bar that he set himself with his sophomore film, even if his romance about a jazz pianist and an actress trying to make their careers in Los Angeles doesn’t soar to the giddy heights that made Whiplash the most talked about indie of 2014 and 2015. UK/US release on 15th July.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (USA, dir Jeff Nichols)

As if John Carpenter weren’t already getting enough love from today’s young filmmakers (2015’s It Follows being the most outstanding recent example) American filmmaker Jeff Nichols decided to use his first studio outing for Warner Bros to make a Carpenter-style “sci-fi chase film”. Midnight Special will see its premiere in-competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. It stars Michael Shannon as a father trying to get his son to safety and evade the attentions of a religious cult and a government task force, both of which want the boy for his supernatural powers. Jeff Nichols is fast becoming one of America’s foremost filmmakers and will soon be releasing yet another film, Loving, about the real-life story of Mildred and Richard Loving, who were jailed in Virginia in 1958 for their interracial marriage. To see a rising talent like Nichols keep one foot in indie cinema, whilst edging towards bigger budget fare, is comforting and exciting. UK release on 15th April / US release on 18th March.

MILES AHEAD (USA, dir. Don Cheadle)

Don Cheadle was considered by Erin David and Vince Wilburn (Miles Davis’ son and nephew, respectively) to be the ideal choice to play Miles Davis on film. Not only did Cheadle agree to play Davis, he chose to direct the film himself. What emerged from the process (with a helping hand from crowdfunding site Indiegogo) is a film that pays tribute to Davis by taking its visual and narrative cues from the modal jazz form that Davis pioneered in the late 1950s and would make him into the music legend he is known as today. The film also stars Emayatzy Corinealdi as Davis’ long-suffering wife Francis and Ewan McGregor as music journalist Dave Braden, who finds himself riding along with Davis on an odyssey through New York City to find a stolen session tape. Taking this as his framing device, Cheadle explores Davis’ past and his turbulent relationship with his wife. Early reviews indicate that Cheadle essentially sets out to blow the doors off the period biopic format and capture the invigorating energy of Davis’ life and music. Though Cheadle is a first-time director, the prospect of seeing him portray Davis in a bold, rule breaking film is immediately compelling. UK release on 22nd April / US release on 1st April.

TALE OF TALES (IL RACCONTO DEI RACCONTI, Italy/France/UK, dir. Mateo Garrone)

If there is a more eccentric film coming in 2016, then I have yet to see any sign of it. Based on tales collected by Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, Matteo Garrone’s latest film adapts three tales, each playing-out in a pre-Renaissance setting with a cast that includes Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, Vincent Cassel and a man who appears to be a dead ringer for Dobby from the Harry Potter films. I could not be more excited to see Garrone’s juicy, visceral take on the kind of folktales and fables that are the connective tissue between modern storytelling and the mythologies of old Europe. and the dash of Fellini-esque imagery in the trailer only makes Tale of Tales that much more seductive. UK release on 1st July / US release on 22nd April.

VICTORIA (Germany, dir. Sebastian Schipper)

This one-take marvel has already finished many of its theatrical runs in the rest of the world but comes better-late-than-never to UK screens this spring. Victoria won the Achievement in Cinematography award at last year’s Berlin Film Festival for the obvious but astonishing reason that it was shot in an unbroken 140-minute single take, which took three attempts on three consecutive nights of shooting on location in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Only Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark has achieved such a feat before. If the positive critical response is anything to go by, Victoria (like Russian Ark) transcends the novelty of its production to deliver a pulse pounding heist thriller that literally rides along with a Spanish expat as she becomes embroiled in her friends’ plans to rob a bank. Certainly it is a film that demands to be seen in the cinema, where hitting the pause button is not an option. UK release on 29th April.

THE WITCH (UK/Canada, dir. Robert Eggers)

The trailer for this period horror promises one very reassuring thing for 2016: there will be at least one nightmarishly terrifying film this year. It Follows filled this space in 2015 but the general lack of hair-raising, jump-out-of-your-fucking-skin horror in UK cinemas is an unfortunate state of affairs in this otherwise rich era of contemporary cinema. But between The Witch and Austria’s Goodnight Mummy we should be in for at least one really good scare at the cinema this year. Production-designer-turned-writer-director Robert Eggers took the Best Director award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival for his story of a family of British Puritans, whose infant child is abducted by a mysterious evil force in 17th Century New England. Ralph Ineson (a.k.a. Chris Finch from the original series of The Office) and Kate Dickie play the parents, who suspect their daughter of witchcraft, played by newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy. UK release 11th March / US release 26th February.

Click ‘Newer’ below for my list of 15 Foreign language films to look forward to in 2016!

New Year’s Film Resolutions 2016

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Sandy Connell

We’re almost a week into the new year and it’s time to weed out those New Year’s Resolutions that were mere posturing at Christmas parties (“this year I’m definitely going to finish my novel!”) and those that you’re willing to see out to the bitter end. In addition to the usual health related self-improvement and language-learning resolutions (advanced Spanish, here I come!) I’ve resolved to achieve four simple but important things that will make me a better, healthier cinephile by the end of 2016. Appreciating cinema is like practicing a sport: it takes a concerted effort to get past certain milestones and overcome certain obstacles. So come on, 2016, let’s dance…

RESOLUTION #1 – COVER MY MOST EGREGIOUS BLIND SPOTS

Below are fifty-two posters for fifty-two essential films from cinema history that I’ve somehow managed to miss or ignore. They are my most egregious blind spots in cinema history. My list (also on Letterboxd) contains one film for each week of the year, so by the time Big Ben strikes midnight on 1st January 2017, I should have this list down to zero and be a considerably more educated cinephile. Though I have seen some of these films in-part, such as The Graduate (1967) and Schindler’s List (1993), I consider this list to be a litany of shame (SHAAAAME!) I try to make a point of never chastising anyone for not having seen a particular film, so to the sanctimonious dweebs of cinephilia I say, “Let he who hath seen every one of these films cast the first stone!”

RESOLUTION #2 – DISCOVER AFRICAN CINEMA

Watching Abderrahmane Sissako’s excellent Timbuktu (one of my favourite films of 2015) recently reminded me of an even greater, more reprehensible blind spot in my film knowledge: African cinema. Films from Africa are much easier to come by than one might expect and the extensive work of the World Cinema Project to restore gems from the archives is making the history of African cinema more accessible. Still, finding an entry point to the cinematic history on an entire continent is a daunting task. One logical place to start might be the work of celebrated veterans like Senegal’s Osumane Sembène and Egypt’s Youssef Chahine (both profiled in this excellent list on African cinema). Then there are recent successes to seduce genre fans, such as the boisterous Congolese thriller Viva Riva! (2010) and schlocky Cameroonian sci-fi Les Saignants (The Bloodiest) (2005). Anyone looking to compose a playlist of African films and find information on the continent’s key filmmakers should start with the extensive lists composed by the dedicated cinephiles in MUBI’s online community.

RESOLUTION #3 – MAN-UP AND WATCH MARTYRS

I have had a masochistic interest in France’s extreme horror sub-genre ever since seeing Alexandre Aja’s stylish but infuriating debut, Haute Tension (a.k.a. Switchblade Romance) in 2003, not to mention the Belgian survival ordeal Calvaire (2005) and the incredibly nasty home invasion horror À L’intérieur (Inside) in 2007. But until now I simply haven’t had the guts to tackle this much maligned sub-genre’s most notorious entry, Pascale Laugier’s Martyrs (2008). 2016 is the year that I will take a deep breath, find a place with no sharp objects with which to gouge out my eyes, and settle down for what has been described to me as the most gruelling film since Pasolini’s Salò (1975). Those already familiar with Martyrs should read extreme horror advocate Scott Tobias’ article on the film in his New Cult Canon.

RESOLUTION #4 – SAY “YES!” TO THE CINEMA

It’s probably good policy to resolve to do more things that get you out of the house each year. Whether you’re going to your local cinema, your local theatre or your local hole in a wall where beer and live music can be found in abundance, you and the artists you love are sure to benefit. Going out to enjoy something special and exhilarating is one of the most fundamental reasons for cinema to exist but with the demands of work, the knackering grind of the daily commute, and the relative convenience of a stack of DVDs or a Netflix account it is all to easy to skip a night out at movies. Just remember that going to the cinema is a pleasure akin to prayer in a congregation or the thrill of seeing live music in a stadium arena and, as such, should be sought out at every opportunity. I intend to visit the cinema as often as possible in 2016, particularly with a view to supporting to my local picture house, Deptford Cinema. Deptford Cinema is a volunteer-run venture aiming to use a diverse and interactive programme to give cinema back to the Borough of Lewisham, which currently has no commercial cinemas to serve over 275,000 residents.

Support filmmakers, support your local cinema, say “YES!” to going to the cinema in 2016!

Best Film Scores of 2015

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Sandy Connell

How did your past year in the cinema sound? Mine sounded bloody fantastic! To close my retrospective of the year’s best cinema and cinema-ephemera, I’ve turned my attention to the film scores that stood out from the crowd in 2015. By clicking into the box below you can listen to my 54-minute mix of the sonic landscape that resonated in British cinemas this year.

Best Film Scores of 2015 on Mixcloud

This mix of my favourite tracks from the original scores of 2015 certainly speaks to a few personal sensibilities on my part (very much accentuated by the desire to hide in a cosy, warm cocoon until spring 2016) but also highlights the star of the year in film music: the synthesiser. Whether it was being used for melodic callbacks to the scores of the 1980s or to create atmospheric drones and modulating electronic rhythms, the humble synth all but defines the scores of 2015 — even to the extent that composers working with acoustic recordings frequently set out to achieve a synth-like sound by digitally manipulating the output of a full orchestra. To my mind, few orchestral scores stood out in 2015 as great works in and of themselves. Michael Giacchino delivered in ever-reliable fashion for Inside Out, while Joe Kraemer took over scoring the Mission: Impossible series with a playful score for Rogue Nation. Carter Burwell’s distinctly Burwellian take on the American pastoral style for Carol has received well-deserved accolades but simply didn’t float my boat on screen or on record, and Thomas Newman’s slavish facsimile of classic John Williams drew attention to Steven Spielberg’s more grating tendency for hero-worship in Bridge of Spies, often to the point of being intrusive in many otherwise captivating scenes.

But first up on my mix of the year in film music is one of three tracks from ‘Junun’, the album recorded by Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur in collaboration with PT Anderson’s regular composer and Radiohead co-founder Johnny Greenwood. The two multi-instrumentalists pitched their recording studio in the 15th Century Mehrangarh Fortress in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, and recorded with an ensemble of local music veterans, known as the Rajasthan Express, with Radiohead producer Nigel Goodrich capturing the sonic output, and Paul Thomas Anderson filming the whole wonderful milieu for his music doc, Junun. It’s a bit of a cheat to include these recordings in a list of the year’s best film scores, seeing as Anderson’s film is essentially a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the album but the power of this hugely eclectic record gave Anderson the ideal excuse to let his hair down and cobble together an unassuming film about the inspiring process of so many talented musicians as they tinker with the many musical genres native to India in a setting built from layers-upon-layers of local history. I found that I needed a little time for Anderson’s loose, playful music doc to grow on me, whereas the album itself needs no time at all to grab one’s imagination.

The crew behind the music and film of Junun.

Another immediately bewitching album is Cat’s Eyes’ score for The Duke of Burgundy. Canadian soprano singer Rachel Zeffira and Faris Badwan, co-founder of The Horrors, are a perfect fit for the somnambulant aesthetic of Peter Strickland’s kinky relationship drama. Their woodwind-heavy score drifts along on a hypnotic current of dreamy vocals, acoustic instrumentation and synth-like processing, inspired by New-Wave-era Czech score-writers and Italian composers like Claudio Gizzi and Ennio Morricone. The title track even contains audible hints of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Everybody’s Talking’, just one of many influences that the director threw at Cat’s Eyes during the writing of the score. Though the instrumentation is drastically different, Cat’s Eyes’ score owes a great deal to the work of Juliee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti for the films of David Lynch. Certainly, fans of Cruise’s dreamy vocals and Badalamenti’s gorgeous modulations and thematic shifts will fall in love with Cat’s Eye’s score just as quickly.

One composer to enjoy a particularly strong year in 2015 was Australian Jed Kurzel, whose scores for Beta Band alum John Maclean’s Slow West and Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth both put a distinctive spin on the word elegiac. Kurzel makes heavy use of the slow drone of a harmonium to underscore both films’ pervasive moods, as he accentuates their themes through the voices of single instruments, such as the pluck of a mandolin or the keening rise and fall of a violin.

Another talented, singular composer enjoying the limelight in 2015 is Iceland’s Jóhann Jóhannsson, who earned an Oscar nomination for his work on The Theory of Everything and *UPDATE* has now received a second nomination for Sicario, possibly my favourite film score of the year. Jóhannsson’s bold orchestral score evokes the nightmare of war that grips the US/Mexico border and is particularly refreshing for its deliberate avoidance of any sounds particular to the music of the border region. Using a 55-piece orchestra, Jóhannsson drew from industrial music of the 1980s and used electronic post-processing to gain the aesthetic benefits of a synth score with minimal use of synthesisers. By his own admission, Jóhannsson’s work here is more textural than melodic, which works to the benefit of a film in which the hero finds herself tumbling further and further down the rabbit hole, into a world of shadows and fog. That Jóhannsson’s most outstanding track, ‘The Beast’ can communicate this feeling within the first thirty seconds of Sicario’s trailer speaks to the effectiveness of this more textural approach that commands the film scores of 2015.

Here enters the significance of the synthesiser and the increasing overlap between the work of the composer and the work of the sound designer. Disasterpiece (a.k.a. Richard Vreeland), chiptune artist and composer for video games like ‘Fez’ and ‘Mini Metro’, was tapped to provide the hair-raising score for David Robert Mitchell’s atmospheric horror, It Follows. From a title theme that lays bare the 80s slasher movie foundations of the film to the actively enervating use of ear-splitting feedback during the film’s most brutal scenes, Vreeland gave his synthesiser and midi-deck a workout that tested the subjective boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic sound and music in storytelling.

As with Jóhannsson’s score for Sicario the explicit aim in It Follows is the creation of a textural mood, something that gets under the viewer’s skin to heighten a single (in this case, terrible) emotion and let a greater idea emerge from it. In so doing, the composer infringes on the territory of the sound designer. This is especially true of the ambient, percussion-free scores of Atticus Ross (for Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy) and Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow (for Alex Garland’s directorial debut ex_machina).

Best known for his Oscar-winning work with Trent Reznor and David Fincher (from the Social Network up to Gone Girl) Atticus Ross is getting more and more gigs as a solo composer (such as the upcoming John Hillcoat thriller Triple 9) but he will have a hard time topping his work for Bill Pohlad on Love & Mercy, where his score is set within the fractured, prodigious creative headspace of living legend Brian Wilson. Working from Wilson’s backups of original recordings, which arrived to Ross in an epic stack of hard drives, the composer sampled, looped and processed years-worth of studio tracks to create a sonic collage, which brings the sounds of Wilson’s creative process to the screen in a way that is both poetic and evocative of Wilson’s focused creative energy and mental fugue. It’s a method particularly appropriate to the film, given how much of the screenplay was based on the snippets of Wilson’s real-life discussions that were captured on the talkback mic during session recordings for the Beach Boys’ albums. The culmination of the composer’s and the filmmakers’ efforts is undoubtedly ‘The Bed Montage’, in which Wilson’s personal and musical history melts through the nervous system and melds into a mosaic of dialog samples, ambient harmonies and tracks from original Beach Boys tunes, ‘In My Room,’ ‘Til I Die’, even a tune by the Four Freshmen.

Paul Dano as the young Brian Wilson on the talkback mic in Love & Mercy.

The work of Ben Salisbury (Emmy-nominated for his work on David Attenborough docs for the BBC) and Portishead producer Geoff Barrow on ex_machina is as much a time capsule for the sensibilities of modern film composers as the film’s production design is for the aesthetics of digital-age architects and industrial designers. The duo worked with writer-director Alex Garland from the earliest stages of production to create a score of mounting ambient tension, one sure not to “blow it all” too soon in a hard sci-fi story driven by dialog and the exploration of huge ideas within a confined space. Their synth-based score takes a classical approach to finding emotional themes within the sonic narrative and is complimented by the inclusion of ‘Bunsen Burner,’ an outstanding bit of contemporary synth work by fellow British artist CUTS.

In keeping with the soundscape laid out by films like ex_machina, Love & Mercy, Sicario and It Follows, I’ve permitted myself another little cheat in my inclusion of a track from Scottish electro artist Blanck Mass’ re-score of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s 2013 art-nouveaux-themed Giallo homage, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears. Made for Death Waltz Records and a special screening at the 2015 East End Film Festival, Blanck Mass decided to curate his re-score of Cattet and Forzani’s eccentric horror via a game of Exquisite Corpse, in which various electronic music artists were given a particular scene from the film to score without knowing what their counterparts would produce. The result is a surprisingly coherent work for a less-than-perfect horror film that succeeds on the strength of the audiovisual sensory immersion imposed on the viewer. (Read my full review of the re-score’s EEFF screening here).

Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson recording the score for Sicario.

In direct contrast to the brooding use of synthesisers mentioned above, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips’ joyful evocation of Joy Division (and all the best parts of 80’s electropop) for Mistress America is sweetly effective and in-step with the trends of the New York hipster scene that Noah Baumbach lovingly teased in his both of his films this year (the first being While We’re Young).

I came across very few memorable original scores in the year’s foreign language films but Adan Jodorowsky’s modest, sentimental score for his father Alejandro’s Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad) deserves praise for being so thoroughly of-a-piece with the film, a beautiful memoir of his father’s childhood. But no score this year has succeeded in bringing a tear to my eye like Laurant Petitgand’s profoundly evocative, ambiguous, exploratory compositions for Wim Wenders’ and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s documentary Salt of the Earth (La Sel de la Terre). Covering the career of photojournalist Seabstião Salgado, Salt of the Earth is built upon the photographer’s moving, brutal imagery of some of mankind’s greatest modern upheavals, from the famine of Ethiopia, to the Kuwait oil fires, to the mass industrialisation of our methods for stripping the Earth of its natural resources. To provide an appropriate score for the astonishing images Salgado has captured must have been a daunting prospect. Petitgand rises to challenge with layered compositions that balance grandiosity with the humble perspective of a single human being, which Wenders and Salgado Jr use to devastating emotional effect within their editing of each successive sequence.

So there we have it. 2015 is over and what a year it was at the cinema. Bring on 2016!

Best Films of 2015 – Honourable Mentions

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Sandy Connell

In the wreckage left by any Best Of list there can always be seen the twinkling of gems that, for one reason or another, just didn’t shine as brightly as those that made the ascent to Top 30 (etc.) Here are some of those minor or imperfect but notable films that hit UK cinemas in 2015, as well as my favourites from the last Oscar race, here referred to as the Awards Season Hangovers.

My you can read my Top 30 films of 2015 here (English Language releases) and here (Foreign Language releases).

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Tilda Cobham-Hervey meets with her mother, played by Del Herbert-Jane, every Tuesday for a year as her mother transitions from a female body to a male body in 52 Tuesdays. — Tilda Cobham-Hervey meets with her mother, played by Del Herbert-Jane, every Tuesday for a year as her mother transitions from a female body to a male body in *52 Tuesdays.*

52 Tuesdays (Australia, dir. Sophie Hyde)

As an aspiring filmmaker with a taste for focussed timeframes (such as 45 Years’ six-day period or Taxi Tehran’s single afternoon) I must doff my hat to Sophie Hyde’s first feature, which is not only set every Tuesday over the course of a year, was shot every Tuesday over the course of a year. Hyde’s background in documentary filmmaking appears in her shrewd use of news clips to introduce each new day and in her gently observational style, charting the relationship between an Australian high school student and her mother as her mother undergoes hormone therapy and breast removal to reconfigure her body to her correct gender. The script’s frank exploration of sex and sexuality through the school girl’s own clandestine creative projects provides a fascinating contrast to the open, matter-of-fact transformation of her mother. It is also worth noting that in 16-year-old Tilda Cobham-Hervey there is captivating talent to behold – certainly one in need of greater exposure and a shot at becoming a bona fide star.

Lucy Honigman, Steve Oram and Tom Meeten enjoy a wholesome family celebration in Aaaaaaaah!  (2015) — Lucy Honigman, Steve Oram and Tom Meeten enjoy a wholesome family celebration in *Aaaaaaaah!* (2015)

Aaaaaaaah! (UK, dir. Steve Oram)

The best-titled film of the year is a gruesome trip into the sludge of the alpha-male psyche from British comedian (and sinister ginger nut-job) Steve Oram. Set in a grim alternate universe, not dramatically different from our own modern-day British dystopia, the cast communicates entirely in guttural grunts and monkey noises and the males of society are clearly divided along the lines of Alpha and Beta. Despite the violent dysfunction in society there are still jobs to be had (such as a washing machine repairman) and family harmony to be enjoyed. Possibly by design, Aaaaaaaah! already feels like some rare, shit-smeared gem that might once have popped up on late night telly as a result of a surplus in Channel 4’s budget. It’s the kind of film we should ask for more often: one that proves how high-quality (dare I say, traditional) storytelling can engage us in spite of the most bizarre and outrageous subject matter (such as male genital mutilation and Toyah Wilcox shitting on her kitchen floor).

Liao Fan and Gwei Lun-Mei in Black Coal, Thin Ice (a.k.a. 白日焰火  - Bai Ri Yan Huo "Daytime Fireworks") — Liao Fan and Gwei Lun-Mei in *Black Coal, Thin Ice (a.k.a.* 白日焰火 *– Bai Ri Yan Huo “Daytime Fireworks”)*

Black Coal, Thin Ice (China, dir. Diao Yinan)

In the frozen wastes of China’s coal mining region, dismembered body parts start to appear at various locations along the freight train lines that carry the region’s economic life-blood to its destination and Liao Fan’s washed up copper reopens the investigation that he and his superiors had thought to be solved before he was quietly retired from the force. Diao Yinan’s gritty gumshoe yarn is a procedural of simple pleasures that succeeds on the flair of its director and world-weary cast as all concerned kindly poke fun at the day-to-day humour and pathos of Chinese life. Liao Fan is a particularly lugubrious protagonist, like Chinese hybrid of Matt Scudder and Jeffrey Lebowski, and writer-director Yinan exemplifies the poise and restraint beloved of China’s finest filmmakers in the gradual culmination of the film’s romantic undercurrent (a skill which, no doubt, made the case for Black Coal, Thin Ice to win the Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival).

Félix de Givry and Pauline Etienne ride through 20 years of the Parisian garage scene in Eden. — Félix de Givry and Pauline Etienne ride through 20 years of the Parisian garage scene in *Eden.*

Eden (France, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve)

Eden begins in the cool dawn of one morning in 1992 and ends in 2012. In that time we ride along with Paul, a feckless lad with a sweet smile, who finds himself seduced by garage music as a teenager and decides to become a DJ. By covering such an epic timescale without feeling any compulsion to visibly age the characters as years go by, director Mia Hansen-Løve (whose brother and co-screenwriter, Sven, lived through the salad days of garage music on much the same trajectory as Paul) conveys what some might call “misspent youth” with a casual elegance reminiscent of Richard Linklater and without the need to shoehorn-in any more plot than one might find in the haphazard tumbling of the dice in real life. Eden observes a similar struggle to decide on one’s true calling as in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, only with added teeth as it becomes abundantly clear that Eden’s latter half could easily be reappropriated and recut to make a Public Service video that might warn people against trying to earn a living in the music industry.

Leland Orser and Mary Elizabeth Winstead engage in a battle of minds in Faults. — Leland Orser and Mary Elizabeth Winstead engage in a battle of minds in *Faults.*

Faults (USA, dir. Riley Stearns)

Leland Orser is my favourite gibbering wreck. As a character actor he has repeatedly found himself cast in roles requiring a state of constant panic (often resulting in a gruesome death). How appropriate that he has finally been given an entire film in which to put the willies up himself! Written and directed by first-timer Riley Stearns, Faults played to great acclaim at a handful of film festivals in 2014 but was released directly to Video On Demand this year, meaning I couldn’t include it on my main list, but feel duty-bound to mention it here. Faults is a genuine treat for fans of compact, twisted, character-driven mysteries. Orser takes the lead as a shamed travelling expert on cults and how cult leaders manipulate their subjects’ minds. When a couple approach him to help them get back their daughter, he suggests reprogramming, whereby he has her kidnapped, brings her to a motel room and spends a week breaking down and re-configuring her personality. But on the strength of the tense, pathetic, hilarious opening scene alone, it is already obvious that the reprogramming is unlikely to run to plan. Deliciously twisty and tense from start-to-finish, Faults sings with the strength of its cast. Leland Orser and Mary Elizabeth Winstead deserve showers of accolades for their work here and the supporting cast exude the same creepy homeliness and/or bizarre menace of the creeps and weirdos one might expect to find in a 90s-era Coen Brothers’ film.

Diego Roman and Viilbjørg Malling Agger in the mysterious landscape of Jauja . — Diego Roman and Viilbjørg Malling Agger in the mysterious landscape of *Jauja*.

Jauja (Argentina/Denmark/France/Netherlands/USA, dir. Lisandro Alonso)

Brutal and etherial in equal measure, this Danish-Argentinian traumnovella is the kind of hypnotic phantasm of a narrative that demands repeated viewings and a certain amount of personal introspection to divine its obscure, heavily conceptual ideas about masculinity and death. In the late 19th Century, a Danish army captian and his daughter are travelling through the surreal landscape of Patagonia, accompanied by some particularly rough Argentine conscripts. When the Captain’s daughter runs off with a handsome young soldier, he sets out alone on an odyssey to rescue her and her lover form the chaos that is engulfing the region, only to encounter dreams and spirits out of time that feel far more native and at home in this land than any notion of humanity. The choice of an arcane aspect ratio and cinematography that mixes natural and artificial light by day and by night gives the illusion of the film having been discovered in some time capsule found at the ends of the Earth. Jauja is an especially haunting film and boasts another first-rate performance from Viggo Mortensen (performing in Danish) and cements him as one of the most compelling screen actors of his generation.

Raúl Arévalo and his partner set out in search of a serial killer in the bleak but beguiling landscape of Marshland   (La Isla Mínima). — Raúl Arévalo and his partner set out in search of a serial killer in the bleak but beguiling landscape of *Marshland* *(La Isla Mínima).*

Marshland (Spain, dir. Alberto Rodríguez)

In the 1980s, when two detectives from Madrid arrive to investigate the disappearance of two teenaged girls in Spain’s Guadalquivir marshes, the brutal history of the Franco regime returns to haunt the police work of the present. Rising Spanish filmmaker Alberto Rodríguez keeps his tight narrative focussed and simmering with atmospheric tension that lays out each moment, each feeling, as if it were a piece of evidence in an investigation into who the two ideologically opposed detectives really are. The striking bird’s-eye-view imagery of Guadalquivir makes for an appropriate companion piece to Denis Villenuve’s equally bleak Sicario, another film in which high arial shots hammer home the daunting challenge our heroes face in fathoming their place in the plots and schemes they are trying to negotiate in order to prevent further violence.

Rebecca Fergusson accomplishes the impossible and outshines Tom Cruise in the fifth entry in the Mission: Impossible series. — Rebecca Fergusson accomplishes the impossible and outshines Tom Cruise in the fifth entry in the *Mission: Impossible* series.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (USA, dir. Christopher McQuarrie)

As the Mission: Impossible series gained punctuation marks with – Ghost Protocol, so too did it rediscover its mojo, which bursts forth with an abundance of style in the best M:I film to date. What is astonishing, and likely the key to the film’s success, is the way that the its female counterpart to Ethan Hunt, played by Brit Rebecca Ferguson, is allowed to kick ass on an equal footing with the top billed hero. To pair Cruise with a heroine that could just as easily take him in a fight as seduce him is exactly the breath of fresh air that the spy genre has been gasping for over the past two decades. The usual M:I gang are all present and correct and have by now settled into a far easier, more enjoyable groove than it seems the reborn MI6 crew of James Bond, Moneypenny, Q and M are ever likely to manage in the contemporary Bond series. Unlike Ghost Protocol, this entry also benefits from a menacing and memorable villain in Sean Harris, who was bound to pop up as a villain in an American blockbuster sooner or later – it was just a question of where and when.

Anaïs Demoustier and Romain Duris form a unique bond in The New Girlfriend (Une Nouvelle Amie). — Anaïs Demoustier and Romain Duris form a unique bond in *The New Girlfriend (Une Nouvelle Amie).*

The New Girlfriend (France, dir. François Ozon)

It’s rare that a film builds to and delivers a genuine shock – think about the last time you physically sat up with surprise of raised your eyebrows involuntarily because the storytelling skill on display in both the script and the cutting room. As a stylish provocateur and psychologically complex filmmaker François Ozon frequently inhabits Hitchcockian territory but nowhere more so than Une Nouvelle Amie, which is not, in fact, a twisty thriller but a luscious melodrama about the peculiar relationship that blooms between Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) and her best friend’s husband Daniel (Romain Duris), who she sentimentally promises to look out for when her best friend, Daniel’s wife, suddenly dies. To describe much more would not be to spoil the plot but rather to deny viewers the kinky pleasures of discovering the layers that lie beneath Ozon’s fascinating romance of ambiguous sexuality. Watching each new scene unfold is like tearing away another layer of wrapping paper in a queer game of pass-the-parcel and the result is a high-calorie delight, perfect as a first taste for viewers not yet initiated into the rich psychological world of Monsieur Ozon.

Camila Márdila is a lightning rod for change in the life of her mother, played by Regina Casé in Que Horas Ela Volta? (a.k.a. The Second Mother). — Camila Márdila is a lightning rod for change in the life of her mother, played by Regina Casé in *Que Horas Ela Volta? (a.k.a. The Second Mother).*

Que Horas Ela Volta? (Brazil, dir. Anna Muylaert)

Brazilian grande dame Regina Casé is Val, the housekeeper to a wealthy intellectual family in São Paolo. When her daughter arrives to the city to begin her studies, the girl’s disregard for the boundaries of the master-servant relationship in the house shreds the veil cast over years of selfishness and neglect within the household. Muylaert and her cast use their universal wit and keen observational eyes to craft a genuinely heartwarming, non manipulative satire of Brazil’s modern-day bourgeoisie. It’s worth noting that the UK/US release was titled The Second Mother, a rather misleading title, far less descriptive of the story than a translation of the (admittedly clunky) original title, What time is she coming back? The Brazilian title emphasises the importance of the relationship between Val and her daughter and the impact of the headstrong girl’s mischief on the family that is hosting her out of reluctant obligation to Val, a second class citizen that has served them faithfully in raising their son, when she could have been in her home town with her own child.

Ryan Reynolds in conversation with his dog, his cat and a severed head in The Voices . — Ryan Reynolds in conversation with his dog, his cat and a severed head in *The Voices*.

The Voices (USA/Germany, dir. Marjane Satrapi)

Continuing an eclectic filmmaking career, that began with 2007’s highly regarded animation Persepolis, Iranian-French filmmaker Marjane Satrapi here continues in the fine tradition of Eurasian filmmakers travelling West to poison the punch at the all-American family barbecue. In a glorious (completely left-field) throwback to the kind of violent, quirky black comedies that seemed to multiply like rabbits on the shelves of video stores in the 1990s, The Voices is the story of a handsome, obviously harmless (wink, wink) young man working in a town in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia, after serving an undetermined period of time in jail. When a date with a beautiful English colleague takes a turn for the macabre, Ryan Reynolds’ troubled young man must fight to save his sanity, caught as he is between the unconditional love of his talking dog and the murderous suggestions of his evil cat. Bright, bouncy and really, really fucking nasty, Satrapi’s film manages to tango back and forth across the line of good taste and somehow endear us to its essential humanity, in spite of our better judgement. Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick are so perfectly cast that it’s difficult not to grin from ear to ear in every scene, even when Arterton’s severed head is complaining that she’s getting lonely because there’s no one else to talk to in the refrigerator.

The lively, all-female brood of The Wonders (Le Meraviglie). — The lively, all-female brood of *The Wonders (Le Meraviglie).*

The Wonders (Italy/Switzerland/Germany, dir. Alice Rohrwacher)

Charting one season on the ramshackle farm of a family of beekeepers in Tuscany, writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s poignant slice-of-life drama is captivating from its opening frame and elevated by putting the excellent performances of its child cast in the foreground. The imagery takes a turn for something magical and evocative when 14-year-old (going on 40) Gelsomina signs the family up for a spot on a TV show celebrating Etruscan tradition and crosses paths with Monica Bellucci’s angelic TV personality. Add to this the textural cinematography of Hélène Louvart and a rough, commanding performance from outstanding Belgian thesp Sam Louwyck and the result is sweetness with a sting.

AWARDS SEASON HANGOVERS

My criteria for the films on my Top 30 list is simple enough: the film must be longer than 60 minutes and it must have had its first non-festival release (no matter how limited) in UK cinemas in 2015. But the changing of the calendar is an awkward time because of the qualifying runs that some films make for the Oscar ballots. In December each year a handful of Oscar hopefuls will run for a few days at one or two theatres in LA. If they’re successful in their nominations, they’ll immediately enter into the conversation and many critics in the US will take the opportunity to include the best of these on their own end-of-year Best Of list, though most of us won’t have a chance to see them until the next calendar year.

To make my Top 30 picks for 2015 that much easier to choose and create some semblance of timeliness, I’ve relegated my favourite English language films from the 87th Oscar race to my Awards Season Hangovers pile. Each of these films was released in the UK in January 2015 and all were debated heavily in the conversation around the last Oscar race.

Owen Wilson and Joaquin Phoenix shamble through the dense web of intrigue in Inherent Vice. — Owen Wilson and Joaquin Phoenix shamble through the dense web of intrigue in *Inherent Vice.*

Inherent Vice (USA, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Well…. shit…. how the hell does one write about this film? The old “eat the elephant in little bites” approach was what got my brain so damn fuzzy in the first place and now it’s hard to know who to blame for the colossal bastard that’s kicking from behind my eyes in the miasmic haze left by so many burst blood vessels and fried brain cells spent on the wilfully impenetrable plot of this film. Joaquin Phoenix plays hippy gumshoe Doc Sportello in PT Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s notoriously non-sensical novel, set in the fictitious LA suburb of Gordita Beach. Anderson assembles an impressive cast, ranging from welcome dramatic performers with a talent for comedy (Josh Brolin) to peculiar choices that somehow manage to soar on their freak-appeal alone (Martin Short). Doc Sportello falls into a typical film noir missing persons case at the request of a carefree flower child, rather than an immaculate femme fatale, and immediately loses his footing in an LA land conspiracy that’s actually hiding a drug smuggling wotsit, wrapped up in CIA informants infiltrating hippie cults. Or something along those lines. PT Anderson attacks Pynchon’s source material with bravery and aplomb – setting out to create a film that embodies the hazy comedown of the 1970s, when the increasingly corporate environment of Los Angeles became as good a staging ground as any for idealistic right wingers to lay the foundations for Reaganism and wash away the long-haired bastards that had made the tail end of the last decade their own. Far from being elegiac, Anderson’s film throbs with a certain kind of sexy rhythm that bursts through to the surface in unexpected ways, like a stage performer swapping masks in the blink on an eye. Inherent Vice is only consistent in being a farce, but whether it is a light send-up of the crime genre or a brutal satire of masculine inadequacy during the sexual revolution depends on which scene you’re going with (and in all cases, the best option seems to be just go with it). Only nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costume Design at the Academy Awards, Inherent Vice seemed to be the underdog that everyone claimed to have invited to the party but didn’t actually want to hang out with once they got there. Anderson has never been a particularly Hollywood-friendly filmmaker, despite his love of Los Angeles, melodrama and prior Oscar success, but I for one am happy to see him doing projects he clearly cares about, even if it’s impossible to tell whether or not the final result is only half-baked.

Oxford native David Oyelowo (centre) plays Martin Luther King in Ava DuVernay's stirring portrait of the civil rights movement,  Selma. — Oxford native David Oyelowo (centre) plays Martin Luther King in Ava DuVernay’s stirring portrait of the civil rights movement, *Selma.*

Selma (USA, dir. Ava DuVernay)

Ava DuVernay’s steady-handed approach to the historical format is inevitably more effective than one could imagine a full-blown biopic of Martin Luther King being. By focussing on King’s campaign to march from Selma to Mississippi’s capital of Montgomery, thus drawing attention to the violent abuse of African Americans’ voting rights in the Southern states, DuVernay and screenwriter Paul Webb permit an insight into the nuts and bolts of the civil rights movement that could easily be lost in the temptation to focus on King alone, and make a saint out of a leader who was content just to be a man. Paul Webb’s script is particularly impressive for his ability to capture King’s voice without the advantage of being able to use any of King’s actual speeches. To translate that same public voice into an inspiring but genuine voice in private and tactical discussions is an impressive achievement of a different kind. That neither Paul Webb, nor David Oyelowo (as King) received nominations for the Academy Awards for best screenplay and best actor is mind-boggling.

Miles Teller as the ingenue drummer under the thumb of JK Simmons' brutal band leader in Whiplash. — Miles Teller as the ingenue drummer under the thumb of JK Simmons’ brutal band leader in *Whiplash.*

Whiplash (USA, dir. Damien Chazelle)

The plucky upstart of the last Oscar race scored high on many American critics best-of lists in 2014 but British audiences had to wait a year to see what it was that audiences in the US had been banging on about since its debut at Sundance 2014. As a visceral five-star cinematic experience, Whiplash has endured and it will continue to endure as an outstanding example of the wit and vitality that makes first-time directors like Damien Chazelle such a pleasure to encounter. By bringing such classical visual craftsmanship to his sophomore feature, Chazelle creates a delicious frisson of sensations new and old in his examination of a tenacious young drummer’s determination to survive the manipulative emotional abuse that his teacher subjects the college band to – apparently to achieve greatness in his students. JK Simmons quite rightly took home the Best Supporting Actor statuette for his turn as the mythologically cruel band leader, Fletcher, but Miles Teller deserves ample praise, too, managing to hold his own in a role that is as physically punishing as it is emotionally draining. Profoundly cathartic, accessible and timeless, Whiplash sets a high bar for Chazelle to clear with his next film and I, for one, can’t wait to see him take a run at it!

Click ‘OLDER’ to see my Top 15 English Language films of 2015 and ‘NEWER’ to hear the year’s best film scores mixed for your listening pleasure.

Best Films of 2015 – English Language

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Sandy Connell

My Top 30 list for 2015 concludes with my 15 favourites from the year’s English language releases in UK cinemas. Expect more pretty pictures and no shortage of hyperbole.

Kodi Smit-McPhee wanders the ruins of a native American village in Slow West .

15. Slow West (UK/New Zealand, dir. John Maclean)

Scottish writer-director, John Maclean (formerly of The Beta Band and The Aliens) strikes a chord with his feature debut, a haunting beautiful Western of dreamlike imagery that is evocative of painters like Edward Hopper, Graham Sutherland and Vincent Van Gogh. Kodi-Smit McPhee is an upper-class Scotsman come to the American frontier in search of the woman he loves. Hopelessly out of his depth in a strange and violent land, the young lad is forced to buy the protection of Michael Fassbender as the Eastwood-like outlaw, Silas. Maclean’s film is one of the few Westerns to make the multiculturalism of the American frontier such a significant part of the story, and it does so by embracing the glaringly obvious floral and geological differences between its setting and its actual locations. By using the foreign tongues of his characters and the distinct, peculiar landscape of New Zealand in place of the Rocky Mountains, Maclean is able to make the American West alien and unknown again.

The gang falls on hard times in Aardman Animation's delightful flock-out-of-pasture yarn,  Shaun the Sheep Movie.

14. Shaun the Sheep Movie (UK/France, dir. Richard Starzak & Mark Burton)

There’s nothing quite like an Aardman film firing on all cylinders to sculpt a broad, toothy grin out of anyone’s lips. Aardman’s most popular creation world-wide, the TV show Shaun the Sheep became an international sensation because of its universal humour, undeniable cuteness and emphasis on physical humour and non-vocal characterisation – elements preserved in Shaun’s big-screen outing. When one of Shaun’s japes backfires and causes the hapless farmer to lose his memory, the flock and the long-suffering sheep dog must negotiate life in the big city to track down their master and return to the comforts of the countryside. The film’s joyful energy, creative verve and drum-tight comic timing give it the same timeless appeal as the wild antics of the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton and exemplify the principles of charm and innovation that British animation was built upon.

Greta Gerwig (centre) finds herself the subject of an unflattering character study in Mistress America.

13. Mistress America (USA, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Deeply affectionate and adorable throughout, Noah Baumbach’s portrait of a flighty thirty-year-old in New York, and the goofy ingenue she takes under her wing. Played as a farce in the vein of Woody Allen’s New York comedies, Mistress America speaks with the peculiar, somnambulant voice of characters who are simultaneously self-absorbed and oddly insightful of those around them. Lola Kirk plays a suburban girl isolated from her fellow students during her first year at Barnard, seeking some level of inclusion through acceptance to her college’s exclusive literary society. She finds an inspiring subject for a short story in her almost-step-sister, played by Greta Gerwig, an enterprising, generally creative young woman, who lives above her means in Manhattan. Baumbach’s comedy of youthful, driven people is distinctly resonant of our current era and the freewheeling aspirations of a generation weened on the expectation that they could do anything that they put their mind to, but simply can’t find the time to decide what that should be.

Paul Dano (and friends) record the Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds' in Love & Mercy.

12. Love & Mercy (USA, dir. Bill Pohlad)

One of the unexpected pleasures of 2015 came in the form of this bifurcated biopic of Beach Boys prodigy Brian Wilson. Love & Mercy is a finely tuned mainstream biopic that eschews the genre’s typical formula to create a sensitive, insightful exploration of mental illness across two intercut timelines. The first charts the momentous creative shift in the Beach Boys’ output, when the young Brian Wilson (played by Paul Dano) recorded ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’, whilst fighting the onset of schizophrenia. In the second a truly radiant Elizabeth Banks plays Wilson’s future wife Melinda Ledbetter, who plays an instrumental role in rescuing the middle-aged Wilson (John Cusack) from the clutches of arch-leech, Dr Eugene Landy, played here with extra grease by Paul Giamatti. Like Ava DuVernay’s excellent Selma (see my Awards Season Hangovers list), Pohlad and his screenwriters steer Love & Mercy to success by using an examination of a single great struggle in Wilson’s life to gently inform the viewer’s notion of the man as a whole.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart seek out the Clouds of Sils Maria (a.k.a. Sils Maria).

11. Clouds of Sils Maria (France/Germany/Switzerland, dir. Olivier Assayas)

The latest from Olivier Assayas enters Bergman-esque territory during its finest moments and feels like an acerbic but warm-hearted by-product of a life spent in show business. Juliette Binoche plays Maria, an ageing movie star who is returning to the stage play that launched her career twenty years before, only this time in the role of the play’s older woman, who was seduced by a reckless, young femme fatale. As she mourns the loss of the writer behind the play, the actress revisits the peculiar landscape of Sils in Switzerland and begins to obsess, disdainfully at first, over the public persona of the rising starlet that will play the role that made Maria a star. By her side throughout all of this is Kristen Stewart as Maria’s PA, delivering the most nuanced performance of her career and quietly commanding every frame she occupies.

Maika Monroe and Jake Weary carry a deadly force in It Follows.

10. It Follows (USA, dir. David Robert Mitchell)

As the film’s wonderful series of posters points out, the It in question doesn’t think, doesn’t feel, doesn’t give up – it follows until its victims have run to the ends of the Earth and their sanity has all but abandoned them. One enterprising young man realises that he must get rid of it by having sex with someone, thus setting the nameless force (visible only to those who are “infected”) on Maika Monroe (best known for 2014’s The Guest). Dreamlike, languid in its pace and incredibly tense, It Follows is essentially a modern (but timeless) re-interpretation of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Shot in the purgatorial suburbs of Detroit, Mitchell and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ wide-angle, Gregory Crewdson-esque compositions demand the largest screen possible, inviting viewers to scrutinise every inch of the frame for tell-tale signs of approaching doom. It Follows eschews a twisty plot in favour of atmosphere and pant-wetting tension and, as a result, becomes a standard-bearer for the horror renaissance currently taking place in international cinema. Afterwards, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself in a hurry to get back inside when nipping out for a cigarette in the garden or running down to the corner shop after dark.

Emily Blunt tumbles further down the rabbit hole in Sicario.

9. Sicario (USA, dir. Denis Villeneuve)

The broad, barren wasteland of the desert that stretches from Baja to the Gulf of Mexico is the setting for Denis Villeneuve’s relentlessly bleak mood-piece on the futile violence that plagues the US/Mexican drug war. Emily Blunt plays an FBI agent specialising in hostage situations, who is conscripted into the shady world of the CIA’s secret incursions over the border, where the rulebook has not only been ignored, but completely forgotten. Occupying similar territory to Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (one of the best films of 2011) Sicario bluntly states the helplessness of the witnesses to the bloodshed in America’s war on drugs. Where Miss Bala wrought pulse pounding intensity from the eyes of civilians in Baja, Sicario is even more pessimistic in its assertion that even the testimony of a law enforcement officer is rendered silent by the pervasive threat of violence from their own allies and the cartels they are fighting. Like a formal companion to It Follows, Sicario is precisely composed and relentlessly tense – a darkly atmospheric portrait of the nightmare that grips the US/Mexican border and the focussed human weapons that play the phantoms and demons therein.

Sonoyo Mizuno and Oscar Isaac get their groove on in the mad scientist's underground layer in ex_machina .

8. ex_machina (UK, dir. Alex Garland)

Alex Garland has finally found his groove on-screen and done so in considerable style. Lured to the secret underground lair of Oscar Isaac’s future super-villain, Domhnall Gleeson is given the task of conducting a Touring Test on the AI that his brilliant employer has invented. But the AI’s strikingly beautiful humanoid body (Alicia Vikander’s to be precise) is the first indication that there is more to this Turing Test than merely a Q&A between man and machine. Provocative, acutely contemporary (an immaculate time capsule of this decade’s dominant design aesthetics) and buoyed by three world-class performers on the cusp of stardom, Garland’s first film as director is far more finely crafted and profound than any sci-fi potboiler starring a hot lady robot has the right to be. You can read my in-depth analysis of the film’s narrative origins and themes on Letterboxd.

iOTA plays The Doof Warrior, the most m/ METAL m/ character in the year's most m/ METAL m/ film, Mad Max: Fury Road.

7. Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia/USA, dir. George Miller)

Could there be a more satisfying follow-up to one of the most beloved action series of all time? George Miller and his crew of mechanics and designers entered the Namibian desert, wandered many days and nights, and returned with the action movie of 2015. Taking up the mantle that made Mel Gibson’s career, Tom Hardy plays a near-mute Max Rockatansky, who is unfortunate enough to cross paths with the Wild Boys, who serve the grotesque warlord Immortan Joe – commander of every grain of sweet-fuck-all from here to the horizon. Max’s only salvation lies in assisting Charlize Theron’s veteran warrior, Furiosa, in her attempt to liberate Immortan Joe’s harem of broodmares (each a kick-ass heroine in her own right) and outrun the greatest war party this radioactive future has ever seen. A rousing ode to Girl Power, a rollicking thrill-ride, a motor-head’s wet dream, an excessive burst of creative punk energy – pick your expectation, pump it up to 11 and guzzle down the greasy popcorn! Fury Road doesn’t just kick your ass, it flays your ass and pours sand in the wound, before leaving you whimpering for more. FUCK. YEAH.

Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez animate the candy-coloured hues of Tangerine .

6. Tangerine (USA, dir. Sean Baker)

When transgender LA prostitute Sin-Dee is released from 28 days in jail, her first mission is one of revenge: to get her own back on her cheating pimp boyfriend and the woman he’s been sleeping with. The only voice of reason to mitigate Sin-Dee’s furious odyssey through North Hollywood is Alexandra, whose attempts to curb Sin-Dee’s propensity for DRAMA often fall on deaf ears. Blasting off into the sunset as a shining light of contemporary comedy and true indie innovation, Tangerine’s larger-than-life transgender characters are so captivating and authentic that it’s by clinging to them through Tangerine’s more extreme moments that the audience survives and, in so doing, comes to love these characters even more. The colours of the LA sunset pop through the plastic lenses of the iPhones used to shoot the film. The endlessly inventive on-the-fly shots captured by Sean Baker and Radium Cheung recall the exhilaration and energy of the European New Wave (only with more hot pants). Add to that the sublime car wash scene and you’ve got the most distinctive American indie of the whole year.

Amy Poehler voices Joy and Phyllis Smith voices Sadness in Inside Out.

5. Inside Out (USA, dir. Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen)

There is no denying the sheer delight of Pixar’s return to form, Inside Out. 12-year-old Riley is in the midst of the real-world drama of moving to a new city, leaving behind all her old friends and her childhood. Inside her head, the fantastical drama of her five emotions (Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear and Anger) plays out as they, too, attempt to cope with change and an interior world that literally crumbles as the outside world incurs on Riley’s sense of self. For its viewers cinema exists as a way to understand the world from a new viewpoint. When a film yields a new perspective on oneself, the experience is richer, even transformational. For kids Inside Out might be just another bright, enjoyable romp. For adults it is a poignant examination of the meaning of growing up and the difference between the monochromatic mindset of children and the complexity of being a functioning grown-up, who must resist the impulse to make everybody feel fine-and-dandy all the time.

Rooney Mara is Therese Belivet, a young woman drawn by the indelible glamour of a wealthy New York housewife in Carol.

4. Carol (UK/USA, dir. Todd Haynes)

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are the lynchpins of one of the most deeply romantic films of the decade so far. As the titular Carol, Cate Blanchett oozes a seductive warmth through her carefully composed movements and an elegance to rival the likes of Grace Kelly and Greta Garbo. Once again returning to the 1950s, Todd Haynes adapts Patricia Highsmith’s novel about a department store shopgirl who begins an affair with a wealthy New York housewife during a painful divorce process. Shooting a creamy colour palette through panes of rain-flecked glass and maximising the grain of 16mm film, Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman’s imagery captures the period and the milieu of Manhattan with more raw authenticity (to the city and the emotional landscape of the characters) than the chocolate box aesthetic that dominates most pre-60s period pieces. Carol is a story hung on the sensation of passion and the magnetic pull of a charismatic fellow outsider. The way that Blanchette’s redder-than-red lips and rich couture dresses cut through the gloom epitomises those moments when the object of one’s desire commands the room. No other film in recent memory has captured the drama of a person’s First Love with such affection or exquisite style.

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling are haunted by lives that never were in 45 Years.

3. 45 Years (UK, dir. Andrew Haigh)

Charting one week in the life of childless couple Kate and Geoff as they prepare for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary party, Andrew Haigh’s insidiously brutal third feature hangs on an simple, provocative premise: what if you discovered that your partner would never have given you so much as a second look if the love of their life had not died before they met you? Haigh and cinematographer Lol Crawley compose their story with casual-looking but deliberate all-in-one master shots that lay out and examine each setting and the interactions therein, like dioramas of truths withheld and unspoken promises turned poisonous with rot. Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay deliver performances of the highest order and the emotional turmoil is stoked with soured memories and simmering resentment right up to the devastating final shot. Read my full review here.

Sidse Babbett Knudsen and Chiara d'Anna ponder love and butterflies in The Duke of Burgundy.

2. The Duke of Burgundy (UK, dir. Peter Strickland)

Peter Strickland’s two previous features, Katalin Varga (2009) and Berberian Sound Studio (2012), stood out as darkly enchanting depictions of outsiders externalising inner turmoil. The Duke of Burgundy marks a delicate shift in subject matter and cements Strickland as a bona fide auteur. Sidse Babbett Knudsen delivers one of the most outstanding performances of the year as a reluctant participant in the sexual role-play scenarios of her younger partner, played with wide-eyed intensity by Chiara D’Anna. Both women live in a peculiar utopia of hand-crafted bricolage, elegant country manors and no men whatsoever. As Chiara D’Anna’s younger partner seeks to elaborate on her sexual fantasies and her love of butterflies, her older, wiser partner feels increasingly smothered by the fallacy inherent in their master-servant fantasy. The ethereal score, meticulous art direction and luscious, retro cinematography create a seductive world out of time, populated by highly educated women with a passion for lepidoptery and no compunctions about discussing their kinky sexual hangups. The great poignancy of Strickland’s idiosyncratic world is not in the impossibility of such a utopia existing but in the way that even the most loving relationship will inevitably undermine the foundations of paradise.

Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell in The Lobster.

1. The Lobster (Greece/France/Ireland/UK, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ first film in English manages an incredible high-wire balancing act, both as a high-concept drama and a down-to-earth, frequently brutal comedy of manners. A relevant, contemporary surrealist fable, at times Kafka-esque, The Lobster proves more rewarding and enjoyable than most of the out-and-out comedies in recent memory. Colin Farrell’s recently divorced protagonist is sent to The Hotel, where he must find a partner within forty days or he will be transformed into an animal of his choice and released into The Woods. In the chillingly mundane dystopia of The City, loneliness is something suffered by society because it is not permitted for individuals. Lanthimos’ obvious respect for the sophistication of his audience is inherent in the deadpan dialog, deliberate cinematography and high ratio of laughs-per-minute. All of this works in spite of the pitch-black that pervades this satire of our society’s one-size-fits-all perspective on happiness. A world-class cast of British, Irish, French and Greek acting talent sells the bizarre set-up and even more bizarre interactions between the singletons in search of love. Ultimately, it is the watchability and subtle expressiveness of the cast that prevents the film from totally confounding the viewer. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz inhabit tremendously empathetic archetypes with personality and soulfulness to spare in a bitter-sweet fable for the ages.

BEST FILMS OF 2015

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Sandy Connell

Over on FOEC Prime I’ve completed my Top 30 list of the best films released into UK cinemas this year, as well as 15 extra Honourable Mentions!

PART 1 lists the 15 finest foreign language films of the year. It’s true that every language may be foreign to someone but this is a list for those that don’t mind a little reading, along with the pretty pictures and sexy naked people.

PART 2 covers my 15 favourites form the year in english language cinema, from The Lobster to It Follows to the Shaun the Sheep Movie!

PART 3 covers 15 honourable mentions and my picks for the best movies from the race of the 87th Academy Awards.

Best Films of 2015 – Foreign Language

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Sandy Connell

I begin my top 30 films of 2015 with a countdown of 15 must-see foreign language films released in UK cinemas this year.

But isn’t every language foreign to someone? …. errrmm … yes, but that’s besides the point!

Nina Hoss impersonates herself under the instruction of Ronald Zehrfeldt in Phoenix . — Nina Hoss impersonates herself under the instruction of Ronald Zehrfeldt in *Phoenix*.

15. Phoenix (Germany, dir. Christian Petzold)

Taking place in 1940s Berlin, when Holocaust survivors are returning from the camps, Nina Hoss plays a survivor recovering from facial reconstructive surgery in Christian Petzold’s seventh feature film. Mistaken by her husband for a stranger with a strong resemblance to the wife he presumes is dead, she must learn to be the woman she was before the war so that she and her husband can collect her substantial inheritance. Petzold’s use of colour and music to elicit his characters’ past is seductive and moving. This luscious, Hitchcockian narrative is the kind of thought provoking meditation that digs into your mind to continue developing long after the projector has stopped running – thanks in no small part to a complex, severely beautiful performance by Petzold’s regular muse, Nina Hoss.

Rita Cortese has a recipe for papas mortales  in Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes) — Rita Cortese has a recipe for *papas mortales* in *Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes)*

14. Wild Tales (Argentina/Spain, dir. Damián Szifron)

Composed of six short stories, Relatos Salvajes takes a leisurely joyride through tales of vengeance, class warfare, masculine frustration and the wedding from hell. The unconnected stories are remarkably consistent in quality and the script has acerbic wit to spare. Relatos Salvajes satirises the etiquette that separates we law-abiding citizens from the animals of the wilderness and takes as its theme the characters’ use of violence in reaction to the deficiencies of their own self-image. Immensely watchable and sharp as a floor covered in broken glass, Relatos Salvajes will not disappoint cinephiles with a dark sense of humour.

Bae Doona takes Kim Sae-ron under her wing in A Girl At My Door ( 도희야  –  Dohui-ya). — Bae Doona takes Kim Sae-ron under her wing in *A Girl At My Door (도희야 –* *Dohui-ya).*

13. A Girl At My Door (South Korea, dir. July Jung)

One of the most understated gems to sneak into a limited theatre release this year is a magnetic story of abuse and alienation in a disenfranchised Korean fishing town. First-time writer-director July Jung eschews sentimentality and outrage in favour of quiet analysis of her characters’ actions and a matter-of-fact condemnation of a society that would permit the abuse of a child. Prestigious Korean stars Bae Doona and Kim Sae-ron play the two sore thumbs in their community: a disgraced, homosexual city slicker and a mentally ill, victimised teenager. The Korean society here portrayed is one incapable of protecting victims of abuse because of its instinctual desire to cast them out into the cold. Read my full review here.

Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pino stands trial under Sharia law in Timbuktu . — Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pino stands trial under Sharia law in *Timbuktu*.

12. Timbuktu (France/Mauritania, dir. Abderrahmane Sissako)

Celebrated African filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako delivers a deeply beautiful portrait of the Malian town of Timbuktu during its occupation in 2012 by the militant Islamist group Ansar Dine, whose men imposed Sharia law on Northeastern Mali. Rather than portraying Sharia law merely as a brutal, archaic system, Sissako uses his precise form to hammer home the banal absurdity of the jihadist regime. The film’s collection of stories pays subtle homage to people’s natural impulse to live and express their passions. The film’s wry wit and essential humanity creates tremendous impact during a scene in which three jihadists happily ignore a local woman, as she flaunts her disdain for Sharia law, so that they can finish their earnest discussion over who is the greater footballer: Lionel Messi or Zinedine Zidane.

The haunting, Earth-moving photography of Sebastião Salgado in Salt of the Earth (Le Sel de la Terre). — The haunting, Earth-moving photography of Sebastião Salgado in *Salt of the Earth (Le Sel de la Terre).*

11. Salt of the Earth (France/Brazil, dir. Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribeiro Salgado)

Wim Wenders’ latest explores the history of one of our greatest living photographers quite literally through his photographs. By placing Sebastião Salgado in front of a transparent screen, where he can view his photos from one side and the camera can view him from the other, Wenders captures the weight and pride of a career spent documenting the epic desperation of mankind on the photojournalist’s face. Wenders, his co-director Juliano Salgado (Sebastião’s son) and their editors cut together a marvel of documentary storytelling, and transform the usually hagiographic talking-head-profile format into something watchable, expressive and personal for participants on both sides of the camera.

Théophile Baquet and Ange Dargent hit the road in Michel Gondry's modest masterpiece Microbe & Gasoil . — Théophile Baquet and Ange Dargent hit the road in Michel Gondry’s modest masterpiece *Microbe & Gasoil*.

10. Microbe & Gasoil (France, dir. Michel Gondry)

The latest from handmade movie wizard Michel Gondry is a modest, delightful Boy’s Own adventure, highly recommended for anyone who spent their adolescence sketching cartoon boobs when they should have been doing their homework. When two 14-year-old boys build their own car from an old lawnmower engine, they decide to do a road trip across France, and to avoid the unwanted attention of the traffic cops they disguise their car as a garden shed. Shot through with the exhuberent creativity and handmade delights that Gondry is known for, Microbe & Gasoil is one of the most unabashedly sweet and enjoyable films of 2015. Read my full review here.

Ellen Dorrit Petersen explores the mind's eye in Eskil Vogt's directorial debut,  Blind. — Ellen Dorrit Petersen explores the mind’s eye in Eskil Vogt’s directorial debut, *Blind.*

9. Blind (Norway, dir. Eskil Vogt)

An endlessly inventive and entertaining rendition of the creative process from within the author’s head, Blind celebrates the therapeutic effects of storytelling. A woman attempts to cope with her sudden blindness by inventing fantasies of her husband’s infidelity and the people that cross his path outside the safe haven of their home. With a sparse soundtrack and abundant flair in the cutting room, first-time director Eskil Vogt (regular writing partner of Joachim Trier) makes a compelling case for cinema as an ideal medium through which to explore the perceptions and relationships of those who are blind, as well as those who are simultaneously isolated and set free by their creativity.

The dynamic, vivacious beauty of Tale of the Princess Kaguya (  かぐや姫の物語   –  Kaguya-hime no Monogatari) — The dynamic, vivacious beauty of *Tale of the Princess Kaguya (* かぐや姫の物語 – *Kaguya-hime no Monogatari)*

8. Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Japan, dir. Isao Takahata)

In 2013 Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement and rumours abounded that his colleague Isao Takahata’s Tale of the Princess Kaguya might be Studio Ghibli’s last film. More recent reports indicate that this is not the case and Studio Ghibli’s most recent film, When Marnie Was There (2014), will have a limited release in the UK next year. But if Kaguya had been the studio’s swan song, then what a conclusion it would have been! This story of an unearthly princess raised by a humble woodcutter and introduced to polite society in Japan’s Edo period is a product of generations of spoken folk-tales and stories told with paint and ink. As a result it is a deeply-affecting poem, valiantly setting out to capture the vitality of a young woman in love with the sensation of human emotion.

The idyllic family unit of Force Majeure (a.k.a. Turist). — The idyllic family unit of *Force Majeure (a.k.a. Turist).*

7. Force Majeure (Sweden/France/Norway, dir. Ruben Östlund)

Sweden’s last submission for the Academy Award for Best Film in a Foreign Language is a disaster movie of just-missed set pieces and invisible wreckage. A near miss with an avalanche in the Alps causes a middle class Swedish family to crumble under questionable notions of respect, fidelity, masculinity and the importance of the family unit. Like an airborne virus, this picture-perfect family’s discord infects everyone around them. Writer-director Ruben Östlund has said of his acidic black comedy that he hopes it will lead to an increase in divorce rates. Don’t take that comment with a pinch of salt. Take it head-on, take a deep breath, and watch Force Majeure in the company of someone you trust and (preferably) love. Though distressing and cynical, this film has more compassion for humanity in all its pathetic frailty than any number of heart-warming family dramas that whore out the indomitability of the human spirit in exchange for a happy ending.

The horror ... The horror ...  Hard To Be A God ( Трудно быть богом –  Trudno byt´ Bogom). — The horror … The horror … *Hard To Be A God (Трудно быть богом* – *Trudno byt´ Bogom).*

6. Hard To Be A God (Russia/Czech Republic, dir. Aleksey German)

Adapting Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s 1964 sci-fi novel, the late Aleksey German’s crowning achievement is a formal tour-de-force that grabs its audience by the scruff of the neck and frogmarches them into the blood, bile, piss, puss, shit and spit that humanity leaves in its wake and torches the fallacy of the Reluctant Messiah. On a planet not far from our own, scientists discover a medieval society that destroyed its own renaissance by persecuting its wise men, inventors and intellectuals. The scientists that have arrived from Earth have set up their own fiefdoms and battle to retain a grip on their sanity as they realise that their superior knowledge over the locals gives them no power at all to change the brutal, fascistic society that surrounds them. Defying those in search of a traditional narrative arc, Hard To Be A God is a film to write home about – an immersive sensory barrage of faces, voices, steam, mud and fetid biological material made over the course of fifteen years with an army of extras and full-scale physical sets captured on black and white 35mm. Think of it as a superior dark inversion of Avatar, then hold your nose, and jump in (you still won’t be ready).

Optometrist Adi watches men recounting the murder of his brother during the Indonesian killings of 1965 in The Look of Silence   (Senyap). — Optometrist Adi watches men recounting the murder of his brother during the Indonesian killings of 1965 in *The Look of Silence* *(Senyap).*

5. The Look of Silence (Denmark/Finland/Indonesia/Norway/UK, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer & anonymous contributors)

Starting with The Act of Killing in 2012 and concluded with The Look of Silence, the documentary diptych that Joshua Oppenheimer and his anonymous co-directors have created of the far-reaching effects of the Indonesian killings of 1965 is a startling achievement in every respect – one that renders words of praise hollow and banal. Oppenheimer finds a remarkable protagonist in Adi, a patient, educated man, whose brother was murdered by militants before he was born. He goes around his community, giving eye exams for elderly residents and, during the exams, questions the perpetrators of his brother’s murder on their view of the killings. In The Act of Killing the perpetrators of the mass killings in Indonesia lived out their dreams and their nightmares. In The Look of Silence the surviving relatives of the victims remain tethered to reality in its most merciless, protracted state, and watch the murderers of their friends and neighbours live in freedom and comfort just a stone’s throw away. The only equaliser in this conflict of bitterness and denial is old age, but it is clear that neither old age, nor death, nor time can be commandeered as forces for justice.

Jeremías Herskovtis plays the young Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores plays his mother and his son, Brontis Jodorowsky, plays his father in The Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad). — Jeremías Herskovtis plays the young Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores plays his mother and his son, Brontis Jodorowsky, plays his father in *The Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad).*

4. The Dance of Reality (Chile/France, dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Bona fide enfant terrible, Alejandro Jodorowsky has always brought a deeply personal part of himself to every project, but nowhere more so than in this anarchic account of his childhood in Chile and his relationship with his father, played here by his son, Brontis. Shooting in his childhood hometown of Tocopilla with a mostly non-professional local cast, Jodorowsky guides us through one vivid tableaux after another in search of the root of his fears and insecurities, leading eventually to a redemption of both father and son. Jodorowsky’s penchant for playing fast and loose with arresting imagery is here in full force, along with quirks of character both humorous and sincere, such as having Pamela Flores sing every one of her lines in an angelic soprano tone because his real mother always wanted to be an opera singer. There is no right place to start with Jodorowsky but watching this film (with my own father, no less) after loving El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre for so many years made me feel like a member of the Jodorowsky family, listening to my beloved Uncle Jodo tell a beautiful story only previously heard in half-remembered fragments, surrounded by the people he loves.

But who will have his beer and shrimp salad?  A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron). — But who will have his beer and shrimp salad? *A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron).*

3. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Sweden/Norway/France/Germany, dir. Roy Andersson)

Try saying that title with a mouthful of porridge! (Keep a cloth handy if you do). Roy Andersson brings his Living Trilogy to a close with an exhibition of images and stories that will remain burned into the viewer’s mind forever. Andersson’s meticulous construction of massive interiors and lifelike facsimiles of the outdoor scenes have allowed him to create his own finely tuned limbo, in which various characters suffer the ludicrous, exquisite cruelties of life through situations that are banal and unremarkable as often as they are dramatic and surreal. Andersson is a deeply compassionate critic of humanity and with his actors’ deadpan delivery, flawless production design and his camera’s unblinking wide-angle shots, Andersson is able to repackage day-to-day reality (and surreality) in such a way as to invite maximum scrutiny of life’s inherent absurdity. Frequently hilarious and with some distinctly un-Anderssonian characters (People without grey skin? Happiness? HUGGING?) A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is a poignant tribute to the act of being alive.

Violence incubated in The Tribe ( Плем'я –  Plemya). — Violence incubated in *The Tribe (Плем’я – Plemya).*

2. The Tribe (Ukraine, dir. Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi)

This extraordinary feature debut is an arresting, icy slap in the face of institutional corruption. The criticism here is not something cosy that can be shrugged off as “what goes on over there” – it is a parody of the inevitable corruptibility of any institution and an indictment of society’s contented ignorance of the neglect and exploitation that lies at the root of youth criminality. Set in a boarding school for deaf pupils, who communicate throughout the film in un-subtitled sign language, Slaboshpytskyi’s shocking slice of a young man’s life of crime is awesome to behold. Each scene is played out in a single, unbroken tracking shot (hats off to cinematographer/editor/producer Valentyn Vasyanovych) that denies Slaboshpytskyi the grammar of conventional cinema. This leaves the telling of the story in the hands of the deaf-dumb teenagers in front of the camera, as they smoke, drink, kick, punch and fuck their way through the elementary mafia system within their rotten boarding school. It’s a tough film to stomach at times, but it is riveting, innovative cinema with a message both contemporary and timeless that should be easy enough for anyone to understand if they are willing to keep their eyes wide open.

Take a ride through modern-day Tehran and the meaning of filmmaking in Jafar Panahi's Taxi (a.k.a. Taxi Tehran –  تاکسی ‎‎ ). — Take a ride through modern-day Tehran and the meaning of filmmaking in *Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (a.k.a. Taxi Tehran –* **تاکسی**‎‎ ).

1. Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (Iran, dir. Jafar Panahi)

After four years under house arrest Jafar Panahi was eventually released into the streets of Tehran and found himself an inmate in a prison without walls. This is Panahi’s third film since Iranian authorities imposed a lifetime ban on him making films and, with his relative freedom, he has chosen to transform a humble taxi cab into a mobile, covert film studio, which he drives himself. The resulting film, set over a single day, has the appearance of a documentary, but the delicious narrative invention in Panahi’s script is unmistakable. Every new passenger in Panahi’s cab unwittingly reveals a new observation, a new insight into the hopes and passions of the people of Tehran, how they choose to take or ignore the complex decisions in their lives. When Panahi picks up his niece, Hana, she grills him on the technique of a good filmmaker so that she can make a film for her school project. When life does not unfold in front of Hana’s compact camera in accordance with the national censorship guidelines her teacher laid out, she must take to directing the people in the street to be more heroic and suppress the “vulgar social realism” of their lives, so that she can screen her film at school. True to form, Panahi spoils his audience with an abundance of wry humour, his flair for multi-layered storytelling and a lightness of touch when spinning us around with a nifty twist. Packed with loveable characters, enough dramatic irony to sink the Titanic, and a chilling coda to remind us of the government espionage used to enforce the ban on Panahi’s filmmaking, this “unscreenable” film represents “vulgar social realism” at its most expressive and most vital. Taxi was awarded the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, and the award was collected by Hana in lieu of her uncle, who is prohibited from travelling outside Iran. It is tempting to suppose that a well-meaning jury might award Panahi such an honour merely as a show of solidarity against the Iranian authorities, but to come to such a conclusion is to sell the film short. There are cameras everywhere that Panahi’s characters go – cameras rigged inside the cab, cameras being used on mobile phones, cameras recording wedding videos, cameras watching our homes in case of intruders. In his exploration of life’s non-conformity to the regulations of Iran’s puritanical censors, Panahi has made an argument for the purpose of filmmaking and the value of his own defiance of the ban on his work. Filmmaking is everywhere and storytelling is not merely the way we come to understand existence, it is the very fabric of existence itself.

Click ‘NEWER’ to read my Top 15 English Language films of 2015.

(LATE) UK RELEASE REVIEW: MICROBE & GASOIL

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Sandy Connell

★★★★

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Théophile Baquet and Agne Dargent as the titular duo Microbe & Gasoil. — Théophile Baquet and Agne Dargent as the titular duo *Microbe & Gasoil.*

Microbe & Gasoil (2015, France) written & directed by Michel Gondry / starring Théophile Baquet, Ange Dargent, Diane Besnier, Audrey Tautou / cinematography by Laurant Brunet / music by Jean-Claude Vannier / companies: Partizan, Studio Canal

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How is it that the latest release from Michel Gondry managed to slip into UK cinemas, steal a handful of crisps, then silently slip back out without anyone noticing? It’s in cases like these that the staggered programming of regional indie cinemas (such as Chichester’s New Park Cinema in my home county of West Sussex) can give cinephiles a valuable last chance to see a diamond in the rough on the big screen. That there was next to no word-of-mouth buzz around Microbe & Gasoil is a crying shame, as it is a bitter-sweet coming-of-age comedy that acts as a balm to soothe the wounds inflicted by overblown, self-serious blockbusters that hang about the multiplexes, waiting to beat up teenagers for their pocket money.

Weedy, slightly effeminate Daniel (dubbed “Microbe” by the bullies at school) is a 14-year-old with a talent for drawing, a crush on a cute girl and no male friends at school. He forms an immediate bond with confident, individualistic transfer student Théo (dubbed “Gasoil” for the constant reek of auto repair shops on his loud red jacket). Whilst taking scrap metal to the local yard for Théo’s brutish father, the boys come across an old lawnmower engine and devise a plan to construct their own car and go in search of a campground in Auvergne, where Théo holidayed as a kid and first discovered the special je-ne-sais-quoi of women with big breasts. Undeterred by the local authorities’ insistence that their vehicle is not roadworthy, the boys disguise their car as a garden shed for ease of evading the police on the road. Along the way Théo and Daniel encounter a creepy dentist, Korean gangsters, Romany gypsies and a chance for Daniel to take another run at winning the affections of the girl that snubbed him at the start of the summer.

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Microbe & Gasoil is a classic entry in the vulgar but lovable genre of boys-own adventures – one that seemed to have all but dyed-out in the 21st Century. The only recent parallel that springs to mind is Wes Andersson’s much more stylised Moonrise Kingdom (2012), which occupies a similar genre territory, only with little intention of being as relatable for younger viewers as Gondry’s latest. Like Jan Svĕrák’s feel-good Czech classic Elementary School (1991), this film is not family-friendly in its language and subject matter yet it is designed to be as suitable for a 14-year-old boy as it is for grown men that still fondly remember their own follies and fantasies at that age.

Gondry does not go out of his way to resist the tropes of the coming of age genre – in fact he frequently mines them for the film’s most frank and effective emotional beats. Daniel grew up in a comfortable home yet suffers from low self-esteem and the insecurities of his absent parents, whilst Théo’s chaotic household is filled with stimulating bric-à-brac but tainted by his parents constantly tearing him down. Daniel needs Théo’s help to become a young man who is sure of himself but he is also a narcissist, who does little to find out about his friend’s inner life. Microbe & Gasoil is a comedy of simple pleasures, delivered with impeccable timing and pitch-perfect performances from newcomers Théophile Baquet and Agne Dargent.

Gondry doesn’t feel the need for an overabundance of bawdy, gross-out humour and his conventional narrative is refreshingly old-fashioned and notable for its lack of smart phones, social media or any glowing screens in the boys’ lives. Their enthusiasm is for handmade, hand drawn entertainment of their own making. Gondry also finds an assertive way to get rid of most screenwriters’ worst enemy: the mobile phone. A few miles outside his home of Versailles, Daniel goes to take a dump in the woods and his phone quite innocently slips out of his pocket. There’s a craftsman’s lack of contrivance in the way Gondry handles such a functional scene but also a welcome lack of diplomacy in his decision to have Daniel shit on the phone and bury it, rather than clean it up and keep it. Getting rid of such a troublesome device allows the adventure to continue beyond the reach of meddlesome parental concerns.

The darker edge to the two boys’ strained relationships with the useless adults that surround them lends weight without dampening the adventure and Gondry’s script and direction are particularly sensitive to the authentic, poignant arc of Daniel’s object of desire, Laura (Diane Besniet). Jean-Claude Vannier’s unintrusive score exemplifies the sweet-but-scruffy, timid-but-savvy tone of this world quite succinctly. Modest in scope, with no need for sentimentality to achieve its depth, the score never cranks itself up to 11 and never butts in where it’s not wanted. Another filmmaker might have opted for a loud pop soundtrack of raucous riffs and thumping beats to hammer home the excitement and freedom of two teens on the open road. Gondry could probably knock such a mix together in his sleep but he chooses to let his actors and the subtle hand of Elise Fievet’s film editing amp up the excitement, rather than exaggerate it with pop hits beloved of older adolescents. By turning out such an unabashedly sweet and restrained film as Microbe & Gasoil Gondry reminds us of the value of his handmade aesthetic and the need for filmmakers to celebrate play alongside the more painful trials of growing up.

One Timers (that you can’t leave alone)

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Sandy Connell

What are those “one-time-only” movies that you just can’t leave alone? To which movies do you find yourself returning again and again, in spite of the agony they inflict upon you? Coming of age as a die-hard fan of Takashi Miike I became one of those loathsome cinephiles that is proud of their endurance for extreme and brutal movies. But there are some great films so tough on the viewer that I figure anyone willing to revisit them must have specific personal reasons for doing so. How else could anyone justify re-watching, say, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992)?

Questions like this were inspired by a couple of lists from the archived episodes of Chicago’s finest purveyor of movie podcasts, Filmspotting.net Back when Filmspotting was called Cinecast they dedicated two top-five lists (1 and 2) to “one timers”: great movies so harrowing and painful to watch that you can only stand to see them once. Sam van Hallgren and Adam Kempenaar cited the likes of The Elephant Man (1980), Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and, of course, Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999). They hit a couple of serious “one timers” for me, including Roman Polanski’s holocaust drama The Pianist (2002), which I saw in-part and never worked up the courage to go back and finish. (It’s worth noting that they missed a trick by overlooking Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975), the most unwatchable five-star film of all time).

It was tempting to think that Adam and Sam were wimps for mentioning Requiem for a Dream (2001), a film I’ve seen several times, but there is no denying that this film does not get any easier to watch with successive viewings. Why would any sane viewer want to relive the electro-shock-trauma of that film? Circumstances, people… circumstances. I believe that every cinephile has a handful of great movies that pain them to watch, yet come around again and again in the story of their lives for reasons perhaps deeply personal or because of bloody circumstances.

I hope the following top-five list might stir up a few painful memories and, who knows, encourage some catharsis among fellow cinephiles with a tendency towards sadomasochism.

1. Come & See (1985)

A film so tough, I never imagined I would be able to watch it twice. And yet I feel compelled to sit through it each time I find a friend ready to take the plunge into the wild mire of the Nazi invasion of Russia. Maybe I watch it with the newbie in question to make sure they sit through the whole thing. Maybe I do it out of concern that they might lose their mind. It never gets any easier to see that church full of people burning down at the end.

2. The Piano Teacher (2001)

Any one of Michael Haneke’s films could appear on this list but the film that first introduced me to the work of Austria’s greatest cinematic torturer has to rank as one of the most bleak and brutal films ever made. It’s even harder to re-watch than either version of Haneke’s Funny Games (1997/2007) but somehow I’ve seen The Piano Teacher at least four times. If you really must re-watch it, just don’t watch it with your Mum. In case you need any persuasion to take a deep breath and see The Piano Teacher for the first time Louis C.K.’s review might just persuade you.

3. I Fidanzati (1963)

Ermanno Olmi’s Italian neorealist story of separated lovers is neither brutal nor bland. It is rich, profound and engrossing. But, boy, oh boy, is it slow. It is not a slow film that demands re-viewing – it is easily absorbed the first time around. Yet I’ve seen it in its entirety five times, mainly because it took three attempts for my wife to watch it without falling asleep. Each time that I noticed that my wife had fallen asleep, I could have switched it off half-way through but the film wouldn’t let me.

4. Hunger (2008)

A deeply painful film to endure (for audiences on both sides of the Irish Sea) but I chose to write about it for the final chapter of my dissertation at university, thus condemning myself to one gruelling sitting after another. Like Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen seems to have built his career on a succession of gruelling “one timers” but despite the grim psychological depravity of Shame (2011) and the excruciating scenes in 12 Years a Slave (2013) Hunger is still McQueen’s most compelling, visceral depiction of dehumanisation.

5. FAMILY-FRIENDLY DOUBLE FEATURE !!! Animal Farm (1954) and Watership Down (1978)

The voice-over of the Animal Farm trailer announces it as “a film that every child can enjoy” … okay … That the copywriters had actually seen the film at this point is doubtful (but hey, copywriting isn’t always about truth and accuracy). By now most parents should know better than to lump either Animal Farm or Watership Down in with the kid-friendly DVD pile. Both are cartoons with talking animals, adapted from beloved books by British authors, and both have scarred generations of children with their haunting, nightmarish images of humanity at its worst and nature at its most unforgiving. Eventually the Black Rabbit will come for us all and we’ll be hauled off to the glue factory for processing.

What horrible, agonising but great films do you find yourself suffering through again and again (and why)?

(Sátántangó, anyone?)

UK RELEASE REVIEW: THE LOBSTER

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Sandy Connell

★★★★★

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Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos’ first film in English serves up the richest, most heartily enjoyable kind of black comedy – one with genuine observations to offer on human nature, constant deadpan absurdity and the occasional punch in the head to keep the audience on their toes.

Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in The Lobster  (2015). — Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in *The Lobster* (2015).

The Lobster (2015, Ireland/France/Greece/UK/Netherlands) directed by Yorgos Lanthimos / screenplay by Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthimis Filippou / starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Coleman, Arianne Labed, Angeliki Papoulia, Léa Seydoux, John C. Reilly / cinematography by Thimion Bakatakis / companies: Element Pictures, Canal+, Scarlet FIlms. Lemming Films, Film 4, Irish Film Board

Emerging from a dark cinema room and interacting with fellow humans after seeing a film by Yorgos Lanthimos is a distinctly surreal experience. It seems that no matter what gestures you make or words you say, the comfortable norms of your personality feel oddly absent and it’s easy to over analyse everything that comes out of your own mouth. Am I saying this just to be polite? Did that sound disingenuous? Because I’m pretty sure that that was genuine, what I just said. Did I really need that gesture or did it arrive too late to match with that thing I was saying?

The deliberately flat, emotionless line deliveries that so brutally dragged the viewer into the world of the grieving and abandoned in Lanthimos’ previous film, Alps (2012), here underscore the wickedly dry humor with which Lanthimos skewers the norms of a permissive but emotionally stunted society. In a blue and grey world of tastefully dressed citizens couples go about their business in The City and live as all happy people do, that is until they lose their romantic partner. As soon as they become single, citizens are transported to The Hotel, a pleasant resort with abundant amenities. There singles are given forty-five days to find themselves a new romantic partner or they will be transformed into the animal of their choosing and released into The Woods.

David (Colin Farrell, sporting a gentlemanly moustache and a pot belly) arrives with his brother, Michael, whose current form as a border collie suggests that he didn’t “make it”. Stripped of his personal belongings and installed in a single room, he opts to become a lobster if he doesn’t make it. So begins his search for a partner with which he shares some defining characteristic (as someone needing glasses, he is looking for a shortsighted woman). When not engaging in recreational activities (all permitted, except masturbation) or attempting to find a partner to dance with in the world’s least romantic music hall, the guests of The Hotel are required to hunt-down The Loners that populate The Woods. Capturing a Loner by shooting them with a tranquilizer gun can extend a guest’s time to find a mate by one day. As his last day draws nearer it becomes apparent that David’s only hope of remaining in human form is to join the Loners and partake in their sabotage of the relationships being fostered in The Hotel. It is with the Loners that he finds his perfect match, a shortsighted woman, played by Rachel Weisz.

There is a sly suggestion that David’s wife left him because he could not give her a child. But the reasons for the guests’ single status hardly matter. The death of one’s partner is just as likely to lead to internment in The Hotel as the failure of a relationship. What is consistent is that the characters are denied the time to grieve for the loss of their relationship and to use their time alone to regenerate and re-enter the world of dating in a way that is true to themselves. Loneliness, it seems, is suffered by society, not by the individual.

Léa Seydoux (and friend) as the leader of The Loners.

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Ignoring the astonishing artistic craft of Lanthimos’ regular cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis and their painterly use of the Irish countryside is impossible. It is equally impossible not to enjoy Lanthimos’ and Efthimis Filippou’s cruelly surreal script. But The Lobster is worth the price of admission for the universally excellent performances of the cast alone. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz are two actors seemingly committed to choosing exciting projects year-in, year-out and both deliver what could be career-best performances here. What really sells the world that Lanthimos and Filippou construct is the subdued flair of the cast as an ensemble. World-class performers like Olivia Coleman, Arianne Labed, Angeliki Papoulia, Léa Seydoux and Ben Whishaw bring a wealth of tension to every scene and John C. Reilly’s depiction of a lisping sad-sack that wants to be turned into a parrot is as heart-breaking as it is hilarious.

Lanthimos’ singletons seem to fall into two different camps: predators and passives. Bakatakis’ cinematography uses controlled movement and deliberate but sparing close ups to underscore the personality most dominant in each scene. As an example of the aggressive determination encouraged in the society, John (Ben Whishaw) exudes tremendous menace in stalking and deceiving the partner he needs (it is telling that his character confesses how his mother was transformed into a wolf, when she didn’t make it). Certain that he will never achieve the happiness that beams out from the Couples’ dining room, David attempts to imitate the predatory nature that nets John a partner but, in his naïveté, he finds himself trying to match with the coldness and cruelty of a certifiable psychopath (the always inscrutable Angeliki Papoulia).

It is highly appropriate that Lanthimos should choose Ireland as the location in which to shoot such a macabre black comedy and, as with his previous films, the use of a chilly, muted colour palette creates a particularly visceral impact when the desperation and loneliness turn violent.

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All-in-all, Lanthimos’ surrealist fable, at times Kafka-esque, proves more rewarding and enjoyable than most of the out-and-out comedies in recent memory. Lanthimos’ obvious respect for the sophistication of his audience is as strong as it ever was but the material here allows more balance between entertainment and exploration than his exploration of loneliness in Alps. As an added bonus, music lovers will be spoilt by music supervisor Amy Ashworth’s selection of melancholic and ominous pieces by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Alfred Schnittke, Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss and many, many more. As an added bonus, the Loners’ silent disco in The Woods is among the comic highlights of 2015. “We have chosen to be alone. That is why we listen to electronic music.”

But there can be no humour without tragedy. Farrell’s facial expressions and melancholy delivery of every matter-of-fact absurdity that comes out of his mouth belie David’s desire for a life of contented subsistence if it will allow him to preserve his passions. In Rachel Weisz’ character, he finds a kindred spirit but the insular, anti-romantic lifestyle enforced by the Loners leads their relationship to an apparent impasse, engendered by the very society that criminalises the Loners. When absurdity has become a fact of daily life, the great tragedy is that two people genuinely in love still cannot see past the superficial differences they have been led to believe will find them their true soul mate.

The Film: ★★★★ The Score: ★★★★

Napoléon comes out in limited cinematic release in the UK and on DVD, Blu-Ray and BFI Player on 11th November 2016.

Watch the trailer for the BFI’s re-release of Napoléon below.

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Toni Erdmann ★★★★★ (2016, Austria/Germany – dir. Maren Ade)

The Red Turtle ★★★★★ (La Tortue Rouge, 2016, Belgium/France/Japan – dir. Michaël Dudok de Wit)

The Handmaiden ★★★★ (아가씨, 2016, South Korea – dir. Park Chan-wook)

Souvenir ★★★★ (2016, Belgium/France/Luxembourg – dir. Bavo Defurne)

Voyage of Time – feature version ★★★★ (2016, USA – dir. Terrence Malick)

Wolf & Sheep ★★★ (2016, Afghanistan/Denmark – dir. Shahrbanoo Sadat)

Elle ★★ (2016, Belgium/France/Germany – dir. Paul Verhoeven)

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★★★

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ARABIAN NIGHTS VOLUMES 1 – 3 (a.k.a. AS MIL E UMA NOITES, Portugal/ France/ Germany/ Switzerland, dir. Miguel Gomes)

THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (LE TOUT NOUVEAU TESTAMENT, Belgium/ France/ Luxembourg, dir. Jaco van Dormael)

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR (a.k.a. RAK TI KHON KAEN – LOVE IN KHON KAEN, Thailand, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethacul)

EL CLAN (Argentina, dir. Pablo Trapero)

EL CLUB (Chile, dir. Pablo Larraín)

CROCODILE GENNADIY (USA/Ukraine, dir. Steve Hoover)

DHEEPAN (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (EL ABRAZO DE LA SERPIENTE, Colombia, dir. Ciro Guerra)

GOODNIGHT MUMMY (a.k.a. ICH SEH, ICH SEH, Austria, dir. Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala)

JULIETA (a.k.a. SILENCIO, Spain, dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

MUSTANG (Turkey/France, dir. Deniz Gemze Ergüven)

NO HOME MOVIE (Belgium/France, dir. Chantal Ackerman)

RAMS (HRÚTAR, Iceland/Denmark, dir. Grímur Hákonarson)

SON OF SAUL (SAUL FIA, Hungary, dir. László Nemes)

WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (a.k.a. 思い出のマーニー OMOIDE NO MĀNĪ, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Japan)

Click ‘Older’ below to go to my list of 2016’s most promising English language releases and, as always, say ‘YES!’ to going to the cinema in 2016!

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A MONSTER CALLS (Spain/USA, dir. Juan Antonio Bayona)

ANOMALISA (USA, dir. Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson)

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME (USA, dir. Richard Linklater)

GHOSTBUSTERS (USA, dir. Paul Feig)

GREEN ROOM (USA, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

HAIL, CAESAR! (USA, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)

HIGH-RISE (UK, dir. Ben Wheatley)

KNIGHT OF CUPS (USA, dir. Terrence Malick)

KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS (USA, dir. Travis Knight)

LA LA LAND (USA, dir. Damien Chazelle)

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (USA, dir Jeff Nichols)

MILES AHEAD (USA, dir. Don Cheadle)

TALE OF TALES (IL RACCONTO DEI RACCONTI, Italy/France/UK, dir. Mateo Garrone)

VICTORIA (Germany, dir. Sebastian Schipper)

THE WITCH (UK/Canada, dir. Robert Eggers)

Click ‘Newer’ below for my list of 15 Foreign language films to look forward to in 2016!

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RESOLUTION #1 – COVER MY MOST EGREGIOUS BLIND SPOTS

RESOLUTION #2 – DISCOVER AFRICAN CINEMA

RESOLUTION #3 – MAN-UP AND WATCH MARTYRS

RESOLUTION #4 – SAY “YES!” TO THE CINEMA

Support filmmakers, support your local cinema, say “YES!” to going to the cinema in 2016!

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So there we have it. 2015 is over and what a year it was at the cinema. Bring on 2016!

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HONOURABLE MENTIONS

52 Tuesdays (Australia, dir. Sophie Hyde)

Aaaaaaaah! (UK, dir. Steve Oram)

Black Coal, Thin Ice (China, dir. Diao Yinan)

Eden (France, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve)

Faults (USA, dir. Riley Stearns)

Jauja (Argentina/Denmark/France/Netherlands/USA, dir. Lisandro Alonso)

Marshland (Spain, dir. Alberto Rodríguez)

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (USA, dir. Christopher McQuarrie)

The New Girlfriend (France, dir. François Ozon)

Que Horas Ela Volta? (Brazil, dir. Anna Muylaert)

The Voices (USA/Germany, dir. Marjane Satrapi)

The Wonders (Italy/Switzerland/Germany, dir. Alice Rohrwacher)

AWARDS SEASON HANGOVERS

Inherent Vice (USA, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Selma (USA, dir. Ava DuVernay)

Whiplash (USA, dir. Damien Chazelle)

Click ‘OLDER’ to see my Top 15 English Language films of 2015 and ‘NEWER’ to hear the year’s best film scores mixed for your listening pleasure.

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15. Slow West (UK/New Zealand, dir. John Maclean)

14. Shaun the Sheep Movie (UK/France, dir. Richard Starzak & Mark Burton)

13. Mistress America (USA, dir. Noah Baumbach)

**WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (a.k.a. 思い出のマーニー OMOIDE NO MĀNĪ, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Japan)**