Nominees
The Beach House (US 18)
The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (UK/Canada 18)
Divos! (US 20)
The Golden Voices (US 18)
Ismael’s Ghosts (France 18)
Naked Dragon (US 14)
The Story of the Stone (Taiwan 18)
Uncut Gems (US 19)
Special Mention
The Golden Voices
Winner
Ismael’s Ghosts
(Lots of pretension that boils down to nothing and trumps the poor budget attempts)
140 films make up the films seen this year, (seven more than 2019) 35.5 of which (25.35%) by female directors. A big rise by 12% and a quarter of the catalogue!
The year featured films from or produced by: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, New Zealand,Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, and USA.
USA, as ever, dominates production clear of France, now second and the United Kingdom. Germany is narrowly 4thagain ahead of Australia, Belgium and Canada.
Countries not represented this year include: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Croatia, Cyprus, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Holland, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Papua Niugini, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, UAE, Uruguay, Vanuatu and Venezuela.
Award nominations are led by: A Hidden Life with 7, The Irishman, Once upon a Time in Hollywood and Waves with 6, The Man who Surprised Everyone and Parasite with 5 and 1917, And Then We Danced, Marriage Story and Sorry We Missed You with 4 nominations apiece.
Comments on films that didn’t make the cut yet deserve a mention:
Hustlers – J-Lo was larger than life but this fast out of the gate movie soon faded fast.
The Whistlers–Romanian thriller set on the whistling island of Gomera in the Canaries. Memorable in parts for the topic and scenery.
Knives Out – Slick comic whodunnit with great cast but underwhelms in the end.
The Farewell – interesting cross-cultural movie with US and China lacking some spice.
Bait – Very stylish B and W film from Britain. No giveaways and almost timeless in atmosphere.
Top End Wedding – Exuberant Aussie number recognizing the Aborigine culture
Un Rubio – Another sexually tense Marco Berger film in gloomy Buenos Aires. Has his own style.
Ride like a Girl – Bio of Michelle Payne, first female to win the Melbourne Cup. Honest stuff.
Sorry Angel – Gay French love story a la française.
The Unknown Girl – Solid Dardenne film but just not quite up there with their best despite Adele Haenel’s efforts.
In Fabric– Peter Strickland is one weird filmmaker and his latest is more memorable and more narratively coherent than others. Hard to know where to place him.
Greta – Neil Jordan writing and directing and Huppert acting couldn’t save this uninspiring and unpleasant number.
Le Jeune Ahmed – Les Dardennes attack racial crime stories with a difference here as they get behind the scenes of a young Muslim fanatic. Technically hard to fault but felt manipulative.
Bacurau– Brazilian fantasy film by the excellent Kleber Mendonça. Lots of good elements but just falls short overall.
Birds of Passage – Colombian blend of tribal customs and drugtrafficking. Ciro Guerra keeps us interested but not inspired. A bit sad really.,
De Stropers– Afrikaaner coming of age film. Solid in both story and technique.
Louder than Bombs – Norwegian directed but set in the US. All a little forced despite an excellent cast.
The Taste of Money – Korean film about a family twisted by money. Very elegant filming.
Late Night – Emma Thompson can do a lot but not save this bland egocentric US film.
Fete de Famille – Almost stereotypic French movie of the warring family having an idyllic summer lunch alfresco. Deneuve solid as always and Emmanuelle Bercot shines.
Tell it to the Bees – Bleak post WW2 British lesbian love affair in a small town. Carefully made, good acting but somehow it shrinks up in the end.
Summerland – similar topic as above, a decade earlier on the South Coast. Not a genre to inspire.
Deux Moi – I really liked this Parisian romantic comedy of near synchronicity.
The Last Note – noble Greek film about the worst Nazi atrocity in their country. Honestly made but hard-going
The Old Guard – Charlize Theron lifts an action movie that has many elements but little real innovation.
Atlantics– Great to see a contemporary film from Senegal that tackles issues like illegal migration and the role of women. Didn’t quite tough it out enough though.
Sobibor – Russian movie about a famous Nazi concentration camp and gas chambers. A bit filmed by the books in the end and you have to be in the mood.
Ad Astra – Brad Pitt goes beyond Mars in this movie. It’s good with great co-stars but never really blasts off.
End of the Century – Small elegant art house movie about two men meeting 20 years after a brief romance. Think Before Sunrise in Barcelona and you get the idea.
Queen of Hearts – Trine Dyrholm is fearless and very good in this taut Danish romance where the relationship between lawyer and schoolboy has devastating consequences.
Mouthpiece – Some raved about this Canadian film using two actresses to play two sides of the main character’s personality. It has its moments but for me the novelty wore off.
Herstory – Solid enough Korean depiction of the struggle of WW2 Korean comfort women to be recognized and compensated by the Japanese.
The Mongolian Connection – Nice to see a sort of Mongolian mafia/western. Low budget but good action scenes.
Cemetery of Splendour – Apichatpong’s latest from Thailand. Not for many as it’s sleepwalking theme and magic reality elements throw up interesting questions about our life in this and other dimensions, all in the context of a hospital in a steamy Thai river town. Different.
In the Aisles – Surprisingly astute sociological portrait of people working in a wholesale warehouse shop in what was East Germany. I liked it a lot.
24 Frames – Abbas Kiarostami’s last movie is definitely different with 24 frames that start as pictures and end up moving. Gets a bit much by half way through.
For the last film of the year we visit Cannes and its glittering and beautiful coastline. This film by Rebecca Zlotowski is very French in essence and seems to fall in between the cautionary tales so beloved of French directors and something altogether more titillating.
In the end it is most of all a portrayal of one summer in the life of a young girl who is leaving school and encountering the adult world.
Naima is 16, her mother works as a cleaner in a hotel but Naima has the sense that she is bound for something better, though she is not sure what. Her cousin Sofia comes down from Paris. Sofia is voluptuous, supposedly interested in only one thing (having fun with men) and is a catalogue of feminine wiles and tips for the gold digger.
She has had plastic surgery to enhance her assets and is open about her sexuality. A sort of post-modern Brigitte Bardot.
Naima becomes her company over the summer and the two of them befriend two rich men who have a luxury yacht moored in Cannes harbour. One (Nuno Lopes) is an art collector and speculator.
The other (Benoit Magimel) reads a lot of books.
Their inclusion in the ‘in-crowd’ is not a great success and one of the best scenes is when Sofia has to defend herself against the fairly blunt comments of Calypso (Clotilde Courau), a friend of these much older men.
And as the days pass, Naima becomes a little wiser. Mina Farid is the young actress in this lead role and holds her own well but undoubtedly the attraction is Zahia Dehar as Sofia. Dehar has a history as an escort and was involved in sex scandals with the French football team. She has reinvented herself as an actress and lingerie designer and is clearly a smart cookie.
This is perhaps the most interesting feature of a rather quiet movie, the presence of both women from Muslim backgrounds playing out roles that are untypical and in fact generally frowned upon by their faith. A sign of the new France.
2 stars plus
Ken Loach, Britain’s social conscience director per excellence returns here in his early 80’s with a movie that lays criticism of the gig economy on thick and heavy.
Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) is a father of two who decides to become his own boss as a courier working for one of these firms that hire “freelancers” but are in fact enslaving them and depriving them of common sense rights.
Wife Abbie, meanwhile, is employed by a National Health Service subcontractor as a carer, giving house calls to feed, wash and supervise the elderly and the needy. Like Ricky, she is paid by the hour but those hours are not increased when she has to deal with emergencies with her clients, who are in fact patients of the State.
Exploitation all round and Loach gives us very clear details of how the gig economy is breaking up the social tissue in countries like Britain.
Over the course of the film we see the consequences on family life with teenage son Seb, going off the rails and daughter Liza also severely affected.
Loach shows us how the working classes now, bereft of unions and as much as they want to improve themselves and be responsible are basically orphaned and unsupported in society today no matter what politicians say.
Not a cheerful film then but an important one to watch and understand.
Debbie Honeywood as Abbie shines in her first role and the other supporting actors, largely unknown do a good job.
4 stars 2 plusses
Lila Avilés gives us a film about a maid in Mexico, but unlike Roma, this one, Evelia, works in a top hotel in Mexico City and is a slave to the rich guests who from what we see in this film tend to make a mess wherever they go.
Evelia (Gabriela Cantol, excellent) has ambitions in life from the modest ones of being the recipient of a red dress left behind by a guest to getting a better education and a better position in the hotel.
We get a tremendous character portrayal here and an insight into work behind the scenes: the staff romances, the fact that many are trying to sell things on the side and the trust and abuse of trust.
Avilés conveys all this in a quiet, cleanly edited way aided by the photography of Carlos Rossini, who at times acts as the eyes of Eve and at times is a distant observer.
Teresa Sanchez as Minitoy, the co-worker is also a very well-defined character.
While the plot line is relatively thin and the film is more like a slice of Eve’s life, we are never bored and the director manages to blend the story of one young woman’s life with a commentary on work and on the class differences between the haves and the have nots in a very elegant way. A deserving winner of many prizes for debut film.
4 stars plus
Something of an artifice here with plenty of plot holes and a not entirely convincing plot twist mid-way through, The Good Liar is nevertheless an opportunity to see two stars oif British stage and film in action. Ian McKellen (excellent) plays Roy Courtnay, an elderly conman who seems to be quite a charming old fellow but is in fact quite ruthless underneath.
He has his sights on Betty, who was apparently an Oxford professor, recently widowed and possessor of a small fortune. She lives in a rather dull suburban house. At first the relationship seems to be advancing despite the doubts of Betty’s grandson Steve (Russell Tovey).
Roy manages to get Betty interested in talking to his accountant (partner-in-crime) Vincent, well played by Jim Carter
and they agree to join forces to make some new investments. It is at this point which coincides with a holiday in Berlin that things take a turn and Betty emerges as not being quite the innocent figure she originally seems to be.
Bill Condon directs the movie in an agile way and it is all quite watchable but fails to convince very much as a story. As a vehicle for Mirren and especially McKellen
to show what they can do with often quite small looks and gestures, it is a delight.
3 stars
Almost unclassifiable last film by Iranian great Abbas Kiarostami. The 24 frames are 24 scenes of 4 and a half minutes strung together into a whole work. Each scene was inspired by a painting
or photograph and in those few minutes we see something come to life. The common threads are: snow, clouds, waves on the shore, lots of animal behaviour in the wild – especially birds, cows, goats, deer and lions but also the odd dog and cat which get set among the crows and gulls.
There are very few frames with humans
and the first of all is the animation of a European painting.
Artistically, the photography for many of them is excellent and despite the lack of story there is plenty to see. Kiarostami is training us to observe the small details of nature and to compare it in some sense to our own species. Some of the frames are light sleight of hand and the whole complexion changes because a cloud comes across or an animal appears.
However….I did find the novelty wearing off after the first few and the sheer number with snow and or birds got repetitive.
It is the type of film for the aficionado and the art-house enthusiast, no more. I do recall some of his earlier films being frustrating in this way and I was not so much a fan of A Taste of Cherry as many. Others I preferred more. 24 Frames probably needed a bit more variety and perhaps some editing. The vignettes in themselves are often well done but the 90 odd minutes got to be a bit of a slog. An interesting idea nonetheless.
3 stars (just)
The latest in a long line of Nazi hunter films, this time recounting the Mossad’s secret operation to capture Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 and take him to Israel for trial.
Apart from a few scenes,
it is not exactly suspense and the core of the movie features the efforts of one agent Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac channeling George Clooney)
to convince Adolf Eichmann, being held in a safe house, to sign a document expressing his willingness to be flown to Israel, without which they cannot leave the country.
Malkin and his captive engage in a series of conversations that supposedly show Eichmann in a different light and Ben Kingsley (impressive as ever), almost succeeds in getting us to like the man, but for an outburst right near the end.
The rest of the movie is largely logistics and some padding like a supposed romance between Malkin and the anaesthetist (Melanie Laurent).
Good to see Greta Scacchi reappear as Eichmann’s wife but she and several others are underused. Production vales are high with Javier Aguirresarobe behind the camera and Alexandre Desplat contributing some urgency in his soundtrack. Interesting to see a house in Hurlingham used as the main base for the Mossad team.
However, at the end of the day, the film is more anecdotal than shocking or impactful.
It just goes through the motions relatively effectively and is lifted by the performances of the two main stars.
Strictly no better than …
3 stars
I enjoyed the 800 page novel a few years back when it won the Man Booker Prize and wondered given the complexity of the plot and the number of narrators whether it could be adapted for the screen. Well, the BBC have done it, filmed in NZ and complete with novelist Eleanor Catton adapting it into a 6-part series.
She has refocused the narrative mainly on the women, given the love story more pride of place and reduced the participation of some of the other narrators like Moody, the lawyer who instead of being with us from the start appears in episode 5. There are still overlapping stories from the present and the past and the more esoteric elements are more clearly established.
Eva Green steals the show as Mrs Lydia Wells, the landlady and hostess who seems to be behind all sorts of devious manoeuvres and Anna, the illiterate maid turned prostitute becomes a central figure well played by Eve Hewson.
Her love interest Emery Staines is played by Hisham Patel, not altogether comfortably with the 1860’s time period and Marton Csokas as the villain Carver represents the main Kiwi input.
He is talented enough to play a convincing bad guy. Australian Ewen Leslie as Lydia’s husband Crosby is perhaps the standout from a big supporting cast, all of whom are adequate but some more impactful than others.
So, does it work? Up to a point. It is a decent enough whodunnit (or rather whatdidhedo?), it seems to create the atmosphere of these fairly makeshift gold run settlements well and uses the New Zealand landscape effectively.
I did feel that the pacing wasn’t always effective, for example episode 5 seemed to drag and episode 6 got by as it should do on the basis of revolving around a court case.
Some complained that the raft of characters and the flashbacks made it hard to follow but it was like that in the book as well and it goes with the territory of these types of film/novel. Perhaps it was a little dark but that seemed fitting for the time.
All in all, a decent effort without sending me into raptures.
Eva Green can be marked down for future films and Hewson graduates to this higher league well.
3 stars plus
Making a late run for one of the films of the year, Waves belongs to an emerging genre of movies set in Florida and featuring social and racial issues. Moonlight was the forerunner but since then we have had others like the Florida Project. There is something about the flat land and the contrast between sunny skies and brooding dark storms approaching that gives it a special mood.
Waves is the third feature by Trey Edward Shults and is remarkable on many levels. First of all it is the story about the decline of a black family who thought they were on their way to fulfilling the American dream but get blindsided in the process.
Shults is white. He is the writer and director of a movie that has a frenetic, violent and almost psychedelic first half which features the son Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jnr), an 18 year-old High School competitive wrestler whose sports career starts to come undone through injury bringing down most of the rest of his life with it.
The second half is much more poignant and slow-moving and features his sister Emily (Taylor Russell)
and her attempt to continue with her life after the storm hits, particularly with a boyfriend (Lucas Hedges). It also looks at the effect on the parents, Sterling K Brown and Renee Elise Goldberry.
While the plot is somewhat melodramatic and is played at times for shock, Shults impresses with the artistic gloss that he brings to the story. Some scenes are shocking and in-your-face and in others he pulls back.
Throughout, attention is paid to the human side and to replicating the feelings the characters might be having and the tender redeeming gestures as well. Drew Daniels give us original and mood-provoking photography and a soundtrack of new and familiar songs and the work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross complete the picture.
Shults is clearly a new and very adept talent at bringing together all the elements to create a very watchable and memorable film. Harrison Jnr and Russell as the two leads and siblings are perfect and all the other performances fit well, especially Lucas Hedges, showing what a capable young actor he is.
4 stars plus plus
passionfilm 