THE LOST DAUGHTER**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 8

Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut is a taut, superbly rendered, character-led drama featuring a bravura performance from Olivia Colman. It is faithfully based on the brutal novella of the same name by Elena Ferrante - a book that dared to ask what happens to a smart woman who dares to throw off the shackles of motherhood.

The protagonist is Leda - a middle aged literary professor who treats herself to an extended seaside holiday. She enjoys her routine of calm reflection and seems self-assured. But this calm is disrupted when her seaside idyll is disrupted by a rowdy working class family with an imperious attitude to their surroundings. 

Motherhood looms large over the film. Leda becomes fascinated with a young pretty mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), and her wilful child.  Nina seems to be stuck in a domineering marriage to her small time criminal husband. She is also steamrollered by his family, not least his sister Callie (Dagmara Domincyk) who resents Nina for getting pregnant so easily when she is only now pregnant in her early 40s. Even Nina's daughter is a mother to her cheap plastic doll. And when both child and doll go missing, Leda rescues both but somehow cannot seem to give the doll back, despite the child's ongoing distress at its lost.

It becomes clear that the doll triggers a painful and undigested memory for Leda, of abandoning her own two small daughters when they were the same age as Nina's daughter. Though happy in marriage and motherhood in theory, her inability to continue her academic work and the fact that her husband (Jack Farthing) puts his career first, becomes suffocating. A chance encounter with two travellers who have thrown off the shackles of bourgeois expectations inspires Leda. And more significantly, one of them (Alba Rorhwacher) takes a sample of Leda's writing and gives it to an influential academic, effectively launching Leda's career. It's joyous to see the young Leda (Jessie Buckley) simply enjoy the act of ordering room service and eat it in peace and quiet. 

What the novel and film ask is what this means for Leda as a mother. Yes she is oppressed by motherhood, but she also does love her daughters. What sacrifices is she willing to make for career versus family? And what is the emotional cost of freedom?  In seeing Nina she sees another life lived, and Nina sees that in Leda too. Both are flirting with each other as an alternative path.  At one point Leda describes herself as an "unnatural mother" but I suspect most mothers feel that same frustration and oppression at various points of their life. It seems to be that these feelings are natural but largely unspoken.

Maggie Gyllenhaal gets so much right in this adaptation, starting with casting. Olivia Colman manages to convey so much without a word being spoken. Childlike joy at a happy moment on the beach. Anger and frustration at loud intruders. And Jessie Buckley matches her in quality to a tee. I also love how Gyllenhaal interrogates what it means to be a single middle-aged woman, where everyone feels it's their right to ask your age, and to intrude into your life - to walk into your flat and start cooking for you - to make you move from your seat to accommodate a family (because families trump single women).... And then the endless indignity of being a strong woman forced to face your fragility in a misogynistic society, from Nina's brooding husband menacing Leda as she tries to drive away, to noisy kids in a cinema who only shut up when a man tells them to.

This is a film full of emotional and physical menace and shows clearly the costs and challenges of living a full independent life as a woman where you fulfil all your potential. I guess my  only criticism of the film is that is shows an ending which is somewhat cleaner than the ambivalent version in the novel. Maybe Gyllenhaal is asking if we believe it? I felt it was just a little too tidy relative to the Ferrante. 

THE LOST DAUGHTER is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes. It won Best Screenplay at Venice, and also played Telluride and the BFI London Film Festival. It will open in cinemas on December 17th and on Netflix on December 31st. 

THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Preview

Sara Colangelo's faithful remake of the Israeli drama THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER is a beautifully acted, tense, slippery little film that has the confidence to leave some of its motivations mysterious. It stars an ever-superb, ever-brave Maggie Gyllenhaal as a teacher in Staten Island called Lisa Spinelli.  She lives a life where she has failed to inspire her own teenage kids to do anything meaningful. And while she attends a poetry class in Manhattan, taught by Gael Garcia Bernal's Simon, it's clear that while she may be artistically sensitive, she has no talent of her own.  One day, a little kid in her class called Jimmy (Parker Sevak) starts reciting poetry that is so precocious, and perfect, that Miss Spinelli is taken aback.  All of a sudden she has a mission in her life that makes HER unique and special by proxy - to be the guardian and nurterer of this little boy's talent.  

What I love about this film is that it continually throws us off balance. At first, when we see Lisa recite Jimmy's poetry in her Manhattan class, we wonder if this is going to be a film about plagiarism and theft. But no, her motives appear pure - at least in her own mind, everything she does is in the service of Jimmy's talent. She keeps telling herself this as her actions become more and more extreme, and the question Colangelo poses to us as the audience is how far we are willing to go along with her, and at what point we start questioning what is really going on here. How far is Lisa just trying to relive her own lost opportunity to shape her kids lives - how far has she become unmoored?

What I admire about Maggie Gyllenhaal is her willingness to play slippery ambiguous characters and take us into sympathising with her even as she does morally questionable things. Without spoiling anything, there's something so heartbreaking about Lisa's conversation with Jimmy through a door at the end of this film - at once the capable caring teacher, at once the emotionally trampled upon woman - that catapults this film to another level. I also love that this film simply allows the child to be a prodigy - and in its appallingly sad final lines, for Lisa to be right...

THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER has a running time of 96 minutes. It played Sundance 2018 where Sara Colangelo won the directing prize. It also played Toronto and London. It opened in the USA last weekend and will open in the UK on February 8th 2019. 

WHITE HOUSE DOWN

Roland Emmerich is not a director whose movies win the hearts and minds of critics. 2012, 10,000 BC, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW are pretty mindless, boorish, loud, overlong action movies that combine heavy CGI effects with a squidgy slurpy schmaltzy underbelly.  It's fair to say that WHITE HOUSE DOWN combines all the worst elements of these previous movies and adds a few more. Every line of dialogue is cheesy.  Every character is a caricature.  Every situation implausible.  And yet, and yet.... I enjoyed every single minute of WHITE HOUSE DOWN. I laughed at it and with it.  I cared about its main characters.  I was genuinely surprised by one of its plot twists.  And when the geeky tour guide finally manned up with a gun I was cheering on the inside.  For me, WHITE HOUSE DOWN is the DIE HARD of this decade - good-hearted wholesome, cheesy action fun.  I can't recommend it highly enough!

The plot is, of course, worryingly similar to this summer's earlier White House Under Attack movie, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN.  Channing Tatum plays a security guard called John Cale with dreams of protecting the President, partly because he's just a gosh-darn patriot, and partly because he wants to impress his plucky little super-patriotic daughter Emily (Joey King).  On the morning that he's rejected from the Secret Service by old flame Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Cale and his daughter find themselves in the White House when a disgruntled employee decides to take the President hostage.  This allows Cale (and his daughter) to prove just what a hero he is.  

Of course, Channing Tatum is perfect for this role, looking good in a wife-beater but also pulling off the wholesome charm of a loving father.  I also really liked Joey King as his daughter, very much styled in the Alyssa Milano- COMMANDO role.  But the real hilarity comes from Jamie Foxx who geeks up as peace-loving President Sawyer - a liberal fantasy President who wants to bring peace to the Middle East and earns the wrath of the military-industrial complex.  There are endless scenes where Foxx plays it for laughs, struggling to turn action hero, earning Cale's mockery. 

In fact, it's worth saying that this movie is really funny.  There are hilariously stupid lines: 

Bad guy number one: Cake? 

Bad guy number two: No, I don't want cake! I'm diabetic! 

Or this one from President Sawyer: Get your hands off my Jordans! 

As well as the visual brilliance of seeing the Leader of the Free World racing round the White House lawn in a pimped out hummer shooting a rocket launcher.  The word for this film is Ridonkulous.  But all that hilarity and the slurpy schmaltzy patriotism shouldn't blind you to the fact that it's actually very well made. The CGI effects are spectacular but don't overwhelm the story.  There are just enough great character actors (Richard Jenkins, Jason Clarke) to keep it this side of spoof. And I like the way that little plot details come back to be of significance, and even minor characters, such as the tour guide, have complete narrative arcs.

So, don't be put off by Emmerich's back catalogue. If you loved early 80s action flicks, and go with the intention of having a good time, WHITE HOUSE DOWN is the movie for you!

WHITE HOUSE DOWN has a running time of 131 minutes and is rated PG-13.

WHITE HOUSE DOWN was released earlier this year pretty much everywhere.  It opens on September 11th in Belgium; on September 12th in the Netherlands; on September 13th in the UK and Ireland; on September 19th in Denmark and Greece; on September 20th in Norway, Sweden and Venezuela; on September 26th in Italy and on November 1st in Bulgaria. 

CRAZY HEART - sanitised

CRAZY HEART is an earnest and handsomely made film from debutant director Scott Cooper. It's a simple story about an old country singer, reduced to playing small gigs while his mentee plays stadiums. He falls for a well-meaning, likeable young woman, and is finally compelled to seek help for his alcohol addiction when he imperils her son. The movie has an air of intimacy thanks to Scott Cooper's predeliction for warm tones, close-ups and lingering shots. It has an impeccable country score, masterminded by T-Bone Burnett, and played out by Jeff Bridges as the ageing Bad Blake and Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet. But there is no "wow" factor - nothing that makes you think this is an Oscar-winning movie or an Oscar-winning performance. Sure, Jeff Bridges turns in an affecting performance, but where's the savage psychological daring of THE WRESTLER? Where's the hurt and hopelessness and sheer Sisyphian pain or endurance? Nah. CRAZY HEART is soul-bearing-lite. It's grinds through its gears, and we reach the end, still basking in the honey glow of an all-too-easy conversion to sobriety, as cheerful as the cute little kid. It's too easy. Too sanitised. Too forgettable.

Additional tags: Barry Markowitz, T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton, James Keane, Thomas Cobb, Scott Cooper.

CRAZY HEART was released in 2009 in the USA. It is currently on release in the UK, New Zealand, Mexico, Norway, Belgium, France, the Philippines, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Malta, Argentina and Turkey.

AWAY WE GO - twee

AWAY WE GO is a great step forward for Sam Mendes, whose previous directorial efforts (AMERICAN BEAUTY, REVOLUTION ROAD) have been story-boarded and designed to within an inch of their lives. In this film, he hangs loose, allowing his story and characters room to breathe. The movie looks and feels lo-rent, almost casually thrown together, rather than distracting us with a high-gloss finish. Great.

Problem is, Sam Mendes hasn't moved beyond his other fatal flaw as a director - being patronising. I have yet to see a Mendes movie that does carry with it an air of smug self-satisfaction. AWAY WE GO features John Krasinki and Maya Rudolph - two actors better known for comic roles on TV - in a semi-serious character driven drama. They are well-adjusted, right-thinking, warm-hearted, in-love and pregnant. When his parents decided to move to Antwerp on the eve of the birth of their child, this prompts a crisis. Well, no, they are too banal to ever have a crisis. Rather, the young couple are concerned that they haven't figured out how and, indeed, where, to live. So follows a road trip, visiting friends and family, hoping to learn.

The couple are basically good people (and indeed, are portrayed by good actors). As shown here, they don't really have anything to learn. This is a road-trip with no real emotional journey. The couple are confronted with a series of increasingly caricatured couples, and it's a no-brainer that these are not the guys to learn from. In particular, the hippie couple depicted by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton were so absurd they completely took me out of the film. And then it all winds up with an ending that is as schmaltzy as it unbelievable.

AWAY WE GO was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, Greece, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Israel and the Netherlands. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next week in Belgium. It opens in October in Finland, Norway, Germany, Australia, and Romania. It opens in November in New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Argentina and Spain. It opens in Russia on December 10th.

THE DARK KNIGHT - The Emperor's New Clothes

This review is replete with spoilers.

THE DARK KNIGHT opens with a suitably moody image of the Batman icon but soon cuts to a very modern, bright picture of the top of a skyscraper in a contemporary US city. It's as though Nolan wants to separate himself completely from Burton's urban gothic. Or maybe he just wants to show that a year after BATMAN BEGINS, Gotham has been cleaned up. So instead of the beautifully designed grunge, overland metros and grafitti of BEGINS, THE DARK KNIGHT looks like a sleek thriller. Indeed, the opening bank heist reminded me of INSIDE MAN more than BEGINS or the Burton movies. It was all very anonymous and rather disappointing.

Half an hour into the movie we get our first scene of The Joker having fun with emasculated Gotham mafiosi. Heath Ledger is captivating: a scene with a pencil is shockingly funny. Finally, I feel like I'm being entertained. I even overlook all his precious lip-smacking.

We then wander around for another twenty minutes. The familiar characters are introduced. Michael Caine and Lucius Fox are wise-cracking and wise respectively as Alfred and Lucius Fox. There's a lot of time-wasting in Hong Kong and some really rather nasty off-hand comments about buying American rather than Chinese. I really don't like the inference. Batman forcefully extradites a mafiosi money-launderer from Hong Kong and dumps him at the gate of Lieutenant Gordon. Gary Oldman - now there's a subtle performance! If anyone deserves praise it's Oldman. Just look at the flicker of a cheeky smile as he appraises Batman's gift. Later, look at him plead for the lives of his loved ones. Now there's real emotion. Contrast it with Maggie Gyllenhaal (an actress I have much respect for.) She never convinces as a lawyer or as a woman torn between two men. She has no chemistry with Aaron Eckhart's clean-cut crusading DA, Harvey Dent. She's even less convincing in her scenes with Bruce Wayne. Watch her tell him she'll be there for him. Could she be more non-chalant? She plays it like she's trying to remember where she put her keys.

Fifty minutes in and The Joker's back on the scene with a truly frightening window scene. We're back to the excitement. He's an anarchist and he wants us to play his game. He even teases us with shifting versions of his origins story. (A little rich from a director who just spent a whole film giving us Batman's!) Note that in my humble opinion you could have cut into this film at minute forty-five and not have missed a thing.

Then we're on again with all the crime-thriller shenanigans. Gordon and the Batman want to bring down the mafia via its money launderer so they take their eyes off The Joker. Bruce Wayne goes all CSI. Blah blah blah. The director attempts to pull the rug from underneath the audience a couple of times. We all figure out what's going on immediately. Like they'd let Gordon die. Of course, once we know he didn't die we know Rachel really has died. They couldn't pull it off twice. Let's stop dancing round each other and get to the action!

One hour and thirty minutes into this film we finally get a proper showdown with the only truly spectacular action sequence involving a truck flipping over.

One hour and forty five minutes into this film and we reach a natural end. It's truly brilliant. Dark, unresolved, nihilistic, The Joker's head out of the car window, laughing at us all. This is like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK only meaner.

Then we get another interminable forty-five minutes in which we basically get the origin story of Twoface, and a terribly rushed unwinding of his story. By this point, I'm fidgeting in my seat. I'm frustrated because Two-face's story should be more interesting than The Joker or BATMAN. After all, THE JOKER is an anarchist. There's no character development. Batman starts off conflicted and ends conflicted. He gets precious little screen time and he's just not that interesting here. But Harvey Dent could've been played like the fall of Michael Corleone. Except, Nolan shoe-horns his character arc into an unwanted epilogue rather than making it the strong start to the next movie. I esepcially disliked Two-face's make-up. The whole point about Batman is that the characters are normal people who are mentally disturbed. So Batman is just a man in a suit. The Joker is just a man with freakish scars and make-up. But Two-face looks so deformed he breaks through my willing suspension of disbelief. Less would've been more.

And, finally, what's with the crude attempt to get into the politics of The Patriot Act and the Ethics 101 practical philosophy class? The conversation between Batman and Lucius Fox about the ethics of wire-tapping to catch a terrorist is ham-fisted. It's as though Nolan is desperately trying to be political and of his time. But these sorts of political allegories are important and require a more profound treatment than a tacked on five minute scene.

Similarly, the philosophical dilemma with the two boats struck me as ridiculous. One boat is full of convicts: the other is full of ordinary citizens. Each boat has five minutes to blow the other one up or they both blow up. Nolan decides to have both the criminals and the citizens act with superlative integrity, despite a bit of whining from some of the people. How unrealistic is that? More to the point, it's completely out of keeping with the dark, subversive tone that he's trying to go for with the rest of the film. In fact, it's pure sentimental schmaltz. The Joker comes to spread anarchy and fear. But we good citizens won't play dice because, at heart, we love our fellow man. Please. The whole point of this film is that "with a few sticks of dynamite" The Joker can turn the most moral man in Gotham, Harvey Dent, into a pychopathic killer. Come on Nolan: make up your mind.

THE DARK KNIGHT isn't a terrible film but it is flawed. I didn't enjoy it except in brief flashes. It's overlong, and yet feels rushed. It has a brilliant cast, and yet feels poorly-acted. It's a comic book film but it films like a cliched movie thriller. Yes, Ledger is one of the highlights, but I've seen better performances this year. Indeed, I've seen arguably better performances in this film, not least that of Gary Oldman.

So, in the immortal words of PUBLIC ENEMY, Don't Believe The Hype.

THE DARK KNIGHT opened in Iceland, Argentina, Australia, Greece, Taiwan, Brazil, the US and Venezuela on the weekend of July 18th. It opens in Egypt, Italy, Nroway, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Turkey and the UK the weekend of July 25th. It opens in August in Belgiu,, Japan, France, Spain and Germany and opens in Russia on September 11th.

If Bina007 ruled the world...or at the very least, the Academy Awards....

Enough of all this negativity! Let's raise a glass to the best and brightest and celebrate all the truly wonderful achievements of cinema in 2007. (An remember, I haven't yet seen NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, THERE WILL BE BLOOD or SWEENEY TODD.....

Best Motion Picture of the Year
Winner: 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS - searing drama about a young woman getting an illegal abortion in Communist era Romania. Outstandingly well-scripted, acted and produced. Drips quality and integrity from start to finish. An instant pantheon movie, for which writer-director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Breath-taking cinema - reminds you how powerful this medium can be.

Other Nominees: THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD - Oz director Andrew Dominik's lyrical, handsomely produced, heart-breaking story. A young man's hero-worship takes him to the edge of murder, but it's the hero's tacit complicity in his own death that breaks our heart. A film of which I expected very little but once again was frozen with awe when the lights came up.

HOT FUZZ - too often, august award ceremonies overlook the deceptively simple-looking movies that make us laugh. HOT FUZZ is spot on with its referential humour but, unlike so many weak spoofs, underpins it with a neat plot, a genuine puzzle to solve and real cameraderie between the protagonists. Kudos to Brit director Edgar Wright.

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA - another genre that is rarely patronised by the Academy, but h children's movie that is never patronising and tackles harsh subject-matter with grace and imagination. Two young kids make a fantasy world that is shattered by a nasty accident. Beautifully made, grabs you by the heart - a movie that should be watched by adults and kids alike.

THE SINGER - Gerard Depardieu reminding us just how good he can be in a May to December romance that surprises us with its insight, sensitivity, emotional bravery and the genuine sexual chemistry between the two leads I can't wait to see what writer-director Xavier Giannoli does next.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: Casey Affleck as Robert Ford in THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. A break-through performance that perfectly articulates the slightly psychotic nature of being a "super-fan". Affleck never allows us to judge Ford harshly - he takes us with Ford into his guilt and regret.

Other Nominees: Richard Gere in THE HOAX - a jaw-droppingly good performance from Richard Gere, who I'd never particularly respected before this, as author Clifford Irving. Gere as Irving fools everyone into thinking he is writing Howard Hughes' biography. Gere conveys the slippery nature of Irving's psyche.

Irrfhan Khan in THE NAMESAKE proved to a Western audience what a subtle and profoundly good actor he was, portraying an Indian expat with a romantic heart struggling to deal with modern American life. He has that thing that all actors should aspire to: he makes us happy to spend time with him and he makes us care about what happens to him. What astounds me about Irrfhan Khan is his range - he's also brilliant in light comedic roles.

Tim Roth in YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH Tim Roth has always been pure class - just check out a very early role as a hyper-intelligent skin-head in MADE IN BRITAIN. In Coppola's come-back he handles complex material in a script that stretches credulity. He plays a young man an old man and everything in between. It's simply an acting masterclass.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

Winner: Ashley Judd in BUG. All these performances are raw, brave and on the edge. All these actresses deserve praise for exploring painful territory and making the extreme seem believable and sympathetic. Ashley Judd wins out because her performance was so convincing and the material was the most difficult: she plays a woman holed up in a motel room with a conspiracy-theorist wacko. They both simply go mad.

Other Nominees: Maggie Gylenhaal in SHERRYBABY. Gylenhaal excels as a drug addict ex-con who comes back to claim her daughter and has to face the demons from her past. A typically strong performance from one of the most impressive actresses of her generation.

Angelina Jolie in A MIGHTY HEART. Jolie reminds us how good she was in GIRL, INTERUPTED - before TOMB RAIDER. A quiet, modulated performance that portrays Marianne Pearl's immense bravery in the face of her husband's kidnap and execution by Muslim fundamentalists.

Julie Christie in AWAY FROM HER. A heart-breaking -performance by Christie as a woman who suffers from Alzheimer's, makes the brave decision to leave her husband and enter a nursing home, forgets her husband and then falls in love with another man.

Marion Cotillard in LA MOME. A charming performance that conveys the complexity of Edith Piaf's character and holds together a biopic that threatens to crumble under its unnecessarily complex non-linear narrative structure.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Winner: Steve Zahn in RESCUE DAWN. A surprisingly honest, moving performance from funny-man Zahn as Dieter Dengler's fellow escapee from the Cong in Werner Herzog's fictional recreation.

Other Nominees: Eddie Redmayne for LIKE MINDS LIKE MINDS is a slight British thriller which will be remembered purely as being Eddie Redmayne's first flick. He is an immensely impressive young actor, even in dreck like SAVAGE GRACE.

Satish Kaushik in BRICK LANE. Kaushik manages to make a comic villain - fat, over-bearing husband - into a figure of symathy and indeed nobility. A truly great performance in a mediocre movie.

Ben Foster in 3:10 TO YUMA Foster is magnetic as a mentally unhinged outlaw in this Western remake. You can measure the brilliance of his performance from the fact that he steals scenes from under Christian Bale and Russell Crowe.

Chris Cooper THE BREACH A performance that perfectly transmits the contradictions of a CIA mole and under-pins a much under-rated spy thriller.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

Winner: Tilda Swinton in MICHAEL CLAYTON. A performance that conveys perfectly conveys the moral dilemma of modern capitalism: how far do these companies recruit insecure over-achievers who will identify with the brand and sacrifice their social lives and indeed their moral integrity for its survivial. In a solid film full of strong performances, Swinton stands out.

Other Nominees: Romola Garai in ATONEMENT. The British actress who should be more feted than Ikea Knightley - in the scene where she apologises to Knightley and McAvoy's thwarted lovers she acts them off the screen.

Saiorse Ronan in ATONEMENT. A confident, intense and assured performance from a young actress as the confused, spiteful little sister who deliberately does something grave and wrong but for what she thinks is the right reason.

Meryl Streep in LIONS FOR LAMBS. Just for the sheer delight of watching two actors at the top of their game (Streep and Cruise) having a war of words over the War on Terror. It was what cinema rarely is these days - a delicate balance of intellectual substance and belly-laughs.

Cate Blanchett in I'M NOT THERE. In a cast of mostly men trying to interpret the life and myth of Bob Dylan, Blanchett gives the most convincing and scarring performance of Dylan in his caustic electro- phase. A far better performance than in ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE, certainly.

Best Achievement in Directing

Winner: 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS What more can I say? If any movie from 2007 survives the test of time, it will be this one. This movie shows us how great cinema can be. Kudos to Cristian Mungiu.

Other Nominees: Susanne Bier for AFTER THE WEDDING If I could nominate an ensemble cast, this movie would win, but at the very least one has to praise Susanne Bier was a scalding tricksy script about a dysfunctional family, riven by secrets and ruled by a manipulative father. This is what Dogme was all about wasn't it? Not some adolescent rant against technical artifice but a desire to strip cinema back down to bare emotional truth.

Sarah Polley for AWAY FROM HER An impressive directorial debut from this actress - and more impressive for the fact that she tackles an unfashionable but increasingly important subject - how Alzheimer's destroys relationships. She elicits career-redefining performances from her cast but also conjures up stunning visuals.

Julie Delpy for 2 DAYS IN PARIS Who knew that Julie Delpy would turn out to an auteur?! A confident directorial debut and a rare movie that combines belly laughs with insight. I also love her confidence in depicting a romantic comedy that is fundamentally cynical about the possibility of love.

Sean Penn for INTO THE WILD Finally Penn finds material that matches his own concerns, rather than taking someone else' film and over-stuffing it with heavy earnestness and pretensiousness. As with Sarah Polley, Penn elicits great performances from his cast but also masters the visuals.

Best Writing, Original Screenplay

Winner: Julie Delpy for 2 DAYS IN PARIS. Funny, smart, unpredictable!

Other Nominees: Michel Gondry for THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP. Funny, smart, unpredictable!

Aki Kaurismaki for LIGHTS IN THE DUSK. Another wonderfully absurd, off-beat, and yes, that most dirty of dirty words, quirk, script from this Finnish director. A hopeless security guard almost wills his own downfall at the hands of a femme fatale and a caper gone wrong.

Shane Meadows for THIS IS ENGLAND Yet another strong film from Britain's most authentic writer-director. Meadows perfectly conjures up the early 80s and all the thwarted hopes of the working classes. Once again he deftly combines profound subject-matter - racial violence, social deprivation - with a good ear for the absurd and comic in even the worst situations.

Nanni Moretti for THE CAIMAN A superlative film not so much about the scandalous Italian Presidency of Silvio Berlusconi but about how ordinary Italian let this happen. A film that depicts moral complicity on a small scale but did so in defiance of Berlusconi himself. Subtle, clever, funny, moving.

Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Sooni Taraporevala for THE NAMESAKE. Another great script from the women behind MISSISSIPI MASSALA and SALAAM BOMBAY!

Other Nominees: Ron Nyswaner for THE PAINTED VEIL. A sensitive adaptation that opened out this novella and made it seem relevant to modern eyes.

Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman for STARDUST.
Matt Greenhalgh for CONTROL

Michael Goldenberg for HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX - an impressive script that condenses down a baggy monster into the most focussed of the Potter flicks.

Best Achievement in Cinematography

Winner: In a great year for cinematography, Harry Savides just edges out the competition for ZODIAC, with his moody visuals of the West Coast in the seventies. Possibly is best work since Se7en.

Other Nominees: Martin Ruhe stunning black and white photography for the Ian Curtis biopic, CONTROL, which one suspects was heavily directed by Anton Corbijn.

Edward Lachman for his technical mastery of black and white, colour, composites and immitation in Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan movie, I'M NOT THERE

Coen-Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins for the stunning landscape photography in Andrew Dominik's THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD.

Philip Robertson for his stuning use of DV to depict Morecambe Bay in Juliet McKeon's FROZEN.

Best Achievement in Art Direction
Winner: Ann Chakraverty, Pierre Pell and Stephane Rosenbaum for THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP

Other Nominees:Suttirat Anne Larlarb for THE NAMESAKE

Nick Ralvobsky for FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS

Isabelle Guay, Nicolas Lepage and Jean-Pierre Pacquet for 300

Aradhana Seth and Adam Stockhausen for THE DARJEELING LIMITED

Best Achievement in Costume Design

Winner: Milena Canonero for THE DARJEELING LIMITED

Other Nominees: Jenny Beaven for AMAZING GRACE

Mark Bridges for FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS

Ruth Myers for THE PAINTED VEIL

Gabriele Binder for THE LIVES OF OTHERS

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Song
Winner: Theme from St Trinian's, Girls Aloud, ST TRINIAN'S

Other Nominees: Rule The World, Take That, STARDUST

Barso Re, A R Rahman, GURU

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score
Winner: Alexandre Desplat for THE PAINTED VEIL - a score heavily inspired by Satie

Other Nominees: Alexandre Desplat for THE GOLDEN DOOR

Elliot Goldenthal for his arrangements of Beatles classics in ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis for THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Nitin Sawhney for THE NAMESAKE
Best Documentary, Features

Winner: TAKING LIBERTIES. Chris Atkins articulated better than I ever could the revolutionary nature of Tony Blair's regime - anti-liberal to an extent that most right wing Home Secretaries could never have dreamed of. Should be required viewing in schools, along with....

Other Nominees: TERROR'S ADVOCATE - Barbet Schroeder's important and chilling documentary about Jacques Verges - a lawyer who has defended terrorists and war criminals with an alarming lack of moral qualms.

BLUE BLOOD - Steven Riley's low budget British documentary about the Oxford-Cambridge varsity boxing match. Funny, engaging, worth seeking out on DVD.

JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN - Rock doc maestro Julien Temple's hommage to Strummer. Rich in interview footage, the movie captures everything that was exciting about punk and the sad hangover of the late 80s and 90s.

ZIZEK! - I can't get enough of Marxist theorist Slavok Zizek. He lectures with imense passion and comedy about movies, life, the universe and everything. Astra Taylor's documentary is a wonderful companion to Zizek's PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA. Is he sending himself up, or us?!

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year

Winner: 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS

Other Nominees: AFTER THE WEDDING

THE SINGER

CLIMATES - emotionally raw Turkish drama

THE FAMILY FRIEND - creepy, surreal Italian film about a manipulative grotesque who blackmails a beautiful young girl. Deeply bizarre but memorable.

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year

Winner: RATATOUILLE - showing that CGI can have heart, rather than just snappy one-liners.

Other Nominees: SURF'S UP - a handsomely drawn movie that also displayed heart rather than post-modern in-jokes.

MAX AND CO - an old-fashioned stop-motion film from France that has a zany story, real visual imagination and even works when the young viewers don't understand the language!

TERKEL IN TROUBLE - a filthy, irreverant animated film about a young kid fighting school bullies. Despite the toilet-humour, spot on on the neuroses that bedevil young kids.

SHERRYBABY - brilliantly crafted portrait of a lady

SHERRYBABY could adopt the same tagline as INLAND EMPIRE: a woman in trouble. It's a breathtakingly well-made and well-acted drama following a young ex-jailbird, junkie and mother as she leaves prison and tries to regain her daughter. The movie features a central performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal that is powerful, moving and certainly the most breath-taking portrayal I have seen in the past twelve months. Indeed, it makes Dame Helen Mirren's multiple award-winning role in The Queen look like dress-up. Gyllenhaal has to portray a woman who is simulataneously angry, strong, determined but also damaged, desperate for attention and self-destructive. We have to believe that Sherry loves her daughter and wants to make good, but also the serious danger of spontaneous self-harm. The complexity of both the written part (writer-director Laurie Collyer) and Gyllenhaal's performance combine to take this film beyond a typical tart-with-a-heart story and into something more impressive and authentic. Not to be missed.

Further to my cursory but glowing review, I bring you in on the thoughts of Movie Matt - probably the nicest person you'll ever not meet and definitely the guy who's seen the most movies. Note that his review contains spoilers and, more to the point, the issues Matt talks about will be more interesting if you've actually seen the film already:

"I'm glad to hear you liked Sherrybaby, because I LOVED it. Maggie Gyllenhaal's central performance was truly captivating, and I found myself thinking about it for days. The story of the film is, of course, remarkably simple and could be summed up in a single sentence. This could be construed as a flaw, because in all probability upon hearing this summation before the movie you would predict a clichéd ending of her making the choice to do what is right by her daughter etc. Indeed this is actually what happens, however in all likelihood you wouldn’t guess the outcome when you see the movie because of how believable Sherry is as a person. I thought the troubled aspects of her character were well explored during the course of the story. I really believed how frustrated Sherry was over her own shortcomings as a mother, and as a person, that I just wanted to see the character develop as much as she did. The subtle ending was well executed, leaving you with just enough hope for her future as a mother, but not so that you’ll unrealistically think it’ll all now be happy times ahead.

The tense, and yet often quiet scenes really emphasised her feelings of isolation and loneliness, which in turn added to the realism of the movie. I enjoyed the simple reflections of the atmosphere to her own feelings, from the (often) intense sunshine when she is the most hopeful about her future (i.e. when she meets her daughter again for the first time since her release) to the dingy, heavy florescent lighting of the motel rooms when despair gets the better of her. This effectively echoed not only her own mental state but also the tone of the film as a whole. Indeed the ending of film takes place at night when you see her driving away into the distance after dropping off her daughter at her brother’s house. While the darkness is still all around her and it has certainly tainted her, she’s still moving forward. Simple, yet powerful.

I was also quite impressed with the solid supporting cast, including Giancarlo Esposito as her parole officer and (quite surprisingly) Danny Trejo who really shows that he has talent as an actor. The bath scene where he cleans Sherry delicately with a sponge was particularly poignant, as the total absence of any sexual intention really gave you the impression that he was taking care of her the way a father would take care of his child.

However, by far my favourite scene in the film was where Sherry meets her father again for the first time since her release from prison, because of how much was revealed about her past and her family’s attitude towards her. Watching her standing on the couch with her arms touching the ceiling like a little girl, and actually competing with her own daughter for her father’s attention was utterly compelling. There were also such strong impressions of Sherry being emotionally disconnected from her family, which was demonstrated beautifully when ten seconds after her father sees her for first time in three years, he immediately moves away from her to talk to his son about getting the gutters cleared.

I was also impressed how the story only gave a hint of the underlying abuse Sherry grew up with when you see her father touch her just for a couple of seconds. The film wasn’t trying to shock you with the notion of abuse, and because of this subtlety it was all the more disturbing. Indeed her own reaction to her father touching her was to run away and this told us a lot about her own character i.e. she wasn’t disgusted with her father for what he just done (when of course she clearly should be) she was disgusted with herself because it happened. Then we wonderfully see her run through the neighbourhood, a great analogy to the escapism that drugs provide.

Brad William Henke also gave a good performance as Sherry’s brother. He was a very conflicted character as on one hand he’s a strong enough person to undertake raising Sherry’s daughter in her absence, but on the other he’s aware of his father’s actions and does nothing. Their relationship is summed up very well in the way they greet each other at the start of the film. They hug very awkwardly and slowly from a distance. Yes they love each other, but they don’t feel close.

All in all I walked away overwhelmingly impressed with the movie and further convinced of the depth of talent Maggie Gyllenhaal has as an actress."

SHERRYBABY played Sundance 2006 and closed the BirdsEye View Festival in London in 2007. It opened in Sweden in 2007 and is available on Region 1 DVD.

STRANGER THAN FICTION - Charlie Kaufman-lite but enjoyable nonetheless

Finally, I hunkered down in the Odeon for STRANGER THAN FICTION, which bites the ass of Charlie Kaufman and Woody Allen rather obviously, but is a rather sweet romantic tragi-comedy nonetheless. For the movie is at heart a sweet (if obvious) love story between Will Ferrell's buttoned-down IRS auditor and Maggie Gyllenhaal's bohemian baker. I haven't seen Will Ferrell give such a quiet, sensitive performance before - he's truly a joy to watch and convinces as this odd-ball leading man. The fly in the ointment is that Will Ferrell's character keeps hearing voices. Or specifically A voice - the voice of an English female author who is narrating his life and alerts him to the fact that he is about to die. With the help of Dustin Hoffman's whacky literary theory professor, Ferrell manages to track down the reclusive author who is, naturally, somewhat shocked to find her main character standing in front of her. Emma Thompson excels in this role of the straight-talking decent author who can either kill a man and create a work of art or settle for the okay novel with the happy ending. In this choice, she is aided by Queen Latifah who is utterly wasted in a small role.

STRANGER THAN FICTION is consistently irritating, with it's smarter-than-smart CGI graphic effects that echo the IKEA-condo scene in FIGHT CLUB but less good. In fact, the whole post-modern storyline is just Less Good than all the movies that have gone before it. For this I suppose we should blame the script-writer, Zach Helm and director Marc Forster (of FINDING NEVERLAND and MONSTER'S BALL fame). But the movie somehow triumphs over all of this because it has a fantastic cast and, pretentious bull-shit aside, a very lovely story at its heart. As I said, I have never seen Will Ferrell so convincing as he is here. Sure he'e funny - but it's unintentional deadpan funny, which is, actually a lot funnier than TALLADEGA NIGHTS.

STRANGER THAN FICTION played Toronto and London 2006. It opens in the US on November 10th and in the UK, Brazil, Argentina, Iceland, Finland and Sweden in December 2006. It opens in Australia, France, the Netherlands and Belgium in January and in Estonia, Germany, Austria and Portugal in February. It opens in Slovakia in May 2007.

Disconnected thoughts on WORLD TRADE CENTER

WORLD TRADE CENTER is an earnest film. It handles a shocking event in US history with sensitivity. It features a script by newbie Andrea Berloff that carefully uses testimony from survivors no matter how hackneyed or unintentionally political the results may be. It features the sort of glossy, big-budget, impressive, weighty production design and cinematography that one would expect from a grave Hollywood treatment of this subject. And most of all, it features a career-redefining performance from Nic Cage as one of the fireman rescued from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, as well as strong supporting performances from Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is NOT an Oliver Stone movie. It does not have a grand visual style - it does not engage in taboo subjects with excoriating insight - it does not challenge us to re-evaluate our relationship with events that have become, for better of worse, part of our pop-culture. And while the use of the true story of the heroic religious marine sticks to the facts, it undoubtedly creates a political spin to the movie that seems rather crass and, bizarrely, at odds with Oliver Stone's previous work. Indeed, in this movie I fear that Stone has finally been what his critics have always accused him of being - irresponsible with history - in focusing on the story of the gung-ho US marine.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is not a movie that I think belongs on the big screen, despite its good intentions and largely good performances. I think it belongs on The Hallmark Channel. It may be all 100% true and earnestly transmitted to the audience, but the conversations between the two firefighters and the visions they experience seem to me - when projected onto a movie screen - incredible and manipulative.

It is, to me, incomprehensible that a film-maker should come at 9/11 from this angle. For me, it is up there with SCHINDLER'S LIST as a truly bizarre film. I find there to be something sociologically interesting but nonetheless depressing about the choices that Stone and Spielberg have chosen to make. To me, 9/11 is about an act of brutal violence and innocent civilians being murdered. It's about bad things happening. To focus on the handful of people who were rescued - on the small glimmer of light - just seems dishonest. And I know my reaction is perverse, because after all these are true stories and deserve to be heard too. But I can't get rid of the sneaking suspicion that Oliver Stone has handed us a security blanket when what I, for one, really want is for someone to shake me up and help me make sense of what happened.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is on release in Canada, the US, Italy, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Israel, Portugal, Thailand, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Spain, Turkey and the UK. It opens in Australia, Slovenia, the Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, Japan, Greece, Italy, Argentina and Hong Kong in October. It opens in Egypt, Chile and Vietnam in November 2006.

TRUST THE MAN - harmless date movie for people with nice handbags

TRUST THE MAN is a film that I really rather enjoyed in a mild sort of giggly way despite its obvious and manifest flaws. It's a slushy romantic-comedy set in Woody Allen's New York. By which I mean that it's the kind of New York where people have cool, artsy jobs - like being an actress or writing a book - and hang out in Sardis or Marc Jacobs. It focuses on two couples, both of which contain a sensible nice woman and a flaky, mid-life crisis-y man. And the idea is that the men have to go off and be flaky before redeeming themselves with a slushy plea for love at the end. So, the movie has a deeply formulaic and slushy story-line and one of the most trite, plagiarised endings I have ever seen. But there is some stuff to like here. While the plot arc is conventional, some of the dialogue by writer-director Bart Freundlich is witty in a low-key giggly sort of way. It also stars a bunch of great actors - not least Freundlich's wife, Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup, David Duchovny and Maggie Gyllenhaal. There are also two scene-stealing cameos from Ellen Barkin and James Le Gros. Overall, what to say? Is this a must-see movie? No. Will it have you rolling in the aisle with laughter? No. But is it a pleasant way to pass an hour or so? Yes. It's a harmless date movie for people with nice hand-bags.

TRUST THE MAN was released in the Israel and the US in August. It is currently on release in the UK and Denmark and opens in Brazil next Friday. It opens in Taiwan, Australia and Italy in October and in France in November 2006. It opens in Argentina in Argentina in January 2007.