The 24FPS Awards 2015

It's not, in my estimation, been a good year, but this list of my personal awards for the past 12 months is at least reasonably varied (only one film wins in more than one category) and has thrown up a few surprises. This year the nominations in most categories weren't that hard to arrive at, the challenge was picking a winner. In multiple categories I found myself debating, chopping and changing the victor several times.

In a year of cinema that often struggled to impress me, every one of these nominees helped, in some small way, remind me why I write this site even in a year like this. None of them is making up the numbers; they all did great work and if I could write in detail about every nominee I would. I'd encourage you to see all the films on each of these lists, if just for the work of the person I've singled out.

Anyway, on with the show. Feel free to yell at me for not nominating Mad Max: Fury Road or [insert movie you loved here] in the comments or on @24FPSUK.


Best Director

Pete Docter: Inside Out

Francois Ozon: The New Girlfriend

Celine Sciamma: Girlhood

Peter Strickland: The Duke of Burgundy

Isao Takahata: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

WINNER

Francois Ozon
Francois Ozon stumbled with his last film, Jeune et Jolie and I wondered whether, after almost 20 years, my favourite working director had finally lost his touch. The New Girlfriend not only confirms that Ozon has picked himself up again, it's a film that, on repeat viewings, reveals itself as one of his best (perhaps behind 5 X 2 and In The House). His balancing of tone is masterful as he draws together the melancholy, comedic and romantic threads of this unusual story and the work with the actors is as strong as ever. Anais Demoustier and Romain Duris give detail rich performances in which tiny moments speak very loudly. Finally, the whole film is beautifully and evocatively shot; Ozon's precise framing accentuating every emotion in the film. It's another great example of why I find his work so engaging and so exciting.

Best Actress

Anais Demoustier: The New Girlfriend

Sara Hagan: Sun Choke

Nina Hoss: Phoenix

Ellen Dorrit Petersen: Blind

Sarah Snook: Predestination

WINNER

Sarah Snook

Talk about a performance that came out of nowhere. I picked up Predestination on DVD because I found it for £2 and Ethan Hawke is one of my favourite actors, the generic cover didn't bode well. When Sarah Snook (who I hadn't seen before) first appeared in the film it took me a while to twig even that the role was being played by a woman. To say that her role is demanding is to seriously understate matters, her character's persona and appearance shifts so profoundly, and her various roles intersect at such levels of complexity that the mere fact that she manages to draw an emotional throughline in her character is hugely impressive. To deliver such a chameleonic and affecting performance that repeatedly takes in jaw dropping twists with seeming ease is little short of brilliance. Predestination isn't the kind of film that gets in the conversation for big acting awards, but Snook blows most of the competition out of the water this year.

Best Actor

Tom Courtenay: 45 Years

Romain Duris: The New Girlfriend

Ethan Hawke: Predestination

Oscar Isaac: A Most Violent Year / Ex Machina

Logan Miller: Take Me to the River

WINNER

Oscar Isaac

It's taken me a long time to come round to Oscar Isaac, having first seen him slicing the ham very thick indeed in Ridley Scott's dreadful Robin Hood, which he then followed up with Sucker Punch: one of the ten worst films I've seen in this site's lifetime. I liked his performance more in Inside Llewyn Davis, but found the film extremely overrated and the character, well acted as he was, nigh insufferable, but for the first time I saw promise.

This year, Isaac delivered on that promise, with intense turns in two of the year's most intelligent dramas. A Most Violent Year is set in 1981, but its approach reaches back to the patiently paced and tense crime dramas of the 1970s. Isaac's performance as a man trying to remain moral despite the corruption around him is also redolent of that period; there are shades of a restrained Pacino or DeNiro here. Ex Machina is more forward looking and Isaac's brilliant but menacing programmer with a God complex has more notes than Michael Fassbender's take on a similar (real life) character. The performances are utterly different from one another and they've made me much more interested in where Isaac goes from here, as long as it's not Sucker Punch 2 or The Further Adventures of Robin Hood.

Best Supporting Actress

Barbara Crampton: Sun Choke

Kim Sae-ron: A Girl At My Door

Angeliki Papoulia: The Lobster

Assa Sylla: Girlhood

WINNER

Assa Sylla

Sylla, like the rest of the young cast, had not acted prior to being cast in Girlhood but, great as lead Karidja Toure is as Marieme, Sylla's sheer presence often sees her dominate scenes in which all four of the girl gang led by her character 'Lady' appear. Silently and quickly she shifts from menacing to playful, from fierce to funny. It would have been easy to write and play the girls of this gang of banlieu badasses as caricatures of troubled kids, to make them one note wannabe gangstas. Lady and her cohorts are much more than that, and it's in this variety that Sylla delivers. Her interactions with Marieme go through several phases; first confrontational, then friendly, then genuinely open and caring, and watching her play on these registers within the same scene you see how versatile she is.

Some of this may be taught, directed out of Sylla by Celine Sciamma. What isn't, what can't be, is her immense charisma. Sylla has it to burn. Just look at the image above (from the film's standout scene) and tell me that's not someone you immediately want to see more of.

Best Supporting Actor

Jeff Daniels: Steve Jobs
Richard Kind: Inside Out

David Morse: The Boy

Michael Shannon: 99 Homes

WINNER

Richard Kind

Several of my favourite actors are in this category this year, but it's an actor who can best be described - at least as I've always seen him - with the words "Oh, that guy. He's great" who is the ultimate winner. Richard Kind has done a lot of voice work (including giving Tom an incredibly pointless and ill fitting voice in Tom and Jerry: The Movie), but I doubt he's ever been better or more affecting than he is as Bing Bong, the long abandoned imaginary friend of 12 year old Riley, in whose mind most of Inside Out takes place. Kind's voice is warm, friendly and just a little silly. He makes Bing Bong the kind of thing we can imagine a little girl dreaming up as a playmate, but also gives him a rich inner life and sense both of optimism and deep longing.

Bing Bong's final scene, sacrificing himself to allow Joy to go and save Riley, capped with a truly heartbreaking read on "Take her to the moon for me" not only engages us with Bing Bong and with Riley, but makes us reflect on the imaginary friends we may have forgotten over the years. Kind's performance helps make the film personal for the whole audience. 

One To Watch [Actors]

Jared Breeze: The Boy

Devon Keller: Petting Zoo

Laurence Leboeuf: Turbo Kid

Ursula Parker: Take Me to the River

Charlie Plummer: King Jack

WINNER
Devon Keller

This is, as is appropriate to the category, a very young group (the eldest is Laurence Lebeouf, who has been making films for some time, but broke through as the winningly nuts Apple in Turbo Kid). It's also perhaps no surprise that four of these five films could, to some degree, be called coming of age movies. 

Petting Zoo is perhaps the most naturalistic of these films and of the performances. Devon Keller was spotted by director Micah Magee at a fashion show at the school where the film was shot (and which Keller graduated from just before making the film). Keller, perhaps thanks to the closeness of the setting and the character, seems utterly at home in Layla's skin. She hits a lot of registers in this performance, but always convincingly, and for all Layla's sharp edges, her intelligence comes through and she's never less than sympathetic. Keller is at her best late in the film as she turns on a dime between some of the film's lightest material, as Layla is given a driving lesson by her new boyfriend, and some of it's heaviest, as she tells him she's pregnant with someone else's child. Keller's unforced naturalism throughout Petting Zoo is hugely promising, and I hope to see much more of her.

One To Watch [Filmmakers]

Akiz: Der Nachtmahr

Ben Cresciman: Sun Choke

Micah Magee: Petting Zoo

Gez Medinger, Robin Schmidt: AfterDeath

WINNER
Ben Cresciman

Sun Choke came out of nowhere and knocked a lot of people over at Frightfest and as a first feature from writer/director Ben Cresciman it's pretty startling, largely for not feeling like a debut. Cresciman doesn't appear to be feeling out his style here, or unsure what he's saying (even if sometimes wants us to be), and that's often the mark of someone who it's worth keeping an eye on going forward.

Sun Choke is full of striking images. The light saturated moments that seem to draw most literally on the title, the cold images of the house where Sara Hagan and Barbara Crampton spend most of the film (a motif reflected in the pitch of Crampton's performance) and the more conventional horror images, such as a viscerally nasty murder that closes the second act. These bring a mix of tones that works brilliantly for the film. As you'll probably have guessed from the other categories, there is also much to admire about Cresciman's handling of his small cast (even Sara Malakul Lane, in a role that is purely decorative for much of the running time, does good work). 

Overall, Sun Choke is both one of the best films of the year and a hugely impressive calling card. I'm looking forward to whatever Cresciman does next.

Best Cinematography / Visuals

Crimson Peak

The Duke of Burgundy

The Forbidden Room
Girlhood

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

WINNER

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Every one of these films is visually stunning. I came incredibly close (as in I'd started writing the summary) to giving the award to another film, but ultimately it's the handmade, effortful, artistry of Isao Takahata's film that wins out.

The style of Kaguya's animation often lends the film an impressionistic feel. At times it feels like an artists's sketchbook come to life, but that's not to say it feels unfinished. In many ways the animation is perhaps more effective for all its roughness, you can feel the work in every brush stroke and the varying qualities of the drawing enables Takahata and his team to suggest emotion not just through the expressions the characters make, but through the way they're rendered. 

This is never more true than when Kaguya runs away from her wedding; the drawings become smudges, reflecting both the speed of her intended escape and the emotional turmoil she's in. It's one of the year's standout sequences and one of the most affecting bits of animation I've seen for ages.

Best Screenplay

Celine Sciamma: Girlhood

Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley: Inside Out

J.C Chandor: A Most Violent Year

Francois Ozon: The New Girlfriend
Christian Petzold, Harun Farocki: Phoenix

WINNER

Inside Out
Pixar have been pretty seriously off the boil since the wonderful Toy Story 3, but in 2015 they recaptured their mojo with Inside Out. Long time readers will know that I'm a huge fan of coming of age cinema, and Inside Out is perhaps the most unique entry in the genre for years. It takes a look at the process from the inside, with Joy, Sadness and the audience watching as 11 year old Riley processes the world, retaining what she needs and literally discarding what, at 11, she's outgrown.

The visuals used to bring this interior world to life are stunning, but it's the sharpness of the writing, which makes complex concepts relateable and funny for adults and kids alike while, in the outside world, creating a believable and affecting family story, that makes Inside Out so special. The screenplay has it all, from gorgeous emotional moments (the opening moments killed me) to cleverly written set pieces (Abstract thought) and some hilarious throwaway jokes ("GIRL! GIRL!"), all tied together by the brilliant concept and characters.

Best Score / Use of Music

Click the links for a clip or a song. The Tami Tamaki song is VERY NSFW.
Girlhood: Score by Para One / Use of Light Asylum, Rhianna

Phoenix: Nina Hoss sings Speak Low

The Skeleton Twins: Starship Karaoke

Something Must Break: Use of "I Never Loved This Hard This Fast Before" by Tami Tamaki

Turbo Kid: Score by Le Matos

WINNER
Phoenix

There is a lot to be said, in cinema and in music, for simplicity. This scene from Phoenix speaks to the power that simplicity can convey. The scene consists of three shots that Christian Petzold cuts between and two performances, both superlative. The moment the music cuts out and we see the expression on Ronald Zehrfeld's face is one of the most powerful of this entire year of cinema, and the clarity of Nina Hoss' voice, the way it cuts so beautifully through everything draws both the scene and, as this is the film's closing moment, the story as whole, together with incredible power. It's a jaw dropping moment, perhaps the best of either Petzold or Hoss' estimable careers.

Best Scene

Diamonds: Girlhood
Bing Bong: Inside Out
"This was very disrespectful": A Most Violent Year

Sex scene: The New Girlfriend

Driving Lesson: Petting Zoo

WINNER

The New Girlfriend
Francois Ozon has long used sex scenes as a dramatic device in his films. Much of his work is explicit and involves a lot of nudity and sex, but those scenes are always about advancing character. I don't think that's ever been more true than in The New Girlfriend, especially in its second sex scene, the first between Claire (Anais Demoustier) and David/Virginia (Romain Duris). 

Throughout the film, Ozon has deftly led us to a place where this moment is inevitable, what it becomes is the film's most emotionally fraught moment. It's cathartic yet confusing for the characters. Shifting identities are a huge part of Ozon's ouvre and especially of this film, but he's never visualised it so nakedly and with such impact. It's an identity crisis of the most intimate sort, and it, along with many other scenes, has stuck in my head since I saw The New Girlfriend at LFF 2014.

Biggest (and best) Surprise

The DUFF

The Final Girls

Landmine Goes Click

Sun Choke

Unfriended

WINNER 

Unfriended
I expected less than nothing from Unfriended. A real time, essentially found footage, horror film that takes place entirely in the visual space of a Mac desktop. It sounded dull and like it would be the cheapest, most visually uninspiring, horror of this year and perhaps many to come. While it may not be the best film on this list, I was genuinely shocked by how good it is. Unfriended gives us two things that feel truly rare in what passes for mainstream American horror now: effort and invention.

There is an argument that not all films need to be seen in a cinema, but this may be the first film I would actively recommend watching not on a cinema or even a TV screen, but on your laptop. There is an ambience that watching Unfriended via your own computer (especially if it's a Mac) lends it. I found that it sucked me into the visual space, which is inventively used, making the film more involving and scarier. I wonder how it will date, but as a movie of the moment, Unfriended is involving, largely credible, and entirely surprising in its quality.

A Month In Movies: August 2015

It's been a long time since I've done one of these, but I thought I ought to get back to it, hopefully to start kicking my writing (which has been sporadic lately for a lot of different reasons) back into gear.

As ever, everything mentioned in one of the awards categories below is a first viewing.

FILM(S) OF THE MONTH

The Birds / Full Moon In Paris

WORST FILM(S)

Terminator Genisys / Mistress America

Best Actor: Jack Nicholson: Five Easy Pieces / Charlie Chaplin: The Great Dictator

Best Actress: Sarah Hagan: Jess + Moss / Sarah Snook: Predestination / Bel Powley: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Best Director: Alfred Hitchcock: The Birds / The Trouble With Harry

Best Screenplay: Eric Rohmer: Full Moon In Paris

Biggest Surprise: Jess + Moss / Predestination

Biggest Disappointment: Marnie

Most Fucked Up Movie: The Visitor

I'm Pretty Sure No One Else Has Seen This: Jess + Moss / AfterDeath

Character I Never Want to Meet: Any of the insufferable fuckers in Mistress America, but especially Brooke (Greta Gerwig)

Why is He/She Still in Movies: Charisma vacuum Jai Courtney: Terminator Genisys

Movie I Finally Got to See: The Birds / Full Moon In Paris / Five Easy Pieces / The Great Dictator

Coolest Title: Class of Nuke 'Em High

24FPS @ LFF 2014: My LFF Awards

The London Film Festival introduced competition strands for the first time in 2012.  In this post I won't be confining myself to the competition films, but instead looking at the best of what I saw during the entire festival.

Best Director
Josephine Decker: Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
Francois Ozon: The New Girlfriend

Christian Petzold: Phoenix
Celine Sciamma: Girlhood
Peter Strickland: The Duke of Burgundy

It's no surprise that this list features four of my final festival Top 5 (in this category Christian Petzold's control of Phoenix just shaded the abandon that Sion Sono brought to Tokyo Tribe).  All five are excellent all round directorial jobs, with fine performances and visuals, in styles ranging from the playful and colourful The New Girlfriend, through the occasional stylisation of Girlhood, to the much more severe Phoenix.

WINNER: Peter Strickland
The Duke of Burgundy is a rabbit hole of a film, you could easily get lost exploring the depth and detail that Peter Strickland brings to it, refashioning artsploitation influences like Jean Rollin, Jess Franco and Radley Metzger into a surreal love story with undertones of horror.  It is achingly beautiful, extremely well-paced and never less than fascinating.  My few issues with it when I first saw it have since receded in my mind and I can't wait to revisit it.

Best Actor
Romain Duris: The New Girlfriend

Grigoriy Fesenko: The Tribe
Lou Taylor Pucci: Spring
Miles Teller: Whiplash
Ronald Zehrfeld: Phoenix

Rather slim pickings this year in this category, which isn't to say that these aren't excellent performances, just that if you asked me to add a sixth to them we'd probably be sitting here all day while I thought it over.  In a lot of ways Grigoriy Fesenko's is the most interesting performance here, given that he has no voice to articulate his feelings, just sign language and physicality; both of which he jabs aggressively at the other characters.  Miles Teller, one of the best young actors in Hollywood, continues to make his mark with a fantastic performance (which may yet net him an Oscar nod) in Whiplash, which also shows off his versatility, being 180 degrees from his last LFF role, in The Spectacular Now.

WINNER: Romain Duris
Romain Duris is an actor I've been aware of for a long time, but not one I've seen deliver a performance that has really put him on the map for me.  The New Girlfriend changes that.  Duris has a complex role here, in some ways he's playing two characters, to begin with he often has to play aspects of both at the same time, but then draw increasingly distinct personalities for them as the film runs on.  He rises to the challenge brilliantly, creating two characters whose physicality and personality are strikingly different from each other, but who also inform each other's behaviour.  Subtle is not what The New Girlfriend is, but there are many subtleties in what Duris does here.

Best Actress
Bae Doo-na: A Girl At My Door

Nina Hoss: Phoenix
Kalki Koechlin: Margarita, With A Straw
Ellen Dorrit Petersen: Blind
Karidja Touré: Girlhood

The welcome surprise of this category was not just the sheer amount of performances I had to leave out of it (from, among others, The Tribe, The Keeping Room, Hungry Hearts, The New Girlfriend and The Duke of Burgundy) but the fact that I had never even heard of three of these actresses before the festival.  Ellen Dorrit Petersen is heartbreaking as a woman dealing with loss (that of her sight) in Blind, Karidja Touré makes a boundlessly charismatic debut in Girlhood and Kalki Koechlin is moving and brilliantly detailed in Margarita, With A Straw.  But...

WINNER: Nina Hoss
Nina Hoss is one the best actresses working in any language right now, and she's seldom better than when she is paired with Christian Petzold, having served as his muse since 2003's Wolfsburg.  Phoenix' take on Vertigo is their second riff on a classic noirish text.  Hoss plays a concentration camp survivor who undergoes extensive plastic surgery (saying she wants to look as much like her old self as possible) to cover her injuries.  On meeting the husband she thought dead she finds that he doesn't recognise her, but is struck by her resemblance to his wife, so much so that he asks her to 'pose' as his wife.  The layers in Hoss' performance are vivid and detailed, and everything, by design, plays on her extraordinary face, right up to the devastatingly powerful final two scenes.

Best Screenplay
Josephine Decker / David Barker: Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
Julia Hart: The Keeping Room

Francois Ozon: The New Girlfriend
Christian Petzold / Harun Farocki: Phoenix
Céline Sciamma: Girlhood

One thing that strikes me about the screenplays here is that while they all have some memorable lines, none of them are really built around dialogue.  The ambiguity of mood in Thou Wast Mild and Lovely begins with Decker and Barker's screenplay, while The Keeping Room's screenplay weaves layers of modern metaphor into its depiction of the American Civil war.  Of the three foreign language screenplays Francois Ozon's The New Girfriend comes closest to taking the prize, with its balance of kitsch comedy, raw emotion and strong characterisation.

WINNER: Celine Sciamma: Girlhood
Celine Sciamma's Girlhood, like her previous two films, takes the broad strokes familiar from hundreds of teen and coming of age movies and views them from a sympathetic, ground level, point of view.  Coming from a filmmaker who is 15 years older than her characters and from a very different background the apparent authenticity, transcending stereotypes, of the interactions between the characters is highly impressive.  The structure is another strength, unfolding in several acts of roughly twenty minutes each, always advancing the characters organically but incrementally as it goes on, while keeping a loose, organically driven, feel to the film.  It's the film that feels least written, and that's perhaps why it wins here.

Best Cinematography
Fabio Cianchetti: Hungry Hearts

Ashley Connor: Butter on the Latch / Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
Crystel Fournier: Girlhood
Nicholas D. Knowland: The Duke of Burgundy
Martin Ruhe: The Keeping Room

I cheated a little bit here by nominating Ashley Connor for both Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, but I really can't separate the two.  Connor has such a definable style and though it grows between the two films there is real continuity between them.  Nicholas D. Knowland might be the obvious choice here for the dreamlike, gorgeous imagery of The Duke of Burgundy, but Martin Ruhe's work in The Keeping Room, while going for a more mainstream approach, also brought beauty and artistic framing to the grindhouse.  The shifting look of Hungry Hearts, which goes from brightly lit rom-com to surreally paranoid shot horror, was a real surprise, and some of the more unusual technique on show at LFF.

WINNER: Crystel Fournier: Girlhood

Fournier has shot all three of Celine Sciamma's feature films, and they have clearly built an understanding and a style together.  Girlhood is their most designed, most expansive and most cinematic work to date, but it wears its technique lightly.  Much of the film has a realistic style, putting us in amongst the girls it is about, and making it all the more striking when, as in the first scene, or the stunning sequence set to Rihanna's Diamonds, Fournier and Sciamma go for something more stylised.  Beautifully and meaningfully framed throughout and carrying recurring themes (for instance the fact every act break features a shot of Marieme's back), Girlhood marks a big maturation in Sciamma's already strong visuals.

Best Score/Soundtrack/Use of Music

Girlhood: Use of Light Asylum, Rihanna / Score by Para One
Kelly & Cal: Song by Wetnap, sung by Juliette Lewis 
Phoenix: Speak Low, sung by Nina Hoss
Tokyo Tribe: Songs
Whiplash: Final drum solo

Film is my first obsession, music is my second, and I love the many ways in which the two intersect.  In fact several of the very best moments of the films at LFF this year revolved around that intersection.  The final scene of Phoenix, in which Nina Hoss, with a beautiful voice I never knew she had, sings Speak Low is a gut punch of a moment that echoes long after the credits roll.  The same goes for the lengthy drum solo that closes Whiplash in an explosion of every feeling Miles Teller's Andrew has bottled up during the film.  Tokyo Tribe is a musical, completely powered by its hip hop beats and (sometimes inexpertly) rapped plot and character developing songs, it's unlikely to be to everyone's taste, but I found it huge fun.

WINNER: Girlhood
I pretty much knew that Girlhood had this category sewn up the second it started.  The opening sequence, set to Light Asylum's Dark Allies is incredibly striking and energetic and sets the tone both musically and for the story of the film in using a song powerfully delivered by a young black woman.  Then there's the sequence set to Diamonds; a key moment of character development for Marieme and a sequence that redefines the song for me.  It's not a song I like outside of this context, but seeing what it means to the audience it is for, and how it draws the girls together, gives it power that it lends to the film.  Add in a brilliant chilled electro score by Sciamma's regular collaborators Para One and you've got a film as rich musically as it is visually and as a story.

Biggest Surprise
The Duke of Burgundy
The Keeping Room
The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow
The Town That Dreaded Sundown
Waiting For August

Surprises came in many forms at this year's LFF (as did disappointments, but we won't talk about those). Satellite Girl and Milk Cow was surprising purely in its completely barmy plot, while Waiting For August and The Keeping Room were both films I wanted to see, expected to like, but was surprised by the specifics of (even after watching it in the case of Waiting For August) and The Duke of Burgundy was a film expected to dislike, on the precedent of Peter Strickland's last film, but found myself falling for.

WINNER: The Town That Dreaded Sundown
At first glance this was an almost completely unappealing prospect; yet another remake of yet another cult horror classic (albeit one I haven't yet seen).  I expected it to follow the blueprint to the letter; drab visuals, stupid and/or hateable characters, overexplained killer, rote deaths, abysmal writing, a sense of 'well, that's good enough' to the whole thing.  That's not what this film is, indeed it's as inventive a remake as I've seen for a long time.  Ambitiously folding the original film into the fiction it spins, this film both pays tribute to the history of horror and uses it as fodder to make something interesting.  It's stylish, directed with verve and an interesting, magpie like, eye, solidly acted and loads of fun.  Definitely the surprise of the festival.


One To Watch
Bruna Amaya: Actress, Casa Grande
Chiara D'Anna:  Actress, The Duke of Burgundy
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: Director, The Town That Dreaded Sundown
Teodora Mihai: Director, Waiting For August
Assa Sylla: Actress, Girlhood

One of the things I like best about a festival is the opportunity to discover new talent.  I decided to include people who I haven't nominated for any other awards here, because otherwise the category would be too crowded with the aforementioned likes of Kalki Koechlin, Joesphine Decker, Ashley Connor and Miles Teller.  What that list and the one above reflect is how great a year this has been at LFF for female talent, both in front of and behind the camera.  It's something I hope we see more of, especially in behind the camera roles.

Bruna Amaya is an interesting choice here, because I didn't love Casa Grande, but in discussing it with a critic friend that evening we agreed that she give a nicely nuanced performance and had a warm presence that left us anxious to see more of her.  The other actresses listed here are the same, they draw you into their films and their roles effortlessly, but otherwise they couldn't be more different; Assa Sylla is all bravado as Lady, the leader of Girlhood's gang of girls while Chiara D'Anna seems like a beautiful apparition teleported in from a Jean Rollin film to appear in Duke of Burgundy.  The directors couldn't be more different.  Alfonso Gomez-Rejon finds an interesting style by playing around with as many 70's and 80's horror influences as he can, but manages to make it all feel like more than empty homage, while Teodora Mihai drew me so deeply in to the experience of the family in Waiting For August I never knew whether I was watching documentary or fiction, but was enthralled either way.

I'm not choosing a winner here.  These people should all be on your radar.

The 24FPS Awards 2013

Whenever I sit down to write and record the review of the year in movies (a 3 part podcast series is underway) I end up asking myself one key question... what kind of year has it been?  Last year was, for me, an historic low, one that threatened my dedication to new cinema and saw me struggle to complete a Top 10, while at the same time having enough for a list of the 30 worst films of that year.  2013, to my immense relief, has been an improvement.

However, this hasn't for my money been the historically excellent year that many people have pegged it as.  2013 has been a year of highs and lows; it delivered the first film I've felt happy to call a masterpiece since I saw Dogtooth in 2009, but it also, for me, was jam packed with movies that, while not all of them were terrible, were extremely disappointing and baffled me with their critical reception.  On the whole, from what I've seen, it's been a perfectly middling year for film.  There are movies, good and bad, from 2013 that I'll carry with me in the future but there are many more I've already forgotten.

With all this said, here are the 24FPS Awards for 2013.  These are purely personal picks, not predictions for the upcoming award season (which I hate anyway).  The films I've considered eligible are those released in UK cinemas or as DVD or Blu Ray premieres in 2013 as well as the handful of festival films I saw that have not yet gained distribution deals in the UK.

BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow: Zero Dark Thirty
Fernando Franco: Wounded
Richard Linklater: Before Midnight
Francois Ozon: In The House
Park Chan-Wook: Stoker

WINNER: Park Chan-wook

I don't say this lightly but - deep breath - I think Stoker is essentially a perfectly directed film.  I don't mean that it is a perfect film as a whole, but it seems that it is an exercise in supreme and supremely beautiful directorial control from Park Chan-Wook. The watchword here is precision; Park conducts this film, the clarity of each moment and the rhythm of the piece as a whole are individually stunning and complement each other beautifully, revealing new depths every time you revisit the film (I'm on my sixth watch since March)


BEST ACTOR
Matthew Goode: Stoker
Ethan Hawke: Before Midnight
Caleb Landry-Jones: Antiviral
Matthew McConaughey: Mud
Jack Reynor: What Richard Did

WINNER: Ethan Hawke

For my money, Ethan Hawke is one of the most underrated actors working right now and if the Golden Globe nominations are anything to go by he's about to get screwed again because despite the fact that he turns in career best work in Before Midnight, adding a deeper melancholy to a now middle-aged Jesse, he has been passed over while his co-star Julie Delpy has been nominated.  Hawke rips your heart out with the smallest things in this performance; the hurt when Celine doesn't pass him the phone after speaking to his son; the way he receives one devastating line from Delpy and the quiet desperation of the film's final moments.  However, this is also still the Jesse we recognise; sometimes playful, sometimes pretentious, it's like seeing an old friend again and finding him the same but different.  It's masterful acting.


BEST ACTRESS
Marian Alvarez: Wounded
Julie Delpy: Before Midnight
Isabelle Huppert: Abuse of Weakness
Cosmina Stratan: Beyond The Hills
Mia Wasikowska: Stoker

WINNER: Marian Alvarez

I honestly thought about making this category a five way tie (and, so good a year was it for female leads, I could have added five more with no struggle), but ultimately I just can't deny or overstate how deeply I felt Marian Alvarez' performance in the as yet undistributed Wounded.  There is definitely a degree of personal experience leaking in to my admiration for this performance, because I've never seen the experience and the feeling of clinical depression and anxiety better captured on screen.  Alvarez' performance is scrupulously real, but what she and the film never lose sight of is the lengths people will go to to hide problems like this, and she draws distinctions between the (effective) mask she usually shows the world and the glimpses of the vibrant person the depression often hides.  It's a layered performance, and perhaps you need to have been there to get the most from it, but I was blown away.


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Barkhad Abdi: Captain Phillips
Jason Clarke: Zero Dark Thirty
Matthew McConaughey: Bernie
Lars Mikkelsen: What Richard Did

WINNER: Jason Clarke

Jason Clarke has been cropping up in supporting roles and doing solid work for a few years now.  In fact, so good has he been that I've not spotted him from film to film, but Zero Dark Thirty is where he throws down a marker.  For me his character is one that gives the lie to the idea that the film simply brushes concerns about torture under the rug.  It's a subtle performance, but we do see how performing 'enhanced interrogations' affects this man, and the way he tries to mask it with bravado to Jessica Chastain's Maya.  He also shows a great ability to show how the character must slip between gears, whether in interrogations or from that active role to a more passive one sitting round tables in meetings.  The character seems thin to begin with, but Clarke does a lot with it; the mark of a real talent.


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Doona Bae: Cloud Atlas
Kaitlyn Dever: Short Term 12
Cristina Flutur: Beyond the Hills
Rosana Pastor: Wounded

WINNER: Cristina Flutur

Beyond the Hills was a late entry into my Top 10, but I was knocked out both by the film and by the two central performances (each is as good as the other, but I decided I shouldn't have ties, which is why only Cristina Flutur has won her category).  Flutur is heart-wrenching as Alina; a young woman reunited with a friend (and likely lover) from her younger days in an orphanage, who finds that friendship changed because her friend has become an orthodox nun and now only want to take care of Alina.  Like Marian Alvarez, Flutur is playing a character with undiagnosed (and in this case misunderstood) mental illness, but while the way that storyline works out is tragic the real sadness comes at watching her try to find a way back into relationship that is now gone forever.  It's a raw performance, and easy to identify with.


BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
Adele Exarchopolous: Blue Is The Warmest Colour
Chloe Pirrie: Shell
Waad Mohammed: Wadjda
Keith Stanfield: Short Term 12
Marine Vacth: Jeune Et Jolie

WINNER: Waad Mohammed

I hope that we will be seeing much more from everyone on this list but, though I've been talking about it for well over a year now, Waad Mohammed's wonderfully sparky but entirely unforced performance in Wadjda still stands out for me, even in what is a good field.  I love how the film doesn't impose its themes on the character, but instead lets her simply be a kid and trusts that the larger themes will come good because there is something recognisable in Wadjda, even for someone who grew up in a completely different situation.  Mohammed strikes just the right notes in playing Wadjda's different relationships; to her Mother, her Father, her teacher and her cheekier interactions with the boy next door and other people she meets.  I think what I like most about this performance is what it lacks; the forced precociousness that you can feel from child stars, instead a natural charisma just jumps off the screen.


BEST SCREENPLAY
Brandon Cronenberg: Antiviral
Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater: Before Midnight
Skip Hollandsworth, Richard Linklater: Bernie
Francois Ozon: In The House
Fernando Franco, Enric Rufas: Wounded

WINNER: Francois Ozon

Thank God that Francois Ozon had two films out this year, because this way I can somewhat wash away the sour taste of Jeune et Jolie (perhaps his single worst film) by reminding myself that he also delivered In the House, which may not be his best film, but is almost certainly his most interesting and his finest screenplay.  The writing here is a masterclass in juggling tone; there is a playful vein of comedy as literature teacher Germain encourages a student to continue writing a voyeuristic story about the family of a fellow student, but Ozon also maintains a sense of tension; a threat underlying the whole story.  At yet another level the screenplay works as a very funny analysis of storytelling, with Ozon almost goading the audience, daring them to figure out where the narrative will go next.  It's a confident work that shows off Ozon at his best, which is why Jeune et Jolie baffles me so much.


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Christos Voudouris: Before Midnight
Lukasz Zal: Ida
Yoliswa Gartig: Shell
Chung Chung-Hoon: Stoker

WINNER: Chung Chung-Hoon

I saw some dazzling sights in the cinema this year, but no award was more assuredly sewn up than this one, I think it was over by the time the opening credits ended the first time I saw Stoker.  The composition and lighting of Stoker are so precise, so perfect, that I can see how it might disconnect some viewers from the film.  For me it was quite the reverse, this was the first film for ages that I wanted simply to dive into, to break down shot by shot because I could tell just how much every frame might hold (there will be more of this in the Top 10 podcast).  For me the shot (and the edit) of the year was the moment that Park dissolves in a perfect match from a brush running through Nicole Kidman's hair to a field of reeds.  That moment, and a hundred others, have stuck with me since March.


BEST SCORE/SOUNDTRACK
Bikini Kill, Kathleen Hanna, Le Tigre, The Julie Ruin: The Punk Singer
Christophe Beck / Richard Lopez / Kristen Anderson-Lopez: Frozen
M83: Oblivion
Cliff Martinez: Only God Forgives
Clint Mansell: Stoker

WINNER: Frozen

I grew up on Disney movies, but had felt disconnected from their non-Pixar efforts for some time until Tangled came along a few years ago.  That film, along with Frozen, seems to be ushering in a new golden age for the studio.  Frozen is a brilliant film; driven by its characters and taking a slightly unusual approach to Disney tropes, retaining fairytale ideas, but not simply having a handsome guy save a princess.  It's combined with a great set of songs which range from the comedic to the heartwarming to the dramatic.  Let It Go (see above) is the crucial point of the film, establishing a different sort of 'villain' that you can still identify with, and Idina Menzel's barnstorming delivery of it turns what had looked like an entirely standard Disney movie into something else (something better) in three minutes.


SCENE OF THE YEAR
The hotel room: Before Midnight
Alina is read a list of sins: Beyond The Hills
Piano duet: Stoker
Richard tells his Dad what happened: What Richard Did
Killing Bin Laden: Zero Dark Thirty

WINNER: Before Midnight [SPOILERS BELOW]

Even with a great film (and all those listed above are great films) there will always be a moment or a scene that will stick out in the memory above the rest and 2013 brought many of them (I could have also picked moments from Wounded or Stop the Pounding Heart or Captain Phillips or... you get the idea), ultimately though this was another category with almost no competition in it.  The 25 minutes or so that Before Midnight spends with Jesse and Celine in a hotel room are the most heart in mouth moments of cinema that 2013 delivered.  We've grown to love these people, individually and as a couple and to see them have a real argument - not something that will go away in five minutes, but a fight that might end their relationship - is genuinely upsetting.  I was on the verge of tears the whole time, and then broke when Celine says a line I could never have imagined I'd hear going into this film.  That moment hits like a punch to the gut, and that's why Before Midnight has no real competition here.

24FPS @ LFF 2012: My LFF Awards

The London Film Festival never used to have awards, but in 2012 it's embraced the idea of a festival competition more than ever before, with three competition strands.  So, just before my Top and Bottom 5's of the fest, and my final 4 reviews, here are my personal awards (good and bad) drawn from the 58 films I saw at the festival this year.


Best Director

Athina Rachel Tsangarai: The Capsule
Runner Up: Jacques Audiard: Rust and Bone

This is the first time in any of the awards posts I've ever done on the site that one of the main awards has gone to a short film, but in purely cinematic terms, as a piece of visual art and as a sustained vision, The Capsule was easily the most impressive directorial work I saw on show at the festival.  Tsangarai draws inspiration from many other filmmakers (Lynch, Bunuel, Cronenberg), but also extends the personal style we saw in Attenberg.  The visuals are stunning, but so are the pacing and mood, and it all adds up to a hypnotic piece of work.

My runner up is Jacques Audiard, whose Rust and Bone is probably my film of the year at this point.  Audiard's depiction of violence, sex and depression is visceral, but he manages to combine it with some gorgeously stylised moments which, along with the brilliant performances, help convey the screenplay's complex set of mixed emotions.  It's a brilliantly balanced piece of work.


Best Actor

Matthias Schoenaerts: Rust and Bone
Runner Up: Kim Kold: Teddy Bear

I had not seen, nor even heard the name of, Matthias Schoenaerts before sitting down to watch Rust and Bone, and his performance was perhaps the one that hit hardest during the festival.  As Ali, Schoenaerts is never truly likeable, nor does he ever expect to or ask to be liked, but he lays the character so bare that we can't help but empathise with him.  There's a crackling energy to the performance that draws us to Ali despite his flaws, and allows us to understand why Marion Cotillard's Stephanie is also drawn to him, and Schoenaerts also allows a few cracks to show in the tough front Ali puts up.  It's a fantastically detailed piece of acting and often outright electrifying to watch.

Bodybuilder Kim Kold, my runner up, also plays an unconventional tough guy in Teddy Bear.  Kold's passive, almost painfully sweet, gentle giant is one of the most purely endearing characters I've seen for some time and his small and subtle performance quietly, but hugely, impressive.  I hope people see the film, maybe Kold's upcoming role in Fast 6 will encourage them.


Best Actress

Waad Mohammed: Wadjda
Runner Up: Shirley Henderson: Everyday

Waad Mohammed, just ten Wadjda was shot,  had bigger challenges than simply being the lead, and in almost every shot, in her first film.  The very act of starring in a film could have been dangerous for her, given that she and the rest of the cast were shooting in Saudi Arabia, where cinema itself is outlawed, under a female director who sometimes had to hide in the production's van and direct via radio, for fear that she'd be spotted.  That's not why Waad Mohammed has won here.  She's wonderful as Wadjda's central figure; a rebellious young Saudi girl who enters a Koran reading competition so she can buy the thing she wants most: a bike.  Mohammed is a naturally engaging presence, and she creates a spunky, somewhat cheeky, entirely likeable and relateable character who we end up feeling deeply for, meaning that we engage with the character first and the film's politics second.  I hope she gets the chance to make more films.

My runner up, Shirley Henderson, is much more experienced.  I've been a fan of Henderson's for years, and it's great to see her frequent collaborator Michael Winterbottom give her a role so good as the one she has in Everyday.  There's nothing showy in what Henderson does here, just an utterly convincing portrait of the day to day struggles, big and small, of a woman left to raise four kids while her husband is in prison.  She can be a quirky presence, but here Henderson is simply real, and simply great.


Best Screenplay

Francois Ozon: In the House
Runner Up: Mamoru Hosoda / Satoko Okudera: Wolf Children

Francois Ozon has made many great films (don't argue this with me, we really will be here all day), but he may never have made one as interesting from a writing standpoint as In the House.  The screenplay as as sharp and witty as you could hope for; Chabrolian in its barbed class commentary, and it's tense enough that the Hitchcock comparisons that have been thrown around are entirely warranted, but the real greatness of the writing here is how playful the script is.  Ozon messes with us at every turn, almost begging us to guess his plot twists, then mocking us for trying and taking the plot in a direction we didn't guess.  He plays with characterisation, making the bourgeois family his main character writes about thin enough characters that they could be fictional even within the film's universe, but rounded enough to hold our attention, and he plays with form, having characters offer commentary on the writing of a scene as it is unfolding.  It's a dazzling piece of multilayered screenwriting.

Wolf Children is also a script with many layers, filtering its story of two children coming of age and the single mother struggling to raise them through a magical fantasy twist, through which Mamoru Hosoda and co writer Satoko Okudera bring their essential story home all the more powerfully.



Best Cinematography

Robbie Ryan: The Summit / Ginger and Rosa
Runner Up: Tobias Datum: Kiss of the Damned

I had many problems with Ginger and Rosa, but Robbie Ryan's cinematography was not one of them.  Ryan's gauzy, dreamlike, lensing of much of the film gives it the feel of a half-remembered childhood (which fits the elliptical structure that undermines the storytelling so much), while his starker rendering of other scenes gives the film a sense of time and place, and of the two girls growing up too fast.  It's a film so beautiful I wished it were better.  Demonstrating his versatility, Ryan also acted as DP for the reconstruction scenes that made The Summit the one documentary I saw at the festival which really cried out to be seen at a cinema, the reconstructions have both staggering beauty and visceral immediacy, the mix serving the film brilliantly.

Tobias Datum's work on Kiss of the Damned is incredibly stylised; channeling the gaudy, somewhat cheesy, beauty of the films of exploitation directors like Jean Rollin.  He captures the impossibly beautiful cast at their best, and, with director Xan Cassavettes, crafts a look that pays tribute to other filmmakers but also gives the film its own very particular feel.


Best Score/Soundtrack/Use of Music

Firework by Katy Perry: Used in Rust and Bone
Runner Up: Still Light by The Knife: Used in Jeff

The second time that Katy Perry's Firework is played in Rust and Bone, I almost cried.  Shut up, you'd understand if you'd seen the film.  The film completely changes the song for me, from a very lightweight pop record to something much closer to the inspirational tune Perry was clearly reaching for.  The scene is beautiful, and the way Firework lifts what is a tiny victory for Marion Cotillard's character and makes us understand and share what it means to her is incredibly moving.  It's an unlikely and brilliant soundtrack choice.

Jeff, the documentary about Jeffrey Dahmer, uses the dark and menacing electro of The Knife's brilliant third album, Silent Shout a couple of times during its dramatic scenes (which really don't work), but it's the choice of the album's closing track Still Light for the end credits that really stays with you, as it is much more effective than any of the reconstructions at conjuring the desperately creepy and disturbing nature of Dahmer's crimes, through Karin Dreijer Andersson's darkly pretty and haunting voice.



One to Watch

Chloe Pirrie: Shell
Runners Up: Caleb Landry-Jones: Antiviral / Sakura Ando: For Love's Sake / The Samurai That Night

Shell was one of the first films I saw at the festival this year, and while it has dropped out of my festival Top 5 (coming soon), Chloe Pirrie's leading performance has stayed with me.  The restraint and subtlety with which she and co-star Joseph Mawle play the strangeness in the relationship between their father and daughter characters gives the film a fascination and a darkness that really pulls you in, and Pirrie impresses with the straightforward reality of her performance.  We saw a lot of so called realism at the festival this year, and many of those performances felt very acted, Pirrie's doesn't.  Shell will hopefully pull in an audience when it comes out, but at the very least it should act as a calling card for Pirrie, I'll be looking forward to what she does next.

Caleb Landry Jones is clearly a hugely versatile actor, and despite his extremely distinctive look I only realised on looking him up after Antiviral that I had already seen him as the weird brother of Ashley Bell's 'possession' victim in The Last Exorcism and as Banshee in X-Men First Class.  He totally disappears again in Antiviral, anchoring the film with a withdrawn but mesmerising performance that signals an interesting young character actor.

Sakura Ando immediately impressed me in Sion Sono's brilliant Love Exposure, but her one two punch of small supporting roles in this year's LFF have convinced me that she's someone to be very excited about.  As well as undoubted talent, Ando has something you can't buy or fake: presence.  She appears in one scene in The Samurai That Night, but it's one of the most memorable, and she's only fourth lead in For Love's Sake, but when she appears you can't take your eyes off her.  I can't wait to see more.


Right, that's enough of being nice.  Here are some of the festival's low points.


Worst Actor

Gulshan Deviah: Peddlers
Runner Up: Jay Paulson: Black Rock

To be entirely fair to Gulshan Deviah, everyone in Peddlers is dreadful, and the film itself is a rampagingly awful, tonally broken, disaster.  I don't think he ever had a shot at being good in it.  That said... oh boy is he bad here.  Playing a bad boy cop, Deviah is laughable; he's far too clean cut for the role, barely able to hide that charming movie star grin (pictured).  The scenes in which he's meant to be most objectionable (like when he force feeds a woman cocaine) are unintentionally hilarious, because there's no sense of darkness in his performance, and frequently you feel like you're watching Deviah run through a scene and that the camera has simply been left running.  Even funnier are the 'brooding' scenes as the character tries to hide his erectile dysfunction.  You get the very real sense that Deviah is embarrassed even to suggest this about himself, and every scene feels incredibly awkwardly played.  It's the most patently acted male performance I saw at the festival.

Jay Paulson doesn't fare much better in the considerably better film, Black Rock, in which he's the sole major weak link.  It's a problem when the main antagonist in a horror film doesn't work, and Paulson doesn't.  He starts out pretty wooden, but becomes hammier as each scene passes until he's off the deep end by the film's third act.  It's an unbalancing performance in an otherwise pleasingly low key film.


Worst Actress

Christina Hendricks: Ginger and Rosa
Runner Up: Liv Tyler: Robot and Frank

Even leaving aside the fact that she is totally miscast as Elle Fanning's mother, Christina Hendricks is impossible to take seriously in Ginger and Rosa.  In a film packed with American actors inexplicably cast as Brits, Hendricks is the one who struggles most.  Her attempt at an English accent is hilariously awful, and sounds for all the world like it's coming out of another actress (who also can't do an English accent).  What's really painful though is how apparent it is that Hendricks is working really hard at her accent, so hard in fact that she has completely forgotten to act.  There's no inflection, no variation, just a flat, laughably overcooked, accent.  That said, the conversation she has about pie is nearly worth the ticket price on its own.

From someone who is working far too hard to someone who is not working hard enough, to basically the same end.  In Robot and Frank - a largely charming but already comprehensively overrated film - Liv Tyler appears to have recently woken from a coma and been wheeled on to set to play Frank Langella's daughter.  Tyler's a variable actress, and this is one long off day, as she turns in a barely conscious, only occasionally inflected performance that threatened to send me to sleep.


Worst Score/Soundtrack/Use of Music

Michael Nyman: Everyday
Runner Up: Karan Kulkarni: Peddlers

Everyday is a hugely affecting and emotional film.  I bought into everything; the process of the kids growing up without their dad, the wrenching feelings on both sides for their parents, the day to day struggles and feeling of imprisonment for Shirley Henderson's Karen and the love between her and John Simm's Ian.  Score can augment those things, provided it does so with a little restraint, and that's where Michael Nyman went wrong here.  Nyman and Michael Winterbottom simply slather Everyday in a gloopy score that essentially bellows at the audience about how they should be feeling at any given moment.  It's a miracle that the film survives it, especially as it ends on a real crescendo of emotion, brutally undercut by the score blaring away.

Peddlers has a different sort of bad score.  To go with the 'edgy' tone of the film Karan Kulkarni uses a lot of modern dance music... or some approximation thereof.  The dance and club music in Peddlers is painfully generic, sounding like the stock music that TV shows used to be reduced to using when the characters went to a club but the budget wouldn't stretch to licencing any actual bands.  It's utterly devoid of personality, and really doesn't fit with the film at all.