For what it's worth: 2011 awards special - part two

Best British Actor
1. Brendan Gleeson, The Guard
I remain mixed on the merits of John Michael McDonagh's comedy, which identifies a comic formula early on and persists without too much variation, but its best quality - a wry scepticism - is embodied in Gleeson's towering central performance. Few actors this year have been able to accomplish so much, suggest so much battered humanity, by apparently doing so little: Gleeson gets big laughs simply from standing stock still in the drizzle, and looking mildly, understandably pissed off.

2. Peter Mullan, Tyrannosaur
Another of this actor's increasingly skilful, thoughtful variations on the hard man theme (previously observed back in January's NEDs): Mullan's Joseph begins and ends the film beating poor, defenceless dogs to death, and in between does something almost unimaginable - winning the audience's sympathies, without taking any obvious shortcuts.

3. Tom Hardy, Warrior
That the "British Brando" tag didn't sound entirely laughable, in this instance, was down to the sheer physical heft of Hardy's performance - one in which every flinch, every twitch of every muscle, appeared properly considered and worked through. After Jean Dujardin in The Artist, the year's second great performance without words.

4. Neil Maskell, Kill List
5. Michael Smiley, Kill List
They came as a pair (as did Tom Cullen and Chris New in Weekend, which these boys just edged out, finally - all entendres, single and multiple, only partly intended): Maskell, erstwhile fatboy and comic relief in the likes of The Football Factory, very nearly as great a revelation as Olivia Colman in Tyrannosaur (see below), the agonies of the plot writ large upon his newly slimline features; Smiley the joker in the pack, injecting whatever levity Ben Wheatley's film could spare us in sly, scene-stealing dispatches.

Best British Actress
1. Olivia Colman, Tyrannosaur
For turning Peep Show's Sophie into Aileen Wuornos, and never letting us see the joins.

2. Samantha Morton, The Messenger
An actors' film, in part because of the fine screenwriting made available to them: I wanted to get Woody Harrelson and the increasingly essential Ben Foster into the Best Actor list, but the competition was too great. Foster's performance, in particular, depends on the heart-to-hearts he shares with Morton, who plays grief in ways we haven't really seen on screen before: quietly, spacily, not quite in the room. Fascinating work, as ever from this actress.

3. Juno Temple, Kaboom
A sexual sherbet fountain, thus combining two of my very favourite things in the world. (And a demonstration of how the uptight British cinema routinely squanders the effervescent sensuality of its younger actresses in sniggering nonsense like the St. Trinian's films.)

4. Carey Mulligan, Shame
Speaking of which... As may have become apparent from my comments elsewhere, I'm firmly mixed on the film itself, which I find alienating beyond its initial remit, but it's true that it starts to make most sense when Mulligan bursts into the picture, and there's finally something at stake other than whether or not its protagonist is going to get his end away. Her openness actively challenges Fassbender's more autistic acting choices, and results in three or four of Shame's sharpest, best defined scenes.

5. Felicity Jones, Chalet Girl
Because the British film industry has a genuine star on its hands, not that it quite realises it yet.

Best Screenwriter
1. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball
The real achievement is not that they make baseball statistics comprehensible, but that they can get us to care - and the collaborative aspect is fascinating: you get the smart, pacy scenes of Sorkinese confrontation (Pitt withholding from Hoffman that one of his players has been transferred out, and won't be playing), but Zaillian - and the director, Bennett Miller - give the film the context, the considered pauses, within which such sequences become doubly effective. The result is a film that feels less showy than The Social Network, while communicating much the same high level of information on its given subject.

2. David Michôd, Animal Kingdom
I'd describe it as textbook dramatic screenwriting, if that didn't sound so tedious: Michôd writes scenes that somehow puts each character in the middle of the room, before offering them four different ways out - some of them, in this criminal context, clearly ways out forever. Yet the script's surest of structures shouldn't overshadow his ear for low-key menace, brilliantly expressed here in the family's living-room banter.

3. Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman, The Messenger
Not surprising that a pair of writers should, collectively, have arrived at some of the best two-sided conversations of the year: the blokey, funny in-car badinage between Foster and Harrelson was perhaps a given, but those scenes in which these men break news of deaths overseas to variously numbed, distraught and furious Army parents were penned with tremendous skill and care. More surprising and accomplished yet was the perceptive nature of those heart-to-hearts between these men and the women in their lives.

4. Kenneth Lonergan, Margaret
No denying that the writing here marks an improvement on the already considerable accomplishments of Lonergan's directorial 2000 debut You Can Count on Me: more expansive, ambitious, explosive, even. He really does write terrific confrontations: everyone in the film is pissed off at something, whether they're in a classroom, trying to talk on the phone while their brother is tunelessly bashing at a piano, or at the scene of a horrific road traffic accident. The latter - a verbal 360-degree pan around not just this out-of-the-blue tragedy, but seemingly all of Manhattan at its most jittery - yields one of the most gripping stretches of cinema I've seen all year, while giving Allison Janney (in what's almost literally a walk-on part) an outside shot at Supporting Actress prizes. The script contains almost everything that's great about Margaret; again, as I've stated elsewhere, I just wish Lonergan had been allowed back in the editing room to finish the film.

5. Asghar Farhadi, A Separation
I think Farhadi's direction is what finally makes the film (see below), but his screenwriting has, surely, to have contributed to the sense of a domestic spiralling rapidly out of control - I like the unusual avenues he opens up for himself and his actors to explore, the way things don't quite implode or explode in quite the way one would expect. If nothing else, he deserves major respect for proposing, with all seriousness, the most symbolic use of a black plastic bin bag in all cinema.


Best Director
1. Asghar Farhadi, A Separation
The film couldn't be shot any less like social realism; even while inhabiting its interior spaces, it's closer to watching a live News 24 feed from a warzone. We sense anything within the frame can blow up - and when it does, Farhadi is on the spot to show us the consequences.

2. Jeff Nichols, Take Shelter
Malick begat David Gordon Green, who begat Jeff Nichols. And lo, the student proved as interested in what's going on on the ground, between his very human, very fragile characters, as he was in filling the screen with vast, brooding, ominous skies; and as interested in what was going on in effects work and the contemporary horror movie as he was in making a big-canvas American art movie. A fresh pair of relentlessly open eyes.

3. Lars von Trier, Melancholia
No denying the vision underpinning Lars's latest: bleak, yes, but simultaneously grandiose, operatic, painterly in its opening and closing stretches - like an unlikely mindmeld of Millais and Michael Bay. The wedding scenes, full of monodimensional caricatures, probably wouldn't work without the Trier sense of mischief to guide us through to the more serious business - and, for once, around the Dunst character and her mental turmoil, you really do sense he's being serious. (Which is presumably why, defensive as ever, he felt the need to josh his way through the Cannes press conference, with such disastrous results.)

4. Gavin O'Connor, Warrior
Old-school showbusiness clout: he makes it work. And incidentally made me forget the film was 140 minutes long.

5. Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Yes, there's still some of the hippy-dippy, hello-sunshine-hello-clouds windiness of The Thin Red Line and The New World in there, but when it clicks, it really is transcendent, or close to it. And no-one else would have been able to get Rupert Murdoch to shell out for a film taking us from The Beginning to the afterlife via apologetic dinosaurs and levitating redheads, then got him (or his minions) to put the result into multiplexes, to dazzle and baffle in equal measure. Direction that states: this is what the cinema is capable of.

Lists of the twenty best (and ten worst) movies of 2011 will run on this site in the first week of the New Year.