Impediments: "The King's Speech" and "127 Hours" (ST 09/01/11)

The King’s Speech (12A) 118 mins ****
127 Hours (15) 94 mins ****

The King’s Speech concerns itself with the historical implications of a stutter. In one corner, it has Colin Firth’s Duke of York, soon to be George VI, wrestling with the speech impediment that has rendered public speaking a nightmare. In the other, we find Hitler, a leader whose very appeal lay in his oratorical skills. Closer to home, George V (Michael Gambon) is marching towards the gravest of silences, and the Duke’s brother Edward (Guy Pearce) can talk solely of that Simpson woman. The need for someone to step up to the plate – or radio microphone – grows ever greater: it’s a film in which the Empire is threatened not by war, but dead air.

Drafted in to address this vacuum is Harley Street speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a garrulous Australian with a fondness for garish interior design. The Duke’s sessions with Logue form the film’s dramatic meat, but a full British repertory is on hand to observe their progress. Helena Bonham Carter is loving, eccentric, and nigh-perfect casting as the young Queen Mum; Derek Jacobi is a fretting Archbishop of Canterbury, approaching the coronation like a church fête threatened by rain; Timothy Spall offers a sly Churchill.

You soon intuit why they were drawn to David Seidler’s fine screenplay: its raw material is language itself. Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare becomes a touchstone: Logue auditions as Richard III for a local am-dram group, George finds solace in Hamlet. In the part of real-life troubled prince, Firth continues his series of increasingly skilful variations on a very English stiffness. Last year’s A Single Man, stylish yet silly, looked like a dress rehearsal for major prizes. This could well be his accession: a sustained and wholly sympathetic piece of precision technical acting that allows us to feel every word catching in George’s throat like a rogue fishbone.

It would be easy to underestimate Rush’s contribution here. Logue is hardly the most fragrant character – he first emerges to the sound of a flushing toilet – but his role is pristinely clear: to relieve the verbal and emotional constipation central to so many Firth performances, his treatment eventually cueing a most un-kingly torrent of curses. In such scenes, director Tom Hooper stresses his characters’ vocal rhythms, deploying off-kilter camera choices to suggest George’s unbalance: the King-to-be is rendered dumbstruck at one turn by the looming portraits of his illustrious predecessors.

What the film shares with The Queen is a way of getting us to think about the Royals less as an institution than as individuals weighed down by pomp and circumstance. George struggles with his words, Edward with his deeds, and both realise they must embrace New World modernity – whether American or Antipodean, radio or therapy – if they are to survive. Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are on hand, with corgis, to assure us there will be a happy ending of sorts, yet this quietly subversive drama approaches royalty with something altogether more probing than outright deference: this once, they are very much the subjects.


127 Hours runs to 94 minutes, and offers further proof – after Slumdog Millionaire, the film that couldn’t be contained – that, as a director, Danny Boyle thrives on the rush and the push of the chase. His latest protagonist, real-life extreme-sports enthusiast Aron Ralston (James Franco), first appears as a bounding big kid, relentlessly pursuing his own agenda – Boyle can barely keep him in frame, until that fateful slip while canyoneering in Utah that left Ralston’s arm trapped under a boulder. (With mordant wit, Boyle delays the title’s on-screen appearance until the arm is wedged firmly in place.) Henceforth, 127 Hours is just us, Ralston, the boulder, and the physical and mental tools our hero had remaining at his disposal.

Boyle and co-writer Simon Beaufoy work their crampons off dramatising Ralston’s dreams and worst fears: a sudden storm serves as its own watershed moment, prompting this erstwhile adrenalin junkie into weighing up what really matters. Yes, it gets grisly: there’s even a Dido song, which seems some way from Iggy Pop belting out “Lust for Life” in Trainspotting. Yet maybe this canyon is where all those junkies in Boyle’s previous movies were heading: not towards the facile highs of Slumdog, but a hit tempered with hard-won life experience. Ralston’s plight comes to demonstrate – vividly, graphically – just what that lust for life can get you. It's a trip, all right, but sometimes you have to give your right arm for it.

The King's Speech and 127 Hours open nationwide from tomorrow.

"It's Kind of a Funny Story" (Metro 07/01/11)

It’s Kind of a Funny Story (12A) 101 mins ***

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the writer-directors behind the lauded Half Nelson and Sugar, here venture into mainstream territory with a comedy-drama – adapted from Ned Vizzini’s 2006 novel – that turns a sharp, sensitive and timely eye to the growing concern of teenage depression. Beset by familiar stresses – academic pressure, diminished self-confidence, girl trouble – nervy high schooler Craig (Keir Gilchrist) checks himself into a psychiatric facility after a nocturnal flip-out on the Brooklyn Bridge. A rocky initiation ensues – there’s an especially unsettling midnight-hour encounter with a fellow patient (The Hangover’s Zach Galifianakis) who masquerades as a doctor – but our boy eventually comes to equip himself with a support network, and finds others need his help a good deal more than he does theirs.

It sounds the stuff of earnest young-adult fiction, but it’s a wry kind of funny, and Boden and Fleck display their usual, touching commitment to getting characters who’ve wandered into potentially overwhelming environments back onto something like the right track. Their sure touch with actors remains: likable newcomer Gilchrist is nudged along nicely by Galifianakis, doing unhinged in a more realistic key than Due Date permitted, and by the increasingly noteworthy Emma Roberts, as a self-harmer who offers Craig renewed encouragement. Countless teen movies over the years have served as a pick-me-up – the cinematic equivalent of scoffing a bag of Haribo in one go. Coming as a genuine antidote to the January blues, this is one of the few that might legitimately be described as therapeutic.

It's Kind of a Funny Story opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Doing time: "The Next Three Days"

Paul Haggis's The Next Three Days is another illustration of the advantage U.S. television presently has over cinema. Watching it, you may - as I did - find yourself longing for the nuance of the generally indelicate, Brett Ratner-produced debut season of Prison Break, which plotted a roughly similar course without any of Haggis's fuss and nonsense, and which knew exactly the pulp it had on its hands, without feeling the need to rebrand it like high-end organic apple juice. Its protagonist John Brennan (Russell Crowe) loves his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks), and is mystified when the police raid their house one night and carry her away on a murder charge. After Lara's appeals fail, and she attempts to take her own life, John elects to bust her out of chokey himself, with the aid of an ex-con (a flat-capped Liam Neeson, continuing his post-Star Wars slide into junk) and YouTube videos with titles such as How to Unlock Your Car With a Tennis Ball. Truly, the man's ingenuity knows no bounds.

In remaking 2008's French thriller Pour Elle/Anything for Her, Haggis - writer/director of the Oscar-winning Crash - has sought to add a veneer of class to proceedings. We're offered the dignified appearance of Brian Dennehy as Crowe's father (the father-son leavetaking is the sole moment of subtlety in the picture), and the hero is given a job teaching Don Quixote to perky uni students. "Couldn't it be about the triumph of irrationality?," one of them asks, and it's clear Cervantes is here being used to justify not only John Brennan's actions, but the way Haggis's wider plot keeps tilting, with increasing absurdity, at a variety of windmills. There's a major problem from the off, in that - despite an opening brouhaha in a fancy-pants restaurant with her brother-in-law's girlfriend over the thorny topic of gender roles in the modern workplace - you don't buy for a minute that the willowy Banks would be capable of braining someone with a fire extinguisher, much less that someone in her social position would be railroaded by the legal system for doing so.

There's also a credibility issue with the hero's steep learning curve. In the process of freeing Lara, Crowe's man of books will have to turn his hand to the lathe, in order to manufacture a so-called "bump key", such as might open any lock; he has also to get the shit kicked out of him while sourcing the phony passports that might effectuate their escape. During a prison visit, he's spurred on only further by his wife's exasperated accusation: "You really don't live in the same world we do". In other words, John Brennan has to prove himself in his wife's eyes as capable as she might have been of taking a life, or at least of taking action. (Listen out for Banks's gasp of breathy, delighted surprise when her screen husband finally gets his gun out in the back of an ambulance. Who's your daddy?)

In a film with weird echoes of Dustin Hoffman projects (Neeson references Papillon, and the scenes of Crowe fathering in the park feel indebted to Kramer vs. Kramer), we might read Brennan's predicament as a decorous, coffee-table retelling of Straw Dogs, which similarly insisted its bespectacled-intellectual hero needed to man up if he knew what was good for him and his wife; and while the nerdy Hoffman was well cast as a timorous thinker, Crowe is rather less well so: Haggis has, rather clumsily, to insert a shot of Big Russ's lower lip trembling during visiting hours to convince us of any sensitivity that needs going away. Essentially, then, we're waiting for the lead to start smashing heads together and doing what a man's gotta do - again, Haggis acknowledges as much with the teaser shot of our hero, bloodsoaked in a speeding car, slipped in just before the opening credits.

Between this and the recent Robin Hood, Crowe would appear to have a real public-perception problem, one that derives in part from a misunderstanding of what audiences responded to in his breakthrough success Gladiator a decade ago: that it was Maximus' romantic side we warmed to, rather than the rugged, taciturn sort knocking seven bells out of allcomers. There have been A-listers who've made it through their careers without having to shed a tear - you think of Cagney or Wayne, in whose manly tradition Crowe evidently falls - but the imposed sensitivity of The Next Three Days becomes neither the film nor the star, flagging up as it does another of the script's central implausibilities: the one of time management inscribed in the title. A hero obliged in the course of these two hours (or three days) to teach Dostoveysky, plot an elaborate jailbreak, undergo numerous heart-to-hearts with his wife, exfoliate, moisturise, and - whilst eluding what seems the entirety of the Pittsburgh Police Department - pick up his child from the zoo? Honestly, dear reader, you really won't know how he fits it all in.

The Next Three Days opens nationwide today.

2011 preview (ST 02/01/11)

Black Swan
Having celebrated the exertions of sweaty he-men in last year’s The Wrestler, a change of bodily emphasis for ever-limber director Darren Aronofsky: Natalie Portman is the ballerina on the verge of a breakdown in this hallucinatory psychothriller. (January 21)

NEDS
It’s been nine years since Scottish polymath Peter Mullan got behind the camera – but early word suggests this tale of 70s Glasgow tearaways (Non-Educated Delinquents, according to the acronym of the title) is every bit as admirably scabrous as 2002’s superb The Magdalene Sisters. (Jan 21)

True Grit
The Coens head into remake territory again, corralling some heavyweight acting talent (Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin) for their take on the Charles Portis novel that inspired the 1969 John Wayne Western. Has to be better than 2004’s The Ladykillers, surely. (Jan 14)

Attack the Block
It’s hoodies versus aliens – a cast-iron movie conceit – in the first feature from writer/director Joe Cornish, a.k.a. one half of perennially playful 6Music favourites Adam & Joe. This year’s Shaun of the Dead, providing it isn’t this year’s Scott Pilgrim. (April 8)

Pirates of the Caribbean 4
In a year of hardly pressing sequels (Big Momma’s House 3, anyone?), the return of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow will doubtless be the most prominent and money-spinning. It’s in 3D, too. Early summer places at Dignitas are still available, we gather. (May 18)

The Adventures of Tintin
On the plus side, it’s Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, collaborating to bring the world’s favourite boy detective to the screen with all their collective state-of-the-art movie nous. Against that: those are some awfully cherished childhood memories they’ll have to live up to. (October 26)

Hugo Cabret
Two firsts for Martin Scorsese in this adaptation of Brian Selznick’s graphic novel: it’s his first (non-Mafia) family film, and his first in 3D. Asa Butterfield plays the titular orphan, enmeshed in a mystery in 1930s Paris in what’s intended as 2011’s big seasonal offering. (December 9)

The Worst Films of 2010

10. Enter the Void
The question to ask about Gaspar Noe's latest provocation isn't the loaded "Is this pushing cinema in new directions?" but "In which direction does this push the cinema?", and I think that - for all its considerable technical and creative bravado - Enter the Void actually only bends us back towards the same empty-headed spectacle most Hollywood 3D product has been aiming for this year, albeit underpinned here by the misinformed sincerity of a Gap-yearer who's discovered Tokyo's red light area for the first time. When it was boring, it was at least as boring as anything in those stereoscopic let-downs Tron: Legacy or Alice in Wonderland - and the rest of the time it played like a terrible betrayal of its alleged source, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Noe couldn't care less about the soul, not when he has bodies to gawp at and penetrate; you don't come away from the film enlightened as feeling vaguely sullied.

9. Baaria
Bore-ier, more like. A tutsi-frutsi cartoon from Cinema Paradiso's Giuseppe Tornatore, telling the story of his ancestors in the Italian countryside, which dragged on like a relentless, sepia-tinted slideshow, or the world's longest Dolmio advert. Even some arbitrary nudity from Monica Bellucci (somewhat over-qualified in the role of "Bricklayer's Girlfriend") couldn't rouse the audience.

8. Tron: Legacy
10 PRINT "ZZZZZZ"
20 GOTO 10

7. The A-Team
Coming as it did from the director who made the preening Narc and the obnoxious Smokin' Aces, no good was perhaps likely to come of this - but did it really have to be this bad? At the press screening, critics rushed the screen to repeatedly kick and punch at the permanently smirking image of Bradley Cooper - and as for Liam Neeson's participation: well, after Taken last year, Clash of the Titans, The Next Three Days and this in 2010, he now gives the impression of an actor grieving not his late wife, but the remnants of his very soul.

6. Kick-Ass
You could asphyxiate on the toxic cloud of cynicism coming off this one, and it nags at me that so many respectable voices - i.e. non-slavering fanboys - continue to laud the strong-armed, jackbooted brutishness leading Conservative donor (and current coalition arts advisor) Matthew Vaughn has so far displayed throughout his career: this is, after all, the same individual who made his directorial debut with a film in which murder was forgiven, so long as drug dealer Daniel Craig could profit from it (Layer Cake), followed it up with a wantonly violent, destructive, not to mention homophobic family film (Stardust), and returned this year with what most often resembled an instructional video for adolescent sociopaths. (Frankly, Claudia Schiffer is welcome to him.) Vaughn displays the cold, hard, calculatingly corporate touch of a sometime producer who's worked out the most efficient way to deliver an audience to his studio paymasters, much as goons were hired in days of yore to bring the intended victims of kidnappings back to their captors. The paedophile debate sparked by the relation of Vaughan's camera to the foul-mouthed, short-skirted Hit Girl is almost an irrelevance; Kick-Ass is guilty of far greater crimes against the public and the cinema alike.

5. The Final
Laughably inept high-school slasher movie that might only have passed muster on video back in 1997; as released by Curzon Artificial Eye's supposedly upmarket distribution arm Chelsea Films, it proved an epic fail on every front.

4. Boogie Woogie
Just what the art world needed: its own Pret-a-Porter. At the end of ninety excruciating minutes of coke-addled monotony, you emerge certain that everyone involved in its production deserves chopping up and pickling in formaldehyde: Danny Huston and Gillian Anderson look to have forgotten how to act; Heather Graham once more displays her remarkable ability to pass through even unfundable shit such as this unsullied (she truly is the sweetcorn of actresses); Joanna Lumley and Christopher Lee wisely maintain some degree of distance, by appearing in the only strand that (vaguely) resembles a proper movie, rather than a shard of pretentious Hoxton twattery. Also starring: Alan Cumming, Jaime Winstone, Nuts favourite Gemma Atkinson. And we wonder why they axed the UK Film Council.

3. The Bounty Hunter
If we never see Gerard Butler upon our screens again, it will surely be too soon.

2. Garfield's Pet Force
Morally, of course, it's hard to make a case for this blink-and-you'll-miss-it, computer-generated schedule-filler being a worse film than Kick-Ass. Yet it seemed a greater betrayal of everything pop culture once stood for. Hell, of everything Garfield once stood (or sat) for: the tubby feline suddenly has a six-pack and a spacesuit, and is up and about, you know, doing stuff? It was like a bad dream - directed by the numbskull who gave the world 1997's infamously hopeless Spawn (shouldn't he have had his licence revoked by now?) and, most dishearteningly, written by Garfield creator Jim Davis himself, so it's not as though he has anybody else to blame for the decision to chase quick bucks on half-empty 3D-equipped screens. What next: Garfield Does Dallas?

1. 4.3.2.1
"Real women. Real life," went the tagline on the flyers for Noel Clarke's latest, setting 4.3.2.1 up in opposition to the generally unpopular (but actually far less irksome) Sex and the City 2. I suppose one person's definition of real life is going to be different from another, but I doubt any save the most suggestible of PRs would consider the following essential components of 24 hours in their real life: international jewel thieves who stash their booty in Pringles cans; classical pianists who look like Tamsin Egerton, and spend their days parading around in "Elle MacPherson Intimates"; lesbians in "Eat Me" knickers; a Mexican stand-off between Michelle Ryan and Emma Roberts; a cameo from Ben "poor man's Anstis" Shepherd, seemingly at a loss even to play himself.

Essentially a two-hour wank tape for its writer-director-star ("Ooh, I bet he's got a huge penis," Roberts is obliged to gush of Clarke at one point), this leering, lumbering bollocks rightly tanked at the box-office, despite its hefty marketing spend - although some day, when branding consultants rule the earth, all films will be made this way. As Kidulthood and Adulthood (brought to you in association with Costa Coffee, "Britain's grittiest coffee") made patently obvious to anyone who wasn't hellbent on jettisoning any shred of integrity in return for being seen as with it and down with the kids, if Noel Clarke is the future of British cinema, then Michael McIntyre is the future of European agricultural reform, and I myself am the future of women's tennis.

The Best Films of 2010, 10-1

10. Another Year
The multiplicity of responses generated by the characters inhabiting Mike Leigh's latest - are Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen's Tom and Gerri models of aspirational ordinariness, a deeper-rooted smugness, or something else entirely? - suggests the hand of a master dramatist: for me, this played host to many of the director's best (which is to say most honest) scenes and moments since 2000's Topsy-Turvy.

9. La Danse: The Paris-Opera Ballet
Another monumental act of observance from the still-underdistributed documentarist Frederick Wiseman, its camera describing the shape of a building, the infrastructure of an organisation, and the movements of elite dancers in such a way as to render them utterly compelling for even non-balletomanes prone to sniggering at the merest mention of The Nutcracker. Such as myself.

8. City of Life and Death
2006's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol suggested director Lu Chuan was a filmmaker with a rare eye for the immediacies and specifics of place; this follow-up, a stunning account of the Rape of Nanking, confirmed it, parachuting us into the middle of a previously undramatisable, possibly unthinkable hell, and resisting all temptation to reframe these atrocities for wider consumption (ct. this year's Europudding City of War: The Story of John Rabe) in order to insist upon the testimony of those who were there, and saw it all unfold, the bloodshed and the heroic sacrifices, with their own eyes. At the risk of sounding reductive: the Asian Schindler's List.

7. A Town Called Panic
In one 75-minute stroke, this animated Belgian riot made even the best of this year's superior American animation (Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon) seem staid. Watch it once to get carried away on its manic flow of ideas, a second time to catch up with the detail its plotting leaves trailing behind it, and marvel throughout at the magnificent shoutiness of a grumpy farmer named Steven. Random is not the word for it. Joyous may well be.

6. Monsters
a.k.a. "It Came Out of Nowhere". In which tyro British filmmaker Gareth Edwards displayed a commendable faith in both our shared humanity and his own ability to knock out a blockbuster on his own laptop between games of Solitaire. Exactly what we should be going to the multiplex to see: spectacle with soul.

5. The Illusionist
The pinnacle of a golden year for animation - though here, the gold is less dazzling than faded: that of the Edinburgh sun going down on one magician's career, a young girl's innocence, and their shared friendship with a rabbit. In its artistry and emotion alike, a beautifully calibrated work - if you don't emerge from the cinema snuffling at least a little, you have no heart.

4. Precious
I'm going to wager, here and now, that this becomes one of the cinema's great one-hit wonders; that nothing that its makers go onto will ever have quite the same impact - because, if there's one thing fans and detractors of this eminently divisive true-life tale can agree on, it's that those behind the camera scarcely seem to know what they have on their hands here, and at times barely seem to know what they're doing. I'd argue it's these rougher edges that rescue Precious from its own dopier choices, and elevates the film from TV-movie blandness - the contrast with Tyler Perry's December release For Colored Girls, a very much considered post-Precious product, is evident - to the standing of naive art, with all its connotations of kitsch. (A more experienced director would surely have thought twice about all those incest/fried food cutaways, for instance - not least on the grounds of questionable taste. Although both do fuck you up a little.) Director Lee Daniels may be guilty of employing shock tactics, but I can't be certain he thinks they're shock tactics, and what they do so brilliantly is cut through any fug of cynicism that might surround the viewer - the film really does come out fighting for its heroine, because nobody else seems to be. Bulked up on all this empathy, it remains - whether you like it or not - the heavyweight champion of this movie year, but perhaps more likely to go down in screen history as a LaMotta than as a Cassius Clay.

3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
It stands alone, albeit surrounded by ghosts and monkeys, and ghosts of monkeys.

2. The Social Network
A pre-eminent example of what happens when Hollywood gets it right: when it goes to the smartest director, the sharpest screenwriter, the best young acting talents in the business, and doesn't bind their hands or asks them to condescend to their audience. The result: bumper box-office, multiple awards and awards nominations, and a film that speaks to people, no matter that what it says is ambiguous indeed about the benefits of a life lived with one's personal cursor hovering over the refresh button, and the manner in which this comes to affect our relationships.

1. Father of My Children
And, by way of a contrast, a film that has absolutely no worries whatsoever about humankind's continued ability to connect, even under the most tragic of circumstances. A gorgeous movie, and a gorgeous movie about the movies, and the intersection of art and life - if I could marry any film released in the year 2010, this would be the one. And, as subsequent viewings only confirmed, it's a keeper.

The Best Films of 2010, 20-11

20. Catfish
However much of this Facebook-related documentary was constructed - and you have to wonder, given the extraordinary twists and turns the filmmakers are obliged to negotiate - it is at the very least brilliantly constructed: a wholly plausible scenario that says much about the way we come to conduct our relationships these days, and which leaves its characters and viewers alike squirming. (Perhaps labelling it a documentary is a categorisation error; perhaps its real antecedents are the docu-fictions The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, with their blundering, unembarrassable leads.) I was prepared to take the film at face value on a first viewing; on a second, it struck me there was definitely something fishy about Nev's (joltingly inserted) description of the family he's befriended online ("They didn't fool me - they just told me things I didn't care to question"), as though it were anticipating the viewer's likely response in the event he or she fell for this story hook, line and sinker. (Ah!, the film can be heard saying: see what we did there?) Still, very little else coming out of the American independent sector this year posed such a challenge to its audience. The question - and it's an increasingly useful one for any viewer or virtual consumer to keep at hand - remains: just how much of this, or any other narrative, are you prepared to swallow?

19. Easy A

18. Raavan

17. Shed Your Tears and Walk Away
A number of this year's outstanding British features seem (admittedly in retrospect) like warnings of what might lie in wait for the most vulnerable among us once the coalition's idea of The Big Society(TM) comes crashing down. (A sidebar: am I alone in seeing something particularly vulgar in that particular policy idea's insistence on bigness - as though it were a spin-off from Steve Wright's terminally naff "Big Show", or worse, an opportunity for the sort of acquisitional boasting once fostered under the Thatcher regime, as so superbly set out here?) Jez Lewis's account of his childhood friends' struggles with drugs, alcohol and poisonous bad luck suggested life in Hebden Bridge was tough enough before the recent wave of cuts - but did so in remarkably sober, humane, unexploitative fashion. The tears follow, surely, but as the filmmaker intuits, you can't walk away from your past, and your mates, so easily - and that's the source of the film's lingering, profound sadness.

16. Vincere

15. Wild Grass

14. Up in the Air
I wrestled with Jason Reitman's generally admired comedy-drama. For some while, I felt a certain resistance toward Clooney's clubbability, Reitman's breeziness, the glib topping of physician-heal-thyself irony that saw a character who jets from place to place laying off workers ending up surplus to requirements himself, both personally and professionally. (As for the talking heads, they fair screamed executive-level self-congratulation: "Hey, we can even turn the credit crunch into boffo box office!") Yet the film clicks when you realise the look on Clooney's face as he peers up at the departures boards that loom over him throughout isn't, as might initially seem, conveying a sense of "Right [rubs hands], where do I go from here?", so much as "Shit, where do I go from here?". That established, the film becomes a melancholy, even haunting account of the knock-on effects of being unable (or unwilling) to settle down; there are real, even harsh truths about the way we live and work rattling around beneath its sharp suits and slick badinage.

13. The Arbor
A spooky-realist haunted house story, and - in its own idiosyncratic way - another warning from history about what might happen should we be forced to return to the 1980s.

12. Of Gods and Men
11. White Material
Two French films that handle similar themes (the terror of encroaching violence, what it is to be a stranger in a strange land) in different yet equally impressive fashions. The first is a model of near-classical directorial restraint in the face of heinous real-life events; the second once more highlights Claire Denis's tendency towards vivid abstraction - even as the script, direction and performances remain wholly clear-eyed about the legacy of colonialism. Aside from all that, it's tense and exciting - and in Isabelle Huppert, gave us the year's most unlikely action heroine.