For your consideration: my Critics' Circle votes 2024

 

Director of the Year

1. Steve McQueen, Blitz

2. Marco Bellocchio, Kidnapped

3. George Miller, Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

4. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Monster

5. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Evil Does Not Exist

(Honourable mentions: Clint Eastwood, Juror #2; Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow; Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light; Blessy, Aaduveejitham/The Goat Life.)

Screenwriter of the Year

1. Yūji Sakamoto, Monster

2. Marco Bellocchio and Susanna Nicchiarelli, Kidnapped

3. Rich Peppiatt and Kneecap, Kneecap

4. Peter Straughan, Conclave

5. Aaron Schimberg, A Different Man

(Honourable mentions: Azazel Jacobs, His Three Daughters; Jonathan A. Abrams, Juror #2; Victor Erice and Michel Gaztambide, Close Your Eyes; Deepu Pradeep, Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil; Ava DuVernay, Origin.)

Actress of the Year

1. Kristen Stewart, Love Lies Bleeding

2. Maisy Stella, My Old Ass

3. Lily Gladstone, Fancy Dance

4. Kani Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light

5. Amy Adams, Nightbitch

(Honourable mentions: Mikey Madison, Anora; Carrie Coon, His Three Daughters; Elizabeth Olsen, His Three Daughters; Natasha Lyonne, His Three Daughters; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Origin; Cynthia Erivo, Drift and Wicked: Part 1.)

Actor of the Year

1. Sebastian Stan, A Different Man and The Apprentice

2. Cillian Murphy, Small Things Like These

3. Fahadh Faasil, Aavesham

4. Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

5. Hugh Grant, Heretic

(Honourable mentions: Prithviraj Sukumaran, The Goat Life and Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil; Glen Powell, Hit Man; Ralph Fiennes, Conclave; Basil Joseph, Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil; Fausto Russo Alesi, Kidnapped.)

Supporting Actress of the Year

1. Joan Chen, Didi

2. Isabella Rossellini, Conclave

3. Zarina Wahab, Mr. & Mrs. Mahi

4. Emily Watson, Small Things Like These

5. Aubrey Plaza, My Old Ass

(Honourable mentions: Simone Kirby, Kneecap; Isabel Deroy-Olson, Fancy Dance; Alia Shawkat, Drift; Kathryn Newton, Abigail.)

Supporting Actor of the Year

1. Adam Pearson, A Different Man

2. Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing

3. Paul Raci, Sing Sing

4. Jay O. Sanders, His Three Daughters

5. Fahadh Faasil, Vettaiyan and Pushpa 2 - The Rule

(Honourable mentions: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain; Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice; Jesse Plemons, Civil War and Kinds of Kindness; Dan Stevens, Abigail; Ravi Kishan, Laapataa Ladies.)

Breakthrough Performance of the Year

1. Maisy Stella, My Old Ass

2. Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge

3. Nitanshi Goel, Laapataa Ladies

4. Kani Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light

5. Katy O'Brian, Love Lies Bleeding

(Honourable mentions: Mikey Madison, Anora; Eka Chavleishvili, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry; Alyla Browne, Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga; Alisha Weir, Abigail.)

Breakthrough British/Irish Filmmaker

1. Rich Peppiatt, director, Kneecap

2. Dev Patel, director, Monkey Man

3. David Hinton, director, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

4. Rachel Ramsay, co-director, Copa 71

5. Toby L., director, Blur: To the End

(Honourable mention: Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, Grand Theft Hamlet.)

British/Irish Performer of the Year

1. Cillian Murphy, Small Things Like These

2. Hugh Grant, Heretic

3. James McAvoy, Speak No Evil

4. Dev Patel, Monkey Man

5. Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge

(Honourable mentions: Cynthia Erivo, Drift and Wicked: Part 1; Adam Pearson, A Different Man; Dan Stevens, Abigail.)

Young British/Irish Performer of the Year

1. Elliott Heffernan, Blitz

2. Alisha Weir, Abigail

3. Dan Hough, Speak No Evil

4. Zara Devlin, Small Things Like These

5. Liadán Dunlea, Small Things Like These

Nominations for the 45th London Critics' Circle Film Awards will be announced this Thursday, with the ceremony following on February 2, 2025; my top 20 films of 2024 list will run on this site at the end of the month.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of December 6-8, 2024):

1 (1) Moana 2 (U) ***

2 (2) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (3) Gladiator II (15) ***

4 (4) Paddington in Peru (PG)

5 (new) Pushpa 2 - The Rule (15) ***

6 (new) André Rieu's Xmas Concert: Gold and Silver (U)

7 (5) Conclave (12A) ****

8 (6) Red One (12A)

9 (new) Nightbitch (15) **

10 (new) Solo Leveling: ReAwakening (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. All We Imagine as Light

2. Conclave

3. A Christmas Carol

4. Interstella 5555

5. Gremlins

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (4) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

2 (re) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

3 (9) Elf (PG) **

4 (14) Love Actually (15) ***

5 (12) The Polar Express (U)

6 (new) Godzilla Minus One (12) ****

7 (13) The Grinch [2000] (PG) ***

8 (24) Wonka (PG) ***

9 (1) The Grinch [2018] (U)

10 (3) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Speak No Evil

2. Kneecap

3. Evil Does Not Exist

4. Alien: Romulus

5. Didi

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Citizen Kane [above] (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)

2. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Friday, BBC2, 3.45pm)

3. The 39 Steps (Monday, BBC2, 2.30pm)

4. Die Hard with a Vengeance (Thursday, BBC1, 11.40pm)

5. Funny Face (Tuesday, BBC2, 2.30pm)

In memoriam: Niels Arestrup (Telegraph 13/12/24)

Niels Arestrup, who has died aged 75, was an imposing French character actor acclaimed for playing menacing father figures in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and A Prophet (2009). Those roles yielded two of his three César awards for Best Supporting Actor, while also prompting renewed discussion of his earlier treatment of actresses, which fell somewhere between heavy-handed and outright violent.

Arestrup’s career began in the early 1970s, with roles in prominent examples of auteur cinema. Briefly glimpsed as Trotsky’s secretary in Alain Resnais’ Stavisky (1974), the young actor nailed a memorably lengthy monologue as a lusty trucker in Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1974), embodying much the same unreconstructed blue-collar masculinity as his contemporary Gérard Depardieu.

Both actors were frequently cast as rogues, but Arestrup only broke through internationally in his fifties, newly stocky and stern of visage, and with a vivid white shock of hair. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Audiard’s nifty reworking of James Toback’s Fingers (1978), Arestrup terrified as the slum landlord bearing down on pianist son Romain Duris; in A Prophet, he was César Luciani, the Corsican godfather running the world from a prison cell.

The films’ success ensured further plum roles: as the former hostage Roussin in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), a farmer in occupied France in Sarah’s Key (2010), as a sour-faced vintner organising his succession in You Will Be My Son (2011). Notable American directors lined up to employ Arestrup: he played the grandfather in Spielberg’s War Horse (2011) and the bar owner Brad Pitt befriends in Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea (2015).

In France, however, he found himself newly dogged by longstanding allegations of abusive behaviour towards female co-stars. Arestrup was accused of fracturing Maria Schneider’s coccyx and perforating Miou-Miou’s eardrum with a slap on the same day during the filming of La dérobade/Memoirs of a French Whore (1979). “You have to simulate,” Arestrup was heard saying to director Daniel Duval, “but Miou-Miou wanted it to look real.”

In 1983, Isabelle Adjani left a stage production of Miss Julie after being slapped by Arestrup during rehearsals; thirteen years later, Arestrup’s company was forced to pay more than 800,000 francs in damages to Myriam Boyer, after she was fired from a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? during which, she alleged, her co-star almost strangled her on stage.

In later life, Arestrup spoke frankly about his history of alcoholism – “I broke bottles, I lashed out, I drank a lot” – but he sounded weary when pressed on these allegations in 2007: “It’s been going on for twenty-five years, since Miss Julie... And since then, I’ve tried everything: explaining myself, keeping quiet, but nothing works, it sticks to me.”

Niels Philippe Arestrup was born on February 8, 1949 in Montreuil (now Seine-Saint-Denis) to Knud Arestrup, a Dane who fled his homeland upon the German invasion, and his French wife Yvonne (née Turmel). He was a solitary child and an unwilling student; as he once confessed, “uneducated, I could neither be tamed nor restrain myself”.

After failing his baccalaureate in 1968, Arestrup laboured through various odd jobs while studying theatre under the actress Tania Balachova. He made his stage debut as a horse guard in a 1970 production of Le Misanthrope, appeared in Peter Brook’s 1981 revival of The Cherry Orchard, and returned to Le Misanthrope, this time in the lead, in 1989. That same year, he began a four-year spell as the director of Paris’s Renaissance theatre.

Following success with Audiard, Arestrup wrote and directed the political thriller Le candidat (2007); he enjoyed further success in this realm, winning a third César for Bertrand Tavernier’s droll procedural Quai d’Orsay/The French Minister (2013) and earning plaudits as a kingmaker in TV’s Baron noir (2016-20). He won a Molière as Rothko in John Logan’s play Red in 2020; his final role, in the miniseries Les papillons noirs (2022), was that of an old man with a troubling past.

Arestrup is survived by his wife, the actress Isabelle Le Nouvel, whom he married in 2012, and their two twins, of whom he spoke in 2021, with reference to his roles as distant fathers: “I didn’t want children. I was always off somewhere else, touring, filming. At first, these creatures, organically connected to their mother, stunned me, paralysed me. And then love followed all by itself.”

Niels Arestrup, born February 8, 1949, died December 1, 2024.

The harder they come: "Pushpa 2 - The Rule"

Opening just before Christmas 2021, the Telugu actioner Pushpa - The Rise was one of the Indian cinema's first major post-lockdown hits, and possibly it caught some demob-happy mood: a thumpingly maximalist, three-hour tale of illegal sandalwood smuggling that often resembled Smokey and the Bandit on steroids, its rowdiness proved by turns exhilarating and exhausting. It's taken a while to assemble, but Pushpa 2 - The Rule similarly affords us scant let-up. Its opening images are of a cargo ship hitting a Japanese dock with a dull thud, and of a container that topples with a comparable crash to spill a) a near-full load of black-market logs and b) a hero prepared to go to the most extreme lengths just to reclaim a debt. "OVERLOAD" flashes a screen on one of the cranes being used to bring the containers ashore, which in this context serves both as a warning and a statement of intent on director Sukumar's part: the gangbusters success of the first film hasn't led him to tread any lighter second time around. For much of its three-and-a-quarter-hour duration, P2 only expands a cat-and-mouse pursuit drawn in cartoonishly exaggerated terms. Our eponymous anti-hero (Allu Arjun) retains his flowing mullet, the mouthful of betel nuts and the swagger of a WWE wrestler, but now thinks even bigger: turned down for a photo by a sitting MP, he will spend much of The Rule plotting to have the politician removed from office so as to get a photo taken with his successor. (The pettiness revealed in him during P1 becomes grandiose, spectacular, movie-filling here.) Tailing him wherever he stomps: the cop introduced towards the end of P1 (Fahaad Faasil), who discards the hooch bottle that helps him infiltrate the smuggler's minions on an open fire so as to spark the first of the film's eardrum-threatening explosions. Even when the characters aren't necessarily larger than life, their gestures very much are.

Nevertheless, whether it be that Sukumar's staging has improved in the past three years or that I was in a more relaxed mood than I was back in 2021, I had far more fun with The Rule than I did during The Rise. For starters, we're clearly witnessing a scale-up: the first movie's success now arms this filmmaker with hundreds of extras, vast flotillas of boats and helicopter trips to the Maldives and back, but also emboldened craft, such as a visually pleasing palette of organic pastels that veer towards the garish whenever the plot takes a lurid turn. (How wonderful it is to see an event movie that truly looks worthy of exhibition on the big screen.) Set against P1, which had to unfold outdoors due to Covid shooting restrictions, P2 showcases more interiors and intricate studio work; for its first two hours, you really do sense a franchise beginning to stretch out, luxuriate, slip elegantly costumed feet under artfully rendered tables. It's not quite indulgent, exactly, because it reflects the story arc: newly loaded woodsman Pushpa is himself coming in from the cold (or as cold as Tamil Nadu gets) by getting into politics, using the ill-gotten gains of the first movie to pay off all and sundry. Suddenly, this narrative starts to feel Little Caesar-ish, even if the protagonist's outrageous dress shirts more precisely recall De Palma's Scarface or the darts World Championship. The hubris, which you can measure whenever the smuggler bigs himself up in the third person, is broadly comparable: "Pushpa doesn't wonder if something is correct or not. He takes a decision, which proves to be correct." (The mind can only travel in the direction of certain CEOs, or those once-popular Chuck Norris memes.)

Suddenly, too, this universe seems populated by characters capable of taking this beardy rogue down a peg or two - and here we should pause to credit Arjun with humility enough to turn down P1's insistent hero worship, cede some of the movie's abundant space and allow Pushpa to be properly pushed. Sometimes it's by newly vocal wife Srivalli (Rashmika Mandanna), who insists on having the final word in any dispute and gets a whole musical number about her horniness: a real breath of fresh air after the poundingly phallic boysiness of The Rise. More often than not, it's by that pesky, dogged cop, and with his bald pate and wild eyes, Faasil conjures an especially potent form of institutionalised sociopathy, resembling Trainspotting's Begbie (or this actor's narcissist gangster from Aavesham) squeezed into uniform. After the hollow chest-thumping of P1, the franchise at last seems to have arrived at the story it wanted to tell all along: it's not just that we now have a clearly defined antagonist, someone to push back against Pushpa, it's that, in Faasil, we have a skilled performer who understands the mass form and knows how to scale his character within a generally towering movie superstructure. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object; in the scenes between the cop and the smuggler, you can almost literally see the actors wrestling for control of the film, and part of the thrill P2 elicits is that we sense this one really could go either way. Would we be disappointed if the cop finally got his man? I don't think so, because Faasil is such fun to watch in these roles, and because, after six long hours of this, the legend of Pushpa the martyr would live on regardless. 

This headlining push-me-pull-you act permits Sukumar to attempt one exquisite formal gag - the funniest thing I've witnessed inside a multiplex for some while - of a kind a director could perhaps only attempt within the generous framework of a three-and-a-quarter-hour entertainment: gleefully dashing through a scene that presents as the obvious intermission block (a tête-à-tête where the cop seeks an unlikely apology from his quarry for the closing events in P1) so that Pushpa can subsequently pull a literal U-turn and make an even bigger scene in the same location, the better to raise the stakes going into P2's final hour. Everything's set up perfectly; it's a pity, then, that in this closing stretch The Rule begins to stagger and stumble, dispatching Pushpa on what proves nothing more, in the vast scheme of things, than a sidequest contrived to initiate what the final credits reveal will be titled Pushpa 3: The Rampage. This isn't the grand showdown we looked to be heading towards; instead, we begin to sense that, unlike our tenacious anti-hero, Sukumar couldn't quite get the picture he wanted, for one reason or another. (Given P2's protracted gestation period, it's possible Faasil was simply called away to shoot elsewhere, perhaps for his supporting role in Rajnikanth's Vettaiyan: an offer he couldn't refuse.) For its closing hour, The Rule instead reverts to wayward, rowdy type: indomitable hero, women reduced to damsels-in-distress, more generic forms of antagonism. Two thunderous strides forward, one rather arbitrary and underwhelming step back. Of the current crop of Indian franchises, this is the one that - for ninety minutes in the middle of The Rule - has come closest to multiplex greatness, but it's also the one that feels most like a work-in-progress, and vulnerable to wildly fluctuating external circumstances. Third time's the charm, maybe?

Pushpa 2 - The Rule is now playing in selected cinemas. 

Bombay dreams: "All We Imagine as Light"

One reason critics have responded to All We Imagine as Light as they have is surely that it does something relatively new with one of the most filmed cities in the world. Shaping an idea of Mumbai as a lived-in, workaday environment rather than a mere backdrop for all-singing, all-dancing spectacle, writer-director Payal Kapadia seeks out sidestreets and backlanes in place of studio lots; once in situ, she's gone searching for everyday interactions, and sought to centralise ordinary people instead of the usual Bollywood heroes. Many of these are migrants, drawn hereabouts by the prospect of paid labour; some of them have even made it to the commuter class, sketched in an early sequence that finds women nodding off on the evening metro train. Kapadia's heroines are both: a pair of Malayali nurses observed sharing a flat, while at different stages in their professional and personal lives. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is the more senior of the two, with fledgling sisters to train and a husband who's gone to work overseas and all but disappeared without trace. Anu (Divya Prabha) is the junior party, a keen texter, still learning the ropes, and involved in a giggly romance with a male contemporary. Although the women's day jobs have a life-and-death element, these two aren't trying to save the world so much as keep a roof over their heads, and maybe find happiness or at the very least some peace. Part of the novelty with All We Imagine as Light lies in seeing a contemporary Indian film where the heroines appear far more likely to gaze up at billboards than be enshrined upon them; you can well imagine Prabha and Anu encountering Deepika or Ananya's latest spot of cross-promotional branding and wondering how the hell anybody reaches such dizzy heights.

Given the extent of the praise lavished on Kapadia's film since its Cannes outing this summer - where it won glowing reviews and, at the last, the Grand Prix gong - you may arrive at AWIAL expecting it to knock you for six. Is it any less of an achievement that it instead quietly diverts, absorbs and involves us? This is partly an issue with festival discourse, where everything has to be talked up as if the very future of the cinema depends on it, but talking AWIAL up strikes me as less than helpful - perhaps even actively unhelpful - to the film's understated methods. There is, for starters, a subtle complexity to the way these women interact with one another, with the men in their lives, and especially with Mumbai itself, regarded here as a very masculine conception, alternating between plugged-in, switched-on attraction and cool indifference. (The girls have to get away from it at a crucial juncture to appreciate the lives they've made for themselves.) I'd venture Kapadia isn't doing vastly more than a lot of the Parallel and independent cinema that never travelled to Europe and thus never had a major festival spotlight shone upon it: she calmly, attentively observes, looking out for her characters in all senses of the term. Yet one appreciable difference is that AWIAL has been written and directed by a woman who - more so than Satyajit Ray, say - knows innately how women talk, act and interrelate at the end of a long and tiring working day. Another would be that this Indian-French co-production has been carefully curated to court Western eyes and tastes. If those critical first responders fell in love, it's in part because the movie was always intended as a mash note or meet-cute.

Inarguably, much of the detail here is Mumbai local and specific: the dishes the women prepare, the dialects spoken, the awkward couplings and ladies-only carriages, the cavernous rich/poor divide. What Kapadia has done is pull all this into the 21st century, to make an observational film that is as much Modi as Ray, born of what has been (for better and worse) a rapid social modernisation, and what we might call the Mubification of India, given the number of shots and sequences here that clearly relate to the texts its maker has studied and metabolised. Michael Mann-like tableaux of Mumbai by night crystallise one of the film's idiosyncrasies: a light blue palette that conveys coolness over the more familiar heat and humidity. (The rains fall on these girls.) The basic set-up even has something of certain American cable shows in its DNA: women adrift in a city that reminds them, time and again, of their own insignificance. You wouldn't have to be a Mumbai resident to know what that feels like. You don't necessarily have to be a woman to know what that feels like. At one point, you catch Kapadia actively pandering, when she films the nurses huddling in a cinema, illuminated by the screen: see, she whispers, they're really just like you. Yet AWIAL is at its most insinuating whenever it channels ambience and transience: travelling shots of migrant workers unloading their goods, the trains rattling along, a second-half outing to the coast, where the film begins to seem like a holiday special of its own, with caves that echo In the Mood for Love's Angkor Wat finale. We're all just passing through, in the end, sometimes borne on the waves, often treading water. Announcing herself as an ultra-empathetic eye and voice, Kapadia at least tries to preserve some record of these women, and she invites us similarly to consider their struggles and travails; quietly, in her film's singularly hushed fashion, the we of the title becomes properly universal and all-encompassing. Folks we recognise, yearning for better and for more, whether greater stability or permanency: sometimes the cinema can be as simple, and yet as rare and precious, a thing as this.

All We Imagine as Light is now playing in selected cinemas.

From the archive: "Daft Punk & Leiji Matsumoto's Interstella 5555"

A collaboration between French dance maestros Daft Punk and one of Japan's leading animators, Interstella 5555 sets the album "Discovery" to an anime reworking of the plot of the S Club film Seeing Double, with an evil impresario (who looks more Ken Russell than Simon Cowell) trying to take over the world using popstars, the latest weapon of mass destruction. The result looks like a couple of episodes of Battle of the Planets rescored by a Shoreditch club promoter. That stylophone guitar riff in the middle of "Aerodynamic" is one of the most thrilling moments in all recent pop music, and if nothing in Matsumoto's visuals quite matches it, the music benefits from being played at Dolby stereo level in a darkened room. (You'd take listening to this over Thomas Bangalter's other score this year, the sonic assault he engineered for Gaspar Noe's Irreversible.) A useful reminder of what a strong album "Discovery" is: even the tracks unreleased as singles have somehow managed to lodge in the subconscious.

(October 2003)

A 4K remaster of Interstella 5555 plays in selected cinemas this Thursday for one night only.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 29-December 1, 2024):

1 (new) Moana 2 (U) ***

2 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (2) Gladiator II (15) ***

4 (3) Paddington in Peru (PG)

5 (new) Conclave (12A) ****

6 (4) Red One (12A)

7 (new) All We Imagine as Light (15) ****

8 (5) Heretic (15) ****

9 (re) The Polar Express (U)

10 (7) Small Things Like These (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. All We Imagine as Light

2. Conclave

3. Gremlins [above]

4. Grand Theft Hamlet

5. Moana 2

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (5) The Grinch (U)

2 (1) Gladiator (15) ****

3 (4) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

4 (2) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

5 (12) The Wizard of Oz (U) *****

6 (3) The Wild Robot (U) **

7 (8) Dune: Part Two (12) **

8 (7) Despicable Me 4 (U)

9 (13) Elf (PG) **

10 (27) It Ends with Us (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Speak No Evil

2. Kneecap

3. Evil Does Not Exist

4. Alien: Romulus

5. Didi

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Bonnie and Clyde (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

2. So Long, My Son (Saturday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

3. The Addams Family (Saturday, ITV1, 12 noon)

4. Petite Maman (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.35am)

5. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Saturday, Channel 4, 10.15pm)