My Top 20 Films of 2024

 

20. Juror #2

19. Conclave

18. Hundreds of Beavers

17. In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon

16. Monkey Man

15. Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil

14. Manjummel Boys

13. All We Imagine as Light

12. Sing Sing

11. Evil Does Not Exist

10. I Saw the TV Glow

9. Close Your Eyes

8. A Different Man

7. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

6. Monster

5. The Zone of Interest

4. Blitz

3. Kidnapped

2. Dahomey

1. Our Body [above] 

Birdsong: "On Becoming a Guinea Fowl"

On the evidence of her first two features, the Welsh-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni's talents stretch far beyond a gift for leftfield titling: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, her follow-up to 2017's terrific I Am Not a Witch, is further distinguished by unusual images and unexpected lines of narrative approach. The new film unfolds in Zambia, in itself an underfilmed location, and for some while it unfolds at a Zambian roadside, where Shula (Susan Chardy) has parked up upon discovering her uncle's lifeless body on a trail outside a brothel. We initially wonder whether this will be a rare entry in that darkly comic subgenre where a corpse proves central to proceedings (cf. The Trouble with Harry, Weekend at Bernie's), but for Nyoni, the stiff is really just an extraordinary way to bring an extended family together. Shula's bibulous sister Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) is first to arrive on the scene, bogling around the body to Afrobeats, and before long, everybody's showing up at the family home: myriad aunties, the girls' grief-stricken mother, the dead man's widow, those who knew the deceased and those who suffered at his hands, for the inevitable commiserations are soon mingling with ugly rumours and allegations of abuse. We wait for it to settle down and to take definitive form, but - to its considerable credit - the film never does; instead, at various points, it resembles a homecoming drama, a whodunnit (because almost everyone has their reasons for wanting Uncle Fred dead), a study in trauma, a #MeToo movie with the dials cranked up to eleven, and - looser and more impressionistic still - a treatise on how we live with those secrets that others would rather take with them to the grave. OBAGF is a little of all these movies, in the end; its title derives from Shula's memories of kids-telly schooling on the importance of having a sound warning system, but it also speaks to an idea of shapeshifting that informs the film entire.

It's a lively one, in other words. The mode is broadly realist - actual locations, inhabited by local performers and non-professionals - but scarcely a scene proceeds in the expected manner. Shula - the sensible one here, to whom our sympathies are quickly drawn - discovers the body on the way back from a fancy dress party, which means she's seen standing over the corpse in a fatsuit of some kind. The Zambian equivalent of sitting shiva offers an opportunity for the women of this tribe to compare gel nails, gossip and get thoroughly sloshed. (One alternative - if greatly more prosaic - title: Drunk Mourning.) One reason Nyoni has been embraced as such a hope is that her first two films have done more than most to reroute the cinema and knock its constituent scenes and stories off the beaten path that has become such a chore to travel down in recent years. Her tactics here even deviate from those of her previous film, which was driven above all else by its striking imagery. Guinea Fowl has the occasional off-kilter image (that fatsuit; a flooded lodging house), but it's chiefly powered by decentered storytelling that kept reminding me of Robert Altman: ever-swelling ensemble, overlapping dialogue, wry humour. Yet this 21st century Altman is also capable of seriousness whenever she's addressing the abuse at this story's heart. When Nsansa describes her experiences with Uncle Fred, it explains why she drinks, and also why so many of the womenfolk here are seen staggering around, caught between grief and giggly relief. The liveliness is sometimes indistinguishable from volatility: the power's out, the laughter's manic, the emotion high. Sometimes it's plain stressy: on one level, this is the tale of a woman trying to get through a funeral without shouting "dude was a sex pest" at the top of her lungs, much as some are going to have to hold their tongues at the Trump inauguration next week. Narratively, it can seem haphazard - but it's clearly been pushed that way by these dazed characters, and when at the last Shula finds a different way to communicate her concerns, she's following the lead of her idiosyncratic director. Compressed into an intense 99 minutes, it's a lot - even the film's most fervent admirers will find stretches of it confounding - but, again, it is for these characters, too; and far better a filmmaker give us a lot to unpack and process than - as has become more common - nothing like enough.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of December 20-22, 2024):

1 (new) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

2 (2) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (1) Moana 2 (U) ***

4 (4) Paddington in Peru (PG)

5 (3) Gladiator II (15) ***

6 (6) Conclave (12A) ****

7 (new) Ivanov/Wright The Nutcracker - ROH London 2024 (uncertificated)

8 (5) Kraven the Hunter (15)

9 (re) It's a Wonderful Life (U) *****

10 (9) Red One (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Spirited Away [above]

2. The Order

3. All We Imagine as Light

4. Conclave

5. Gremlins

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) Love Actually (15) ***

2 (5) Elf (PG) **

3 (6) The Polar Express (U)

4 (1) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

5 (3) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

6 (re) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

7 (9) Arthur Christmas (U) **

8 (re) Terrifier 3 (18)

9 (new) Smile 2 (18)

10 (15) Dune: Part Two (12) **

(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. The Untouchables (New Year's Day, BBC2, 10pm)

2. Strangers on a Train (Friday, BBC2, 9.35am)

3. The Godfather (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.45pm)

4. The Godfather Part II (New Year's Eve, Channel 4, 11.05pm)

5. The Searchers (New Year's Day, BBC2, 1.15pm)

Monkey trouble: "Better Man"

As you'll have heard, Better Man is the chimp-based Robbie Williams movie, a framing that first sounds like more gibberish from a popular cinema that has shown signs of comprehensively losing it, but which scans on some instinctive level: you can well imagine the Robbie of 1997, the one who dyed his hair Gazza blonde and started drinking with the Gallaghers and Chris Evans, masturbating in public or flinging his own poop at horrified onlookers. This one leftfield choice allows Michael Gracey, the Aussie director who broke out translating Baz Luhrmann for kids with 2017's The Greatest Showman, to attempt something new and relatively unexpected with the jukebox musical at a point, six years on from the (cough) Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody, when the form badly needs it. (I say relatively unexpected, because Better Man arrives in cinemas only a few weeks after Piece by Piece, which was Pharrell Williams done as Lego.) The movie's Williams is, in familiar fashion, a Stokey tearaway dazzled even by the tawdry limelight inhabited by his failing club singer father (Steve Pemberton, reliably good) and subsequently undergoing boyband bootcamp (where Damon Herriman, as Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, resembles Colin Firth if he were on some sort of watchlist), overnight celebrity, solo highs and lows, drink, girls, pills and depression, all the topics the real Robbie has been so candid about over the years. It's just that he's represented, in this case, by a mo-cap primate - conjured by Weta, voiced and performed by Jonno Davies - rather than BAFTA-seeking flesh-and-blood. I'll give Better Man this: at most junctures, it feels less template than test balloon, floated before us to see what the multiplex audience is now willing to swallow. What next: Olly Murs as a felt hippo?

Gracey's film is still floating within established pop biopic parameters; narratively at least, it's never as far out as I was hoping. There's surely a more piercing, arthouse-ready musical rendition of la vie Williams, perhaps one that leant more heavily into the heart-on-sleeve psychodrama of such songs as the Stephen Duffy-penned "Advertising Space" (which gets nowhere near this soundtrack). We get flickers of this adjacent movie in the aftermath of Take That's break-up, scored to "Come Undone" and featuring the image of this monkey man trapped on the other side of the thin ice he's been skating on, struggling for air. Dramatically, however, it might have been more interesting if the other characters were seen to respond in some way to the idea of Robbie-as-chimp, as they never do here. Instead, we get the multiplex-and-radio-friendly version of the greatest hits: brief sex and drugs, snarkily postmodern narration (Robbie-as-chimp-as-Deadpool), Rhesus Robbie rampaging down Regent Street to "Rock DJ", happy ending, home. (The heart does rather sink around the halfway mark upon the realisation we're going to have to experience "She's the One" and "Angels" again.) In other respects, however, Better Man proves more perplexing; the spectre of nonsense re-enters the frame. After The Greatest Showman's runaway success seven years ago, you would have thought the studios would have been begging Gracey to oversee one of these pricey New Musicals that have been coming down the pipes at regular intervals; instead, he's wound up on a project with no stars and few faces, and where the money's gone on rights clearance and a roaming computer graphic. Gracey brings much the same tits-and-teeth energy to his task as he did to his earlier hit, but it would only be admirable if Better Man felt less fatally parochial.

For a big holiday musical, Better Man doesn't look like much: even its exteriors have that wishy-washy digital sheen, as if everything beyond the chimp had also been green-screened in. (I began thinking more fondly of 2019's Rocketman, another modestly budgeted pop biopic where the flights of fancy were booked on a shoestring.) Cheap, cheerful, cheesy-to-naff: it's undeniably very Robbie, and there's an argument the anonymous approach isn't inappropriate for a film about a performer who never cracked America and wound up duetting with a cartoon cat on those Felix ads. Yet Better Man never fully answers the question of why we've been invited to witness a 140-minute movie about Robbie Williams - who, whatever else he is, is no Bowie, no Elton, no Amy Winehouse. Never mind Murs, by the time of the finale - in which Chimp Robbie declares himself a light entertainer (and that's OK) - we could almost be watching The Shane Richie Story. I'll confess I just couldn't get my head around this one, and that may be partly because I never got Robbie the first time, but it's also because I don't get where some part of the popular cinema is going, why there's a generation of cinemagoers, creatives and critics who just want their movies to be memes on a bigger screen, meant to inspire random thoughts rather than revelation or rapture. Why is Robbie a chimp? How is Nicole Appleton British all of a sudden? (Is it because Gracey couldn't afford to hire Canadian?) You look to Better Man to explain itself, to show its logic or creative reasoning, and all it can offer in return is an insouciant shrug, a CG leading man and another reprise of "Let Me Entertain You". I can't see it expanding the Williams fanbase unduly, but it feels symptomatic of a year where the movies, having long since abandoned their pretensions to being any good, decided en masse to give up making basic sense. Murs: your time is now.

Better Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl"

This time last year, I concluded my review of the almost immediately forgettable sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget by offering up a prayer that Nick Park was busying himself with plasticine in an Aardman corner office. The good news this Christmas, as you've doubtless already noticed, is that he was. Vengeance Most Fowl - which, in a sign of the many masters Aardman are now contracted to serve, opened in UK cinemas on December 18 and aired on the BBC on Christmas Day ahead of its arrival on Netflix in the New Year - is itself more than a little sequelly: it sees the return of not just Park's beloved Wallace and Gromit, but Feathers McGraw, the dead-eyed penguin antagonist of 1993's The Wrong Trousers, here going full Max Cady in busting out of prison (or zoo) to make our heroes' lives tricky again. Yet the return to tried-and-tested Aardman formula has been supplemented by a few fresh visual and narrative ideas. The W&G garden, for starters, has been repurposed as Gromit's escape from an incessantly automated household - until the introduction of AI gnome Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith), who's scraped all his operating data from a show called DIY Action Force and promptly sets about turning this florid Kew into an angular, rather soulless Marienbad ("Neat and tidy!"). Sometimes these new ideas feel faintly recycled: having a copper answer the phone with "'ello 'ello 'ello" is an example of a joke being so old it's been semi-forgotten and so amuses all over again. (Perhaps inevitably, the character is voiced by Peter Kay.) And when Norbot is seized upon as a Trojan horse enabling Feathers to access our heroes' home, Vengeance Most Fowl returns to a foundational idea of genre cinema: that, when placed in the wrong hands, tech might prove as much existential threat as nifty timesaver.

The new film thus mirrors a struggle going on within Aardman, a cottage industry whose Oscar wins prompted deals with major players (first DreamWorks, then Sony, now Netflix) and thereafter a scaling-up of production to meet the ruthless demands of a bigger system. As Vengeance bears out, the company's strong suit remains those little, humanising touches at which neither supercomputer nor artificial intelligence could arrive. Feathers idly tapping a flipper while guessing Wallace's password (it's not, in the end, rocket science); a young constable (Lauren Patel) busting open a cellar door CSI-style while wielding a flashlight, only for her superior to reach around the doorjamb and flip the lightswitch; Wallace, in a low moment, plucking out a discordant version of the series' theme tune on an untuned piano. My gut feeling is that no Aardman feature - not even the beloved Farmageddon - has quite scaled the dizzy heights of the company's short masterpieces, because - to use a metaphor even the dozy Wallace could grasp - the internal wiring gets looser and flappier, those Eureka moments more spaced out, the bigger the films become. The whole Norbot business here feels like a delaying tactic designed to fill the forty-or-so minutes before the Fury/Usyk-like main event of visually mirroring, perfectly matched adversaries Gromit and Feathers going head-to-head once more; we're watching two workable ideas for shorts that have been twisted together like pipecleaners. (Or moulded together from differently coloured lumps of clay.) The positive is that Park and co-director Merlin Crossingham thereby allow themselves time to exercise greater control over notionally small stuff: the voice casting (Ben Whitehead's soothing Northern tones amply matching the late Peter Sallis's performances as Wallace), a light smattering of choice sightgags, varyingly suggestive puns ("ooh, me begonias") which will doubtless yield an even cheerier response over the boozy festive period. Nothing too revolutionary, then, but a small step back in the right direction for its makers.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is now streaming via iPlayer, and will also be available to stream via Netflix from January 2, 2025.

The razor's edge: "The Order"

Justin Kurzel, the muscular yet crafty Aussie who broke through with Snowtown before making the Fassbender/Cotillard Macbeth and 2019's very fine True History of the Kelly Gang, is exactly the kind of filmmaker who might have made a substantial career for himself in Hollywood in decades past. The trouble is that Hollywood isn't what it once was: the first time Kurzel was invited out that way, it was to oversee the Assassin's Creed movie that came and went without much trace. Unfussily adapted by screenwriter Zach Baylin from Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt's non-fiction tome The Silent Brotherhood, the true-crime tale The Order feels like a project altogether better tailored to this director's strengths, charting as it does a collision course between two men on the razor's edge. Jude Law plays the evocatively named FBI agent Terry Husk, who as we join him in 1983 has just been dispatched to run the Bureau's Idaho office. After a run of personal and professional setbacks that seem to have been etched into his face, Husk is hoping to live a relatively quiet life out here in the sticks, but of course his luck's out: he's been parachuted in just as a white supremacist splinter group are cranking up their activities, their leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) using bank robberies to fund the raising of a militia with which to carry out terror attacks. The shape of the movie that ensues is not notably new - it's a manhunt, like Heat purged of any sheen, or a leafier, less nocturnal Zodiac - but from a very early stage The Order reminds you this is the sort of thing American movies used to excel at, back when the studios had craftsmen of Kurzel's ilk at their disposal.

Kurzel himself is doing little revolutionary here, beyond keeping his eyes and ears open at every turn. Yet even that much distinguishes him from that MBA class of producer-directors who shoot everything green screen for reasons of efficiency, and to further their ambitions to make money rather than art. By contrast, working closely once more with the gifted cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, Kurzel frames this backwater much as he did the Outback in earlier films, allowing us to register both the space that allows Mathews' antagonists to disappear into the hills between cashgrabs, and the quiet hum of violence left behind in their wake; one reason The Order grips as it does is that we know this director isn't one to look away whenever things get fraught. There's certainly action to behold here - scrappy Don Siegel gunfights, and one sequence that demonstrates everything this filmmaker learnt on the Ned Kelly movie - yet Kurzel also underlines his already strong claim to being an actor's director, casting attentively, and then eliciting the scene-by-scene effects that enable this story to gather the momentum it does. Law, improving with every decade of work, sketches a flatfoot put out to pasture and trying to pull himself together on the hoof; for the first time, the actor's hairline tesselates perfectly with the role. The still underrated Hoult, meanwhile, does something very different from his conscience-stricken Juror #2, combining a cult leader's charisma with a tendency to go horribly dead behind the eyes at critical moments, like a cross between the young Tom Cruise and Manson; and there are characterful contributions from Tye Sheridan as a fresh-faced deputy, Marc Maron as a Jewish radio DJ the bigots target, and Alison Oliver and Odessa Young as the women in Bob's life. The framework Baylin sets in place remains inescapably generic, but what matters is the very raw material Kurzel and these performers work into individual scenes and moments: the frayed nerves and sore spots, the simmering aggression, the underlying grievances that lend themselves to being whipped up and weaponised. Having slipped largely unnoticed through successive lists of nominations, The Order now occupies an odd cultural space, sent out to compete for screens with Robbie Williams' chimp biopic and the Wicked singalong, yet its haunted, wounded, ominously febrile atmosphere ensures Kurzel's film feels more in touch with America as we leave it at the end of 2024 than most of the season's major awards contenders.

The Order opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of December 13-15, 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) Kraven the Hunter (15)

6 (7) Conclave (12A) ****

7 (new) The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (12A)

8 (new) Queer (15)

9 (8) Red One (12A)

10 (5) Pushpa 2 - The Rule (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Spirited Away

2. All We Imagine as Light

3. Conclave

4. Gremlins

5. Grand Theft Hamlet

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

2 (4) Love Actually (15) ***

3 (1) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

4 (new) Transformers One (PG)

5 (3) Elf (PG) **

6 (5) The Polar Express (U)

7 (2) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

8 (14) Nativity 2 - Danger in the Manger! (U)

9 (11) Arthur Christmas (U) **

10 (10) 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. Pan's Labyrinth (Saturday, BBC2, 12.45am)

2. Die Hard [above] (Sunday, Channel 4, 9pm)

3. Casablanca (Boxing Day, BBC2, 12.45pm)

4. Meet Me in St. Louis (Monday, BBC2, 11.05am)

5. It's a Wonderful Life (Christmas Eve, ITV1, 2.30pm and 3.50am)

In memoriam: Marisa Paredes (Telegraph 19/12/24)

Marisa Paredes, who has died from heart failure aged 78, was a graceful yet game Spanish actress who found international fame as a foundational part of the Pedro Almodóvar ensemble, earning plaudits for her lead role in The Flower of My Secret (1995) and essaying headstrong women in several of the director’s other titles.

Paredes had been acting on stage and screen for two decades when punky newcomer Almodóvar cast her as Sister Estiércol, one of a convent of wayward nuns sheltering a fugitive nightclub singer in Dark Habits (1983); this was the director’s third feature and the kind of knowing provocation by which cash-strapped young filmmakers often announce themselves. 

Sister Estiércol (or “Sister Manure”, as translated) was both a murderer and LSD devotee; still, as reframed by a wimple, Paredes’ lofty beauty almost dignified the more lurid narrative developments. Only almost, though: Dark Habits eventually wound up premiering out of competition at Venice after the festival’s organising committee decried it as blasphemous.

As Almodóvar moved in from the post-Franco fringes to become an acclaimed pillar of the arthouse circuit, he found less abrasive means of showcasing Paredes’ virtuosity. Though latter-day screwball High Heels (1991) prompted raucous laughs, its most memorable scene found Paredes, as firebrand chanteuse Becky del Páramo, passionately lip-synching to the Mexican torch song “Piensa en Mi”.

 

The Flower of My Secret, meanwhile, felt like the first shoots of a new, mature Almodóvar. Loosely inspired by Dorothy Parker’s The Lovely Leave, it too was capable of irreverent wit, but its narrative – charting the struggles of a mass-market romance novelist approaching middle age – was presented with abundant sincerity. Paredes’ star turn, for one, was nothing if not heartfelt, earning her a Goya nomination for Best Actress.

Almodóvar returned to Paredes, albeit thereafter in supporting roles. She was the lesbian actress who kickstarts the plot of the much-laurelled All About My Mother (1999) and cameoed in the scarcely less feted Talk to Her (2002), before assuming a Mrs. Danvers-like froideur as mad scientist Antonio Banderas’s black-clad PA in The Skin I Live In (2011). Each time, Almodóvar insisted, Paredes offered total commitment: “Marisa placed absolute trust in me and gave me everything.”

Marisa Luisa Paredes Bartolomé was born in Madrid on April 3, 1946, the fourth child of a doorman whom the actress later claimed routinely mistreated her. She left school aged eleven to work, but entertained hopes of acting, lent credence by the proximity of the Teatro Español, two minutes’ walk from the family home.

Despite making an uncredited film debut in Police Calling 091/091, policía al habla (1960), Paredes struggled to persuade her father to let her pursue similar work; indeed, aged fifteen, she briefly went on hunger strike. Her protest paid off: she debuted on stage later that year in José López Rubio’s farce Esta noche, tampoco at Madrid’s Teatro de la Comedia.

While in her teens, Paredes was introduced to the Spanish polymath Fernando Fernán Gómez, three decades her senior, who became her first love and cast her in his much-admired melodrama Life Goes On/El Mundo sigue (1965). Yet Paredes largely established herself through televised stage work: “I was lucky, because I don’t look Spanish. When television was cultured and broadcast theatre, I played out all the dramas of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen…”

Following her Almodóvarian successes, Paredes was often cast as grandes dames or divas: Sarah Bernhardt in the period drama Off Season (1992), a businesswoman in Raúl Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), a snobby socialite in the divisive Life is Beautiful (1997). She expanded into English-language period drama with Talk of Angels (1998) and Mexican cinema via Deep Crimson (1996) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001).

Between 2000 and 2003, Paredes served as President of the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, using her platform to criticise the centre-right Aznar government’s support for the Iraq war. She continued to combine acting with activism: earlier this year, she spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and shot the road movie Emergency Exit (2025 tbc). Upon receiving an honorary Goya in 2018, she noted her profession “demands approaching with absolute rigour and seriousness. It requires dedication, courage, strength, not being defeated by discouragement.”

Paredes was briefly married to the writer-director Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi; she is survived by their daughter, the actress María Isasi, and by her partner of forty years, José María Prado, the former director of the Spanish National Film Library.

Marisa Paredes, born April 3, 1946, died December 17, 2024.

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.