It’s another night in an emergency services dispatch room in Copenhagen. Policeman Asger Holm has been taken off active patrol pending a conduct investigation and is stuck on the phones. Drunks, druggies, posh blokes complaining of being mugged in the red light district, he’s pretty brutal with these time-wasters. Then a call comes in from a desperate woman.
Richard E Grant has captivated the internet. The actor greeted the news of his nomination for an Academy Award by returning to his first rental when no one had heard of him. There he whooped with childlike delight, and then shared the whole thing in an utterly disarming Instagram post. He also phoned up his co-star and co-nominee Melissa McCarthy, and together they cried.
French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.
Is #MeSnooze a hashtag? It could well be for those who sat through the 90th annual Academy Awards, an Oscar night so reined in by the current climate in Hollywood that it was as if all the fun and frolics had been leached out of a ceremony always at its best when it lets in a teensy bit of the lowbrow, or at least allows for the unexpected.
The unpredictable was certainly the case last year. The Best Picture cock-up (the so-called Envelopegate) wasn’t going to happen twice in a row, even if Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were invited back to do the honours: “Presenting is lovelier the second time around,” Dunaway deadpanned. Indeed, Guillermo del Toro rather sweetly checked to make sure that the card was accurate before stepping to the podium to give thanks for his film, The Shape of Water, winning Best Picture. The top prize was in this instance easily the most competitive of the night, with many expecting Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or even Get Out to squeak in at the final moment. (The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars in all, was the evening's big winner, followed by Dunkirk with three, all in technical categories.)
By the point del Toro made the second of his two visits to the stage, a long evening (nearly four hours) had some while before run out of juice. Perhaps as if in understandable obedience to movements that hadn’t been named this time last year, Hollywood’s annual paean to itself has rarely seemed so muted. Sure, there was the offer of a jet ski for the presenter who gave the shortest speech (step up Mark Bridges, the costume designer for Phantom Thread), and host Jimmy Kimmel announced that he would time all the speeches instead of allowing the orchestra to drown them out: Bridges’ lasted 36 seconds.
But somewhere past the halfway mark, prolix winners were indeed given a musical prompt to hurry up. By that point, too, one had begun to notice that Kimmel often seemed strangely absent from his own second consecutive hosting gig, having promised at the end of last year never to come back. From an opening monologue comparatively light on comedy and thick with an earnest reminder of where the industry has got to now, one felt the evening all but buckling under the weight of having to toe the correct line. During one of his wanderings through the audience Kimmel asked Steven Spielberg if he had any pot. You wondered whether a collective toke might do everyone some good.
The very start – with contemporary faces folded into retro-style visuals in keeping with the Oscars’ nine decades – was a great idea given insufficient room or space to build: think how much Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal would have done with the same material. Or how much more relaxed such presenters as Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) and The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjiani seemed in the face of #MeToo, #TimesUp and a newly enlightened climate that brought out the impassioned trio of Annabella Sciorra, Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd, three of the many women who have levelled allegations of sexual abuse at the producer Harvey Weinstein. (For the record Weinstein was namechecked during the show while Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey, among others, were not. Oh, and Mike Pence was, though Donald Trump wasn’t – at least directly. Lord knows how the Orange One feels about Mexican filmmakers winning the directing Oscar four out of the last five years: mandatory cheeseburgers for everyone, one fears.)
Even the redoubtable Frances McDormand (pictured above), kicking off with her now-familiar strategy at such events of informing us that she had “something to say”, closed out her Best Actress remarks with talk of an “inclusion rider” – an industry-speak reference that sent everyone scurrying to Google. Oh for the comparative brio and passion she brought to the stage when she won her first Oscar 21 years ago for Fargo: the rhetoric, or McDormand's delivery of it, is looking ever so slightly canned, though it was a nice touch when she encouraged all the female nominees in the auditorium to stand. Meryl Streep, with 21 nominations the prevailing female Oscar grandee, immediately led McDormand’s call, and the other women directly followed. (Streep, incidentally, now seems to occupy the prime position in a seat down-centre that for years went to her Ironweed co-star, Jack Nicholson.)
The roll call of winners was pro forma pretty well down the line: the trophies themselves were awarded across an array of films, with Lady Bird among the few that was entirely shut out. All four acting awards followed expected protocol, the Academy missing a golden opportunity to honour on the same night Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) and the first of his five wives, Phantom Thread’s Lesley Manville.
And though the enthusiasm inside the Dolby Theatre for nominees Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name) might have suggested an Adrien Brody-style upset, Oldman’s Winston Churchill once again prevailed, just as McDormand and Sam Rockwell did for Three Billboards and Alison Janney’s LaVona Golden (from I, Tonya) did for supporting actress. “I did it all by myself,” Janney said once she got to the stage, pausing for effect before issuing a correction: “Nothing could be further from the truth.” And though the self-seriousness of the evening seems to work against discussion of the nominees’ sartorial choices, Janney did look a lot more comfortable here than several weeks ago at the Baftas. Gone, thank heavens, was the collar ready to behead her at any second.
There were undeniable delights scattered here and there. It was wonderful to see the great Roger Deakins finally awarded for cinematography for Blade Runner 2049, his 14th nomination, just as one was heartened by the cheers for Mudbound’s Rachel Morrison – the first woman ever nominated in the cinematography category. The two British winners, themselves a couple, for live action short film for The Silent Child were eloquence and grace personified, and one can only assume that the subject of their film, six-year-old Maisie Sly, had some while before gone to bed.
Eva Marie Saint, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront in 1955, at age 93 handled presenting chores with aplomb, and Broadway regular Keala Settle once again proved the undeniably galvanic power of best song nominee “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman, which brought an ovation-happy audience once again to its feet. In context, the fact that the award actually went to “Remember Me” from Coco (a winner as well for animated film) remains a head-scratcher given that all four of the other song nominees came across better in performance. (Gael Garcia Bernal’s pitch troubles didn’t help the “Remember Me” cause.)
And to be honest, once all the appeals to inclusivity, immigrants, and a kinder, fairer Hollywood had quite sensibly and aptly been made, one still found oneself wishing for just a tiny bit of vulgarity or something truly lively that might at least knock at the door of the prevailing constraint. Del Toro – as gifted a speech-giver as the film industry has these days – got some of the way there in his buoyant shout-out to youth across society “showing us how things are done”. But I have a hunch there was a silent nod of assent when Oldman, paying tribute to his 98-year-old mum back in Britain, urged her to “put the kettle on”. By that point, we all could have used a drink.
If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history.
Prepare to disagree. 2016 has been getting bad reviews all year long, but for film it was actually pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that there are big omissions from this list of our best films from the past 12 months. Our method of selection was arbitrary: each of the theartsdesk’s film reviewers was invited to volunteer one film each as their favourite of the year. No one was allowed to choose two.
So there is no place in our top seven for the film which was this year’s winner of the Oscar for best film (Spotlight), nor best adapted screenplay (The Big Short), nor the film with the best performance by an actress. No room for Room? What did we choose instead? Read on. And on page two we sharpen our blades and carve up the year’s true turkeys, some of them very expensive turkeys.
THEARTSDESK'S BEST FILMS OF 2016
"Chekhov meets Edward Hopper" is merely one way of describing Charlie Kaufman's extraordinary stop-motion film, an Oscar-nominated portrait of anomie as the prevailing psychological condition of our time, which also has the good sense to fold Cyndi Lauper into its soundscape. The up-tempo Lauper anthem is, of course, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", a carefree sentiment inimical to the careworn landscape in which the itinerant Michael (David Thewlis), an LA-based Brit in Cincinnati to speak at a conference, meets the sad-eyed Lisa (a peerless Jennifer Jason Leigh). Their connection is an attempt to enliven the anaesthetised sameness of a world in which, tellingly, all the other characters are voiced by one person (Tom Noonan). Thewlis hasn't had a role this rich since Mike Leigh's Naked, a movie coursing with the kind of electrical charge unavailable to the characters in Kaufman's scarily samey environs. That the film was obviously conceived and made before the rise and rise of Donald Trump makes its baleful tone even more remarkable: too much more of the president elect, and I suspect many will be feeling Michael's bone-deep desolation as their own. Matt Wolf
Denis Villeneuve's film is sci-fi for those who don't like sci-fi, a time-jumping tale about aliens visiting Earth in pod-like structures, with weird heptapod creatures inside who speak only an abstract language that linguistics expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams, pictured above) and mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) have to interpret to find out if the aliens come to wage war (as the military running the operation, including Forest Whitaker's army colonel, fear). As the experts (not the military, you note) eventually find, the aliens have come to warn us that to save our planet we must co-operate internationally, and at its heart is a powerful message about communication, the importance of language and the need for humans to properly listen to one another. This being a Hollywood movie, there has to be a (sort of) romance, and there's a Gravity-style story involving a mother and a lost child, but both are done with subtlety, and it's a film that releases its secrets gradually, like the best detective stories. It pulls off that difficult trick – of being mainstream entertainment that makes the audience think. Veronica Lee
Everything about Julieta felt totally Almodóvarian despite its unusual source: a trio of short stories by the Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro. A family saga blending tragedy and levity, ravishing cinematography as a backdrop to exquisite performances from a company of passionate actresses led by Adriana Ugarte (pictured above with Daniel Grao) and Emma Suárez as younger and older incarnations of the title role. Many of the director’s abiding themes were here: terminal illness, sudden death, a mother’s love for a lost child, men hanging about the fringes. As ever there’s a lovely performance from Almodóvar’s tomahawk-faced stalwart Rossy de Palma.
Meanwhile Almodóvar’s career-long homage to Hitchcock continued in Alberto Iglesias’s Hermannesque score, the ravishing costume designs of Sonia Grande and above all in Julieta’s immutable blondeness. Almodóvar’s veneration for femininity of all ages is gracefully caught in a scene in which the young Julieta’s dyed blonde mop is dried by her daughter; when the towel is removed she has transformed into the older Julieta. The signature colour is red, which pulses on the screen everywhere like a hazard light. It’s the colour of everything in this heartbreaking but hopeful film: rage, blood, heat, passion, danger, love. Jasper Rees
From the quivering body fat of its provocative opening titles through to its beautifully framed, icily immaculate interiors, it’s clear that designer-turned-director Tom Ford’s second feature is going to be nothing if not impeccably stylish. But his tale-within-a-tale of young love, disillusion and bitter revenge packs a massive emotional punch, too – and Ford draws out some of the strongest performances Jake Gyllenhaal (pictured above) and Amy Adams have given in years. The harrowing atrocities of the film’s embedded novel – a young family's nightmarish encounter with a trio of Texan thugs – are what stick uncomfortably in the memory. But Ford’s real achievement is keeping us hanging on every frame until the quiet desperation of his horribly lonely ending. Assured, unsettling and magnificent. David Kettle
If the news in 2016 drenched us in images of war, refugees and racism to the point where we could no longer follow the nuances of right and wrong and instead retreated into mourning celebrities, looking to history to provide moral certainty proved elusive. László Nemes’ drama, Son of Saul, took us back once again to the death camps of WWII and in place of the usual binary narrative of bad Nazis/good victims gave us a complex, wholly immersive tale of moral ambiguity and incomprehensible compromises. Géza Röhrig plays Saul (pictured above), a Hungarian drafted into the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners charged with ushering new arrivals into the gas chambers for a few months before being slaughtered themselves. In the babel of languages and conflicted allegiances between prisoners of different nationalities, Saul’s quest to honour one of the corpses with the religious rituals of death is impossible, absurd and heart-breaking. This is one of the very few films in 2016 that grows more equivocal with every viewing and repays in-depth consideration. That Son of Saul should be made in Hungary in 2015 as anti-Semitism and persecution of the Roma and Sinti people are once again at full throttle is wholly admirable. One can only hope that its Foreign-language Oscar led to wider viewing in its native country. Saskia Baron
Fairy tales were the primal source for the relentlessly original story and spectacle in this gory, gritty one-off. Giambattista Basile’s 17th century tales, freely adapted by Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone with Goya and Game of Thrones in mind, lack the comforting predictability of our sanitised retellings of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. Instead, as Salma Hayek’s queen chomped on a sea-dragon’s heart, Bebe Cave’s princess caused collateral damage to a passing circus troupe during her savage escape from an ogre, and Toby Jones as her father the king preferred the company of a beloved giant flea, we were in a world of darkly redolent wonders.
Garrone sprinkled a fairy tale’s stardust on his last film, Reality, in the unlikely setting of Rome’s Big Brother house. Tale of Tales conversely gave visceral conviction to scenes of grand artifice. Filmed in the castles which stud Italy’s landscape, special effects recalled animated Ray Harryhausen creatures from analogue childhoods. Like much of the Italian renaissance confirmed this year by Youth and A Bigger Splash, Tale of Tales was also richly, earthily Neapolitan. Hollywood rules were ignored. Folk truths of human nature and artisan, crafted visual imagination combined, and felt uncompromised. It caused quiet entrancement at seeing things we hadn’t quite seen before. Nick Hasted
Notorious for being the movie in which Leo di Caprio got mauled by a bear, sheltered for the night inside the corpse of a horse and ate raw bison liver, The Revenant brought new meaning to the word “immersive”. It was a tale of fur trappers on the wild frontier in the early 1800s, and was as gruelling and physically punishing as film-making has ever been, but director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki wanted more. While the action sequences (not least the opening battle between trappers and indians) had you ducking for cover as bullets, arrows and axes sizzled past your ears, Lubezki’s astounding photography (much of the movie was shot in the Canadian Rockies) meant that the pictures really did tell the story. Awesome mountain ranges, frozen forests prowled by torch-carrying horsemen, fiery comets in the heavens and a weird derelict chapel in the middle of the wilderness made The Revenant feel like the real Apocalypse Now, its near-mystical power reinforced by a brilliantly-conceived sound picture which suggested a landscape filled with spirits and mysterious natural forces. When di Caprio, Lubezki and Iñárritu scarpered with the gongs on Oscar night, it seemed only reasonable. Adam Sweeting
It’s been an année merveilleuse for Isabelle Huppert – the great French actor has given us two major screen roles, first Things to Come at the Berlinale, then Elle in Cannes, as well as the landmark theatre project Phaedra(s) which has toured internationally (“total stage-goddess territory for Huppert”, theartsdesk said). Plus, two more than respectable films, Valley of Love with Gerard Depardieu and a “breezy romcom” performance in Souvenir; she’ll be back in Michael Haneke’s new Happy End in 2017, too.
“What proper cinema for adults is all about” is a phrase that has been used of European provocateur Paul Verhoeven's Elle, which only reaches the UK in March, and that film’s explicit story and content is certainly “adult” in one way: Huppert is at the top of her game, in remorseless control of a story that initially looks like something very different. Reach your own verdict, but for me Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come – that title a brilliant, bleak translation of the French original, L’Avenir – trumped its racier stablemate. It’s Huppert (pictured above) at her most brilliant, playing maturity to the full, as she loses control of much in her life: her marriage falls apart, her mother dies, that future changes. It’s serene, rich in understanding, and transcendentally profonde. Tom Birchenough
Anthony Weiner, a successful Democratic congressman, was forced to resign in 2011 after a sexting scandal in which he sent pictures of his bulging briefs to various women, often under the name of Carlos Danger. Dickileaks, Stroking Gun, Weiner Exposed: it was a gift from heaven for the New York Post's headline writers. But he decided to clean up his act and run for mayor of NYC in 2013. So far, so good: his super-stylish wife, Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, was, mysteriously, behind him all the way. However in the middle of the campaign it turned out that Weiner was still sexting like crazy and one of his recipients, a woman known as Sydney Leathers, went public. “What is wrong with you?” an MSNBC host asked Weiner, and you do have to wonder. He soldiered on for a while, with Abedin looking grim – they have a child together, as well as a very odd-looking cat – but finally the game was up and he withdrew (sorry). What’s fascinating is how weirdly appealing the egotistical, self-sabotaging Weiner seems. Trouble is, we now know that it was the FBI’s last-minute investigation into emails on his laptop that may have lost Hillary Clinton the election. Politics – what a game. This riveting documentary showed that in all its glory. Markie Robson-Scott
The causes kept coming – diversity, of course, but also climate change, sexual abuse, LGBT rights and more – at the 88th annual Academy Awards, which surely ranked as the most politically charged Oscars in years. And that’s not only because one of the warmest welcomes of the night went to the American vice president, Joseph Biden, in an evening during which Donald Trump’s name – surprisingly or mercifully, or maybe both – was heard only once.
If there is a successor to the great Hollywood costume designer Edith Head, it is Sandy Powell, the British designer of six films directed by Martin Scorsese, three each by Todd Haynes and Neil Jordan, and others by the likes of Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Stephen Frears and Julie Taymor. Powell’s recent Oscar nominations for designing the costumes for Haynes’s Carol and Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella raised her total to 12: her wins have come for Shakespeare in Love, Scorsese’s The Aviator, and Young Victoria.
The autumn cinema schedules of 2015 were assailed by the double whammy of Spectre and The Force Awakens– at times making it hard to find a screen showing anything else.