It is Christmas most of the year in our house. I don’t have the space to hide away a box of unused crackers (one box lasts four years), so they sit on a shelf until they become relevant. Not very feng shui, I know. But it is also odd to reflect on the best of the year’s releases when the year is not yet up. So I offer apologies to Mike Leigh and Sofia Coppola, whose new films I have not seen at time of writing.
Typically, a London film reviewer’s first trip to a screening room in a new year presents them with something exceptional, against which other movies fall woefully short. So it was in 2010 with designer Tom Ford’s feature debut, A Single Man, an elegant, wholly involving ticking clock of a drama featuring a career-best performance by Colin Firth – and pretty good support from Julianne Moore. It was several trips later before I saw anything nearly as good, with Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman, a drama about the aftermath of a car accident that also dissected the class divide in Argentina, finally measuring up.
Religious doubt figured in two great movies that book-ended my year. Lourdes was a very dry examination of a modern miracle and responses to it. Of Gods and Men powerfully portrayed the doubts of a group of monks caught in a divided Muslim country. Like other reviewers, I was profoundly moved by the scene in which the monks listen to Swan Lake and experience emotional release – until one reviewer decided to stand up, block the projector and take an ill-timed toilet break.
I enjoyed far more than my colleagues Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, a comedy-drama of misinterpretation. MicMacs represented a partial return to form for Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. What it lacked in heart-felt emotion, it made up in comic incident.
Fantastic long takes set to the music of John Adams characterised I Am Love, which featured Tilda Swinton as a Russian living in Italy falling for her son’s friend. Her life unravels in the final scenes in mesmeric, fantastic style. My guilty American pleasure of the year was Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, featuring Ben Stiller as an emotionally immature man living in his brother’s house coming to terms with his own foibles and shortcomings while dealing with Greta Gerwig and a dog.
The most exhilarating movie of the year was Alain Resnais’ comedy-drama, Wild Grass, a study of delay, featuring enjoyable performances from André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma and Mathieu Amalric. It features the most tragic use of a zip since There’s Something About Mary – not that Resnais would reference such a film.
Heartbreaker was a perfectly enjoyable French masquerade movie in the American mode. Tamara Drewe offered a similarly summery pleasure, with a journalist (Gemma Arterton) upsetting the locals when she returns to the village where she grew up and shacks up with a rock star – or, rather, Dominic Cooper pretending to be one. To those who wondered whether it was a comedy or drama, I’d say it was neither – rather a whirligig that asked you to appraise your own morality. I found myself being more upset when two foul-mouthed teenage girls break into Tamara’s house than when Tamara has sex with the husband of a woman who runs a writing retreat.
Mexico fielded the sublime We Are What We Are, a tense blend of stylisation and naturalism portraying cannibalism in a contemporary urban setting. I was particularly wowed by Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, in which an author and a woman who runs an antiques shop pretend to be man and wife. It is the year’s best study of the desperate search to re-experience original pleasure.
Sadly, two of the year’s final releases don’t measure up to these others. Tron: Legacy plays like the sequel no one asked for in which Jeff Bridges stars opposite a digital botox version of himself. It was as dull as the 1982 – now woefully underwhelming – original. I had better hopes for Peter Weir’s first film in seven years, The Way Back, about a “United Nations” group of prisoners who escape from a gulag (among them Jim Sturgess and Ed Harris) in the Second World War and make their way to India via China. (The dialogue should have referenced the “League of Nations”, but I’ll let that pass.) The criticism of communism is overt and unapologetic. There is also an idealised view of a world without borders. When the survivors arrive in India and are asked to present their passports and visas, they are unable to do so; the officials happily waive them on. Alas, for many Britons, this message won’t play very well.
My 13-year-old-son would not let me finish without plugging his films of the year, particularly Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, Inception and A Town Called Panic. He didn’t thank me for taking him to his first Woody Allen film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which Lucy Punch steals Gayle Tuesday’s routine by way of Catherine Tate as a chesty, money-grubbing bimbo. “No, Dad!”
