From action-packed blockbusters to exciting indie releases, heartbreaking gems and movies that were difficult to watch but unforgettable, film reviewer Penelope Debelle shares her top films from the past 12 months.
It seems a while since that sweet early morning in Gotham City when Robert Pattinson’s Batman escorted Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) to the outskirts of town on their hotted-up motorbikes.
It was March, at the start of a year that felt more COVID normal, which is not to say that the pandemic is over, only that we can sit together and catch it unmasked.
Just a couple of months after The Batman came one of the most-anticipated blockbuster revivals in recent cinema, the return of Tom Cruise in a role from 30 years ago: test pilot Maverick, aka Top Gun.
Unlike The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t cool. It was made for rev-heads and thrill-a-minute tragics who soaked up the banter, the nostalgia, and the cleverly paced aerial swoops and dives which unfolded just as they should.
Its success lay in a strong script, and an old-school commitment to as much real stunt work as Cruise’s insurance permitted. There is not another sequel that surpassed its original with such definitive flair, and the film is now being re-released in select cinemas in the lead-up to Christmas.
After the desultory Marvel offerings this year of Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (sorry Benedict Cumberbatch) and Morbius (sorry Jared Leto), we had to wait until last month to get a taste of what Marvel could do.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is frenetic and ambitious, but it has a touch of magic that throws forward to a future after the loss in 2020 of the original Black Panther, actor Chadwick Boseman, whose character the film lovingly remembers.
The most exciting cinema was found in smaller indie films, with the standard set early on by the incomparable Joaquin Phoenix in a subdued and tender story about a radio journalist making a documentary with kids, C’mon C’mon.
Phoenix, playing the crumpled, good-natured Johnny, is called on to care for his smart little nephew Jesse, 9, played by Woody Norman, who joins him on the road. It was charming in the best possible way.
After Yang, about a family with an android, Yang, brought by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) as a companion for their adopted girl, was good, and noteworthy for its visual strength. And for once, the robot didn’t go berserk and want to be one of us.
In Mothering Sunday, Australian actor Odessa Young was a star in the making as the English maid, Jane Fairchild, having a luscious affair with the squire of a neighbouring estate, Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) in rural England after the Great War. It wasn’t perfect, but it brought the sublimated grief of Graham Swift’s novel very powerfully to the screen.
Some of the most interesting films were all but ignored by audiences because of their subjects. I sympathise with those who didn’t want to see top-ranking Nazis meeting at a stately villa on a lake at Berlin Wannsee in 1942 to discuss The Final Solution (I could never bring myself to see Schindler’s List).
Yet The Conference was a minor masterpiece, based on a real diary of this event, with Hitler’s bureaucrats jockeying for position and complaining about their workload which involved transiting Jews – kept compliant through hope – to their doom. The terrifying banality of the arrangements being made to kill 11 million European Jews was history’s lesson for today. It was note-perfect.
Drive My Car was a dreamy gem, based on a story by Haruki Murakami, about a theatre director with an unfaithful wife, who dies, and his odd but cathartic relationship with the stoic driver of his precious Saab, a woman called Yusuke.
But my pick of the small films was The Quiet Girl, a little heart-breaker of a story about an Irish girl from a large, poor family who spends a summer with distant relatives where for the first time she feels the warmth of family.
Directed by first-timer Colm Bairéad, The Quiet Girl is set in 1980s rural Ireland and stars Catherine Clinch, a virtual unknown, as the young girl who goes through life trying not to be noticed. The couple who cares for her are Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett), who, it emerges, had lost a child. This is an exquisite, understated film with magnificent performances, all in Gaelic, and a subtext that says everyone, not just children, need love.
The year is closing with a rush of mid-level films of quality, like She Said, which turns the investigative legwork that brought down Harvey Weinstein into an involving drama. Starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as The New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, it is a right-versus-might story that brings home the heavy personal damage caused by Weinstein’s predatory exploitation of hopeful young actresses.
There are pleasures ahead with a pre-Oscar rush coming up, notably The Banshees of Inisherin, a story of a fractured friendship that reprises the In Bruges trio of director Martin McDonagh with actors Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell; a new Emily, about Emily Bronte and starring Emma Mackey; and the towering Tár, with Cate Blanchett at the height of her powers as an abusive and brilliant conductor.
Finally, the film people will least want to see but should be mentioned anyway is Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) and starring Timothée Chalamet. Its cannibal content makes it hard to recommend but it is daring and unforgettable, and, with notable gross exceptions, wonderful to look at.
The film triumphs over its subject of a couple drawn together by their taste for human flesh to become a doomed love story about two outsiders trying to manage their chaotic lives.
Keep an eye in the coming weeks for reviews of The Banshees of Inisherin, Emily, and the highly anticipated Avatar sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.This article first appeared in InDaily. Read the original here.
