Best films of 2010

I think the best film I saw in 2010 was Poetry, made by Lee Chang-dong of South Korea.

The still shows the lead actress, Jeong-hie Yun, who made the film after sixteen years of retirement, and the director, Lee Chang-dong. Her performance was outstanding. Lee Chang-dong has now made five films as screenwriter/director and he has won several international awards. I don't doubt that he now has a place with the best directors in the world.

This film's strengths were its deeply moving poetic quality, avoiding the drama at its heart like a dramatic elephant in the room, until the very end, when all the themes converge. Other very good films for me were:

• Of Gods And Men, a story of monks bravely staying put in a place of political instability. This film has sublime casting, perfect acting and striking cinematography.

• A Single Man, Tom Ford's first film. An adaption of a Christopher Isherwood story. The most moving romance I can remember seeing on film.

• Chongqing Blues, a story about a returning seaman trying to discover the circumstances of his son's death, and raking through the gravel of Chinese society in the process. An understated and beautifully filmed and acted Chinese film, revealing much about contemporary Chinese society.

• How I Ended This Summer, A Russian film set in a remote arctic meteorological monitoring station. It was named Best Film at the London Film Festival. This is a strong drama with very powerful acting in a remote and stunning location

• Up In The Air, a George Clooney vehicle made by Jason Reitman. While being entertaining this film has an elegant and complex screenplay that resonates with many meanings.

Honourable mentions should go to I Am Love a bold and back-to-basics melodrama, with the 'melo' provided by John Adams, The Secret In Their Eyes - a fresh drama extended over lives and time, Shutter Island - outrageously entertaining hokum, The Maid - a Spanish drama in which not much happens very dramatically, Gainsbourg - a very imaginative realisation of Serge Gainsbourg's life with excellent casting,  Mother, a film from South Korea, Certified Copy, Kiarostami's first film made outside of Iran, 3 Seasons In Hell, a Czech film about events in Czechoslovakia in the period between 1947 and 1949, seen from the point of view of a rebellious poet, Leaving, a story of blind lust and passion, Manila Skies, a film from the Philippines showing a man being dragged down by the difficulty of life in Manila and finally acting desparately and The Illusionist, a very moving animated film based on a screenplay by Jacques Tati. On a different day I might have put any of these films into my top list.

I also saw many very good old films, including The Leopard, Pandora And The Flying Dutchman, Ozu's Tokyo Story and Late Spring, Metropolis, Went The Day Well, Sammy Going South, The Shop Around The Corner and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners And I.

My top cinema event of 2010 was - well, there were two! At the Chichester Film Festival I saw Tony Palmer present his South Bank Show film about the Wagner family. This film will be released on DVD in 2011 in a feature-length version. Palmer has become knowledgeable about Wagner as he also made a film about him starring Richard Burton. In support of the South Bank Show film he showed a filmed dramatized biopic of Wagner made in 1913! The film is 90 minutes long and only two prints remain. Wagner in the film is played by an Italian comedian who looks strangely like Wagner. Palmer sat at the front with a microphone and talked the audience through the film - a very special experience!

But this was capped a couple of days later when Palmer presented his film Bird On A Wire, a film Palmer made about Leonard Cohen in 1972 and which then became lost. Recently the audio master tapes were found along with editing fragments of film, and Palmer has reconstructed the film from memory using 3000 fragments. This is a significant document about an important artist in his prime and it has extremely moving moments. Palmer believes that many of the takes of Cohen's songs are better than the takes on the albums that made him famous. Palmer showed the film and talked about it for a hour. I am very pleased to have the DVD.

The most moving films were Poetry, Of Gods And Men, and A Single Man.
The most interesting films were Chongqing Blues and How I Ended This Summer
The most entertaining and enjoyable were Shutter Island, Up In The Air, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and Gainsbourg.
Best non-fiction was Bird on a Wire followed by John Pilger's The War You Don't See. A film about embedded journalists and how the media collude in government lies and deception and pass on to us the propaganda.
Notable acting: Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, Kristin Scott Thomas in Leaving,  Jeong-hie Yun in Poetry, Grigory Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis in How I Ended This Summer and all the monks in Of Gods And Men.
Best film music: Shutter Island, I Am Love

If I could take a DVD of just one of these films to a desert island it would be Bird On A Wire

Disappointments were:

• Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, a very fine-looking film that says very little about someone who's not very interesting, I was bored. Maybe I'm not as taken by pole-dancers as I should be.
• Inception, a film targeted at a demographic with far more taste for hackneyed and cliched shoot-em-up scenes than I have, all overlain with impenetrable and tedious mysticism
• The Social Network, a not-bad Friday evening flick, but unworthy of the attention it has received in best-film lists. It has very good cinematography and looked very good up on the screen, but the drama lost its way.

Films I still haven't managed to see are The Arbor and Police, Adjective.

The film I'm really looking forward to seeing next year is Biutiful.

Into The Wild

I saw this film on TV. It was directed by Sean Penn and released in 2007. It is based on the life Christopher McCandless who, after graduating, went off into the wilder parts of the USA to escape the materialistic and professional world of his parents. The film is recounted in voice-over by his sister, who knew very little of his life because he cut off all communication with his family. This may seem unsatisfactory but it works. We see many 'Marlborough Man' stereotypes living in caravans and working on farms.

Towards the end he meets and elderly man, played by Hal Holbrook, who comes to want to adopt him. Holbrook won several best supporting actor awards for his part. There is much beautiful camera-work, some of it slightly tricksy , with use of split frame and freeze frame. The film starts at the point where McCandless comes across an abandoned bus, which he temporarily adopts as a home. The film then moves chronologically forwards while flashing-back to the parts of his travels before the bus.

McCandless finally died of starvation at the age of 23 and his body was discovered a couple of weeks after his death. McCandless's story inspired a written account by Jon Krakauer, and it is on this that the film is based. This account has some misunderstandings, including the false notion that McCandless died after eating poison berries.

This is a moving and deeply-committed film and Sean Penn is to be respected for having made it.

The War You Don't See

This is another episode in John Pilger's crusade to help people to understand how the world works, as opposed to the understanding that the elites and those who aspire to control our lives would like us to believe.

This documentary is about embedded journalists, and it is also about the failure of the mainstream TV media, particularly BBC and ITV, adequately to express views that differ from the government message.  Any war is also a propaganda war and the media have a pivotal role selecting who's version to publicise. Pilger has no difficulty in providing examples of the mainstream media conscientiously presenting the government's version of events while not attempting to present any alternative views or, alternatively, broadcasting film and arguments from recognized propaganda sources, without any analysis or interpretation from more independent analysts. In the film he interviews those in senior positions in the news heirarchy and we see that they are unable to justify their failure in their journalistic roles.

The Shop Around The Corner

This film was made by Ernst Lubitsch in 1940. It stars Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. It is the film that made me understand how good James Stewart could be - with incredible charm, a gift for delivering lines and allowing mixed emotions to pass across his face. The film is adapted from a Romanian play and it concerns the goings-on in a shop, and particularly the conflict and romance between the shop's longest-standing and most senior employee, Stewart, and a new employee, Sullavan.

The film shows in bucket-loads the Lubitsch 'touch' - felicitous camera movements and humour which is light, efective and does not pall or condescend. The cinema was almost full and there was much laughter from the audience. I saw it with a large group and it produced a smile on nearly eveyone's face, and I heard no negative remarks about it.

Somewhere, a film by Sofia Coppola

This is a film in which not much happens. It makes Mike Leigh's Another Year seem quite action-packed.

Somewhere is about the life in LA of a successful actor. We see snapshots of his life and in the course of the film the mother of his daughter telephones him asking him to look after his daughter while the mother is away for an indeterminate time. We see that the actor, Johnny Marco, is an easy-going charming guy who lives in an hotel (the well-known Chateau Marmont). At the beginning of the film, over the credits we see a black sports car driving in circles around a circuit. After the credits, Johnny falls down stairs and breaks his wrist, and his wrist-in-plaster is a recurrent element in the rest of the film. Then we see Johnny lying on his bed being entertained by a pair of pole dancers. Then he gives a press conference. He goes to Italy with his daughter and they stay in a luxurious hotel with their own en-suite swimming pool, fawned upon by immaculately-dressed Italians, and he is interviewed for the radio. We see that Johnny is pretty inarticulate, which is fortunate, because he doesn't seem to have many thoughts or ideas anyway. He doesn't know much about his daughter, Cleo, but does his best in an easy-going way to look after her. She prepares food, phoning down to the hotel reception for the ingredients. In fact, as Johnny doesn't seem to have a home, the most stressful thing he does is phoning reception. We see the pole dancers a second time and we see how they break down and fold up their poles and put them away in a special bag when they are dismissed (Johnny fell asleep).

At every turn women throw themselves at him. There is a scene in which he walks into his hotel room ahead of Cleo and there, on his bed, is a woman showing him her breasts. He says to her "Now isn't a good time." and turns to his daughter behind him and says "Shall we go down stairs for a burger?"

Johnny's car, a black and noisy sports car, figures quite prominently, as there are several scenes in it, and once he gets a puncture and phones for help. He often suspects that he is being followed. I don't know why.

The film got off to a fairly bad start for me with the driving of the sports car in circles and then the pole dancers. There is a scene in which Cleo shows her father how she can ice-skate. This scene was held too long, as were the pole dancing scenes, as though the film-maker thought I might be interested in watching pole dancers and ice-skating. These scenes were shown from Johnny's point of view, implicating me in them, when I would have preferred some contextualising device. As I watched the film I wondered whether it was intended as a parody or send-up of life among the stars in LA, but it is more a pretty meticulous miniaturist observation without seeking drama or judgment. At the end of the film Johnny drives off into the desert and wanders along the road looking lost and confused, reminding me that I must press on with that article: 'The Role And Meaning Of The California Desert in The American Imagination.'

Is Coppola saying I grew up among Hollywood royalty and I know how it is, so I can make this film; because I KNOW? If a film were made set in the corridors of Buckingham Palace that told us definitively, once and for all, whether Prince Charles does or does not put his own toothpaste onto his toothbrush; how interesting would that film be? A bit, I suppose, in a gossipy way. This is the Hollywood equivalent of that film. Now we know that when the tide of angst and boredom wells out of the TV screen and across the hotel bed the Hollywood star phones reception and orders a brace of pole-dancers. I can cope better with toothpaste. It is more interesting to look at.

This is a fairly well-made film that doesn't say much about a fairly uninteresting subject.

On Tour

This film is directed by the prolific French actor Mathieu Amalric, who also stars in it and is the screenwriter. It is about a man, Joachim, played by Amalric, returning to France from the USA with a troupe of American burlesque entertainers. He has organised a tour in France, intended to terminate in Paris. Instead, the tour makes its way along coastal places and becomes bogged down by problems originating in Joachim's past, when he has made many enemies. Also his children join him and of course distract him from his professional obligations. It is impossible to watch this film without thinking of Cassavete's Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I also thought of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. These are two films I love. I saw Amalric do a Q&A after the film and he mentioned these films.

I have no taste for burlesque and although the main focus of the film is on Joachim's struggles as he encounters increasing difficulties in trying to keep the show on the road, the film assumes that the viewer is more interested in the acts than I am. Although the drama dominated, the shots of the acts were held longer than I would have held them. Amalric, in the Q&A, said how fond he was of the women and how much he admired what they do. My problem is I just cringe.

That this film can hold its head high in the company of Killing of a Chinese Bookie and All That Jazz, which for me are masterpieces, is a mark of its quality.

Of Gods and Men

This is a marvelous film. It is authentic and deeply moving, and strong in all film-making departments.

The film, which won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes, is French, and is based on actual events in Northern Algeria in 1996. It is an account of a French monastery in a North African country becoming politically unstable, with rebels and the government army in conflict. The monastery has eight monks who cultivate the garden, produce honey and raise sheep. The political developments force them to consider and discuss the nature of their vocation and whether they should return to France or stay, risking whatever violation the political currents may bring.

The cast includes the wonderful Michel (or Michael) Lonsdale as a doctor, tending to the needs of the local community. The rest of the cast are perfect; diverse and embodying the simplicity and simple courage of a small community wavering and fearful yet sustained by their faith. They often pray and sing communally, and there are magical musical moments, with one particularly striking scene as they huddle together in fear and faith, singing their defiance, as a helicopter hovers over the monastery.

I am tempted to say that the star of the film is the cinematography by Caroline Champetier. There are of course many dark interiors, but she has also contrived, when shooting outdoors, to find shadow in a very expressive way.

The American

This is a film about a professional killer who has to go into hiding in a beautiful Italian village. There are plenty of picture-postcard shots of the village, which is piled beautifully on the side of a hill. Hiding George Clooney in an Italian village seems as good an idea as hiding a herd of sheep in my sitting room. Why not Milton Keynes? Still, at least Clooney didn't have far to go to work while he was making the film because I think he may have a home in Italy. As one might predict, he doesn't fade into the brickwork and is quickly spotted and forced into conversation by the priest, despite his instructions to avoid friendships. Not content with the priest he frequents a glitzy brothel and falls in love with his chosen prostitute and wants to 'go straight' and run away with her, apparently unaware of the number one rule of professional killer films: these guys can't just decide to go straight and walk away from their past.

So here we have it, an American isolated in an Italian village with two alliterative human contacts, a priest and a prostitute. They both perceptively remark that he is secretive. He is secretive with good reason because he has just, in a pre-credit scene, killed a woman he had previously been making love to by shooting her in the head at point blank range.

There are some incidental scenes that don't ring true. which I attribute to variable screenwriting by Rowan Joffe, who has written, apart from this film, 28 Weeks Later and Last resort, as well as TV plays. He has now directed a remake of Brighton Rock, which has received considerable praise. The American is directed by Anton Corbijn (no, I don't know how to pronounce it), who's first film, Control, was about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who killed himself. Corbijn made his name as a photographer. The American is based on a novel by Martin Booth

The awful violence and cliched quality of the pre-credit scene (in the love-making part they were before an open fire, she naked on the bed) got me off to a bad start. After the credits there were more cliches: fetishisation of the gun, with detailed scenes of dismantling and assembly of precision parts, scenes I've seen an uncountable number of times in other films. I think that if one is going to show such material it needs some freshness. There is a scene in which he is pursued though the village, resulting in two bodies, so it seems, but this implausibly doesn't seem to bring out the local plod, knocking on his door.

Nevertheless for me the film found its rhythm and I started to enjoy its leisurely 'European' pace. He was able to frequent some nice-looking restaurants that I wish were more local to me. I admire George Clooney and I admired him again for taking such a downbeat part, which many stars of his magnitude wouldn't have done.

A fresh element in the film is the fact that the Clooney figure, although a professional killer, is not a free spirit, but he is a flunky in a hierarchy of command, taking his orders by telephone, cowed rather than in control, and looking as unhappy and oppressed as Clooney is able to do. He has a good crack at it.

Mike Leigh's Another Year

I am quite resistant to Mike Leigh's work. He is an actor-based director and I think the acting is sometimes excessive. Also I find he often prescribes too strongly what we should think about his characters, leaving me too little room to work out my own response. Like quite a few people I've spoken to I couldn't stand Happy-Go-Lucky because the main character was over-cooked and implausibly irritating.

Another year is better and as I watched it in a preview I was thinking that the critics would give it four or five stars, which most of them did. The film is structured around a professional couple approaching retirement age, and their adult son, and the film largely concerns two family friends. In the course of the film the son acquires a girl friend (who has more that a touch of the Happy-Go-Luckies). Leigh's films reverberate with his work generally and he often uses the same actors in several films. This film starts with a scene, only tangentially connected to the rest of the film, featuring Immelda Staunton, who starred in Leigh's Vera Drake (unseen by me). This scene seemed like a gesture of friendship from Leigh to Staunton, so she wouldn't feel neglected. After this the film has four scenes corresponding to the four seasons, and each scene is a sort of snapshot of these characters. For those into allotments this is a good film. The film is largely about Mary, played by Leslie Manville. She is a work colleague of Gerri, the female half of the professional couple, and she is going through a drink-fueled mid-life crisis where she moves from seeing herself as an attractive, single woman to a middle-aged woman past her prime, with old-age fast approaching. You either think her acting is great or you think it distracts from responding to the character. It is definitely show-case acting. The other satellite of the professional couple is Ken, who's situation is not so dissimilar to Mary's, although he probably is way beyond thinking of himself as attractive. He is unhappy and unfulfilled, and eats and drinks immoderately in ways the film makes it impossible to misinterpret or ignore, shoving the camera in his face as he drinks beer, wine and eats crisps. He is overweight. He makes a rejected pass at Mary. For me he is the least satisfactory character because he is drawn with such a lack of subtlety .

The other half of the professional couple is Tom, played by Jim Broadbent, who is one of those actors everyone hastens to say they like (just as everyone hastens to say how much they hate Titanic!), and he is capable. Tom has a brother Ronnie, who enters the film after his wife dies, and we go to the funeral, which is one of the film's best scenes, and Ronnie is one of the more successful characters, maybe because he seems to be catatonic with shock at his wife's death, and doesn't have much to say, or act. Then Ronnie moves in with Tom and Gerry and there are some conversations between him and Mary, in which we see Ronnie slowly re-connecting with life.

A problem I have with Leigh's work generally, and it applies here, is the lack of dramatic impulse. Some of the film is moving, but one doesn't really wonder what will happen next. It is almost the cinema equivalent of a still life. There is a fault line in the film between the professional couple, who are stable and happy, and appear to have no doubts or problems, and their satellites, who have all the problems and doubts. I don't really know why the doubts and problems couldn't be more evenly spread, unless Leigh was making a class-related point. One might ask who is changed by the events of the film? The couple's son acquires a girl friend, although this happens outside of the film and isn't dramatised. Ronnie's wife dies, again outside of the film, and his angry son appears out of the blue at the funeral. Ken discovers that Mary doesn't fancy him. Mary hunkers down for old age and spinsterhood. The professional couple sail on. Something, but not much

All this is recounted in a slow and thoughtful way which it is hard to dislike and easy to respect. Well, one flippant journalist said it seemed like Another Ten Years. I don't agree.