After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.
film reviews
Matt Wolf
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot.
I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is riveted throughout to a story whose outcome is no surprise: Irving famously lost a libel case that he brought in 1996 against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her UK publishers, Penguin Books. Indeed, seeing this film amidst the present climate, I doubt I'm the only one wishing that Tom Wilkinson's indefatigably incisive Richard Rampton QC might be put to work combating several leading politicians in Ms Lipstadt's modern-day America. 
The film introduces its central sparring couple at a lecture Stateside, where Emory University professor Lipstadt is heckled from the floor while giving a talk for her latest book by the unrepentant gadfly that is Irving, Waving $1000 by way of provocation, Irving proceeeds to deploy both his age and experience – and the fact that he is English – to challenge Lipstadt (and anyone else) to prove that the Nazis did in fact gas Jews at Auschwitz. From there, Irving ramps up his needling to pursue Lipstadt for libel in court, where she is quite rightly astonished to discover that in Britain she will be presumed guilty unless proven otherwise; America's vaunted presumption of innocence is nowhere to be found.
Lipstadt's dismay leads her to that firebrand solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott, smiling only when totally necessary), whose CV includes handling "the Diana thing" – which David Hare's surprisingly laboured screenplay then goes to some lengths to explain. Julius, in turn, leads Lipstadt on to the barrister, Rampton, who insists on an exhaustive and first-hand tour of Auschwitz (pictured above) that makes for certainly the most visually heart-stopping section of the film. The soundtrack goes silent as Haris Zambarloukos's roaming camera lets the baleful imagery speak for itself.
Elsewhere, Hare and director Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) take a largely by-the-book approach, as if perhaps to resist the emotionally incendiary nature of what is on view. The script is full of "you must be" identifiers that seem like the lazy way out, and one feels slightly for Harriet Walter, who is forced to embody the entire community of Holocaust survivors that Lipstadt wants brought before the judge (Alex Jennings, suitably imposing), though her legal counsel argue otherwise. The Anglo-American differences are fairly ham-fistedly dealt with – Lipstadt jogs as incessantly as Rampton drinks fine red wine – and I stifled a laugh at the visual emphasis placed on a particular piece of London statuary which would have been far better left on the cutting room floor.
Still, Hare has always provided catnip for actors (Weisz led a recent New York revival of his 1978 play Plenty), and they more than rise to the challenge here, Weisz giving it her Sally Field-style gusto-driven best, notwithstanding a Queens accent that might as well exist in inverted commas. The men are all terrific, ranging from British theatre regulars like Elliot Levey and Pip Carter in smallish roles to the trifecta of Scott, Spall, and Wilkinson: the last-named a Mozart-loving paragon of integrity who instructs Lipstadt on the appeal of black pudding (yuk!).
Indeed, listening to Wilkinson hold forth on the depredations of prejudice and cowardice sends the mind on a mental march, the likes of which all too many men and women at the moment in Washington would do well to take on board.
- Read more film reviews on theartsdesk
- Overleaf: watch the trailer for Denial
Adam Sweeting
"This had better not be shite, Danny," was the warning delivered to director Danny Boyle from his cast, amazingly reunited from the original Trainspotting 21 years later. They had reason to be fearful, knowing how things often go with sequels, but Boyle, teaming up again with original screenwriter John Hodge, has pulled a fabulously misshapen rabbit out of his hat, which triggers echoes of the 1996 film yet can stand unaided in its own right.
Markie Robson-Scott
“A First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases,” remarks Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Melania Trump, take note. Jackie, the first English-language film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain (Neruda, No), is set in the week following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, as Jackie moves out of the White House and before the Johnsons move in.
Tom Birchenough
The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.
Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, the film is based on a true story. Given that it’s one we may have heard about before watching – and the film’s existence presupposes a certain conclusion – the ending feels less important than the story that has come before (the final mystery actually lies in the title). Set between India and Australia, its action crosses continents – and, no less importantly, the very different ways of lives we see in each – and amply realises Lion’s cinematic potential.
Pawar conveys a wide-eyed, silent wonder as he discovers it all
Davis and his cinematographer Greig Frasier relish wide landscapes, presented through panoramic aerial shots, and Lion opens high above the dry plains of central India, the year 1986. It’s the subsistence world in which five-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar, who has real screen panache) lives. His life revolves around his mother (Priyanka Bose), who works as a labourer, and his adored older brother Guddu, who does whatever odd jobs he can. Their very basic existence is grounded in family love, more often conveyed through gesture and image than words, in a film whose first half is spare on dialogue.
Saroo’s eagerness to prove that he too can make a contribution precipitates Lion’s first dislocation. Accompanying Guddu to a nearby town, his elder brother leaves him sleeping on a railway station bench. The next thing we know, Saroo is waking up on an empty train taking him off to an unknown destination, his cries of help to anyone he sees in the passing landscape ignored. If that’s a shock, arrival more than a thousand miles away at Kolkata’s teeming main terminus is an immersion in horror, not least because he speaks only Hindi in this frenzied Bengali conglomeration.
Saroo may slowly find his bearings in this unfamiliar world, but his survival is initially a matter of chance as he’s hassled by police and narrowly escapes the attentions of others whose designs on him are clearly sinister. Even when a chance act of kindness brings him to an orphanage, it’s a far from nurturing environment. We get a sense of the city’s variety, from the station underpasses (lit in anaemic yellows) in which Saroo sleeps on cardboard, through its shrines and streets, to the sheer scale of life around the wide Hooghly river.
When all attempts to resolve the mystery of where he has come from fail, Saroo is chosen for international adoption, and his next removal is to Tasmania, to his new parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham). After the aridity and tumult of India, this Australian landscape is an open one, dominated by water, every bit as unfamiliar to Saroo as the refrigerator and television in his new home. Pawar conveys a wide-eyed, silent wonder as he discovers it all, and he’s anchored by Sue's unquestioning presence. There’s nothing glamorous about Kidman (pictured above with Pawar) – even for late-80s Tasmania she seems almost determinedly plain – but she’s translucently sure of herself, emanating a stillness that captures the screen. It’s an assurance that will be tested with the arrival of the couple’s second adopted son, Mantosh, clearly damaged by his experience in a way that Saroo has avoided.
Cut forward to 2008. Saroo, now played by Dev Patel (pictured below) as a lightly bearded, gangly 25-year-old, has come to Melbourne to study. He's winningly confident in this new world of international contacts, which includes Lucy (Rooney Mara), an American student who becomes the film's understated romantic interest, as well as some Indians at the same college. It’s when he visits the latter for a meal that he’s thrown back into a past that he has seemed to blank out completely: it’s a distinctly Proustian moment, the re-association coming with jalebis, the brightly coloured Indian sweets that are lodged deep in his memories. In fact, food – and how you eat it – provides a nicely linked connection in Luke Davies’s screenplay. In childhood Saroo ate with his fingers, then a scene in Kolkata shows him discovering a spoon; part of his formal preparation for going abroad involves laboriously learning table manners, while with his new Indian friends, he’s once again inducted into eating with his fingers.
But it’s something else that he learns from them that propels Lion’s denouement. When Saroo opens up about his past, their mention of Google Earth sets him on a new journey, which will both disrupt his Australian life and (no particular spoiler alert) open a new Indian world. That it’s a piece of new technology that sets him out on his journey home may seem at first anomalous – myths normally being made of things other than GPS coordinates and screen images – but there’s no disputing the reality of Saroo’s story: we see its real-life conclusion in the film’s coda.
To say that Davis doesn’t complicate Lion is meant as a compliment, relying as he does instead on some excellent playing, from Patel and Kidman especially. Its vision of India may not surprise, and be somewhat served up for international tastes, but it doesn’t milk its story. Lion has a cinematic heft, not least in an emotive, often piano-driven score from Dustin O’Halloran and Hausckha that fills the screen, but finally allows the simplicity of its story to speak for itself.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Lion
Jasper Rees
There is an event at the heart of Manchester by the Sea that cannot be spoken about, either here or by any character who is a witness to it. But it explains why Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) has withdrawn into a state of catatonic frigidity. He is so cut off from the world around him he can barely persuade a muscle on his face to twitch. Only if he sinks enough beers is he roused to start thumping people in bars before returning to his dingy one-room apartment. We’re a long way from La La Land, this week’s other five-star movie out in time for the Oscars.
Lee is not entirely incapable of action. When he hears his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) is back in hospital with a chronic heart condition, he returns from his job as a janitor in Boston to the maritime community where he grew up. He arrives an hour too late. After tenderly kissing his brother’s corpse, he is soon angry at his memory when he learns that Joe has appointed Lee guardian to his 16-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). He flatly refuses to accept the role even though there’s no one else: the boy’s mother is an estranged alcoholic, while other relatives are off somewhere unpronounceable in Minnesota.
It’s not clear why but flashbacks to a sunnier past reveal that Lee was once a family man himself. There’s a beautifully crafted scene in which, cheerfully sozzled, he returns home from work to his wife Randi (Michelle Williams, pictured below) and it is slowly revealed how many children he has fathered. One’s making stuff on the floor, another’s on the sofa watching TV and, look, here’s another new-born hiding in its cot. But for some reason Lee doesn’t live with them any more, and on his return to the community he is the focus of intense, hushed gossip.
Manchester by the Sea, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, maps out its emotional terrain in a sparse opening sequence. On the rear platform of a family fishing boat carving through a coastal sound, Lee joshes with the young Patrick (Ben O'Brien) that he’d be a better bet in a survival crisis than his father. Cut to deep midwinter where Lee shovels snow, dumps trash and, as a plumbing handyman, deals with other people’s literal shit. This is a film about man who is so frozen solid he has no means of dealing with his own.
It becomes clear that Lee has barely seen Patrick in the intervening years, and their relationship is soon on a testy footing. Patrick is a confident boy juggling two girlfriends. “Am I supposed to tell you to use a condom?” Lee says when one of them stays over. Embedded in his community, Patrick is horrified by Lee’s edict that they will be moving to Boston. The fact that his father can’t be buried in the rock-solid ground till the spring buys some time. So Lee enters a holding pattern, ferrying his nephew around, hunting for work, and not confronting the profound trauma that is mirrored in the face of everyone he encounters.
If this all sounds like a long hard stretch in miseryland, that's not quite how it pans out. The mutual incomprehension of uncle and nephew is the source of much awkward comedy. Patrick is feistily incapable of grief apart from one bad encounter with the fridge-freezer. He disastrously enlists Lee to help in his efforts to get laid in the house of one of his girlfriends. And throughout, a jagged seam of tenderness between the two goes mostly unexpressed.
The reckoning when it comes is not what would happen in other films. Lee has an encounter with Randi in which Michelle Williams, very impressively, does all of the emoting. "You can't just die," she pleads, and it's quite heartrending. If the film has a flaw it is that Lonergan (pictured above on set with Affleck) places just a little too much faith in the tactic of withholding. He puts most of the overt feeling into the soundtrack instead, which at heightened moments features Handel, Albinoni and Massenet. And he lets elemental symbolism do a lot of the heavy lifting: this is a story about ice and fire. And water: the family boat is not just a boat, it's a means of staying emotionally afloat.
For all Lonergan’s storytelling skills, Manchester by the Sea stands or falls on its central performance. Casey Affleck, outstandingly skilful at keeping his cards close to his chest, packs immense power into a study of incurable grief and guilt. Hedges is a screen natural too, and makes for a lively foil. Chandler and Williams offer strong back-up while Gretchen Moll is touching in a cameo as Patrick’s brittle mother. For the bromide of superficial redemption, best look elsewhere. This is a collectors’ item: a mature, slow-burning, unshowy film for adults.
Adam Sweeting
The aura of Ben Affleck burneth bright. It only seems about 10 minutes ago that he starred in The Accountant, and now here’s Live by Night, his fourth outing as director, and the second movie on which he’s been writer, director and star. He’ll be performing that multitasking feat again on the forthcoming solo-Batman flick The Batman, when he’s not putting in guest appearances in all the “DC extended universe” franchise spin-offs.
Matt Wolf
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance.
That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same at next month's Oscars. Cynics might say that Hollywood is merely honouring its own. But such a response is to undersell Chazelle's formidable ability to make a film about dreamers set in a city of dreams that leaves you floating out of the cinema as if on a cloud. An original movie musical of the likes they weren't supposed to make any more, La La Land arrives in time to be the cultural tonic needed for our troubled times: it's wise and witty but underlyingly wistful, even melancholic as well.
For that, credit the boy wonder that is Chazelle, 32 next week, whose breakout film Whiplash finds its perfect complement here. Whereas the earlier film came with a furious beat that simply would not be stilled (its Oscar-winning star, JK Simmons, gets a neat cameo this time out), La La Land has a disarming intimacy that gets under the skin. Indeed, those who associate movie musicals with canned razzmatazz that makes you wonder what these people are singing about in the first place will instead find a haunting, sometimes hilarious portrait of two creators who career towards each other only to discover that life and art don't always align. 
Those aspirants are Mia (Emma Stone), an audition-weary actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a softly-spoken jazz musician she chances upon in a bar. They embark on one of those screen romances in which music and dance arise entirely naturally from personality: caught up in the emotion and heat of the moment, what other choice is there?
And with a deftness that nods to the likes of Astaire and Rogers, Jacques Demy, and (the director revealed only last week) a 1927 Janet Gaynor starrer called Seventh Heaven, Chazelle makes retro chic feel richly contemporary. After all, if the pair are going to go on a date to the Griffith Observatory - the LA planetarium - why shouldn't they also find themselves dancing high atop the city? It's magic in the moonlight, if there ever was such a phrase.
Stone had a well-received Broadway run (replacing Michelle Williams) in the recent Broadway revival of Cabaret, so her singing chops don't entirely come as a surprise. Singing "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)", which in theatre would be called the 11 o'clock number, she impresses precisely because she lacks that hard, vaguely shellacked edge that catapults many a lesser entertainer into the spotlight. By contrast, hers is a plaintive, ruminative presence in a film that believes in the sudden raptures of love but also its ruination. The Justin Hurwitz score, with lyrics by Broadway's current golden boys Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen), is sprightly and vigorous where needed but also knows when to come to rest, and there's no equivalent of the go-for-broke power ballad that one finds with a more calculated type of movie musical such as Frozen.
And in a film which lacks many supporting characters - John Legend (pictured above) is among the few other names on view, as the leader of the band Sebastian joins - Gosling proves a debonair delight as arguably the more surprisingly cast of the two leads. (Emma Watson and Miles Teller were the first tapped to play these roles.) His withheld power and quiet charm are well suited to the Star is Born-like trajectory of a character who valiantly holds out against the smothering sameness of the culture that the film itself resists. The movie ends with a postscript that ramps up the pathos, and why not? Set in a town famous for crash landings, La La Land offers the promise that, in the right circumstances, a few do get the chance and the space to soar.
RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
Blue Valentine (2010). A controversial break-up melodrama sees things from the male point of view
Drive (2011). Ryan Gosling's brilliant, bruising ride into LA darkness (pictured)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). Ryan Gosling teaches Steve Carell how to score in a film that doesn't
The Ides of March (2011). George Clooney's star-packed morality tale superbly anatomises political chicanery
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013). Derek Cianfrance and Ryan Gosling follow Blue Valentine with an epic tale of cops and robbers
Gangster Squad (2013). Ruben Fleischer swaps zombies for gangsters with mixed results
Only God Forgives (2013). Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling follow Drive with a simmering tale of vengeance
The Big Short (2015). Director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Nice Guys (2016). Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling buddy up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 70s LA
La La Land (2017). Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (pictured above) will have you floating out of the cinema on a cloud
David Kettle
A computer virus – even one as apparently malevolent and unstoppable as the infamous Stuxnet – would make an unlikely subject for a feature-length documentary, you might think. But New York documentary maker Alex Gibney’s Zero Days is a remarkable achievement – and in so many ways. As an edge-of-your-seat, real-world thriller; as a sobering investigation of shadowy US foreign policy; and ultimately as a wake-up call to a new form of warfare, unleashed without us even noticing.
theartsdesk
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