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[stripyhorse23]

Films of the Year 2020

1) A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood

I re-watched this to make sure I wasn’t overrating it, but found myself every bit as moved, almost overwhelmed, as the first time I saw it.  The confidence of Marielle Heller’s filmmaking is such that nothing ever feels forced, her themes never have to be underlined, nor does she ever have to draw attention to the quietly excellent below-the-line elements.  Tom Hanks exudes warmth and compassion as Mr. Rogers, matched step for step by Matthew Rhys as the guarded, cynical journalist who resists the possibility of goodness and comfort with every fibre of his being.  Some of the most masterfully filmed conversation scenes of the year - the diner sequence alone is extraordinary.

2) Parasite

Hugely good fun, wildly unexpected, handles its tonal shifts fantastically with an ensemble cast that’s totally in tune to one another, and slickly channels the capitalist satire of Bong Joon-ho’s earlier films.  It’s not that Parasite is saying anything that different or original necessarily, but it feels utterly of its moment and despite its anarchic energy is never glib or peevish.  I squealed several times, laughed even more, and the film left me with a weird, immovable sense of melancholy.  Deeply impressive.

3) Portrait Of A Lady On Fire

The range that Céline Sciamma has shown over just four films!  Deliberately paced without ever feeling slow, I loved how invested this was in portraiture as an art form and how that folded into Marianne’s burgeoning feelings for Héloïse.  Unlike a lot of other love stories, and by nature of its subject matter, Portrait is interested not just in how its two protagonists make one another feel but how they perceive one another.  The ghostly apparitions that Marianne witnesses feel at first like a false note only for that to pay off beautifully in the final act.  Héloïse’s final words are up there with The Lives of Others in terms of last lines that make you break out in goosebumps.

4) And Then We Danced

For a film that’s so concerned with the hard lines of its dance movements, it’s appropriate how tuned-in the screenplay is to when it needs to puncture its atmosphere of repressive masculinity with compassion and tenderness.  Each relationship in the story is replete with texture and feeling, not just Merab’s rambunctious, chaotic home life, but also his dance partner / best friend.  What really made the movie for me was how focused it was on Merab’s own journey, outside of and alongside his relationship with another male dancer.

5) A Hidden Life

Malick is back, baby!  Doesn't quite reach the giddy heights of his filmography up to and including The Tree of Life and the three-hour runtime is a little punishing, but Malick is clearly working with a renewed sense of focus and purpose. Tracking the life of Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis in 1943, I was unexpectedly and profoundly moved by A Hidden Life’s spiritual curiosity.  Franz's commitment to his faith might seem alien, but it becomes clear that it's the only thread he has to hold onto in order to see him through; even his relationship with his steadfast wife is defined by their shared religion.  The roving camera and Jörg Widmer's stunning depictions of bucolic life turned sour, as the small village community become spiteful and cruel, also feel like some sort of spiritual rebuke (and it's notable that we're kept closely within Franz's POV rather than venturing out into the atrocities that lie on the margins of the film).  I fully lost it when I realised that the title is taken from the monumental final paragraph of Middlemarch.

6) Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Eliza Hittman’s new film is definitely going where you think it’s going, but that hardly matters when the filmmaking and performances are this strong.  Whilst it’s concerned with the difficulties of obtaining an abortion for vulnerable young women, that’s not all that’s on its mind, and I was struck by how well it draws the patriarchal society these two teenagers have to manoeuvre through every day.  Hittman’s New York is a nightmare landscape, with Hélène Louvert’s cinematography expressively capturing the sense of oppressiveness and isolation that big cities can have on a person.  Like with Beach Rats, Hittman draws fine performances from her leads, ones that say a lot with very little dialogue, and of course the scene that gives the film its name is just fantastic.

7) Corpus Christi

Somehow manages to overcome its reliance on coincidences in the early going to become an exhilarating, deeply-felt film about the failures of organised religion and the limits of faith.  Bartosz Bielena could take me to church any day of the week, and he's truly electric as the ex-con who masquerades as the priest of a small town recently rocked by tragedy.  The plot could easily be that of a Hollywood rom-com, and it's to the film's credit that, aforementioned coincidences aside, it's always interested in digging deeper.  It's incredibly powerful as a testament to how difficult it is to confront the most difficult truths about ourselves and how grief is turned outwards.  The visceral, upsetting fight scene that closes the film is memorable, sure, but it’s the troubled character study at its centre that ensures Corpus Christi lingers.

8) Boys State

I suppose you might argue that finding a microcosm of American politics at an annual event where a group of 17-year-old boys are asked to form their own government is a little like shooting fish in a barrel, but directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine mine their subject matter for much more than simple prescience.  Impeccably cast and edited, it manages to be simultaneously hugely entertaining (with true heroes and villains) and also an insightful, terrifying window into the glibness with which white American men treat both real world issues and anyone on the other side of the argument.  There were other, perhaps more accomplished documentaries released in 2020, but Boys State was so irresistibly of its time and so gripping because of that it kept creeping up in my estimation as the year wore on.

9) The Forty-Year-Old Version

What a fun, smart screenplay this is.  Which isn't to say there isn't plenty of other things that impress about this debut feature focused on an almost-forty-year-old Black woman who, frustrated with the dead end her career as a playwright seems to be facing, turns to rap as an alternative means of expression.  It's incredibly astute on the ways in which Black artists are forced to compromise to appease white gatekeepers and perceived audiences, a topic that it handles with equal parts anger and wry humour.  The film isn't blind, either, to the ways in which Radha's frustrations impact her relationships (particularly with her loyal agent/best friend).  When the only complaint you have about a film is that it suffers from a surfeit of ideas, it’s indicative of what a special, unique voice it possesses.

10) Rocks

A huge step up from the stolid, dishwater-y Suffragette.  The film’s deceptive simplicity in its depiction of a teenage girl and her younger brother who suddenly find themselves having to navigate an adult world they’re not ready for allows for the performances and screenplay to fill in the bustling, often joyful elements of Rocks’ life.  Cast perfectly top to bottom, some of the film’s best scenes are where Rocks and her mates are just hanging out, shooting the shit with one another.  And whilst there’s a heart-breaking centre to this particular story, it never feels reliant on pulling your heart strings, or leaning too heavily into the more troubling aspects of Rocks’ life.

Ten performances that I loved this year: Cosmo Jarvis in Calm With Horses, Joe Keery in Spree, Radha Blank in The Forty-Year-Old Version, Delroy Lindo in Da 5 Bloods, Bartosz Bielena in Corpus Christi, Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite, Hugh Jackman in Bad Education, Alfre Woodard in Clemency, Johnny Flynn in Emma and Haley Bennett in Swallow.

[stripyhorse23]

TV of 2020

1) I May Destroy You

I May Destroy You might not have been written during the pandemic, but when it arrived in June it felt like the sort of complicated, cathartic show that could have been.  Detailing one woman’s experience of rape and its aftermath, Michaela Coel (who wrote every episode) continually found rich narrative avenues in which to explore her characters’ individual experiences of sexual assault and consent.  If that makes the series sound concept-driven, it always placed its characters first; the push-and-pull between Arabella, Terry and Kwame is key to the ways in which Coel’s tender, curious writing is able to explore power dynamics within relationships, friendships and hook-ups.  Other, lesser shows that are this deliberately open-ended might feel opaque: it’s testament to the show’s confidence of voice that isn’t the case here.

2) Normal People

Like plenty of others, I binged the entire series of Normal People in a weekend, although one of its many pleasures is how Sally Rooney and Alice Birch’s adaptation teases out the episodic nature of the former’s bestseller.  From Connell’s early days at university, to a Tuscan holiday turned sour, and an exchange year in Sweden, Normal People was about the ways in which the people we love move in and out of our lives over the years.  It wasn’t immune to mis-steps (the show draws something of a crude line between the abuse Marianne suffers at home and what she seeks out in romantic partners), but the sheer emotional heft of the show was undeniable, nowhere less so than Paul Mescal’s floodgate-opening performance in Episode 10.

3) Adult Material

Perhaps one of the year’s most overlooked shows, Adult Material follows Hayley Burrows as she attempts to balance life as the harassed mother-of-three and the twilight years of her career as adult performer Jolene Dollar.  The slyly comic edge of the first episode is quickly eroded after Jolene becomes embroiled in the abuse of another actor on-set.  A stark portrait of alcohol abuse and loneliness, it’s also a sharp indictment of how little the so-called ‘culture wars’ surrounding pornography are meaningfully impactful on sex workers themselves.  Hayley Squires gives the sort of white-hot star performance usually reserved for 90s Hollywood rom-coms, a veneer of frustration and resignation overlaying even her character’s most abrasive moments.

4) Cook, Eat, Repeat

Why not in this interminably shitty year, choose the one show that offered the sort of balm it’s impossible to reverse engineer?  Following hot on the heels of a disappointing series of The Great British Bake-Off, Nigella Lawson’s warm, inviting half-hour new series was the televisual equivalent of a long bath and a facemask.  Her fish finger bhorta, brown butter colcannon and black pudding meatballs have already made it into this household’s repertoire, but there’s something innately comforting about the luxurious silliness of Nigella that almost transcends criticism.  Whether it’s the giddy nonsense of her liquorice box, the ‘did I hear that right’ moment when she revealed her pronunciation of ‘microwave,’ or the seductive self-care of making a creme caramel for one, no other show elicited such pure enjoyment from me this year.

5) I’ll Be Gone In The Dark

The true crime documentary series boom has increasingly leaned into a focus on the victims, from last year’s The Yorkshire Ripper Files to Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, but none so effectively or compassionately as I’ll Be Gone In The Dark.  Less a story about the hunt for the Golden State Killer and more a study of trauma and obsession, the series splices together home footage of the late Michelle McNamara’s investigation with survivor testimony to create a haunting portrait of one man’s legacy of pain.  The early episodes are replete with skin-crawling tension, anguish and tears, but the later episodes allow that to fall away, focusing on the mental fortitude necessary for the survivors at its centre and the sense of community fostered by meeting other women like them.

6)The Salisbury Poisonings

I had no interest in watching this BBC limited series initially: the advertising made it look dry, the story itself (the Novichok poisonings of 2018) seemingly devoid of juicy narrative material.  That I’ve watched this three times in the space of a year speaks to its robust, urgent filmmaking.  Like several other shows on this list, it arrived into the context of a pandemic it couldn’t have foreseen, but watching the rapid, careful response of local government (crucially and deliberately obstructed by Whitehall) to this crisis presented a sort of horribly watchable what-if scenario.  What seemed at first blush to be middle-of-the-road programming evolved over three episodes into the sort of spare, quietly terrifying journalistic drama that invites comparison to last year’s Chernobyl.

7) We Are Who We Are

It turns out that Luca Guadagnino’s woozy, seductive style transfers perfectly to television, and despite We Are Who We Are lacking the timelessness that typifies I Am Love or Call Me By Your Name it thrillingly captured the turbulent adolescence of its teenage characters.  Equally effervescent and raggedly emotional, the show’s joy always felt hard-won, bumping heads with the often cynical, unreadable motivations of the adult characters.  A tender and frank depiction of queer identities within traditionally restrictive environments, it’s also a love letter to young friendship and the lifeline that can provide during our formative years.  Spellbinding.

8) Selling Sunset

Perhaps the year’s most impressively constructed reality show, I was slow on the uptake with Netflix’s Selling Sunset only to have it take over my life for a few weeks during the summer.  Manufactured reality series are tough to get right, but much like The Hills (surely this show’s biggest influence) Selling Sunset gains a lot of mileage from gaming pre-existing friendships for maximum impact.  Christine and Mary’s beleaguered relationship and, obliquely, their respective responses to fame continued to provide wildly watchable fireworks, but the build-up to Chrishell’s separation from husband Justin Hartley was exquisitely handled.  Suddenly Davina’s strangely uncharismatic shit-stirrer and Christine’s predictably OTT wedding were forced to take a back seat to something approaching genuinely moving television.  Trying to tease out what was real and what wasn’t, and following the ways this all spilled out onto social media, was pure, unmitigated pleasure in a year sorely lacking in just that sort of unfettered escapism.

9) My Brilliant Friend

Two seasons in and there might not be another character on TV that I’m as continually frustrated and fascinated by as Lila, the eponymous ‘brilliant friend’ of the show’s title.  Sparingly warm, often cruel, seductive, Season 2 of HBO’s masterful adaptation sees her trapped in a loveless, abusive marriage but as ever it’s her fractured relationship with Lenù that forms the emotional spine of the show.  There’s often a strange sort of snobbery around the term ‘prestige drama,’ as if all that money on the screen is a smokescreen for a dearth of anything to say; My Brilliant Friend uses every colour in its paintbox to portray the yawning void that opened up between Lenù and Lila as they entered adulthood, from the lavish, provocative outfits Lila’s adopts after she marries Stefano to Max Richter’s evocative score and the detail poured into the show’s supporting characters.  Rewardingly complex.

10) Mrs. America

I laboured over what would take my tenth spot this year since there was so much TV that I loved, and especially this year so much of it felt essential to how I was receiving the world around me.  Ultimately, Mrs. America’s mixture of astute political commentary, character-driven writing and host of enjoyable performances tipped the scale in its favour.  Cate Blanchett’s all-timer of a performance as Phyllis Schafly understandably received the majority of attention, but Mrs. America gave us so many memorable moments: Sarah Paulson’s Alice ringing the bell at reception whilst high, Uzo Aduba’s Shirley Chisholm speaking to a potentially bugged hotel ventilator, Margo Martindale’s Bella Abzug quietly realising she’s no longer the radical of her youth on a busy New York street.  This sort of deft, smart political drama isn’t often this much fun to watch, and what an ending...

11) This Life

An honourable mention to a show made almost twenty-five years ago that nevertheless helped define the year in TV for me.  Shows that were once considered part of the zeitgeist can often feel quaint and old-fashioned in retrospect, but Amy Jenkins rambunctious flatshare drama isn’t one of them.  Whilst it can sometimes feel like the show’s characters are universally adverse to making even one good decision between them, there’s a compassion and care underpinning This Life that means it never comes across as overly cynical or sneering.  There’s also a lot to be said for discovering a performance that you genuinely consider to be one of the best of the decade, and no other character this year frustrated and moved me in the ways that Daniela Nardini’s Anna did.  Bonus points for the genuinely chaotic final episode, perhaps one of the best I’ve ever seen.

And FWIW, these are ten performances from shows not on the list above that I loved this year: Marielle Heller in The Queen’s Gambit, Nicholas Hoult in The Great, Sarah Lancashire in Last Tango in Halifax, Poorna Jagannathan in Never Have I Ever, Michael Sheen in Quiz, Imelda Staunton in Talking Heads, Leila Farzad in I Hate Suzie, Alison Pill in Star Trek: Picard, Gillian Anderson in The Crown and Andy Allo in Upload.

And ten episodes of TV that I loved too: ‘Terry and Korvo Steal a Bear’ (Solar Opposites), ‘The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality’ (The Good Fight), ‘Uncle Naseem’ (Ramy), ‘The View From Halfway Down’ (Bojack Horseman), ‘The Vat of Acid Episode’ (Rick and Morty), ‘I Am’ (Lovecraft Country), ‘No Small Parts’ (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Seven-Spotted Ladybug’ (Everything’s Gonna Be Okay), ‘Daytona’ (Cheer), ‘Whenever You’re Ready’ (The Good Place).

[stripyhorse23]

Films of the Year 2018

Tully:

A lot more than just a sardonic look at the tolls motherhood has on a woman already barely keeping her head above water, Tully is also about the lies we tell ourselves about the people we were ‘before’ a major life event, how we - often by necessity - reframe trauma, and how we’re in constant communication with different versions of ourselves. Charlize Theron’s Margot isn’t as instantly iconic a creation as Young Adult’s Mavis Gary, but it’s a more interestingly weathered, lugubrious performance that’s doing more heavy lifting that you think at first.  Diablo Cody’s incisive screenplay goes to darker places than you might expect; she may well be one of the 21st century’s foremost chroniclers of bitterness. Compassionate when it could easily have settled for caustic.

Phantom Thread:

Phantom Thread takes a moment to settle, but once it has you in its thrall, it never lets go. The way in which the three principle characters circle and stalk around one another is meticulously, thoughtfully written and performed.  Manville’s icy carapace, in particular, is so much more than it at first appears (even though she nabs all the film’s best one-liners); no mere ice queen, her stern demeanour slowly reveals itself as the most straightforward and painless way of dealing with her difficult, child-like brother.  Kudos should also be given to PTA for playing so marvellously to the British gay contingent by casting Julia Davis and Gina McKee.

Lady Bird

Light as air, but hits home hard.  Greta Gerwig’s script is not only observant, but she also elicits sympathetic performances from pretty much everyone, no matter how small the role. Hedges is maybe my pick of the bunch, but Metcalf’s portrait of mothering from the margins is just as affecting as all those early raves promised.

120 BPM

A wider canvas for Campillo than Eastern Boys and he fills it beautifully.  I can't remember the last film I saw where the large supporting cast was so well-defined, and whose relationships to one another within the narrative were so piercingly felt without the need for reams of exposition.  Nathan is a beautiful cypher, and the film sort of solidifies into something slightly more conventional (maybe even reductive) than what its first half would have you think, but this is loud, intelligent, talky cinema.  The cross-talk that was so enjoyable in The Class is even more impressive in this setting, combative and comforting by turn, creating that rarest of things - a believable community.  Fantastic use of music throughout, proudly queer in an intelligent way that doesn't sacrifice feeling for the sake of cerebralism.

Hereditary

Creepy and unsettling, with wonderful performances from Toni Collette and Alex Wolff, Hereditary pulls its influences from where you’d expect (Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist) whilst also hewing close to a lot of what Jennifer Kent was saying in The Babadook.  Production and sound design both top notch, and it’s pretty skillful in wrong-footing its audience into where any given moment is going to go next, even if a lot of the big picture stuff feels more (enjoyably) predictable.

Shoplifters

After Kore-eda’s last film - The Third Murder - saw him take a swerve into very different territory, it’s nice to see this return to the sort of intimate family dramas that made his name.  Although, of course, the family in this film is an untraditional one, something that Kore-eda gently and expansively investigates as relationships grow closer or diverge.  Shoplifters primarily focuses on two relationships, one paternal, the other maternal, and whilst both overlap to a certain extent, the ways in which each of the characters responds to love, abandonment and difficulty draw lines in the sand that lead to the film’s powerful, intricate final act.  Sakura Ando, especially, gives a particularly careful performance, as she finds herself gradually and unexpectedly enveloped into a different sort of family than she ever knew she had.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout

Nothing makes sense and all loyalties are built on shifting sand, but if there’s anything that’s certain it’s that seeing Tom Cruise run full pelt across London’s skyline is a very specific, but quantifiable pleasure.  The ways in which Fallout speaks to the other Mission: Impossible films is sort of fascinating, with three progressively younger female love interests/antagonists pinballing across the pristine cityscapes and vistas this franchise lives in. Vanessa Kirby, as a woman who one assumes reaches orgasm every time she touches a doorknob, is one of the film’s great withheld pleasures.  It also contains the most memorable car chase sequence since The Bourne Identity.

First Reformed

Pretty incredible that Schrader manages to pack so many ideas into a film this tight, with not an ounce of meat on its bones.  Or that it’s so angry without losing any of its rigour.  Dense, with a lot to pick over, not least Hawke’s barely-keeping-a-lid-on-it performance.  Naturally, I’m also delighted that between this and Mamma Mia!, Amanda Seyfried is lowkey having such a great year.

Custody

It's hard to believe that any judge would allow unsupervised visits between a father and the son who not only testifies that he doesn't want to see him, but who likewise backs up his mother and older sister's testimony that his father was abusive.  After that set-up is dispensed with, however, this is really something.  The father, clearly wound tight and capable of anything, is a ticking time bomb, and once the film reaches its final third, it's clear that things are going to go south very soon, the question is how badly.  Xavier LeGrand gets a pretty incredible performance from Thomas Gioria as the child stuck at its centre, terrified but incapable of understanding what his father is really capable of.  Similar to something like Southcliffe, Custody builds an inexorable sense of tension before finally releasing it in a heart-in-mouth mad rush.

Lean On Pete

Marvellous, a cinematic gut-punch in the Kelly Reichardt mould. It takes real skill to make something this deliberately simple feel so profound, and to move its audience so deeply.  It's also a very smart, elegiac adaptation of Willy Vlautin's book, itself a paean to loneliness and how to find yourself when nobody else sees you.  Chloe Sevigny is given the best role she's had in ages (casting her as a tough, but not unkind jockey was a masterstroke), but Charlie Plummer feels like the real find here, a sympathetic, slyly hawkish presence, doing wonders to stop the film sliding into mawkishness or easy answers.

[stripyhorse23]

TV Episodes of the Year, 2018

Peak TV has made end-of-year lists a bun-fight over what people have missed, ignored or forgotten about.  It was a year in which I never finished the second season of The Deuce, but devoured each episode of Younger as soon as it was available.  A year in which I prioritised re-watching The Haunting of Hill House with my dad over a second season of Making A Murderer, slogged my way through Dark, Castle Rock, This Is Us and Westworld for the occasional bright spots, and stalled completely on a few shows that I either stopped liking some time ago (Agents of SHIELD) or just fell too far behind on (Silicon Valley, Fresh Off The Boat).  Buzz might be unquantifiable, but it matters more and more when there’s so much to sift through, and because the conversational window of any show gets shorter and shorter every year.  Here are the episodes of TV that I enjoyed most this year, in no particular order.

Atlanta, ‘Teddy Perkins’.  Atlanta had such a wonderful second season, but it was this episode, in which Darius encounters a tortured musician, that felt even more singular than what we had come to expect from the already-high standards the show had set for itself.  Standing in for other black artists who had similarly suffered at the hands of both their families and record company expectations, Teddy Perkins was an unsettling, deeply idiosyncratic character, a person presenting us one thing whilst being something else entirely.  There are several shocking moments in the episode, but I was most struck by its quieter, haunting undertow, epitomised not just in Donald Glover’s committed performance in the titular role, but in Lakeith Stanfield’s unexpectedly melancholic work as Darius.

The Americans, ‘START’.  In the age of Peak TV, it can be hard for any one show to cling to its status as ‘best drama currently airing’, but The Americans is the little show that could, building on its initial critical acclaim to become, if not exactly a juggernaut, nevertheless the universally agreed-upon cream of the crop in terms of dramas.  For a show with this many narrative threads to stick the landing feels like some sort of miracle, but ‘START’ gave us both the deeply satisfying confrontation between The Jennings and Stan and the train station bait-and-switch.  Whilst the cat-and-mouse element of The Americans has always been important to its success, the finale felt so satisfying because it focused on the complex character relationships at its centre.  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Stan, Philip, Elizabeth or Paige got happy endings, but where they ended up felt absolutely right.

The X-Files, ‘The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat’.  If The X-Files’ first attempt to reboot itself was a mess, its eleventh season found a firmer footing.  This episode, written by Darin Morgan (behind such classic episodes as ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’ and ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Response’), was an absurdist metacommentary on the show, as a mysterious figure, Reggie, turns up claiming to have been a former colleague of theirs who is being erased from existence.  Equally smart and silly, none of its humour feels effortful and, as such, elicits inspired, loopy performances from guest star Brian Huskey, as well as Gillian Anderson and David Duchovany.

Forever, ‘Andre and Sarah’.  Encouraged to watch this once it started showing up on various ‘best of’ lists, I was pleased not to have let ‘Andre and Sarah’ pass me by.  A standalone episode, it focuses on the relationship between two characters played by Hong Chau and Jason Mitchell, realtors who meet each other at an open house over the course of several years.  Bittersweet is a difficult tone to get right, but it helps when your actors have the kind of chemistry that Chau and Mitchell have here.  What makes the episode so memorable is less that we get to see these two people become disillusioned with one another, but that we have to see them work within the narrow parameters of what their romance will allow.  The almost-final shot (of a specific detail in a house neither of them could ever sell) is especially heartbreaking, an obvious visual motif that nevertheless exerts real power.

Unforgotten, ‘Episode 6’.  The third season of this superior crime procedural saw a slight dip in quality after its deceptively tricky second season, but Nicola Walker has always been its secret weapon and for my money gave the performance of the year.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in the season finale when Cassie finally cracks under the pressure of her job in a final confrontation with the creepily collected sociopath she’s spent the season pursuing.  Unforgotten has always emphasised the human cost of the work its characters are engaged in, choosing to linger in the morally grey areas of its stories more often than not, and there was something fortifying about watching Cassie choose herself over her job for once in what could easily have been a series rather than a season finale.

Castle Rock, ‘The Queen’.  A rocky first season came together briefly in this episode focused on Sissy Spacek’s Ruth.  Her fragmented state of being has played mostly as background noise up to this point, but by framing ‘The Queen’ through that perspective we’re invited to understand and sympathise with her.  The episode itself is something of a puzzle box, flashing back to Henry’s childhood and Ruth’s relationship with Alan Pangbourn as she deals with the unwelcome intrusion of The Kid in the present day.  Hinging an episode of revelations on one of the show’s most under-utilised and misunderstood characters proves a smart choice, and Spacek fuses each aspect of Ruth’s personality into a compelling whole.  The ending provided on of this year’s most memorable moments.

The Good Fight, ‘Day 478’.  No show currently airing is grappling quite so obviously or as compellingly with life under Trump as The Good Fight is.  Thrumming with indignation, and weaponsing its own hysteria, this episode sees the firm tackling a website that posts names of men accused of sexual impropriety.  The maelstrom this causes in the office is both deliberately comic whilst also asking the audience to constantly shift their own point-of-view and sympathies.  It’s a dynamo piece of writing, and one that feels very precisely of this moment.  There were other, more arc-based episodes of the show this year, but ‘Day 478’ felt more true to The Good Fight’s anarchic spirit and arrhythmic tones.

Pose, ‘Giving and Receiving’.  Proof that sentimentality, when done right, can be every bit as powerful as any number of character deaths Game of Thrones cares to throw at us.  Pose’s great strength lies in how easily it manages to find pockets of warmth and kindness in a world that’s often so harshly uncaring to its protagonists. ��Yes, there are edges being smoothed off, but how wonderful it was to see these characters given room to shine like this on screen.  The Christmas episode may well exhibit some of the show’s most nakedly tear-jerking moments, but it’s also a great example of Pose’s primary focus on friendship, kindness and community.  It doesn’t matter that you know that box is going to contain those red pumps, you weep buckets all the same.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, ‘Princess Prom’.  One of the most unexpected, joyfully queer TV experiences of the year was the She-Ra reboot.  Starting off sluggishly, it quickly found its feet as a bubblegum mash-up of the 80s cartoon with more modern sensibilities. ‘Princess Prom’, in which She-Ra is forced to attend a high-school style prom where she faces off with her former best friend/arch-nemesis Catra, embodies the show’s delightfully frothy sense of melodrama and knowing camp.  By the time Bow had ripped off his cummerbund to feel more comfortable in formalwear, I was entirely on-board.

The Haunting of Hill House, ‘The Bent-Neck Lady’.  Quietly one of the best shows of the year, The Haunting of Hill House received its fair share of grumbles for how it ended, by which most people seemed to mean its final five minutes, a gloopy celebration of heteronormativity that tied things up in a neat bow.  Everything up until that point had been top-notch, from Carla Gugino’s carefully calibrated performance as both a woman poised on a precipice and as her various children’s idea of her, to Mike Flanagan’s ability to build tension seemingly from thin air.  Most year-end praise has focused on ‘The Storm’, the show’s most formally audacious hour, but ‘The Bent-Neck Lady’ is what stuck with me most.  Charting Nelly’s eventual collapse and murder at the hands of Hill House, it was a slowly forming scream of an episode as she’s led incrementally back to the place that will kill her.  Haunting in the best possible meaning of the word, the scene where she lies paralysed in bed as her husband collapses and dies right in front of her is the sort of goosebump-inducing moment that many shows are unable to pull off their entire runs.

One Day At A Time, ‘Not Yet’.  Why does this episode work as well as it does when its premise is so inherently corny?  The magic of Netflix’s sitcom reboot shouldn’t be questioned, especially after two seasons that have so gracefully juggled ‘issues’ with slapstick.  This season finale, in which the family gather round the bedside of their beloved abuela, letting her know how much she means to all of them, was as powerful as many more self-consciously serious dramas similarly aiming at the audience’s tear ducts.  You’d think that the appearance of Lydia’s dead husband’s ghost, ready to escort her to the afterlife would be a bridge too far, but when Rita Moreno smiles and says, ‘not yet’, your heart would have to be made of stone not to let out a cheer.

Killing Eve, ‘Don’t I Know You?’.  The wheels came off Killing Eve a little towards the end, but ‘Don’t I Know You’ was one of the most exciting episodes of the year in that it felt like a real discovery, not just that Phoebe Waller-Bridge could pull off something so drastically different to Fleabag, but that this was one of the most audacious and unique new shows of the year.  As awards bodies have gravitated towards Sandra Oh, audiences seem to have coalesced around Jodie Comer, but here more than ever it’s clear why these two sides of the same coin require and nourish one another.  The icy, playful nature of Villanelle receives its most menacing showcase yet, as she leads Bill to a Berlin nightclub and stabs him to death on the dancefloor, and it’s perfectly balanced by Eve’s deceptive scattiness and similarly obsessive focus.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, ‘A Random Killing’.  I was a little less convinced of this second season of American Crime Story than others, in particular Darren Criss’s committed but one-note performance as Andrew Cunanan.  Later episodes concerning Andrew’s real-life friendships fall flat for me because Criss seldom reads as anything other than a psychopath, but since his relationship with Lee Miglin is presented as more transactional and fleeting in nature, ‘A Random Killing’ felt like more of an across-the-board success.  The first example of what Cunanan is capable of, the ramifications of his actions resonate more deeply here too.  Both seasons of American Crime Story have been at their best when they’re exploring artifice, and Mike Farrell and Judith Light find a wealth of regret in their carefully constructed facades.

Bojack Horseman, ‘Free Churro’.  Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s sad-com found further room for innovation in its fifth season.  ‘Free Churro’ is composed of only two scenes, and is mostly taken up by Bojack’s rambling monologue about his relationship with his recently-deceased mother.  Excoriating, uncomfortable, and deeply sad, we’re in danger of under-appreciating just how consistently impressive this show is.

Homecoming, ‘Protocol’.  The shot of the year, as Heidi’s dormant memories are awakened and her deeply disturbed, mournful face fills the screen.  Casting Julia Roberts in a role that requires dowdy anonymity might have felt counterintuitive when it was announced, but by keeping such a tight lid on her star persona for so much of the season’s run, this sudden release of feeling hits especially hard.  And yet the moment that stuck with me is when Heidi realises that Colin has been orchestrating her performance.  Overcome, she pushes him into a water fountain, making him instantly ridiculous and flipping the episode’s escalating tension on its head.  For a woman who has so far been defined by her lack of power, Heidi is finally able to wrest back control of her own narrative.

Bodyguard, ‘Episode 1’.  There’s a reason why Bodyguard became the only water-cooler television event of the year, and it’s the opening thirty minutes of its first episode.  Breathlessly directed by Tom Vincent, Jed Mercurio’s typically tightly-wound screenplay finds Richard Madden’s veteran-turned-police officer having to talk down a suicide bomber in a creaky old train carriage.  Yes, it piles it on thick, but the sheer commitment of everyone involved - including Madden’s best performance yet - made sure this episode screamed ‘event television’, making it the biggest ratings smash the BBC has seen in ten years.  It sets things up perfectly for the imperious entrance of Keeley Hawes’ impossibly sexy home secretary in the episode’s second half.  It was a near perfect introduction to Mercurio’s world, one that felt much closer to the skulduggery of, say, State of Play, than the current political farce spilling out of the Guardian’s live feed in 2018.

Mum, ‘Episode 4’.  Mum’s second season struggled a little for lack of story, and characters that shone brightly in its first six episodes, like Kelly, had less to do here.  How long can they really string out Cathy and Michael’s will-they-won’t-they relationship, after all?  Turns out, about four episodes more, as here Michael confesses his true feelings for Cathy in a rush after his mother passes away.  It’s a beautifully conceived moment, not only because Peter Mullan plays so well against type as a vulnerable man who can’t stand to lose one more thing in his life, but because he’s matched beat for beat by Lesley Manville as Cathy.  Rather than spell anything out for the viewer, writer/director Stefan Golaszewski trusts that his actors can convey what they’re feeling largely in silence.  We know Michael will tell Cathy barely two minutes in, and we know that Cathy doesn’t want him to, not necessarily because she doesn’t feel the same way, but because this isn’t the right time for it.  In a series full of broad laughs, this episode was full of smaller, quieter moments of tremulous reflection.

Glow, ‘Mother of All Matches’.  I toyed picking ‘The Good Twin’, where the GLOW women put on a fake TV show, but whilst format-breaking episodes are something of a perennial now among cable shows, standalone episodes based solely on character feel more and more like a dying breed. ‘Mother of All Matches’ gives us a glimpse into the life of one of the first season’s most underused characters, Tammé, as she tries to explain GLOW to her college-age son.  Not only is this a plea to her son to see how and why wrestling gives her a sense of community and pride, but it’s also the most concerted argument the show makes to see its supporting characters as real people as it expands its reach outside the antagonistic triangle at its centre.

The Handmaid’s Tale, ‘Smart Power’.  One of the biggest bugs of the Peak TV era is that both critics and viewers are quick to turn on a show if it stops giving them what they want.  In 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale was ‘prescient’ and ‘terrifying’; in 2018, it’s ‘too much’.  I’d argue that the show was exactly the same this year as it was last, but frontloading a lot of its more provocatively upsetting moments towards the first half of the season meant that people tuned out for its more redemptive and hopeful back half.  Yvonne Strahovski’s performance was one of the second season’s most compelling elements, no more so than in ‘Smart Power’, when we see her take a trip to Canada and how close she comes to leaving Gilead behind altogether.  As a portrait of a woman overwhelmed by anger and regret, and yet finding herself unable to utter a word to anyone, it refused any easy catharsis, its fury kept at a constant simmering point.

Wanderlust, ‘Episode 5’.  Weirdly billed by the BBC as their sexiest drama yet amid a lot of stuff and nonsense about this being the first UK drama to show a woman orgasm on screen (Apple Tree Yard was only last year, after all), Wanderlust wasn’t groundbreaking television, but it did give the world another fantastic Toni Collette performance.  Anyone wondering why Sophie Okonedo was cast in the relatively minor role of Joy’s therapist had that question answered in the series’ excellent fifth episode, a two-hander whereby we see her slowly coax her patient to reveal some of her darker feelings, ones that run much deeper than the desire for an open relationship.

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Wish I still had that hat.. #TBT

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Films of 2016

1) Spotlight

In a year like this, a film about passionate but not hysterical, cool but not unfeeling journalism just felt more timely than it might have done even twelve months previously.  Tom McCarthy’s film about The Boston Globe’s investigation into institutional child abuse within the Catholic church was collected, even calm, fertile ground for some of the best supporting performances of the year.  Even Mark Ruffalo’s slightly over-egged performance as the angriest member of the investigative team felt like much-needed moments of release in a film that largely kept its anger at a simmer.

2) Things To Come

It’s strange to think of a sixty-three-year-old actor having a breakthrough year, but Isabelle Huppert’s performances in Elle (released in 2017 in the UK) and Things To Come caught fire in a way that’s unusual for non-English language roles.  Mia Hanson-Løve’s film about the dissolution of a marriage between two academics is cerebral without ever seeming cool.  There’s a very neat trick being pulled off here, as Huppert’s philosophy professor Nathalie finds comfort in her ability to intellectualise, each experience an opportunity to prompt discourse, but she’s also not immune to the humour and sadness in the vagaries of her life.  It’s a sneakily warm film, its smartness more than just skin-deep.

3) Victoria

Sebastian Schipper’s one-take marvel invited inevitable comparisons to Birdman when it was released earlier this year, but its aims are probably a little more modest than Iñárritu’s.  After a mildly flabby set-up whereby Spanish waitress Victoria falls in with a bunch of rambunctious thieves, the one-take method grips like a vice and doesn’t let go.  Even the few moments of respite are full of a nervous giddiness as the robbery spirals out of control.  The relationship established between Victoria and one of the thieves serves to underpin proceedings in the final third, a rabbit warren of film-making that never resorts to bleakness, ping-ponging between its characters’ ineptitude and moments of fast-thinking.

4) Arrival

Denis Villeneuve’s impeccable craft finds a quite wonderful fit in Eric Heisserer’s emotionally fluid screenplay and Amy Adam’s deeply textured central performance.  Playing a linguist tasked with translating the language of an alien race that has mysteriously appeared across the world, her character’s commitment to the job doesn’t cover up emotional deficiencies elsewhere, and it’s to Adam’s credit that she manages to weld these two sides of the character so deftly.  In addition to being a wider story about the importance of patience and understanding, it also folds its big twist into the whole screenplay, playing it as a cathartic moment for its protagonist rather than a gotcha to the audience.

5) Love And Friendship

It stands to reason that Whit Stillman and Kate Beckinsale would make the best Jane Austen adaptation since Sense And Sensibility.  Lady Susan is a comic delight of a character, sharp and economically-driven whilst finding amused respite in her own weaknesses.  The rest of the cast are equally delightful, especially Tom Bennett’s joyfully dim suitor.  Stillman knows exactly how to lean into Austen’s more satirical elements (imagine a version of Mansfield Park that discards Fanny Price and focuses solely on the Crawfords).  In both writers’ landscapes, love is a happy afterthought, not the main thrust of the story.

6) Creed

Ryan Coogler’s debut film, Fruitvale Station, was a well-meaning but one-note examination of a tragedy.  Creed, a sequel to a dormant franchise that most were happy to stay that way, is a huge leap forward.  Michael B. Jordan again proves himself as one of the most charismatic performers Hollywood has on its roster as a young boxer who wakes Stallone’s Rocky Balboa out of retirement.  Whilst there’s plenty of time spent on hitting familiar beats, Coogler builds believable relationships in the margins, be it the love interest disarmingly played by Tessa Thompson, or Phylicia Rashad as Creed’s compromised adoptive mother.  More than just a strong sequel to a beloved franchise, Coogler’s film stands on its own merits, something which other, more popular franchises could learn from.

7) 10 Cloverfield Lane

Another sequel, albeit one in name only right up until its final sequence.  Mary Elizabeth Winstead, long under-utilised by Hollywood, makes for a resourceful hero when she finds herself kidnapped by John Goodman’s fuzzily ambiguous captor.  He tells her that a deadly virus has wiped out the rest of the people on earth, but should she believe him?  Building his film on the shifting allegiances between these two characters and a second captor, Dan Trachtenberg’s film never forgets to have fun, using musical montages and light humour as tension breakers before finally letting loose with a cheerfully nasty anti-climax.  I’m concerned about a sequel (if there is one, and 10 Cloverfield Lane seems to set us up for one), but for now this is a thankfully self-contained entry in Abrams’ cinematic universe.

8) Our Little Sister

A minor film from Hirokazu Kore-eda is still a delight, and what even counts as a minor film from a director whose focus is so often on the small business of domestic life?  Stripped of the more overt sentimentality of I Wish and Like Father, Like Son, Our Little Sister is a delicate portrait of three adult sisters who, upon the death of their estranged father, invite their younger half-sister to come and live them.  Kore-eda finds depth within seemingly featherweight subject matter, quietly but generously examining the sisters’ relationship to both their parents and one another.  It doesn’t quite have the emotional heft of Like Father, Like Son, but Our Little Sister’s less flashy subject matter, married to Kore-eda’s expert world-building, makes this nevertheless a rich, careful piece of filmmaking.

9) Sing Street

John Carney can go right on giving us the same film over and over again if they continue to be as charming as Sing Street, a worthy follow-up to the excellent Once and Begin Again.  Set in mid-eighties Ireland, bullied, moderately-talented musician Cosmo puts together a band with his schoolmates.  There’s an impossibly cool love interest (Lucy Boynton), and plenty of implausibly excellent pop rock songs, but what breathes life into Carney’s musical is the level of care and attention that clearly went into the film’s numerous subplots, which serves to give Sing Street a melancholic undertow without depleting from the moments of sheer, unadulterated joy.

10) Embrace Of The Serpent

Whilst Embrace Of The Serpent might not at first glance seem to bear much resemblance to any of the other films on this list, one thing it shares with several of them is its ability to wear its influences and predecessors on its sleeve without being defined by them.  Told across duel timelines, two European explorers attempt to find a rare plant with healing properties with the aid of Karamakate, a shaman and the last of his tribe.  Reminiscent of Apocalypse Now but utterly its own beast, Embrace Of The Serpent is an indictment of the effects of colonialism, using moments of psychedelia to document its more horrifying moments.  But within that, it’s also a character study, as Karamakate navigates his own legacy.

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2016 On Television

1) Atlanta

Best of lists are often full of new shows (my own is no exception).  After all, it’s harder to make an impression five or six seasons in unless the critical consensus is overwhelming, or you have a major character death up your sleeve.  However, there’s something undeniably appealing about a voice as confident as Donald Glover’s in Atlanta, a show ostensibly about a struggling music manager that’s both more expansive and more intimate than that description suggests.  The humour is sharp, uncomfortable, even melancholic, but whereas other comedies might be satisfied with that, Atlanta also has a warmth to it, and a sensitivity towards its characters that no other show is pulling off to this high a standard.

2) The People v. O. J. Simpson

Remember when Ryan Murphy tackling the O. J. Simpson trial seemed like the worst pitch of 2016?  And yet Murphy’s lurid, camp sensibilities found the perfect match in writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s empathic, layered screenplay to create one of the most talked-about shows of the year.  People were quick to diminish Murphy’s contribution, but his fingerprints are all over this, and as usual he roped in a cast that knows how to find the folds within the broad strokes.  Sarah Paulson, Courtney B. Vance and Sterling K. Brown sold the tragedy of the human weaknesses that underpinned the case, operating within a canvas that also had room for whatever John Travolta was doing as Robert Shapiro, and Connie Britton’s gloriously strung-out Faye Resnick.

3) The Girlfriend Experience

A singular, daringly opaque story of a law student who moonlights as an escort, creators Amy Seimatz and Lodge Kerrigan found the perfect vessel in Riley Keough as their main character, Christine Read.  All but inscrutable to the viewer apart from a few key moments, The Girlfriend Experience is as finely honed a character study as you were likely to see on television this year.  What seems ambiguous, even glacial at first, transforms into a thriller of sorts by around Episode 9, one that keeps us inside Christine’s head as she’s forced to think her way around a number of impossible situations.  To pull back from those more propulsive elements in its shimmering, hard to categorise season finale ended the series on the perfect note.

4) Fleabag

Fleshing out her one-woman show, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag wasn’t the only filthy-mouthed comedy this year interested in the mental health of its lead character, but it was probably the most successful one.  It’s very funny, of course, but it also skillfully unfolds certain stereotypes (the dreadful mother-in-law, the uptight sister) and bounces them off its protagonist in ways that illuminate whilst providing big laughs.  Fleabag’s openings of honesty, especially its gut-puncher of a final scene, proved it to be one of the most scathingly observant shows of 2016.

5) American Crime

The second season of John Ridley’s anthology drama took as its central crime the rape of a teenage boy, an already loaded subject, and managed to find new angles and perspectives with each episode.  Connor Jessup ended up giving one of the year’s most strangely unheralded performances as the fragile, brittle teenager at the story’s centre, but returning cast members Felicity Huffman, Regina King and Lili Taylor helped flesh out the fractured community he’s living in.  The final few episodes experience something of a wobble, but Ridley’s interesting and clear-eyed apportioning of empathy keep it compelling, even timely, right up until the very end.  The image of an open car door in the final episode is as haunting as anything you’re likely to see on TV.

6) Girls

Peak TV pretty much ensures that once a show has lost its viewers, it won’t gain them back.  Which is a shame for those who fell away from Girls through its scattered last two seasons, because Season 5 was its best yet.  Hanging much of its season off the strained friendship between Hannah and Jessa, it plays to Lena Dunham’s strengths as a writer, whilst also shipping off its most cartoonish character Shoshanna to another country for the season’s duration.  An even more welcome surprise came in a spotlight episode focused on the amusingly noxious Marnie in the show’s best episode since ‘Beach House’, ‘The Panic In Central Park’.

7) Stranger Things

Some shows are more than the sum of their parts, and such proved to be the case with Stranger Things, an 80s throwback influenced as much by the pleasing sentimentality of Spielberg as it is by the robust childhood horrors of Stephen King’s 80s output.  What might not have been the most original concoction is nevertheless expertly spun into a mythology-light, emotionally-led caper that retained its brisk pace through its blissfully truncated run of episodes.  Binge-watching has a bad reputation for a number of valid reasons, but Stranger Things fits perfectly into that model, the sort of perfect TV dinner material that’s too often over-complicated.

8) Orange Is The New Black

Although I’ve always appreciated Orange Is The New Black’s capacity for humour, its darker moments are often its best, and Season 4 was its darkest so far.  For a show that’s still submitting as a comedy to SAG, it managed to build up a head of steam heading into a fraught, upsetting season finale.  Not all of what made Orange Is The New Black great once upon a time works quite as well now (the flashbacks appear more crutch-like than ever), but creator Jenji Kohan’s ability to shift focus to any number of supporting players ensures that the main thrust of its story rarely feels stale, allowing for new pockets of despair and humanity to open up amongst its occasional, raucous sense of humour.

9) Happy Valley

The first season of Sally Wainwright’s police drama was close to perfect and perfectly self-contained, so bringing it back for a second round flirted with spoiling what had come before.  Thankfully, the two year break between seasons ensured that Wainwright had time to work out how old characters could fit into the fabric of a new story.  Sarah Lancashire, peerless as ever as beaten-down police officer Catherine Cawood, again finds herself involved in a case that seems to bear unfortunate parallels to her own life.  What could feel repetitive instead gives the impression of a densely-woven tapestry, one that’s bleak but rarely sparse or unfeeling.

10) Mum

There were probably more skillfully-told stories on television this year, but Mum gave me such unalloyed joy in a year that so poorly needed it that I couldn’t leave it out of my personal Top 10.  Told over the course of a year in the life of Lesley Manville’s recently-widowed Cathy, it hits a lot of familiar beats for anyone familiar with British sitcoms, but it’s such a warm hug of a show that you can overlook the occasional misstep into too-broad humour, especially when it resolutely refuses to patronise characters that might appear one-note on the page but are gifted with surprising depth by an accomplished supporting cast.

Honorable mentions to: The Americans, which had its best season yet, and especially Alison Wright’s performance as the distraught fly caught in Philip and Elizabeth’s web; Selina Myers’ Congressional Ball tirade on Veep; Judith Light’s rendition of Hand In My Pocket on Transparent; the Robert Durst gag on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; the interior design of Deutschland ‘83; Please Like Me’s dinner party episode, the crowning jewel of a slightly underwhelming season, featuring a marvellous performance from Debra Lawrance; Donna Lynne Champlin in general on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; Younger’s very silly but still endearing jokes at the expense of the publishing industry; Susan Kelechi Watson’s detailed, unsung supporting work on This Is Us; Lena Headey watching the world fall down on the Game of Thrones’ finale; how Bojack Horseman approached Todd’s asexuality; any number of story arcs that Queen Sugar is dealing with more delicately than most other family dramas; BrainDead’s fleet-footed daftness.

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Dream Emmy Ballots 2016

Since I never got round to posting my Best Of TV round-up at the end of last year, here’s my pick for the Emmy nominations later this month.  As a caveat, I only allowed myself to nominate what had actually been submitted or was eligible for this year’s Emmy Awards, partly to give a bit of structure to a list I’m making in the middle of the year, and also as a sort of organising principle.  So Orange Is The New Black is classified as a Drama, Transparent as a Comedy and shows such as Mom and Deutschland 83 that I watched and enjoyed but are ineligible for Emmy consideration don’t crop up here.  As for the Miniseries or TV Movie category, I simply didn’t watch enough of either to give this a fair shot, hence why there’s no American Crime Story, American Crime or The Girlfriend Experience even though both these shows would’ve been top of my list.  My choice of winners in bold.

Outstanding Comedy Series:

Catastrophe

Girls

Master Of None

Please Like Me

The Real O’Neals

Transparent

Veep

 I suspect Veep will win again this year, which would be difficult to argue with after its best and most biting season yet.  Girls, another show in its fifth season, managed to bounce back after several years of not quite knowing what to do with too many of its characters.  2015/16 was also a great year for new comedies.  Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s Master of None, after hitting a few stumbling blocks early on, benefited enormously from slowing down and weaving together traditional sitcom premises with smart character work.  The Real O’Neals showcased ABC’s commitment to diverse storytelling with a game cast that gelled straight out of the gate.  Catastrophe is perhaps the best example of the sort of sexually frank romantic comedies we’ve seen in years, even managing to squeeze in a second season within one year that scratched deeper than the first.  Transparent gifted us with another season of television as uncomfortable, curiously humorous and sad as its first season. Please Like Me edges it for me, though, with a third season so perfect (and this season ran the gamut from achingly sad to desperately funny and raucous) as to feel like a sort of small miracle.

 Outstanding Drama Series:

The Americans

Happy Valley

Marvel’s Jessica Jones

Mr. Robot

Orange Is The New Black

Rectify

UnREAL

Sadly unlikely to crack the Drama field this year, The Americans put together its best, most meticulous season yet.  Happy Valley returned for a second season, finding new variations on old stakes and upending my expectations of a watered-down repeat of its excellent first season.  Jessica Jones comfortably breezed past every other comic book show on TV, a meditative look at post-traumatic stress and abusive relationship patterns through a grimy fantasy filter.  Mr. Robot took a hackneyed techno-thriller template and invested it with confidence, verve and a smart awareness of its viewers’ expectations.  Orange Is The New Black continued its hot streak, again finding pockets of warmth and humour in unexpected places and expertly diversifying its storytelling.  Rectify bounced back from a slightly lacklustre second season with an unlikely third season full of guilt and recrimination, pushing its characters into new and uncomfortable arenas for them to fail in.  UnREAL was the surprise of the year, a show set behind the scenes of a reality TV show that was as lean and mean as the shows it lampooned, but even at its cruellest never forgot that its characters were human beings.

 Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series:

Andrew Daly for Review

Rob Delaney for Catastrophe

Billy Eichner for Difficult People

Randall Park for Fresh Off The Boat

Jeffrey Tambor for Transparent

Josh Thomas for Please Like Me

 Even if Review cut a little too close to the bone for me to make my favourite comedies of the year, there’s no denying the level of commitment Daly brings to that role. Delaney is at a slight advantage, having two seasons of Catastrophe under his belt in the space of a year, but if the first season proved how funny he could be, the second proved his willingness to poke at his own good guy role.  Eichner grounded his larger-than-life persona into a character that remained larger-than-life but never quite felt cartoonish.  Constance Wu rightly gets a lot of praise for Fresh Off The Boat, but few people seem to have noticed quite how willingly Park is to go toe-to-toe with her.  If Transparent stands a chance of being lost in the shuffle of great new comedies this year, Tambor surely won’t be forgotten for his wonderful performance in a year that saw Maura face up to some of the mistakes she’s made in the past. Please Like Me has gone from strength to strength, and creator Josh Thomas’s awkwardness in the central role has evolved into a brittle optimism that helped balance out the show’s more serious, or potentially frustrating character arcs.

 Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series:

Rami Malek for Mr. Robot

Mads Mikkelson for Hannibal

Matthew Rhys for The Americans

Aden Young for Rectify

Clive Owen for The Knick

Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul

 Rami Malek is the safest bet for a new actor breaking into this category at the Emmys; the swagger of Mr. Robot would be nothing without his supremely assured and oddly sympathetic performance at its centre.  Mikkelson is destined to never be rewarded for his creepy but full-bodied and sensuous performance as Hannibal Lecter, a beacon even in an uneven final season. Matthew Rhys has a shot at a Best Actor nod, if only because the field is thinner than Best Actress, and it would be much deserved after several years of solid work as morally compromised Philip Jennings.  Aden Young continues to do an impeccable job as a former convict whose guilt we’re still not entirely sure of, and his emotional journey towards finally leaving his hometown behind was quietly but forcefully persuasive in Rectify’s third season.  I didn’t love the drug addiction storyline The Knick stuck Clive Owen in, but there’s no doubting the rigour with which he plays it, even if the show’s shortcomings became a little more apparent in S2.  Detractors were quick to label Bob Odenkirk’s presence in this category last year a holdover from Breaking Bad, but Odenkirk has consistently dug deeper for his portrayal of the man who became Saul Goodman, and was given the opportunity to use both the character’s inherent comic sensibility (the montage of him trying to get fired was just wonderful) and something more melancholy as his relationship with his brother fell apart.

 Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series:

Rachel Bloom for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Aya Cash for You’re The Worst

Sutton Foster for Younger

Sharon Horgan for Catastrophe

Julia Louis-Dreyfus for Veep

Constance Wu for Fresh Off The Boat

 I’m less keen on the show as a whole than other people, but Rachel Bloom wrestles a very difficult character and makes her both empathetic and fun to watch.  Aya Cash has always been acerbic gold on You’re The Worst, but this year had a very difficult story arc involving her depression that she aced thoroughly without it seeming like the character was stuck in a dead end. Sutton Foster is an elastic delight on Younger in a performance more deft than it’s perhaps often credited for, balancing the sitcom’s wackier elements with some of the show’s more serious-minded (if not exactly serious) themes in a way that doesn’t undermine either. Like her onscreen partner Rob Delaney, Horgan has the benefit of two seasons to show us what she can do, gifting the audience with a consistently ‘difficult’ character that’s nevertheless easy to root for even when she’s fucking up.  Julia Louis-Dreyfuss will likely cruise to another victory in this category, and why shouldn’t she for what was perhaps Veep’s funniest seasons yet, with such a wonderful showpiece as ‘Mother’ at its centre.  If Constance Wu was going to break into this category, you’d think it would’ve been last year, but here’s hoping she pulls a Maslany and critical fervour gets more people to watch the peerless work she’s doing on Fresh Off The Boat.

 Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series:

Shiri Appleby for UnREAL

Gemma Chan for Humans

Taraji P. Henson for Empire

Sarah Lancashire for Happy Valley

Krysten Ritter for Marvel’s Jessica Jones

Keri Russell for The Americans

 A comeback of sorts for the former Roswell actor, Shiri Appleby showed hitherto untapped range as beleaguered showrunner Rachel, selling her soul one piece at a time as one of the season’s most memorable antiheroes.  Gemma Chan was the clear focal point in Humans, a remake of a Scandinavian show that didn’t quite come together in a satisfying way, with the notable exception of Chan’s performance as an android who may or may not be more than she seems.  If Humans was a disappointment, Empire was a mess, but that doesn’t mean Taraji P. Henson isn’t working miracles in making Cookie, an outsized caricature on paper, into a coherent human being that also happens to be hugely enjoyable to watch. Happy Valley had a bit of an uphill struggle in topping its wonderful but very much self-contained first season, but the fact that it came so close owes much to Lancashire’s acrid, fascinating performance at its centre, one of the great television characters of the last few years.  Krysten Ritter fantastic curdling on that black comic persona from Don’t Trust The B--- In Apartment 23 works better than any other performance in Marvel’s TV universe because it doesn’t just feel like a feint towards ‘serious’ issues, but neatly folds her character’s PTSD into the construction of the superhero at the show’s centre.  Keri Russell has been deserving of a Lead Actress nod for years on The Americans, this year doing especially good work as Elizabeth is forced to betray her friend, Young Hee.

 Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series:

Sam Richardson for Veep

Tituss Burgess for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Noah Galvin for The Real O’Neals

Glen Powell for Scream Queens

Andrew Rannells for Girls

Zach Woods for Silicon Valley

 Veep is a series full of MVPs, but Sam Richardson is a constant source of delight, and the running gag that Selena actually thought he was good at his job just killed me.  A deserving nominee last year, Burgess didn’t have anything quite as good to play as ‘Pinot Noir’ this year, but the episode where Tituss meets his boyfriend’s parents was a particularly good showcase for his exuberant talents.  Mis-categorised in Supporting, Noah Galvin is nevertheless the real deal, combining charm with a sharper-than-you-think wit on The Real O’Neals.  Ryan Murphy shows are pinball machines when it comes to tone and it takes a specific kind of actor to know how to field it, but Glenn Powell was a riot as privileged frat boy Chad Radwell.  Andrew Rannells was great on the last season of Girls too, but this year he got something a little more dramatic to play, his cautious courtship of Corey Stoll’s Dill one of this year’s many highlights.  Like Veep, Silicon Valley is a comedy with superlative performances from pretty much its entire cast, but Woods mixture of optimism and vulnerability prove so crucial to the fabric of the show, a counterbalance of sweetness to a world that’s almost uniformly cynical.

 Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series:

Jonathan Banks for Better Call Saul

Clayne Crawford for Rectify

James D’Arcy for Marvel’s Agent Carter

Peter Dinklage for Game of Thrones

André Holland for The Knick

James Norton for Happy Valley

 Lacking a showcase as spectacular as last year’s ‘Five-O’, Jonathan Banks remains a deep well for the Breaking Bad universe to draw from, his steady battle of wills with Hector Salamanca perhaps the best use Better Call Saul has made yet of its predecessor’s bank of eccentric supporting characters.  As Teddy Jr. reflected on what his separation from Tawnay meant for him moving forward, Crawford went to some dark, unexpected places, especially in a disturbing monologue to his younger brother.  A lot of people dug Agent Carter’s move to the West Coast, and although I wasn’t one of them, James D’Arcy was at least given more to do, especially with the shift in his relationship to Peggy following the shooting of his wife. Dinklage might have been largely sidelined last year (a perennial risk for GoT characters), but he had a couple of really great moments this year that demonstrated just how valuable he is as the cool head at the centre of that hectic show.  Given a slightly larger role this season, André Holland also had a bit more to play with as he came to realise that his position at The Knick might not be as sure as he first thought.  James Norton had quite a year with both Rev and War & Peace alongside his terrifying, unhinged performance as Happy Valley’s persuasive psychopath, knowing exactly when to pull back from Shirley Henderson’s cowed devotee.

 Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series:

Kether Donahue for You’re The Worst

Jemima Kirke for Girls

Jane Krakowski for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Alexandra Billings for Transparent

Lea Michele for Scream Queens

Amanda Peet for Togetherness

 Kether Donahue was the MVP of You’re The Worst’s first season, and with Gretchen’s depression storyline such a point of focus in S2, she shouldered the bulk of the show’s comedy this year, be that with heartfelt karaoke renditions or being the best actor at eating food onscreen since Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.  Allison Williams is likely to get the lion’s share of the praise for S5 of Girls and it’s hard to begrudge that, but Jemima Kirke gave a surprisingly delicate, wounded performance this year, her look back at Hannah after everything is out in the open about her and Adam one of my favourite acting moments of the year.  It’s unbelievable that Jane Krakowski doesn’t have an Emmy at this point, and she was again consistently hilarious with pretty much everything her character was given to do on Kimmy Schmidt this year.  Alexandra Billings has created a complex and, importantly for Transparent, infinitely likeable character on the sidelines with very little material.  Ryan Murphy’s shows are often a hodgepodge of different tones, but Lea Michele nailed an incredibly difficult role, embracing the show’s humour in a way that never made her character seem like a victim or a punchline.  Togetherness might have been quietly cancelled earlier this year, but thank goodness we at least got what is possibly Amanda Peet’s best ever performance as a peculiarly sympathetic narcissist flailing after she falls in love with her best friend.

 Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series:

Siobhan Finneran for Happy Valley

Selenis Leyva for Orange Is The New Black

Taryn Manning for Orange Is The New Black

Abigail Spencer for Rectify

Alison Wright for The Americans

Constance Zimmer for UnREAL

 Primarily acting as a source of comfort and support to her sister in S1, Siobhan Finneran was given the chance in S2 to expand both her role on the show as she tentatively pursued a relationship with a fellow alcoholic, and to deepen her relationship with Lancashire’s Catherine.  Orange Is The New Black is notorious for its generosity with the spotlight, and whilst there are any number of actors you could pick out of its deep bench, Gloria’s complicated rivalry with Sophia and Pennsatucky’s well-handled rape storyline rang most clearly for me this year.  Abigail Spencer has always been great on Rectify, but this year was her strongest yet as Amantha flailed in the wake of her brother’s newfound independence. Alison Wright was deserving of a nomination and maybe even a win last year, and that’s still true in 2016 as the scales well and truly fell from her eyes.  Constance Zimmer makes her hard-ass character fun without sacrificing the intensity and masochism of her relationship with Rachel, providing the show with its bitter but beating heart.

 Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series:

Justin Kirke for You’re The Worst

Ki Hong Lee for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Peter MacNicol for Veep

Peter Scolari for Girls

Corey Stoll for Girls

David Wain for Younger

 Justin Kirke was just the right amount of horrible as the smug suburban dad who forces Gretchen out of her reverie on You’re The Worst.  Ki Hong Lee is the perfect counterpart to Ellie Kemper’s Kimmy Schmidt, sweet with a sharp edge.  Peter MacNicol’s vitriol was the icing on the cake of Jonah’s ludicrous campaign on Veep. Peter Scolari’s journey towards self-acceptance might be a minor storyline on Girls, but it’s also one of its most emotionally astute.  Corey Stoll similarly made a big impression in Girls this year, and not only because of that sex scene, but because he made you see all the ways in which he was unsuitable but also why Elijah found him impossible to resist.  Younger had some terrific send-ups of authors in its second season, but David Wain’s self-described ‘male feminist’ was the perfect mixture of vim and wit.

 Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series:

Richard Armitage for Hannibal

Michael Cristofer for Mr. Robot

Pablo Schreider for Orange Is The New Black

Christopher McDonald for The Good Wife

Zach Woods for The Good Wife

B. D. Wong for Mr. Robot

 Richard Armitage continued Hannibal’s streak of finding new ways to approach existing characters as Francis Dolarhyde.  Michael Christofer provided silky menace on Mr. Robot, bolstering an area of the show that might have seemed superfluous otherwise.  B. D. Wong similarly provided welcome personality to Mr. Robot’s corporate playground.  Pablo Shreider was barely in S3 of Orange Is The New Black, but he made a visceral impression during his mother’s visit to him in prison.  Of the many Good Wife below-the-lines stars, Christopher McDonald was a welcome obstacle to Alicia’s time in bond court at the start of the season, and although Zach Woods wasn’t exactly stretching himself, he was also at the centre of the series’ last ever decent standalone episode.

 Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series:

Becky Ann Baker for Girls

Anna Camp for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Claire Danes for Master of None

Carrie Fisher for Catastrophe

Lisa Kudrow for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Amy Sedaris for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

 There’s a reason Lena Dunham always gives at least one spotlight episode per season to Becky Ann Baker on Girls, who’s perfect at channelling both her character’s resignation and fury.  Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was full to the brim with great guest stars in its second season, from Anna Camp’s inspired turn as an hysterical socialite to Amy Sedaris’s desperate divorcée and Lisa Kudrow’s more sombre, strained performance as Kimmy’s long-lost mother.  Claire Danes clearly relished the opportunity to let loose on Master of None as a bored, rich wife wanting to cheat on her dull husband.  The coup that Catastrophe pulled off in casting Carrie Fisher as Rob’s tell-it-straight, unbearable mother is worth however much money they’re paying for her.

 Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series:

Arielle Kibbell for UnREAL

Natasha Lyonne for Orange Is The New Black

Carrie Preston for The Good Wife

Bridget Regan for Marvel’s Agent Carter

Sarah Steele for The Good Wife

Lorraine Toussaint for The Fosters

 UnREAL had a bunch of great supporting performances, but Arielle Kibbell is the only one able to submit in this category and she was a hoot as the first contestant to leave the high-stakes reality show.  Natasha Lyonne was sorely missed during S3 of OITNB’s, but she got one hell of a send-off in an early emotional highpoint.  Carrie Preston continues to be one of strongest weapons in The Good Wife’s arsenal of great supporting characters.  Bridget Regan was such a fantastic villain on Agent Carter’s first season, it’s a shame we got so little of her in S2, a simmering intelligence that the season sorely lacked in its back half.  Sarah Steele again proved that every now and then The Good Wife could write its teenage characters well, enormous fun even if the writers were effectively recruiting her to heal the rift between Alicia and Eli.  Lorraine Toussaint handled a delicate storyline about a racist comment her stepson had made with typical intelligence on one of The Fosters standout episodes this season.

 Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series:

The Outs – Gentlemen Enjoy Solitude

Girls – The Panic In Central Park

Please Like Me – Coq Au Vin

Transparent – Man On The Land

Veep – Mother

You’re The Worst – LCD Soundsystem

 The Outs took a significant leap in quality in its second season, Gentlemen Enjoy Solitude its most assured and affecting episode yet.  Most of the conversation about Girls’ bounce-back season focused on this episode, with good reason – Marnie has often been a divisive character, but The Panic In Central Park was uncharacteristically generous to the character, in the process creating one of the show’s best episodes since Beach House. I’d have probably picked Pancakes With Faces (the episode where Claire gets an abortion) were it submitted, but Coq Au Vin is almost as fine, an ideal mixture of the sort of extreme sadness and cautious optimism that Josh Thomas has perfected.  I worry that Transparent may get lost in the shuffle, but Man On The Land was the show at its most inquisitive, prodding at some of Maura’s faults whilst finding empathetic humour in her two daughters experiences at an all-female music festival.  Mother is an easy pick for Veep’s best episode, even in a very strong season.  I know some people weren’t keen on the direction You’re The Worst took in its second season, but LCD Soundsystem saw it all come perfectly together as Jimmy was finally forced to recognise Gretchen’s depression.

 Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series:

The Good Wife – End

Happy Valley – Episode 1

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – 4,722 Hours

Mr. Robot - eps1.0_hellofriend.mov

Orange Is The New Black – Trust No Bitch

UnREAL – Truth

 Plenty of people hated The Good Wife finale because of where it left Alicia and Diane’s relationship (not to mention Diane and Kurt), but as a statement of how its protagonist was and what she stood for, it was perfect.  Sometimes a satisfying ending doesn’t need to be a perfect one.  Happy Valley probably had better episodes than its S2 opener, but that doesn’t mean it’s not as densely packed and emotionally rich as the remaining five episodes, deceptively humorous as it puts its various building blocks in place for the rest of the season.  I’ve been close to giving up Agents of SHIELD on numerous occasions, but if only they could put out fantastic standalone episodes such as this one – where Simmons is trapped alone on an alien planet ��� more often, perhaps viewers would feel more invested.  Mr. Robot had one of the most confident pilots since Alias, where every part of Sam Esmail’s vision comes together so well almost immediately. Trust No Bitch, OITNB’s season finale, was a wave of positive feeling amid a new regime that promised darker days to come.   This is the episode of UnREAL where Faith reveals that she’s gay and perhaps the season’s best example of the troubling intersection between character and ‘good TV’.

 Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series:

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – Josh Just Happens To Live Here, dir. Marc Webb

Girls – I Love You Baby, dir. Jenni Konner

Please Like Me – Natural Spring Water, dir. Josh Thomas

Review – Falsely Accused; Sleep With Your Teacher; Little Person, dir. Jeffrey Blitz

Togetherness – Advanced Pretend, dir. Jay and Mark Duplass

You’re The Worst – Spooky Sunday Funday, dir. Wendey Stanzler

 Marc Webb was a perfect choice to convey Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s zippy and offbeat rhythm for its pilot.  I Love You Baby could easily have operated as a series finale to Girls, but the argument between Jessa and Adam and Hannah’s performance at The Moth were both impeccably handled statements of intent for both the show and its characters. Natural Spring Water is the episode of Please Like Me where they’re all on drugs, and like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, it’s an episode that’s very dependent on rhythm and balancing a lot of different moving parts at the same time.  Review can feel a little too masochistic at times, but the direction is a lot of the reason why its more manic side makes sense.  Advanced Pretend has two very distinct storylines to handle, one a gad about their hometown for Brett and Alex and the other has Tina trying to look after the kids for the first time.  The majority of the episode keeps you on edge as you wait for something to go wrong, but it’s a credit to Togetherness’ patience and intelligence that the episode lands where it does.  Spooky Sunday Funday was probably the only episode of You’re The Worst that feels like an out-and-out comedy.  Gretchen’s depression still looms over the other characters, but it still makes for some jittery, nervous humour.

 Oustanding Directing for a Drama Series:

The Americans – The Magic Of David Copperfield V: The Statue Of Liberty Disappears, dir. Matthew Rhys

Better Call Saul – Fifi, dir. Larysa Kondracki

Game of Thrones – Battle of the Bastards, dir. Miguel Sapochnik

Marvel’s Jessica Jones – AKA Ladies Night, dir. S J Clarkson

Mr. Robot - eps1.8_m1rr0r1ng.qt, dir. Tricia Brock

Orange Is The New Black – Mother’s Day, dir. Andrew McCarthy

 At least The Americans had the good sense to submit its best episode into Directing even if it only submitted the finale into Writing.  Better Call Saul continues Breaking Bad’s tradition of getting in wonderful directors that understand its idiosyncrasies perfectly.  Game of Thrones will surely be the winner in this category, a barn-stormer of an episode at least as far as its direction, if not its writing, is concerned.  Jessica Jones managed to feel like a comic book adaptation without being too cute about it in its strong opener.  This is the episode of Mr. Robot with the big reveal, and it’s a great example of how to wrong-foot an audience, beginning with the reveal that Alison and Darlene know each other, which dovetails perfectly into the flashbacks to Elliot’s childhood.  OITNB’s reliance on flashbacks, meanwhile, experienced some diminishing returns in its third season.   Mother’s Day, which expanded the format to include several characters in one episode, was probably the best example of how effective it can be when it works.

[stripyhorse23]

Films of 2015

Mad Max: Fury Road

The cinematic equivalent of a heart-attack, George Miller fashions one of the best feminist road movies since Thelma & Louise with brute force and bold elegance.  Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron are a robust, grime-smeared double act, anchoring the film’s delightful surfeit of idiosyncrasies.  Coming at the exact moment when Marvel fatigue was beginning to set in, its blood and dirt served as a welcome antidote to the chrome and steel of other blockbusters.

Carol

Following a keenly-felt eight year absence from film, Todd Haynes has returned with one of his best films yet, a shimmering romance of façades between two women in 50s New York.  It captures so much with such precision – love’s first blush, both the thrill and comfort of queer intimacy – that the film’s technical aspects would almost be beside the point were they not so radiant.  Carol invites us into its seductive world, leaving its viewers as in thrall to its beauty as its two protagonists are to one another.

Girlhood

A slyly exuberant look at young female gang life, as a teenage girl who increasingly feels like her life has nowhere to go discovers a new kind of family in a group of raucous young women she meets outside the school gates.  By focusing on the positives that this small enclave provides its main character, Céline Sciamma’s third feature is brimming with unexpected joy, not least in the year’s best musical moment, a lip synch performance to Rihanna’s Diamonds.

Mommy

Following his tightly controlled thriller, Tom At The Farm, Dolan is back to his usual free-wheeling, bursting-at-the-seams self with Mommy.  Like I Killed My Mother, Mommy is another film fascinated by the tough decisions parents have to make for their children, and the way in which love can be misinterpreted.  A difficult, violent teenage boy and his mother who find unlikely support from a mousy, depressed neighbour sets us up for tragedy, but delivers broad brushstrokes of exuberance along the way.

The Look Of Silence

A companion piece to Joshua Oppenheimer’s staggering The Act of Killing, this second documentary about the Indonesian killings of 1965-6 shifts its focus away from the perpetrators to the victims, in particular the younger brother of one of the men who were murdered.  His calm in the face of the people responsible, who still live within the communities they terrorised makes for provocative, prickly viewing, but it’s also an empathic, clear-eyed (to the point of uncomfortableness) study of how we deal with mass trauma.

From What Is Before

Whilst not quite as awe-inspiring as Norte, The End of History, Lav Diaz’s typically epic treatment of a small barrio under martial law, From What Is Before, is just as quietly observant, incisive and yearning as his previous masterwork.  His wide, critical scope of his country’s history finds focus in his characters as they are forced to weather a life that becomes increasingly, impossibly hard to bear.  Spread over nearly six hours, it’s tempting to label it episodic, best to watch in bite-size chunks, and whilst there’s some truth to that, it also does a disservice to its expansive, purely cinematic qualities.

Wild

A robust adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about one woman walking the Pacific Crest trail in attempt to find her way back to herself following the break-up of her marriage.  The key to overcoming the inherent corniness of its protagonist’s journey is in the way Wild winnows down Cheryl’s pain to a series of moments and, in particular, the trauma of losing her beloved mother (a radiant Laura Dern in flashback).  It’s a film shot through with acute pain and shimmering, hesitant reflection.

Selma:

Ava DuVernay’s crackling account of the Selma march was unfairly clouded by the chatter surrounding its awards prospects.  A year after its release, it stands as an imperfect, but nonetheless confident, incendiary indictment of history moving too slowly for the people it affects the most. Oyelowo is a lightning rod as Luther King, but it’s the pockets of humanity DuVernay finds in her generous ensemble that makes this such a memorable tapestry.

The Tribe:

A Ukrainian film focusing on a school of deaf children who communicate in sign language, but with no subtitles provided, sounds like tough going.  Instead, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s debut feature proves an exhilarating triumph, as he delves into the criminal underworld of this community.  Once you’ve settled into The Tribe’s rhythms, it’s a captivating experience, a rough-and-tumble introduction into an insular world, full of interesting provocations.

Still Alice:

Yes, objectively, Still Alice isn’t as impressive as plenty of other more finely crafted films this year, but such lists stand on shifting sands.  As such, Still Alice remains the movie I re-watched the most and which resonated with me most personally in many ways.  Not just a moving study of one woman grappling with Alzheimer’s, but also a quiet enquiry into how we underestimate those closest to us.  It was one of 2015’s most tender offerings.

 Honorable Mentions: The Lobster, Brooklyn, Foxcatcher, Timbuktu, Force Majeure, Testament of Youth, Mistress America, The Nightmare, Far From The Madding Crowd.

Best Director:

George Miller – Mad Max: Fury Road

Lav Diaz – From What Is Before

Ava DuVernay – Selma

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy – The Tribe

Céline Sciamma – Girlhood

Best Actor:

David Oyelowo – Selma

Grand-standing, but never less than acutely aware of his precarious position, Oyelowo evinces intense melancholy, but is also fervently believable as one who inspires hope in others.

Antoine-Olivier Pilon – Mommy

Sells the delight of his character’s knife-edge of happiness with abandonment and openness without compromising the maelstrom of rage and pain hovering just beneath the surface.

Colin Farrell – The Lobster

The comic performance of the year, perfectly hitched to Lanthimos’s absurd rhythm and able to conjure specific humour from the bleakest of scenarios.

Ian McKellen – Mr. Holmes

Not coasting for the first time in years, this wry, upside-down portrayal of Holmes gently and carefully erodes the actor’s hard surfaces, utilising his charisma slyly and purposefully.

Tom Courtenay – 45 Years

Fashions a forty-five year marriage in an instant, Courtney’s scratched record performance is complemented beautifully by Rampling as their twin trajectories of realisation come together before swooping dramatically apart.

Honourable Mentions: Bradley Cooper (American Sniper) John Lithgow and Alfred Molina (Love Is Strange), Arnold Oceng (The Good Lie) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Enemy)

Best Actress:

Cate Blanchett – Carol

For belying the stereotype of a ‘predatory’ older woman, for matching Therese’s hesitance with a burnt-before reluctance of her own even as she not-quite-unconsciously draws her closer.

Julianne Moore – Still Alice

Not only a careful depiction of how Alice finds herself at sea all of a sudden, but a pinpoint accurate portrayal of the shifting feelings she has towards her family, resiliently clinging on to those parts of her mind that she can use to reach her youngest daughter.

 Karidja Touré – Girlhood

Welcomes the audience into a small and particular enclave, opening up her character in ways that don’t sacrifice her complexity, so that each turn of the dime the script feeds her feels unforced.

 Gugu Mbatha-Raw – Beyond The Lights

With more substantial material than Belle provided her, Mbatha-Raw gives a fascinating portrayal of a damaged star, grounding some of her film’s flimsier trappings whilst also finding unexpected creases in the script from which to build her character.

Reese Witherspoon – Wild

A welcome return to form, and a wise distillation of her movie star charisma, Witherspoon is quiet and determined as Cheryl, a sliver of pain that’s constantly at risk of breaking wide open.

 Honourable Mentions: Alicia Vikander (Testament of Youth), Charlotte Rampling (45 Years), Elisabeth Banks (Love & Mercy), Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn) and Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behaviour)

Best Suppprting Actor

Michael Sheen - Far From The Madding Crowd

Confidence built on shaky foundations, we get the sense of a minor tragedy occurring just off-screen, his attachment to and devastation at the loss of Bethsheba saying as much about him as it does her without ever overshadowing the main text.

 Emory Cohen – Brooklyn

Finally those Brando comparisons make sense; a beacon of tremulous sensuality that imprints itself so firmly on the story that even an absence for a whole third of the movie isn’t enough to shake his presence.

 Edward Norton – Birdman

Good-naturedly playing himself up, Norton’s also the only part of Birdman that feels genuinely and generously funny, a riot in wolf’s clothing.

 Mark Ruffalo – Foxcatcher

Underplaying to perfection, Ruffalo portrays David Schultz as a man edging up to his own jealousy, not quite able to admit to himself what he’s getting himself or his brother into, a marvel across the board, but especially during the interview scene.

 Oscar Isaac – Ex Machina

A character that you’re completely unable to put your finger on, brimming with a charisma that artfully conceals just enough of his true nature to keep Caleb exactly where he wants him to be right up until the film’s final moments.

 Honourable Mentions: Jason Statham (Spy) Ben Whishaw (The Lobster), Colin Morgan (Testament of Youth), J. K. Simmons (Whiplash) and Michael Shannon (99 Homes)

 Best Supporting Actress:

 Kristen Stewart – Still Alice

Perhaps even better here than in The Clouds of Sils Maria, not least for finding unexpected pockets of warmth within her famous prickliness and for creating believable familial bonds without softening her character’s personality.

 Assa Sylla – Girlhood

A woman just beginning to understand the force of her own personality and how far she can run with it, Sylla provides unexpected warmth in a film that already zigs when you expect it to zag.

 Jessica Chastain – A Most Violent Year

Never overplays her character’s confidence, there’s a precise, tight-lipped rigidity to Chastain’s performance, the thinnest layer of effortfulness to her Pfeiffer-channelling gangster’s wife.

 Elisabeth Moss – Listen Up, Philip

A ray of hope in an otherwise turgid film, Moss makes Ashley’s rapid disillusionment with her poseur boyfriend Listen Up, Philip’s one point of human contact, a sour note that plays entirely differently to all the male noise that surrounds her.

 Sarah Paulson – Carol

A truly supporting turn, providing succour to Carol and unveiling a storied past of passion that might have cooled but has nonetheless left its mark on both of them.

 Honourable Mentions: Laura Dern (Wild), Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation), Érica Rivas (Wild Tales), Rose Byrne (Spy) and Jada Pinkett Smith (Magic Mike XXL)

[stripyhorse23]

TV of 2014

Best TV Drama:

1) Mad Men

Now in its seventh season and showing no signs of aging, Mad Men remains the pinnacle of what television drama can achieve.  Splitting the final season into two parts might have interrupted the show’s momentum, but take each episode as an individual and this is comfortably some of the most emotionally acute writing on TV.  Hanging the season on Don and Peggy’s relationship, both his new acceptance of the status quo and her ascent as SCDP’s brightest copywriter, Season 7 returned to the show’s core players, on what they’d left behind and what new horizons they were yet to breach.  It might be running on cumulative power from what’s come before, but any show in its seventh season that can bust out moments like Don and Peggy’s slow dance to My Way, or Bert’s musical number, perfectly evincing resignation, melancholy and cautious optimism, even wonder is a show operating at its peak.

2) Happy Valley

It might not have had the water cooler hype of Broadchurch last year, or even the splashy intrigue of The Fall, but in its own, modest way, Happy Valley may well have been the best programme British TV has produced in years.  The story, in which a bumbling middleman gets in over his head arranging the kidnap of his boss’ daughter, and the middle-aged police detective with a personal stake in the case, seems both convoluted and clichéd at the same time.  But there’s much more to Sally Wainwright’s crime drama than that, not least Sarah Lancashire’s bracing central performance.  A morality drama writ large without ever falling into the pitfalls of similar shows, it was also, more subtly, an inquisitive and sensitive exploration of depression.

3) Orange Is The New Black

An unexpected word-of-mouth hit in its first season, OITNB had a lot to live up to in its second.  Shifting its focus from Piper’s privileged white point-of-entry character proved absolutely the right decision.  Instead, the show delved into Taystee’s fraught relationship with duplicitous mother figure Vee, who was in turn staging her own coup against Red’s benign dictatorship.  With two compelling central conflicts at its centre, the show managed to retain its momentum from Season 1 whilst simultaneously drawing out characters like Rosa, Cindy and Morello, its interest in shifting character dynamics over plot only rivalled by Mad Men.

4) The Good Wife

Name another show that received a groundswell of critical support in its fifth season.  A show that’s constantly looking to test its limits has its downsides – The Good Wife has reset its goalposts an awful lot this year – but few other shows can rival it for sheer satisfaction, or for the sort of sly complexity it brings to network television.  Season 6 has had a few dud moments (the Carrie Preston episodes were almost a total dud), but there was nothing I anticipated as eagerly as a new episode of The Good Wife each week and that, as unscientific as it may be, makes it worthy of a place in my Top 5.

5) The Americans

There were a couple of shows that made huge leaps in their second season in 2014, and whilst Hannibal probably had one of the most jaw-dropping finales of the year, its slow start meant that it was pipped to the post by The Americans’ wonderful Season 2.  Doubling down on the domestic, we saw Philip and Elizabeth find new ways to both support and hurt one another as they grew closer together.  Opening up that closed world to include fascinating side-players Nina, Martha, even Paige, reaped dividends for a show that was suddenly as emotionally rich as it was sharp and terse.  Bonus points for its continued spot-on 80s soundtrack.

Best Comedy:

1) The Comeback

Shows that come back from the dead are few and far between, and shows that return with a real purpose are even rarer.  Nine years after its premature cancellation, The Comeback remains a seething depiction of the essential emptiness of the television industry.  Its subject, Valerie Cherish, is as fame-hungry and desperate as ever, the looming spectre of middle age granting her the unusual opportunity to present herself as a 'serious' actress playing a spin on her own persona as part of a gritty new HBO dramedy ('a comedy without the laughs', Val helpfully explains.  It's uncomfortable viewing, but with a rare streak of empathy for its vapid protagonist that puts this a cut above other similarly caustic comedies.

2) Transparent

Amazon Prime’s lobbying shot at Netflix’s dominance in the TV streaming industry, Transparent was one of a number of new comedies that didn’t sacrifice warmth for the sake of snark.  Jeffrey Tambor stars as Moira, a transgender woman on the verge of outing herself to her three grown-up, fucked-up children.  That’s a difficult scenario to mine humour from, especially for a show that for the most part shuns ‘broad’, but Jill Solloway’s remarkably steady-handed show finds pockets of comedy amid even its most serious moments.  It also produced the most inexplicably touching title credits of the year.

3) Broad City

It would be easy to peg Broad City, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s adaptation of their own web series, as Comedy Central’s attempt to create their own version of Girls.  Like Girls, Broad City is personality-led, but unlike both that show and several other well-regarded comedies it’s unabashedly uncynical.  That isn’t to say that it doesn’t luxuriate in cringe comedy, or that it’s characters always treat each other well, but the unassailable friendship between Abbi and Ilana is what holds everything together.  A finale in which an adrenalin-pumped Ilana has to carry Abbi out of a fancy restaurant after she has an allergic reaction to fish is able to find exactly the right amount of sweetness, horror and hilarity.  In a year when most comedy was either thinly-veiled tragedy or presented its characters as monsters, it was a refreshing change.

4) You’re The Worst

On paper, this show sounds awful.  Against the odds of its own premise – two dreadful people try to make a go of it as a couple – You’re The Worst turned out to be surprisingly sweet-natured.  Similar in sensibility to shows like Happy Endings and Community, if lacking both those shows’ franticness, it showed that it is indeed possible to make good comedy from a couple who aren’t on the verge of breaking up all the time.

5) The Mindy Project

By no means perfect, for laughs alone, The Mindy Project would be top of the comedy heap.  Whilst its supporting cast might not be as well-rounded as they probably should be at this point in the show’s run, there’s no denying just how successful the Mindy and Danny pairing has been this year, be it for the giddy romance of their Empire State Building hook-up to the episode built entirely around anal sex.

Best Actor In A Drama

1) Jon Hamm in Mad Men

Even if awards bodies have stopped noticing Jon Hamm, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t continue to give one of the best performances on TV.  Don’s second chances with the two most important women in his life (Sally and Peggy) as he clawed his way back to sobriety reaped huge rewards in Mad Men’s superfluous seventh season.

2) Matthew Rhys for The Americans

Strong in a good first season, Rhys was even better in a second season that was finally up to the level of him and co-star Keri Russell.  Upping the emotional stakes as Philip and Elizabeth seek revenge for the murder of their friends, he managed to find complexity within convolution.

3) Aden Young for Rectify

If Jon Hamm has dropped off the Emmy's radar, Aden Young was never on it in the first place.  Playing a man released from death row on a technicality, we got as close to an answer as we’re ever going to get on whether his character, Daniel Holden, was innocent of the murder at the show's centre.  Young’s quietly furious performance was a perfect fit for this spiritually curious show.

4) Hugh Dancy for Hannibal

Starting the season in prison charged with Hannibal’s crimes, Dancy’s Will Graham was put through the ringer as he attempted to clear his own name and flush out the real killer.  In a series full of gruesome flourishes, Dancy has a tricky part in making you believe Will’s role in an ongoing investigation as his mental state rapidly deteriorates.

5) Demián Bechir for The Bridge

Cancelled just as it had settled into a sort of loopy groove, The Bridge is continually bolstered by actors who commit to the material, however lurid it may be.  Season 1’s finale saw Detective Ruiz in a position that might have felt unlikely for the character, but Bechir sold a lot of disparate elements this season, his low-key charisma the perfect foil to co-star Diane Kruger’s more brittle charms.

Best Actress in a TV Drama:

1) Sarah Lancashire for Happy Valley

If not quite a national treasure, Sarah Lancashire has been a valued actor in prestige British drama for years.  As a police officer struggling with depression and investigating a kidnapping with links to the rape of her daughter years previously, her ragged determination was placed front and centre, grounding the show’s twists and turns in a weathered sadness that astonished.

2) Elisabeth Moss for Mad Men

With Top of the Lake, The One I Love and Listen Up, Philip barely within a year of one another, Moss feels like Mad Men’s true breakout star.  Thank goodness we get her for Mad Men’s final season, because she turned in series best work here, be it in the pithy bitterness she extends towards her beleaguered secretary, or that wonderful slow dance with Don.

3) Lizzie Caplan for Masters of Sex

Masters of Sex had a rough season, full of narrative dead ends and losing three of its most valuable supporting players.  Virginia had comfortably the season’s most compelling arc, as she’s forced to realise the ways in which she’s prioritised work over her children.  Caplan suffused easy heartbreak with something harder, her feminism and forthrightness never feeling anachronistic.

4) Tatiana Maslany for Orphan Black

If Masters of Sex had a rough season, Orphan Black had a disastrous one, tonally fractured with one eye on fan service at all times.  Aside from the unwise decision to add a transgender clone, Maslany did another impeccable job of differentiating between her many characters.  The show’s novelty may have lost its veneer, but Maslany remained consistently outstanding.

5) Julianna Margulies for The Good Wife

Alicia is such a shuttered character so much of the time, that it’s easy to gloss over Margulies’ achievements in the role.  She had a lot to deal with this year, from Will’s death to Carey’s arrest, but it was the campaign for State’s Attorney that demonstrated Margulies’ ability to build her character’s myriad woes into one of the most charismatic TV performances of the last ten years.

Best Supporting Actor in a TV Drama:

1) Clayne Crawford for Rectify

From unrepentant asshole in Season 1, to one of Rectify’s most empathic and wounded characters, Crawford had one the TV season's most unexpected arcs.  Using its extended season run to focus on the supporting cast leant him an opportunity to expand on Teddy Junior in fascinating ways.  Like Daniel, it’s a performance of closed doors, but his emotional collapse once Tawney finally leaves him is a masterclass in emotional repression.

2) Craig T. Nelson for Parenthood

Building its final season around Zeek’s possible death might be a cynical attempt on the show’s part to extract further tears from it audience, but it’s afforded Nelson an opportunity to run the gamut.  His confidence and stuttered stubbornness, it’s the slow dimming of one of the series’ most under-recognised guiding lights.

3) John Slattery for Mad Men

Always a reliable source of humour in a show that never gets recognised for its abundance of that very quality, Slatterly had a typically impressive year as he attempted to reconnect with his estranged daughter.  The intrusion of new ideas has been a persistent theme on the show for years, but Slatterly grounds his generation’s inability to accept change in his seriocomic absent father routine.

4) Mandy Patinkin for Homeland

As fine a bounce-back season as you could hope from this lapsed critical favourite, Patinkin was backgrounded for much of the season, but his kidnap, escape and recapture provided Season 4’s high point.  Panic sinking rapidly into resignation, Saul’s plea to Carrie to allow him to kill himself was the most affecting moment in a season full of them.

5) Bob Odenkirk in Fargo

Somewhat overpraised in several year-end round-ups, Fargo nonetheless provided several excellent performances from its murderers’ row of character actors.  Odenkirk’s naïve cop could have easily fallen into caricature, but his speech about a world he wants out of in the season finale was one of a handful of emotional beats not drip-dried in irony, leaving a mournful taste in the mouth that the show struggled to achieve elsewhere.

Best Supporting Actress in a TV Drama:

1) Lorraine Toussaint for Orange Is The New Black

A deliberately overpowering performance in Orange Is The New Black’s unnervingly confident second season, Toussaint worked as many angles on the audience as Vee did on the other characters.  Bringing a much-needed threat to Lychfield this year, her ruthlessness provided plot momentum even as her wilful maternal streak wreaked emotional havoc.

2) Annet Mahendru for The Americans

Navigating writing that never quite comes down on any one side as to its character’s true feelings, Mahendru continued to be one of The Americans’ finest assets in its second season.  Backed into an increasingly small corner, Nina’s predicament was increasingly heart-in-throat viewing, thanks entirely to Mahendru’s performance of intuitive intelligence.

3) Samira Wiley for Orange Is The New Black

Orange Is The New Black might have added a firecracker of a character in Vee, but it also wisely added shading to its dynamic supporting cast this year, most notably Wiley’s Poussey, the one inmate to see Vee’s true colours from the get-go.  As a smart young woman confounded by unrequited love, she provided the season with its beating heart.

4) Christine Baranski for The Good Wife

Giving Christine Baranski more to do can only result in good things, and she’d be on this list for Diane’s clipped dismissal of an overemotional employee alone, but she continues to find surprising layers underneath a character initially introduced as little more than a ball-buster.

5) Annaleigh Ashford for Masters of Sex

Despite being given little to do in the back-end of the season, Betty’s strained but surprisingly tender marriage to Gene and the reappearance of her old flame gave the underutilised Ashford some great material to play in a bumpy year for the show.  Continuing to find humour and sharp intelligence even at Betty’s lowest moments, it was a plea for more material in Season 3.

Best Actor in a Comedy:

1) Jeffrey Tambor for Transparent

Transparent was a marvellous achievement for creator Jill Soloway, with Tambor’s performance as Moira the cherry on top of the cake.  Served well by Soloway’s sensitive writing, Moira is every bit as flawed as her children, but Tambor finds delicacy and fragility beneath a robust surface and vice versa.

2) Jonathan Groff for Looking

Playing the more naïve member of a group of San Francisco gay men, Groff’s performance is trickier than you might think at first blush.  The underlying playfulness and half-hidden wilfulness to transgress subverted any expecations of ‘representation’.  It’s a deft sleight of hand and one Groff carried off with ease and charm.

3) Chris Messina for The Mindy Project

An unlikely (ish – this is still network TV) lust object for anyone watching The Mindy Project, it’s sort of a wonder that Messina hasn’t become a bigger star.  For now, it’s enough to watch him knock both the show’s broader, raunchier moments and the smaller, more intimate stuff out of the park.

4) Louis C. K. for Louie

Experimenting with long-form narrative was a dicey move for Louie this season, and not all of it worked, but it did allow for Louis C. K. to do some of his best work in front of the camera, first with his fumbling romance with Amia and then again with the reappearance of Pamela.  Few people are as good at making awkward humour so empathic and yet so clear-sighted.

5) Chris Geere for You’re The Worst

Giving a wonkier version of the bad boy archetype we’re used to seeing on TV (not least because he’s so evenly matched by partner Aya Cash), Geere’s sneering vulnerability plays much better than you might expect.  Like the show around him, it’s a bruised take on familiar material and all the better for it.

Best Actress in a Comedy:

1) Lisa Kudrow for The Comeback

It’s hard to know where to begin with what will surely be seen as one of the great television performances of all time.  Let’s just say that in Valerie Cherish, Kudrow created an instant classic, and one that will be as deeply felt as she is gloriously, hilariously quoted.

2=) Ilana Glazer for Broad City and Abbi Jacobson for Broad City

Inseparable, but operating on their own highly specific frequencies, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson managed to ground Broad City’s wackier moments in a friendship that felt as essential as any relationship on screen this year.

4) Gina Rodriguez for Jane The Virgin

A breakout performance on a telenovela pastiche airing on The CW seems unlikely in 2015, but Rodriguez nails the bubble-gum tone of her star vehicle.  As a twenty-something woman who is accidentally inseminated at a clinic, she’s smartly personable in all the right ways to lift the already cleverer-than-you-think-it-is material.

5) Mindy Kaling for The Mindy Project

Sometimes you just have to give it to the funniest performer on the funniest sitcom.  The Mindy Project might have its occasional missteps, but even then it’s comfortably the funniest show on TV right now, and with a female protagonist of rare mettle.  Has a character as pop culture-savvy as Mindy ever been presented or performed so intelligently?

Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy:

1) Parker Young for Enlisted

Let’s pour one out for Enlisted, shall we?  A military comedy that was funnier than those two words put together might suggest, Young’s dumb but loveable jock was the perfect comic foil to his more down-the-line brothers.  Unfairly cancelled, this was still a step in the right direction from his scene-stealing work on Suburgatory.

2) Raúl Castille for Looking

There are a lot of ways in which this sort of character can go wrong, not least as the sort of magically perfect boyfriend that opens up a whole new world to the protagonist.  There’s an easiness to Castillo’s performance that perfectly rubs up against Groff’s nervous energy, making him a great fit for creator Andrew Haigh’s sutro-filtered sensibility.

3) Tony Hale for Veep

Sometimes one very good joke performed well can win you more love than any amount of beautifully realised character work.  The nervous nosebleed once Selina discovers that she’s going to be president was hands-down one of the funniest moments of the year, and Hale continues to be an unmitigated joy in this role.

4) Danny Pudi for Community

Being the sort of show that it is, the fact that television is flooded by characters who are broadly ‘on the spectrum’, Danny Pudi’s performance as Abed remains one of the most compelling and interesting depictions of autism on screen.  Struggling to overcome the imminent departure of his best friend this year, Pudi found unexpected creases within the rigid persona of his character.

5) Zach Woods for Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley was one of those shows that, whilst occasionally very good, was never quite funny or idiosyncratic enough to inspire devotion.  Zach Woods, as a pale overachiever desperate to fit in, provided a welcome innocence to the show’s bro-centric universe.

Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy:

1) Kether Donohue for You’re The Worst

For bringing something new to the sex-starved best friend, Kether Donohue deserves the same amount of plaudits as her similarly archetype-busting co-stars.  Bringing a weepy self-knowledge to her brittle, miserable wife act, she felt fully-formed from the offset, which simply served to make those glimpses into her home life towards the end of the season that much more resonant.

2) Gaby Hoffmann for Transparent

Gaby Hoffmann has had a banner year, providing excellent and singular work not only on Transparent, but also on Girls, and in Obvious Child on the big screen.  As a narcissistic little-girl-lost on Amazon’s premiere show, she’s all flaky adolescence and rumpled self-confidence.  A messy tragedy who’s unafraid of her character’s inherent repellence.

3) Gillian Jacobs for Community

I will never not be overjoyed by everything Jacobs does on Community, at this point entirely turning upside the persona of her uninformed liberal Britta.  Her openness ensures the jokes the show throws at her land differently than they would on a more scathing comedy, but this year we got to see a bit more underneath that with the arrival of her old friends and Jeff’s subsequent realisation of his connection to her.

4) Rashida Jones for Parks & Recreation

Despite exiting at the end of January, this season of Parks & Recreation gave perfect Ann Perkins some of her best moments.  Most of these involved her graceful exit from Pawnee, not only a wrenching goodbye with Leslie, but also an emotional farewell with April that was no less affecting for being exactly what you knew was going to happen.

5) Allison Williams for Girls

Frequently picked out as the most irritating, narcissistic, one-note character in a cast that are constantly having to deflect similar accusations, Williams’ survived Girls’ bumpy third season relatively intact. ‘Beach House’, deemed by many to be the season’s high watermark, was an especially good showcase for her prickly perfectionism and spiky presence.

Best Guest Actor in a Drama:

1) Suraj Sharma for Homeland

The first whisperings of Homeland experiencing a bounceback season arrived with its delicate handling of Carrie’s ill-advised affair with Suraj Sharma’s medical student.  Choosing to film so much of those early episodes from Sharma’s fraught, stubbornly sentimental perspective provided the show with its best emotional pivot since ‘Q&A’ back in Season 2.

2) James Wolk for Mad Men

One of the undisputed highlights of last season, Wolk’s brief reappearance in Mad Men’s final season was a lament of sorts.  Wolk’s good looks were married so perfectly to his relentless optimism that it’s almost easier to view him as a well-spoken sociopath, but his heartbreaking proposal to Joan added something new to that character that was absolutely of a piece with everything else the show was saying this season.

3) Pedro Pascal for Game of Thrones

One of the fourth season’s most successful additions, bisexual lothario Oberyn Martell added a lusty swagger to the intricate and fascinating political machinations of King’s Landing.  At the centre of the season’s most joyfully gruesome and watercooler-worthy moment in ‘The Mountain and the Viper’, he was dispatched altogether too soon.

4) Harry Hamlin for Mad Men

Introduced as a sort of partner-in-crime for Roger, Bert Cutler’s off-the-cuff charm curdled this year.  A key antagonist of the season, his mirroring of the other characters around him (especially Slatterly) is shrewd work in a show that has increasingly relied on uncanny parallels.

5) Ryan Lane for Switched At Birth

Few characters inspire as much joy as Travis whenever Switched At Birth turns the camera on him.  Given a couple of meaty storylines, including Travis’ conflict about attending college, and providing a delicate grace note to its ongoing storyline with his hearing mother, he’s undoubtedly one of the standouts from Switched At Birth’s pretty stellar teen cast.

Best Guest Actress in a Drama:

1) Yael Stone for Orange Is The New Black

For a season as strongly story-arced as Orange Is The New Black’s second season was, Yael Stone’s standalone episode was a desperately sad respite from dramatics elsewhere.  Everything cute, comic or familiar about her character was washed away, not only serving as an excellent example of Stone’s talents, but also setting up her grand gesture in the season finale.

2) Gillian Anderson for Hannibal

Winner of an Evening Standard Award and headlining a more propulsive second season of The Fall, Anderson had a good year.  It’s no wonder she was promoted to season regular for Season 3, her chilly therapist a daring spin on her own persona that fit in beautifully with Mads Mikkelson’s cool charms on Hannibal this year.

3) Julianne Nicholson for Masters of Sex

One of a handful of close-to-perfect arcs on Masters of Sex this season, Julianne Nicholson gave one of television’s most under-heralded performances as a proud woman dying of cancer.  Scrubbed free of sentimentality, her at-times frosty relationship with Virginia is the most emotionally engaging the show has ever been.

4) Betsy Brandt for Masters of Sex

Transitioning from two very different roles, both on Breaking Bad and The Michael J. Fox Show, at first it seemed like Brandt would have little to play beyond ‘nervous secretary’.  Later in the season, she’s charged with parsing a hugely troublesome and difficult backstory of childhood abuse, something she manages with delicacy and precision.  An unexpected highlight of the back half of S2.

5) Marlee Matlin for Switched At Birth

Too few guest actors are used as well as Switched At Birth continues to use Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin.  As the hearing-impaired mentor to a group of high school students, she finds notes within that role that are consistently affecting, but Melody’s uncertain foray into the world of dating gave her nervier material to play.

Best Guest Actor in a Comedy:

1) Donald Glover for Community

One of the saddest departures of 2014, Glover’s boundless enthusiasm, excellent comic timing and, first and foremost, chemistry with Danny Pudi made Troy the highlight of an already absurdly talented cast.  Frequently used as the cornerstone of Community’s more reflective moments, he provided probably the best moment of this season’s best episode, ‘Cooperative Polygraphy’ when he realises that he actually *wants* to leave Greendale.

2) Scott Bakula for Looking

For a show that couldn’t quite get its act together in its first season, it sure did have some wonderful component parts.  I wasn’t thrilled by Dom’s storyline in Season 1 in which he opens a restaurant, but Bakula proved a remarkably engaging counterpart to him.  Like Castillo, he fits well with the laid-back style of the show, whilst also bringing a specificity all his own.

3) Hannibal Buress for Broad City

So much more than the person who’s constantly confounded by the actions of the show’s two protagonists, imagining Broad City without Lincoln is pretty much impossible at this point.  It’s a more low-key humour to what Glazer and Jacobson are going for, but that’s why it fits in so perfectly, especially in standout episode ‘Destination: Wedding’.

4) Andrew Rannells for Girls

Andrew Rannells continues to be better than what Lena Dunham writes for him.  Brining a sharper, more comically-inclined form of narcissism to Girls, he showed surprising depths in Season 3 standout, ‘The Beach House’, inexpertly masking his pain after breaking up with Danny Strong’s superficially similar boyfriend.

5) Seth Rogen for The Comeback

A perfect example of star casting that works in a show’s favour, Rogen’s laid-back charm and sympathetic ear provided welcome balance to those excruciating early scenes as Valerie is (again) humiliated whilst filming Seeing Red.  Similarly to his dialled-down performance in Take This Waltz, it's a version of Rogen we see all too little of.

Best Guest Actress in a Comedy:

1) Kathryn Hahn for Transparent

A consistent background presence in everything from Parks & Recreation to Girls, Hahn was a grounding presence in Transparent as a rabbi brought in to both counsel the troubled Pfeffermans and as a potential love interest for Josh.  Practicality papered over deeper wounds, you felt every bit of her presence on such a tonally precise show.

2) Gaby Hoffmann for Girls

A very different part to what she’s playing over on Transparent, Adam’s livewire sister was an opportunity for Hoffmann to let loose in ways simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.  That’s a hard balance to strike with a character like this, but Hoffman was one of the few more memorable moments of Girls’ third season.

3) Amber Riley for Glee

Ryan Murphy has put so many of his characters through so many contortions at this point that most are unrecognisable at this point as human beings.  A complete surprise then that Mercedes, one of the show’s most overlooked characters, returned with a surprisingly well-written and sensitively performed storyline involving her relationship with Sam.  A beacon of hope in a struggling season.

4) Lauren Weedman for Looking

One of those actors that just seems like they’re having fun, Weedman was a welcome and necessary counterpart to the self-absorbed central trio in Looking.  It helps when you’re given all the best lines, or when you’re echoing the thoughts of the audience, but sometimes being good fun on a show that sometimes forgets how to be just that feels like a real gift.

5) Pamela Adlon for Louie

Whilst Sarah Baker was great in her episode too, Adlon’s intelligent (but never academic) frustration and anger with Louie was one of this season’s most compelling components.  Much as this season fell flat for me, although Louis C. K.’s commitment to exploring his (and society’s) relationship to women is commendable, especially when he finds a performer as committed as Adlon.

Best Writing for a Drama:

1) Semi Chellas, ‘The Strategy’, Mad Men

2) Carly Wray, ‘Waterloo’, Mad Men

3) Sally Wainwright, ‘Episode 4’, Happy Valley

4) Sian Heder, ‘A Whole Other Hole’, Orange Is The New Black

5) Robert King and Michelle King, ‘Oppo Research’, The Good Wife

Best Writing for a Comedy:

1) Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow, ‘Valerie Gets What She Really Wants’, The Comeback

2) Andrew Haigh, ‘Looking for the Future’, Looking

3) Alex Rubens, ‘Co-operative Polygraphy’, Community

4) Abbi Jacobson & Ilana Glazer, ‘Destination: Wedding’, Broad City

5) Bruce Eric Kaplan, ‘Flo’, Girls

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Films of the Year 2014

1) Under The Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer)

An unusual film, but still one whose probing curiosity and disinterest in providing clear answers is of a piece with Jonathan Glazer’s previous features.  There’s something disarmingly odd about Scarlett Johansson’s predatory alien wandering the streets of Glasgow in a white transit van, but Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel finds unexpected horror in the more mundane aspects of her journey, be it a gaggle of girls outside a nightclub or, most memorably, a trip to the beach turned horribly wrong, he knows exactly when to push in and when to pull back.  As Johansson’s character gradually becomes more vulnerable to the outside world, the film opens up into something else entirely.  It’s a stunning genre exercise, visceral, even surprisingly tender when it needs to be.

2) 12 Years A Slave (dir. Steve McQueen)

A film of immense cumulative power, 12 Years A Slave finds both strength and weakness in its documentarian instincts.  A film that feels so big that one can only imagine that it will be shown in classrooms for years to come, but also one whose attention to detail can feel, initially, a shade remote.  Credit then to Steve McQueen’s (almost) uniformly excellent cast in mining disparate and rich seams of sorrow, resentment and heartache in their performances.  McQueen doesn’t so much show us beauty in a rotten world as depict the gradual erosion of one man’s soul.  A huge achievement and one that finds ways to move you in its complexity rather than in levelling its characters out.

3) Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater)

It might be a little too adulatory of its subject, but it’s hard to deny the reach of Richard Linklater’s twelve-years-in-the-making magnum opus to adolescence.  Choosing not to focus on ‘moments’, the lackadaisical sway of Boyhood is moulded precisely to its protagonist as he progresses from quiet, contemplative child into, well, mini Ethan Hawke, pretty much.  What makes Boyhood great is its ability to find symmetries and repetitions in the way we live our lives.  Just as Mason transforms into his father, so does his mother find herself attracted to men who hide their dark sides under sunnier personalities, even his sister’s smirking diffidence is mirrored in her cool, distant affectation as a college student.  Brief, sparkling moments of wonder, even terror, make up Linklater’s complex tapestry of family life.

4) Ilo Ilo (dir. Anthony Chen)

Sometimes it’s the gentlest films that end up making the biggest impressions by year’s end.  Anthony Chen’s subdued but specific take on the relationship between a petulant boy and his no-nonsense nanny seems light as a feather, but, like its protagonists, is made of surprisingly firmer stuff underneath.  Set during the Asian financial crisis, Chen depicts the characters’ struggles as a series of minor triumphs over a ploddingly indifferent world.  As such, it’s as good a depiction of love as witnesses on a day-to-day basis as anything else this year.

5) Pride (dir. Matthew Warchus)

Pride, about the coming together of a gay rights group who helped campaign for the miners’ strike during the 80s, could easily feel like a cynical attempt to plug the gap in the market left in the wake of films like Billy Elliott and Brassed Off.  Instead, Pride emerges as a nimble, empathic call-to-arms, an urge to look outside of our own struggles and see the struggles of others we previously thought a million miles away.  Although hardly devoid of euphoric moments, the film finds quiet strength in its margins, extending a generosity of spirit to all its characters whilst simultaneously allowing harder truths to pierce its winsomely sentimental streak.

6) Olive Kitteridge (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)

A sort of cheat, given that Olive Kitteridge aired on HBO as a four-part miniseries, but since it premiered as a whole at this year’s Venice Film Festival and because it still feels like a feature production, I’m including it here.  Adapted from Elizabeth Strout’s novel, it’s another in a long line of movies whose main purpose seems to be to hammer home the point that life is hard and then you die.  Embodied in Frances McDormand’s tough, but remarkably open performance, Olive Kitteridge is a difficult, ornery women, approaching old age with thinly-covered disdain.  Films of quiet, domestic disappointment might feel like they’re ten-a-penny, but this resolutely level-headed melodrama proves expansive in ways other, more formally daring fictions, aren’t able to come close to.  Finding moments of empathy hidden within its endless parade of cruelty and unfairness, what’s astonishing is how generous Cholodenko’s film feels during its final moments, wringing peace and curiosity from a woman long hardened by the shit life has thrown at her. 

7) Snowpiercer (dir. Bong Joon-ho)

A film headlined by Captain America, starring two Oscar winners and directed by the man who gave us cult revenge flick, Oldboy, it’s a mystery why Snowpiercer never scored a UK release.  Whilst not quite the masterpiece some have claimed, it’s still a meaty, propulsive dystopian fable that feels bound to find a second life on DVD.  Set during a second, man-made Ice Age, Chris Evans does his sensitive rugged thing as one of the destitute people living in the rear carriages of a train hurtling the remains of the human species around Earth.  Staging a coup to reach the front carriages managed by those in charge, Snowpiercer’s episodic narrative, with its characters leaping from one carriage to another, works in most part due to its canny production design and its idiosyncratic, deeply-felt performances from an international cast.  Not everything works, but no other action film this year felt quite as full-bodied.

8) Begin Again (dir. John Carney)

One of the most pleasant surprises of 2014, Begin Again looks so dreadful on paper that it’s a marvel that even fans of John Carney’s last film, Once, went to see it.  Keira Knightley gives perhaps her best performance yet as a struggling English singer/songwriter living in New York who’s picked up by Mark Ruffalo’s shambolic ex-record producer to put together an album on the streets of the big city.  Steering clear of romantic comedy territory, Begin Again certainly isn’t afraid to dip into a few clichés here and there, but that same heart-on-sleeve mentality means it also has ample rewards for anyone willing to check their cynicism at the door.

9) It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell)

A horror film for people who don’t enjoy horror films, It Follows employs a retro aesthetic (think The Virgin Suicides) to a hoary tale of sexually transmitted panic and fashions a perversely languid slasher worthy of all those nods to John Carpenter. When Jay has sex with a boy from out of town, she finds herself the latest in a string of hormonal teens to be haunted by a shape-changing spirit intent on her destruction, that is until she can pass it along to the next victim. The film itself is riddled with plot holes, but where it succeeds is in its extraordinary craft, and in director David Robert Mitchell’s understanding of the malleability of his characters’ sexuality, which means the film feels much less reactionary than its premise might suggest. Whilst recent horror films such as The Babadook and last year’s The Conjuring have worked wonders with impeccable craft and strong emotional through-lines, It Follows is an imperfect but more complex and difficult film to pin down than either.

10) The Babadook (dir. Jennifer Kent)

One of the most controlled movies of the year, The Babadook takes a relatively simple haunted house premise and wrings it for all it’s worth. A single mother who can barely stand her clingy, disobedient son is forced to face up to her bereavement after the loss of her husband when The Babadook, a children’s storybook monster, insinuates himself into their lives. Director Jennifer Kent knows how to set up a good scare, but she also recognises the importance of playing off her characters’ fractious emotional states, building to a keening, terrifying climax.

11) Mr. Turner (dir. Mike Leigh)

Rather than Turner’s life in the rise-and-fall parabola familiar to many biopics, Mike Leigh instead presents a series of vignettes gradually pulling their subject towards death.  That’s not to say there isn’t beauty, even joy in this striking and emotionally rich portrait.  On the contrary, it’s Leigh’s most generous film in some time, but it’s also one of ineffable melancholy and sadness.  This is less the story of a man whose genius wasn’t appreciated by his peers, and more one of a person gradually turning himself into an island, solemnly marching towards death.

12) Inside Llewyn Davis (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen)

Perhaps one of the Coen Brothers’ most overtly sad films, certainly one that feels unleavened by the arch humour that characterises a lot of their work.  The story of a man who starts the film a loser and ends it as one too might not have caught the imagination of everyone, but the Coens find more warmth than you might expect in such a loveable arsehole.  Although the film isn’t without a certain recognisable knowingness, this is in fact its weakest aspect (Carey Mulligan’s character is an unfortunate wash), or at least the gap between their protagonist and the characters surrounding him feels especially pronounced.  Unhappy without feeling glib, it’s a gorgeously-shot, affecting film that nevertheless could have benefited from being a little more ragged around the edges. 

13) 20 Feet From Stardom (dir. Morgan Neville)

Populist music docs feel like an easy bet when it comes to predicting awards line-ups (look at the plaudits afforded Searching For Sugarman), but sometimes a simply-made documentary with great characters and an interesting story can just hit you the right way.  The story of a handful of under-appreciated backing singers, who have lent their vocals to some of pop music’s most enduring hits, complete with Darlene Love’s triumphant comeback narrative is obvious, sure, but there’s something endearingly straight-up about the way these women tell their story.  Like Inside Llewyn Davis, it’s a story of people who have lived their lives just outside of the spotlight, for whom fame and fortune might once have been the dream but who have had to realign their dreams.  Less a tale of success than of adjusted expectations, it operates as both an eye-opener into the mechanics of the music industry and of the women sidelined because there can only be ‘one Aretha’.

14) Phoenix (dir. Christian Petzold)

A woman set free from a concentration camp after the War is reunited with her husband, only to find that he doesn’t recognise her due to extensive reconstructive surgery on her face.  Petzold’s spin on Vertigo uses a fanciful premise to dig at more troubling truths about Germany’s post-Holocaust identity.  We never find out exactly what happened to Nelly, although Petzold litters his film with ellipses.  Did her husband turn her in?  How much of Nelly’s stories are based in fact?  Their sixth collaboration, Petzold puts a huge amount of faith in Hoss’ exemplary, difficult performance, one that perfectly marries the screenplay’s intellectual inquiries to its characters’ emotional lives.

15) We Are The Best! (dir. Lukas Moodyson)

You’d have to be pretty heartless not to fall for this joyous, 80s-set romp in which a group of thirteen-year-old girls decide to form their own punk band.  Following the likes of previous of Lilya 4-ever and A Hole In My Heart, this comes as a particularly welcome jolt in the arm from Moodysson.  Concise, never letting the pace slip, it’s a riot of a movie that never drops the ball, either in the more confident Bobo and Klara’s adoption of shy, Christina Hedvig into their inner sanctum, or a boy-related mishap during the film’s final act.  It’s the kind of film that leaves you with a big dumb smile on your face throughout.

16) A Touch Of Sin (dir. Jia Zangkhe)

What Jia Zhangke’s film lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in its gleeful, maybe even wilfully disrespectful mash-up of genre elements that it layers over its four stories, loosely adapted from real life.  A man recognising the inequality of power in the work force seeks bloody retribution on his employers, a seemingly meek sauna receptionist turns out to be anything but, a young man falls in love with a woman working in a hostess club.  Take any one part and it’s sort of a nonsense, but as a whole it’s confrontational in a way that’s hard to put down.  Not necessarily a great film, but an angry and singular one whose dafter flights of fancy stick in your head longer than you might think at the time. 

17) Edge of Tomorrow (dir. Doug Liman)

Comfortably Liman’s best film since Go, Edge of Tomorrow is better than it had any right to be given its deliberately repetitive structure and better than anyone expected given Liman’s record.  Cruise is better than he’s been in ages as the soldier forced to relive the same day over and over in order to defeat the aliens intent on destroying earth.  Yes, yes, it’s hokey and played-out bullshit, but its snappy direction and a fantastic performance from Emily Blunt as the ‘full metal bitch’ at Cruise’s side make for blockbuster cinema’s sleekest 2014 offering in a climate that feels increasingly over-saturated by franchises.

18) Gone Girl (dir. David Fincher)

A smart, if not entirely successful adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s thoughtful potboiler.  Moving the twist up proves a smart decision, as Rosamund Pike’s performance doesn’t have much to show beyond ‘performative’ in those early scenes, but once her true stripes are revealed, Flynn and Fincher’s amalgam of media satire and dark marital comedy clicks into place.  Smart performances on the fringes (especially Kim Dickens and Carrie Coon) inform a blockbuster that might go down a little too smoothly, but was one of the most memorable hits of the year.

19) Obvious Child (dir. Gillian Robespierre)

Robespierre’s shaggy comedy about a stand-up comedian who decides to have an abortion following a one-night stand didn’t quite come together in every area for me, but damn if it didn’t gift us with one of the year’s finest comedic performances.  Clearly treading a thin line, but never feeling like it’s doing so, it’s comedy that knows when to be sad, bolstered by believable, fully-realised supporting performances from Poll Draper as Slate’s mother and Gaby Hoffmann (having quite the year herself) as the supporting best friend.  Slate’s last stand-up towards the end of the film is pretty close to perfect, even if I wasn’t entirely sold on some of the meet-cute stuff with the one-night stand, but it feels churlish to dwell on the negatives with such a sure-footed, funny debut.

20) Captain America: The Winter Solider (dirs. Anthony and Joe Russo)

As someone who constantly complains about the surfeit of comic-book movies clogging up screens throughout the year but who goes to see each and every one in the hope that this might be the one to replicate the joys of Spider-Man or X2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a pleasant surprise indeed.  Earnestly anachronistic, Captain America is handily removed from the rest of Marvel’s stable’s snarky quips and comebacks, and the Russo brothers go one further in handing him Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow as his partner in a battle against Sebastian Stan’s resuscitated best friend.  The beats are all fairly familiar, of course, but Cap’s earnestness and easy-going camaraderie transfer to the film itself, with action scenes that are noticeably easy to follow and a screenplay that feels stuffed but not necessarily overloaded.  There are plenty of complaints to be levelled at the Marvel franchise, but here the Russos find a way to colour inside the lines without making their film feel too sterile.  This is where the sequels to all those other superhero films should be looking for inspiration.

Best Actor:

1) Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave

Providing solid, nimble work in films as diverse as Dirty Pretty Things and Kinky Boots, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s magnificent, expertly-judged performance in 12 Years A Slave can’t exactly be labelled a surprise, but his ability to shoulder the weight of what he’s given should not be underestimated.  Other actors in the ensemble get showier work, but the film is from Solomon’s perspective, and it’s Ejiofor who carries the story’s emotional heft in ways that smartly but never showily eschew cliché; Solomon might suffer largely in silence, but it would be hard to say Ejiofor’s performance is one of ‘quiet dignity’, or even, really, of repressed anger, open emotionality or anything else that simple.  It’s a performance as meticulously rendered as the film around it.

2) Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street

There’s a lot to dislike about Scorsese’s arguably celebratory, definitely tedious, portrayal of New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort.  DiCaprio’s performance is not one of those things.  Not only does he hold up a repetitively plotted script, but this is the best use of his star charisma since Catch Me If You Can.  By tunnelling deep into Jordan’s joyous nihilism, DiCaprio is looser here than he’s been in ages, giving the sort of livewire performance you might expect from the heir apparent to DeNiro as Scorsese’s muse.  To elevate a film so needlessly blinkered about the very world it’s set in, it’s the clearest sense of a nastier, more insightful film than the jaggy romp we’re given.

3) Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis:

Anchoring the best Coen brothers film in years, Oscar Isaac’s breakthrough role as a down-on-his-luck Dylan-adjacent musician is a performance of ragged edges: hounded, selfish, sympathetic in unexpected ways.  The story, of someone hugely talented who doesn’t achieve success, requires a lightness of touch to counterbalance the tug of melancholy that underlies the film.  Isaac is aided by a supporting cast that’s more grounded than you might expect from a Coen brothers films, allowing a mordant humour to seep into the cracks of his self-confidence.  The fact that his journey is circular shouldn’t mean that his performance and the character he creates is this touching.

4) Ben Whishaw in Lilting

Lilting is a film small in scale, but generous to a fault with its two central characters.  Unfortunately, the film itself gets caught up in co-lead Chang Pei-pei’s romantic life, because it’s pretty fascinating when it explores the ways in which Ben Whishaw’s character navigates his own grief following the death of his partner.  It feels like an atypical performance from him, tapping into the fragility that made his Keats so swoony romantic in Bright Star, but allowing for the film’s strong queer sensibility to run through his character’s anxious pride.  In a year when gay characters have felt more and more co-opted by straight prestige filmmaking, it’s a moving and specific performance.

5) Chadwick Boseman in Get On Up

Praising a performance in a biopic typically comes with a caveat concerning the hackneyed material they’re transcending, and that’s no different in the case of Tate Taylor’s workmanlike but entertaining film about the life of James Brown, with its flashbacks to an impoverished childhood and its ticking-the-boxes approach to the civil rights movement playing out largely in the background.  Boseman’s performance manages to faithfully recreate Brown’s signature moves and vocals, but more importantly he exudes an electric, dangerous charisma that makes us understand why the people Brown hurts the most stick with him, along with the grief and emotional impoverishment that fuel his show on-stage.  This is real star-is-born stuff.  Hardly any wonder that Marvel signed him up to headline Black Panther in 2017. 

  Best Actress:

1) Scarlett Johansson in Under The Skin

It’s been a banner couple of years for Scarlett Johansson.  After winning a Tony for her performance in A View From The Bridge, she’s felt nothing less than invigorated in projects as diverse as Don Jon, Her and Captain America: Winter Solider.  Under The Skin, however, is the film that uses her most interestingly, and Johansson responds to Glazer’s trust with an inquisitive, dangerous, finally vulnerable performance as an unnamed alien roaming the streets of Glasgow.  Her character has a clear arc, transforming from seductive predator to haunted prey, but Johansson finds subtleties of performance that keep upending your expectations.  In a film not prone to handing out easy answers, her ability to draw you into her character’s reluctant journey towards annihilation keeps Under The Skin from feeling removed, even as you’re admiring Glazer’s impeccable craft.

2) Nina Hoss in Phoenix

Now on her sixth collaboration with Christian Petzold, Nina Hoss mines a small but increasingly effective line of inquiry into the film’s post-Holocaust concerns with a character that, on paper, feels unbelievable.  The war over, her character, Nelly, is disfigured following her time in a concentration camp and must find her way in world that feels hostile no matter what path she chooses.  Reuniting with her husband, who doesn’t recognise her, they enter into a pact to have her impersonate the woman he believes to be dead in order to claim her sizeable family inheritance.  Phoenix is a high-wire act, constantly wrong-footing the audience as to what both Nelly and her husband believe, but Hoss is remarkably effective in conveying a woman unable to move on from her past, piecing together a new identity for herself from the scraps of smouldering love and hard new betrayals.

3) Julianne Moore in Map To The Stars

David Cronenberg’s loosest and funniest film in some time might fall flat in some key areas, but Julianne Moore adds another instant classic to her character gallery with professional narcissist Havana Segrand, an aging actress overshadowed by her deceased, adored mother.  It’s been some time since Moore has worked in quite so overtly comedic a register, but she’s a natural fit to Cronenberg’s peevishly perverse vision of Hollywood.  All petulance and flouting, she’s a constant waterworks of elation and depression with no in-between.

4) Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night

Cotillard’s lack of luck with Oscar following her win for La Vie En Rose continues to be an embarrassment with each stunning performance she piles on top of one another.  In Two Days, One Night, she’s battling against the Dardenne brothers schematic screenplay as a woman struggling with depression trying to keep her job.  The repetitive structure of the film works against her, but Cotillard continues to find new folds in a woman who consistently shows herself to be more than the sum total of what her beleaguered co-workers think of her.

5) Angeli Bayani in Ilo Ilo

Steadily working in Filipino film for a number of years, Angeli Bayani appeared as two women fighting against the odds this year, first in Ilo Ilo’s humanist depiction of a family hit by financial crisis and then in Lav Diaz’s four-hour epic, Norte, The End of History.  Here, as a maid employed to take care of an unruly child, she’s tough without ever allowing it to overcome her character’s empathy, her tough love response to her charge reflecting, or even covering for, the loss of her biological child that she’s left back home.  It’s unshowy almost to an extreme, but it’s a performance whose quiet persuasiveness sticks with you, particularly for its tender, but unsentimental ending.

Best Supporting Actor:

1) Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyer Club came under a lot of fire for depicting the AIDS crisis through a straight, white male prism, but (and this in spite of what I will charitably label a lack of generosity towards the trans community on the actor’s behalf) Jared Leto’s portrayal of trans woman Rayon is still effective, difficult, particular.  His character arc is foretold from that first moment of unexpected kindness towards McConaughey’s Ron Woodroof, but Leto overcomes the film’s overly simplistic plotting, a thin layer of desperation gradually scraped out from underneath the resigned sadness when he’s reunited with his father, or his bristly early encounters with Ron.

2) Andrew Scott in Pride

One of the largest and most well-utilised ensembles of the year (seriously, think how many characters get moments to shine here), Andrew Scott stands out as the quiet other half to Dominic West’s flamboyant bookshop owner.  Not only is the way in which the film inserts into the background of scenes, allowing him to gradually insinuate himself into the main narrative very clever, but Scott also makes small scenes matter.  Returning to his homeland, reuniting with his mother, getting gay-bashed would be bigger, splashier scenes in another film; Scott manages to depict immense, complex pain in miniature whilst still adding to the stories of the ensemble surrounding him.

3) Michael Fassbender for 12 Years A Slave

It’s easy to play a monster, and there’s no doubt that Fassbender’s plantation owner Epps is the worst possible kind.  Part of what makes McQueen’s film is effective is its interest in the many facets of rage its characters feel, up to and including the film’s most vicious creation.  Fassbender’s performance is one that feels almost blinkered from every other character bar Patsy, his vision only focusing on Solomon when he’s standing in his way.  He’s terrifying, but in ways that upend our understanding of what that word means.

4) Nelsan Ellis in Get On Up

As with a great many other biopics, the women in James Brown’s life in Get On Up are ultimately unimportant.  However, whilst Jez and John-Henry Butterworth’s screenplay  gains some mileage from the father/son dynamic between Brown and his manager, it’s most interested in his relationship with friend-turned-bandmember, Bobby Byrd.  Ellis has long-served as one of Alan Ball’s more entertaining characters on the creative black hole that is True Blood, but here he’s quieter, his ebullience and talent gradually subsumed by the man by his side.  It’s the film’s single most interesting aspect, and Ellis’ watchful performance, informed and responsive to Boseman’s star turn, is, in many ways, its highlight.

5) Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake

I wasn’t as sold on Stranger By The Lake as some people, a cool queer noir that could have used some more daring formally.  Patrick d’Assumçao, as a middle-age man who regularly attends a cruising ground but can’t bring himself to join in, brings a welcome note of reality to director Alain Guiraudie’s chilly approach to human sexuality.  Mournful without tipping into melodrama, he offers respite to protagonist Franck as he pursues a man he’s attracted to but suspects of murder.  The film itself never quite gives into its own lurid premise, but d’Assumçao lends it a resignation and world-weariness that nicely balances out Franck’s puppydog enthusiasm.

Best Supporting Actress:

1) Uma Thurman in Nymphomaniac Part 1

So little screentime, but who’d have guessed that Uma Thurman would be the main takeaway from Lars von Trier’s surprisingly spry epic?  Playing a spurned wife who takes her children to meet Daddy’s new mistress, she’s amusingly throwing herself into the curve of her own hysteria whilst simultaneously being aware of how close to the brink she really is.  It’s difficult to find humour in this type of role without making it at the character’s expense, and Thurman benefits from bringing the only moment of real pain into Nymphomaniac’s first part, and the energy she brings to the part (this is the best she’s been since Kill Bill) proves much harder to shake off than a film that’s both flimsier and more entertaining than you might expect.

2) Alfre Woodard in 12 Years A Slave

Another slim-on-paper role that is packed with such substance that it becomes one of its film’s defining moments.  Harriet Shaw may not have felt her master’s whip in years, but her elevated status relative to the other slaves has given her a clear-sightedness about the wider crime that feels embedded in her character in a way that Brad Pitt’s white saviour doesn’t.  Careful to skate close enough to her rage, she’s the only hand held out to Patsy that understands her impossible condition, suggesting ways in which she might both survive and repress what is being committed against her. 

3) Amy Adams in Her

Her lost a lot for me on a second viewing, but Amy Adams’ performance as Theodore’s lonely best friend still stood out.  Whilst the film is more interested in Theodore’s dependence on a romantic partner, Adams’ character (also called Amy) explores themes of companionship and friendship without a sexual component.  One of the film’s smarter decisions is to never allow for any spark of attraction between Theodore and Amy, but Adams differentiates in fascinating ways her giving, supportive friendship with Theodore and the possibility of something more uninhibited with her own (female) OS.  Non-destructive friendships are so rarely depicted onscreen, and Adams does such a fine job of painting her own struggles against the background of Joaquin Phoenix’s more expressive performance, that it makes you wish to see Jonze’s film from a whole other perspective.

4) Melanie Lynskey in Happy Christmas

This Anna Kendrick film snuck onto Instant Video earlier this year, and although its series of improvisations can make it feel slight at times, Joe Swanberg’s uniformly excellent cast scratch at some hard truths underneath the surface of its tired premise, which has Anna Kendrick’s aimless twentysomething land at her older brother’s home over Christmas.  Lynskey, who’s built a wonderful resume of powerful supporting roles after that electric breakout in Heavenly Creatures, is on especially astute form as Kendrick’s sister-in-law.  A writer who is inquisitively mournful of the ways in which her creativity has been subsumed by motherhood, she’s sad without ever really feeling sorry for herself, her relationship with Kendrick built up slowly, surely and persuasively until it becomes the very backbone of the film.

5) Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

It’s hard to deny what Patricia Arquette accomplishes so beautifully in Boyhood.  Working largely alongside professional actors, her hardscrabble maternal love rubs up in interesting ways against the open vulnerability she exhibits towards the men in her life.  In many ways she’s the movie’s heart, albeit one that’s hard to pin down, her unfussy love for her two children tethering them to a more complex reality than the film is interested in elsewhere.

Best Original Screenplay:

1) Boyhood

2) Inside Llewyn Davis

3) Obvious Child

4) The Babadook

5) Pride

Best Adapted Screenplay:

1) 12 Years A Slave

2) Under The Skin

3) Olive Kitteridge

4) Gone Gir

5) Ernest & Celestine

Best Cinematography:

1) Dick Pope for Mr. Turner

2) Philippe Le Sourd for The Grandmaster

3) Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski for Ida

4) Mike Gioulakis for It Follows

5) Bruno Delbonnel for Inside Llewyn Davis

Best Score:

1) Rich Vreeland for It Follows

2) Alexandre Desplat for Godzilla

3) Tindersticks for Bastards

4) Steve Moore for The Guest

5) Alexandre Desplat for The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Production Design:

1) The Grand Budapest Hotel

2) Her

3) 12 Years A Slave

4) Snowpiercer

5) It Follows

Best Costume Design:

1) 12 Years A Slave

2) We Are The Best!

3) The Grandmaster

4) Olive Kitteridge

5) The Boxtrolls

Best Visual Effects:

1) Dawn Of The Planet of the Apes

2) Under The Skin

3) The Grandmaster

4) Godzilla

5) Interstellar

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"Welcome to Binding Christian Arbitration"

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Looking, Season 1, Episode 8: Looking Glass

When Looking debuted earlier this year it was freighted with expectation.  Not only was it the most high-profile show about gay men since Queer As Folk, but it was airing after another buzzy youth-oriented show, Girls.  What we got was, thankfully, its own thing entirely, but that’s not say that Looking hasn’t had to navigate any number of criticisms, ranging from vague cries of poor representation to more specific arguments against its characterisation, pacing and ‘unlikeable’ characters.

  This week’s finale ended things on fine form, making a virtue of the writing’s occasional woolly-headedness.  Patrick remains the show’s strongest element, which has tended to pull focus from both Augustín and Dom in the past (it’s no coincidence that the show’s best episode eschews those two entirely), but here everything cohered and fed into his central dilemma.  Patrick’s fear of commitment is well established at this point, although the writing has been careful not to put too fine a point on it.  Instead, we’ve explored the character’s inherent distrust of intimacy, his pre-conceived notions about what his family thinks of his ‘lifestyle,’ and, here, his inability to say no, or to communicate with Richie on the same level that his boyfriend communicates with him.  That eventual hook-up might have been preordained by Kevin’s repeated presence on the show and by the fact that this was, after all, the season finale, but Patrick’s silence in response to Richie’s confession was telling.  It’s unusual for a scene like that to emotionally pivot on what someone is unable to express, perhaps even to feel at this point in time, but that inability to move forward or to grow spoke to the show’s wider fascination about what commitment, intimacy and friendship mean for its characters.

  Even Augustín, a figure of ire to so many viewers, felt well-used this week.  Whilst it’s hard to give two shits about his break-up with Frank – and that put-down about Augustín never amounting to much trod the same rote path Looking continues to pursue with this character – his easy, platonic intimacy with Patrick informed the episode’s curiosity about what it means to be known by someone.  This filtered through almost perfectly in Dom’s storyline, as he opens his pop-up chicken shop in a constant state of fear that Lynn won’t turn up.  Casting Dom as a self-consciously aging stud hasn’t really worked out for the show – it’s too lo-fi to contain the sort of supernatural sex magnet characters you might see on Sex & The City or The Good Wife – he’s much more compelling when we get to see the insecurities behind all those jokey little comments about turning forty, or setting out on his own.  To that end, Lauren Weedman has been a godsend to the show, fitting seamlessly into its world as an older, slightly more hardened presence than its three central characters.  That assertive ‘He’s worth it’ to Lynn might have been the highlight of the episode, again showcasing the intimacy these people feel for one another underneath all that bravado and nervous humour.

  There are plenty of smart ideas being teased out on Looking each week, and its frank, explorative interpretation of gay sexual relationships is unlike anything else on television right now.  So why is Looking still coming under such fire?  As concerns about representation have faded into the background, new complaints are being lobbied about ‘unlikeable’ Augustín and ‘boring’ Dom.  If the finale managed to fold them into Patrick’s narrative, other episodes have been merely paying lip service to the show’s ostensible co-leads.  I’ve no problem with Augustín being an asshole, but being an asshole in the exact same way week-to-week can get tiresome if the writing lacks the sharpness of, say, Girls’ treatment of Marnie.  But, then, aren’t these the same sorts of quibbles viewers are having with Girls, True Detective, The Good Wife, and numerous other shows with perceived problem characters.  That a show like Looking, the only US cable drama focused exclusively on gay men, has, in eight episodes, moved past those early articles worried if this would be an ‘accurate’ portrayal of gay life (ridiculous, really, considering what a small, privileged focus group Looking is pulling from) and fans can simply pull apart its writing, characters and structure should be considered a minor victory in itself.

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Films of 2013

Best Film:

1)      Norte, The End of History

Screened at this year’s London Film Festival, a four hour-plus Filipino drama that plays out like a Russian novel is a hard sell.  Perhaps because of the circumstances in which I saw it, this felt like a real discovery, since I’m unfamiliar with Laz Diaz’s other work.  Norte’s Dostoevskian antihero is Fabian, an intellectual sick of the corruption he sees running through his country.  Killing a selfish moneylender and her daughter, he flees for Manila whilst another man, Joaquin, is wrongly imprisoned for murder.  Diaz’s intricate film splits in three directions, as Fabian follows through his intellectualism to horrifying ends, Joaquin builds a life for himself from within the prison system, and his wife, Eliza, struggles to make ends meet.  Playing out like an intricate miniseries, Norte is fascinating and involving enough that the running time hardly seems to matter, even as the film enters more obtuse territory in its final act.  It’s been afforded a release in the UK next year, and even though I can see myself watching this comfortably at home over a few viewings in the same way I would any miniseries of a similar length, there are also some stunningly cinematic segments – most notable a tracking shot of a sunrise as Eliza begins her day selling fruit and vegetables to local villagers – that demand to be seen on the big screen.

2) Before Midnight

No film this year came as heavily freighted with anxious anticipation as this; nine years after Before Sunrise left Jesse and Celine tentatively reuniting, Before Midnight sees them married with kids.  It’s a thornier, more difficult film than the previous two, its happy ending hard-won for two people who have learnt how to hurt one another with a precision that keeps you on the edge of your seat.  There was no other film whose outcome I was so invested in this year.

3) Zero Dark Thirty

Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker is an even more impressive piece of work, detailing the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Criticised of being both pro- and anti-torture, Bigelow, along with her co-writer Mark Boal, created an even-handed, compelling fictionalisation of what is arguably one of the most significant events of the twenty-first century.  Pieced together with great care, bolstered by an ensemble that made you feel the weight of the campaign on those embroiled in it, the devil is in the details, and this was one of the finest examples of filmmaking in 2013.

4) Frances Ha

I’ve always liked Noah Baumbach, even if I’ve had difficult connecting to his films at times.  Teaming up with Greta Gerwig as a co-writer on Frances Ha has produced a film that’s deceptively featherweight, stripped of the snark that categorised his earlier work.  It’s one of the great films about being lost in your twenties, and speaking as someone who’s just left their twenties behind and is every bit as clueless as Gerwig’s Frances, it felt like a big warm hug of a movie when I needed it most.

5) No

Perhaps the most enjoyable films of the year, despite its subject matter, as we follow Gael Garcia Bernal’s ad man work to convince the people of Chile to vote against keeping Pinochet in power.  Shot on low quality film, No is a wonderfully cynical piece of work, as one man is brought to political awareness by what’s going on around him.  The thin sliver of threat that runs throughout Pablo Larrain’s remarkable film is constantly threatening to crack open, ensuring that the eventual catharsis that comes with the eventual success of the ‘No’ campaign carries an unprecedented emotional weight that belies the lightness of touch elsewhere.

6)      Our Children

Perhaps the most clear-sighted examination of post-natal depression I’ve ever seen, Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children examines the collapse of one woman, Murielle, as she’s trapped by both the expectations of motherhood and the two very different men in her life.  It’s a prison built in such exacting detail, that Murielle’s decision – foreshadowed by its troubling prologue – to kill her own children feels sickeningly inevitable.  Nothing built dread more carefully and with greater exactitude this year than Lafosse, basing his story on a real-life case and helped enormously by Emilie Dequenne’s tremendous performance at its centre.

7)      Tom At The Farm

Like Noah Baumbach, Xavier Dolan is another director that I’ve had a lot of time for without ever quite loving any of his films.  This, his fourth film and at only twenty-four, is easily his most accomplished yet.  A hugely confident thriller of sexual identity and loss, melding Hitchcock to Highsmith, Dolan casts himself as the titular Tom, arriving in rural Canada for the funeral of his dead partner only to discover a more dangerous and ambiguous relationship of sorts with the older brother.  Keeping his lead character on a constant knife’s edge, Tom at the Farm displays the usual visual splendour of Dolan’s previous films with none of the excess baggage. 

8)      To The Wonder

From a director I’ve struggled with in the past, to one that I have - and perhaps always will - love unequivocally.  Terrence Malick’s follow-up to Tree of Life is much more than cast-offs from his previous feature, as has been suggested.  The minute played out on an epic scale is always open to ridicule, and Malick comes close to self-parody here, but his examination of a marriage falling apart, as the artifice of first love falls away, leaving Ben Affleck’s environmental inspector searching for meaning in a previous romance, and as Olga Kurlyenko’s Marina uncovers her own sense of self in a foreign land is endlessly fascinating.  Trying to get a handle on To The Wonder only causes it to slip away, but its story of the impossibility of holding onto first love, and of people frustrating those early feelings of love as they reveal themselves to be something more complex, wowed me when I saw it this Spring.

9)      Like Father, Like Son

I’ve never exactly been averse to sentiment, and Kore-eda’s recent shift towards that territory has only softened me further.  In Like Father, Like Son, he takes hackneyed subject matter – two children switched at birth – and invests it with great emotional depth by looking at it almost squarely from the perspective of one of the father’s.  The lack of connect between the happier, working class family, and the more rigid upper-middle class family is obvious, but the more well-to-do father’s journey not only towards accepting his son, but in understanding his own fundamental character flaws are stunningly well-observed, and left me pretty much a wreck by the end of the film.

10)   The Impossible

There are objectively better films lower down on this list, but few had quite the wallop of Juan Antonio Bayona’s unlikely follow-up to his 2007 horror, The Orphanage.  Of course, a more wide-ranging film about the Thai people displaced by the tsunami of 2004 would have been preferable, but it would also have been a different film.  What The Impossible lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in blunt emotional trauma.  From the magnificently staged tsunami sequence itself, through to its manipulative yanking at audience’s worst fears, there’s something brutally, but undeniably effective about the whole endeavour that’s held up for me through four viewings (more than any other film this year), and that has to stand for something. 

11)   Eastern Boys

This was one I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, an astute romantic drama about France’s relationship to its immigrant population.  When a successful businessman picks up a teenage hustler, he has no idea that he’s inviting a group of Eastern European thugs over to his flat to rob him blind.  The relationship that develops between the older Daniel and the more insular, troubled Marek is fascinating and complicated in ways not dissimilar to writer/director Robin Campillo’s screenplay for The Class a few years back.

12)   The Act Of Killing

It’s difficult to know how to approach Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, which asks the perpetrators of the mass killings in Indonesia during the sixties to re-enact their actions using Hollywood movie tropes.  Hugely uncomfortable and morally questionable, it’s also a fascinating and important insight into events that, even by film’s end, prove impossible to comprehend.

13)   The Selfish Giant

Clio Barnard’s hardened but still touching homage to the Oscar Wilde story is one of the finest examples of British talent in some time.  Inspired by the kitchen sink dramas of Mike Leigh, Barnard’s film gives us two boys let down by both the education system and by their own families, collecting scrap metal for Sean Gilder’s tough nut, Kitten.  You can sort of see where this is headed, but there’s a tenderness to Barnard’s treatment of her two leads (both tremendous) that resonates even more than her patiently detailed background of urban poverty.

14)   Mud

Describing any film as ‘solid’ sounds like a back-handed compliment, but Jeff Nichols’ coming-of-age story is exactly that.  It’s a film not short of symbolism, as two scrappy youngsters uncover the hiding place of Matthew McConaughey’s escaped con, who just wants to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart, Juniper.  Nichols’ world is almost oppressively masculine, but it’s also an incredibly well-realised story of broken dreams, of leaving childhood behind and the encroachment of a new world order.

15)   Lore

There are innumerable ways in which German-set World War II narratives can go wrong, most having to do with the subject matter being so overfamiliar.  Aussie director Cate Shortland’s adaptation of the Booker-shortlisted novel, The Dark Room, is an intuitive, sensory exploration of a teenage girl’s journey towards acceptance and enlightenment in the wake of Allied Troops entering Germany.

16)   Blue Jasmine

Every new Woody Allen film that’s half decent gets labelled as a return to form; Blue Jasmine really is.  As sharply scripted as anything he’s written, it mixes pathos and laughs almost perfectly, bolstered by Blanchett’s commanding central turn as the Blance DuBois-inspired antihero.

17)   From Up On Poppy Hill

This Studio Ghibli effort from Gorō Miyazaki took me by complete surprise.  Its teenage romance and complete lack of magic is reminiscent of Only Yesterday, and there is indeed a similarity in the ways in which both film spin gold from more realistic adolescent concerns.  This, a story of love between a couple of teenagers who discover they may be related is improbably touching and, if Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement is indeed imminent, proof that his studio is in more than capable hands.

18)   The Bling Ring

As far as I’m concerned, Sofia Coppola is five for five with this, her humorous but slyly empathic take on the Hollywood Hills burglaries.  The last film to be shot by the great Harris Savides, it looks gorgeous, and the mix of Coppola’s broader comic sensibilities with her warm, tentative take on adolescence are the perfect match for the material.  And despite its feather light romp through the homes of the rich and famous, it’s specific, probing and exciting.

19)   The Spectacular Now

James Ponsoldt follows up to Smashed with another tale of alcoholism, only this time broadening his canvas to show the implications his lead character’s disease has on the people around him.  He’s also created one of the finest teen romances of the decade.  It wears its heart on its sleeve, just like its characters, and it’s all the better for that.

20)   After Lucia

  The comparisons to Haneke are obvious with this Mexican film that quietly slipped out on DVD earlier this year, not afforded a cinematic release in the UK.  It’s a staunch examination of bullying and its implications after a girl is filmed having sex on someone’s smartphone.  Whilst what happens next will turn your stomach, director Michel Franco’s refusal to look away, and his insistence on following events through to their logical conclusion casts a shadow on his bravely shepherded audience sympathies.  Astonishing.

Best Director:

  1)      Lav Diaz for Norte, The End of History

2)      Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty

3)      Xavier Dolan for Tom At The Farm

4)      Alexandre Moors for Blue Caprice

5)      Cate Shortland for Lore

  Best Actor:

  1)      Masaharu Fukuyama in Like Father, Like Son

As the uptight father of a child he’s perpetually disappointed in, Masaharu Fukuyama’s gradual realisation that he might have lost the most important person in his life through his own short-sightedness proves a valuable backbone to a film that might have seemed woolly otherwise.  It’s a performance utterly in tune with Kore-eda’s vision, and there’s a moment with a digital camera late in the film that is overwhelming.

2)      Gael Garcia Bernal in No

After a few years stuck in the wilderness (A Little Bit of Heaven and Letters to Juliet anyone?), Gael Garcia’s comeback last year with The Loneliest Planet is superseded only by one of the year’s most charismatic star performances in No.

3)      John Hawkes in The Sessions

One of Hollywood’s most valuable character actors was given a lead role in what sounds on paper like Oscar-bait, as a paraplegic embarking on sex therapy.  The film was surprisingly subtle, leant emotional candour by John Hawkes’ unexpected performance.

4)      Ethan Hawke in Before Midnight

The Before Sunrise trilogy has produced Ethan Hawkes’ best work, but neither of the first two films required him to reach quite as deeply as Before Midnight.  His easy charm sliding into self-satisfaction, his insecurities a little better hidden this time around, Jesse is one the year’s most fully-realised characters.

5)      Israel Broussard in The Bling Ring

Just one of a number of great performances from younger actors this year, Israel Broussard plays what is probably the most progressive gay character of the year as the only male member of Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring.  Incredibly assured, his performance offered the most significant window of understanding on the various critiques of capitalism that populated 2013.

Honourable Mentions: Bruce Dern in Nebraska, Tye Sheridan in Mud, Jack Reynor in What Richard Did, Isaiah Washington in Blue Caprice and Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips.

  Best Actress:

  1)      Emilie Dequenne in Our Children

Unusually committed, Emilie Dequenne’s portrayal of post-natal depression, resulting in the murder of her five children is perhaps 2013’s most painful performance.  It’s not just that Dequenne earns your sympathy, it’s that you feel as if you’re entering a black hole with her.  If I were to pick one acting moment of the year, it would undoubtedly be her rendition of French ballad, ‘Femmes Je Vous Aime,’ one long howl into the abyss.

2)      Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine

There’s a reason why Cate Blanchett has been the de facto frontrunner for the Best Actress Oscar since Summer.  Giving the best performance in a Woody Allen film since ScarJo in Match Point, she’s tasked with holding together his finest film since Husbands and Wives.  Funny, tragic, dynamic, it’s a showstopper.

3)      Julie Delpy in Before Midnight

There are places Julie Delpy goes as Celine in Before Sunrise that actually made me gasp out loud in the cinema.  Not that I’m adverse to public overreaction, but few other actors are prepared to lay themselves out as barely as Delpy does here, every raw nerve on display.

4)      Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

One of the most reliable young actors in Hollywood, Greta Gerwig had to write her own script to find a film worthy of her considerable talent.  As a twenty-something drifter, she brings her own ineffable likeability to a role that could easily be insufferable.  Instead, we’re sat waiting for everyone else to see the value in Frances’ amiable aimlessness, a performance that’s pretty much a joy from first frame to last.

5)      Paulina Garcia in Gloria

On screen for every frame of Gloria, Paulina Garcia’s sensual, intelligent performance as a middle-aged woman wondering about the next stage of her life is one of the finest character studies of the year.  The final scene, in which she sings along to the Umberto Tozzi classic might be obvious, but it was still hugely satisfying, a bittersweet moment to end an all-too-rare study of what life has to offer for those in search of their own third act.

Honourable Mentions: Shaileen Woodley in The Spectacular Now, Saskia Rosendahl in Lore, Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue Is The Warmest Colour, Amy Acker in Much Ado About Nothing and Kirsten Dunst in Bachelorette

  Best Supporting Actor:

  1)      Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained

Samuel L. Jackson’s eye-popping satire of Uncle Tom figures, he’s easily the most compelling part of Tarantino’s difficult mixture of slave narrative and spaghetti western.  It’s a much smarter performance than, say, Leonardo DiCaprio or Christoph Waltz are giving, at least for my money, even if it’s not as straightforwardly entertaining.

2)      Ewan McGregor in The Impossible

This is easily the best Ewan McGregor has been since Moulin Rouge!, as an aggrieved father and husband separated from his wife and eldest son.  His phone call home was an Oscar reel clip that never transpired, but that doesn’t negate what McGregor does here.  The performance has to justify some fairly stupid actions on his character’s behalf, and he, like Naomi Watts and Thomas Holland, keeps the audience right with him throughout.

3)      Barkhad Abdi in Captain Phillips

That Bakrhad Abdi is an unprofessional actor is astonishing in itself, but that he’s so memorable in the film and manages to draw attention from a bone fide movie star giving what many consider to be the performance of his career is something else.  At least part of this is down to Billy Ray’s incisive script, but Abdi ensures that the audience is aware of a whole other story happening in the margins, a story of how this man was pushed into piracy in the first place.  His words, ‘Maybe in America,’ were one of the most resonant this year.

4)      James Franco in Spring Breakers

James Franco is an actor that infuriates me a lot more than he piques my interest, but his faintly ludicrous, utterly plausible villain Alien was easily one of the most memorable characters of American cinema in 2013.  From ‘Look at ma shit’ to his creepily wistful  rendition of ‘Everytime,’ Franco was totally on point.

5)      Daniil Vorobyev in Eastern Boys

Another larger than life villain this year was Boss in Eastern Boys, an example of no-bars-hold charisma threatening to overwhelm the movie around him.  Boss’ appearances are brief, but they’re certainly memorable, thanks to Vorobyov’s sly, testosterone-fuelled presence.  He’s also smart about drawing a line between his livewire antics with his group of young immigrants, and a more precarious and dangerous aggression hidden underneath that. 

Honourable Mentions: Bradley Cooper in The Place Beyond The Pines, Pierre-Yves Cardinal in Tom At The Farm, Matthew McConaughey in Mud, Kyle Chandler in The Spectacular Now, Ben Foster in Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

  Best Supporting Actress:

  1)      Lea Seydoux in Blue is The Warmest Colour

Even though I was never quite on board with Blue Is the Warmest Colour, it would be hard to deny the power of those two lead performances.  Lea Seydoux has a difficult job in selling a relationship that we understand completely from one point of view, but which begins to feel a bit mystifying from the older Emma’s perspective.  Seydoux, as ever, isn’t especially interested in making the audience like her, instead opting for a very specific brand of selfishness that nevertheless weds her to Adèle and provides a valuable counterbalance to her co-star’s wide-eyed innocence.

2)      Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy

Those that didn’t catch onto the heady gumbo Lee Daniels served us with his delirious Paperboy were especially unfortunate in not seeing the most fun Nicole Kidman has had onscreen in years.  As the sexually voracious pen-pal/girlfriend of a convicted killer, she’s required to orgasm without touching herself in a prison waiting room and piss on Zac Efron’s face.  If that doesn’t sound like something you’d like to see, then you’re missing out.

3)      Mickey Summer in Frances Ha

Everyone has had a friend like Mickey Sumner’s frustrating, beguiling Sophie.  Fun-loving, whip-smart and creative, she’s also the person in your life you most depend on who ends up deciding to grow up before you’ve quite made that leap.  Given how heavily the film leans on Gerwig’s considerably charm, it’s a wonder that Sophie isn’t a figure of pure loathing.  Instead, by the end, Sumner makes you understand and even appreciate her.

4)      Scarlett Johansson in Don Jon

Part of what feels like a concerted comeback, Scarlett Johannson gave her most successful and overtly comic performance in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial misfire Don Jon.  A collection of New Jersey stereotypes on the page, she somehow makes her Barbara into a fully-realised character, with flaws a thousand times more compelling than those of her leading man.

5)      Lili Taylor in The Conjuring

Decent horror performances are as few and far between as decent horror movies, so when one comes along that’s as surprisingly committed and full-blooded as Lili Taylor, it feels important to shout it from the rooftops.  As the possessed mother of a family haunted by a coterie of evil spirits, she’s every bit as great when she’s sentimentally staring at family photos as she is when she’s coughing blood and threatening to kill her youngest child.

Honourable Mentions: Katie Chang in The Bling Ring, Macy Gray in The Paperboy, Julianne Moore in What Maisie Knew, Machiko Ono in Like Father, Like Son and Julianne Moore in Don Jon.

  Best Original Screenplay:

  1)      Frances Ha

2)      Before Midnight

3)      Gloria

4)      Blue Jasmine

5)      Norte, The End of History

�� Best Adapted Screenplay:

  1)      Zero Dark Thirty

2)      Tom At The Farm

3)      In The House

4)      Lore

5)      The Spectacular Now

  Best Documentary:

  1)      The Act of Killing

2)      Stories We Tell

3)      How To Survive A Plague

4)      Mea Maxima Culpa

5)      The Crash Wheel

  Best Cinematography:

  1)      Emmanuel Lubezki for Gravity

2)      Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt for The Bling Ring

3)      Benoît Debie for Spring Breakers

4)      Bradford Young for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

5)      Emmanuel Lubezki for To The Wonder

  Best Score:

  1)      Gabriel Yared for Tom At The Farm

2)      Daniel Hart for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

3)      Hans Zimmer for The Lone Ranger

4)      Thomas Newman for Side Effects

5)      Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld for Blue Caprice

  Best Costume Design:

  1)      Blue Jasmine

2)      Stoker

3)      Blancanieves

4)      Tom At The Farm

5)      The Paperboy

  Best Production Design:

  1)      The Great Gatsby

2)      Norte, The End of History

3)      Stoker

4)      The Conjuring

5)      The Impossible

  Best Special Effects:

  1)      Gravity

2)      The Impossible

3)      World War Z

4)      White House Down

5)      Oblivion

  Most Disappointing Film of the Year:

  1)      Hitchcock

In theory, the making of Psycho should be fascinating.  Instead, we get Helen Mirren on autopilot and a cast list full of people I’d forgotten were even in it.

2)      Trance

As beautifully shot as Trance may be, its climax still involves Rosemary Dawson shaving her vagina.

3)      Sightseers

An unfunny, offensive feature length version of Murder Most Horrid.

4)      This Is The End

In which the end of the world isn’t nearly as important as the end of bro comedy and homosocial relationships.  Minus points for repeated use of the term ‘rapey.’

5)      Passion

No film this year had so many people on so many different pages as Passion.  Things sort of coalesce into nonsense cod-Hitchcock territory (natch) towards the end, and if you’re like me, you’ll get a kick out of Rachel McAdams saying ‘cunt,’ but that’s about it.