In Contention

Tag: Citizen Havel

  • LONDON: Gongs for ‘Mice,’ ‘Tulpan’ … and my own awards

    My last post on the London Film Festival brings some happy news, as one of my favourite festival titles was justly rewarded last night. The festival is not a competion-based one, but three prestigious awards are still handed out before the final screening.

    One of these is the global festival staple, the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Award. I’m thrilled to see it went to Australian multi-hyphenate Matthew Newton for his superb debut feature “Three Blind Mice,” which I already gushed over here. At only 31 years of age, I predict big things for Newton, both before and behind the camera.

    Meanwhile, the Sutherland Trophy for best debut feature went to “Tulpan,” the Kazakhstani entry for Best Foreign Language Film, beating such heavyweight contenders as “Ballast” and “Hunger.” It’s an auspicious award with a 50-year history: previous winners include “L’Avventura,” “In the Realm of the Senses,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “You Can Count on Me” and “Persepolis.” I was rather taken with “Tulpan,” so I’m pleased to see this underdog come through — it’s a dark horse to crack the Oscar shortlist.

    Other winners included the Italian character drama “Mid-August Lunch,” which took the Satyajit Ray Award for “artistry, compassion and humanity” in a debut film, and “Victoire Terminus,” a study of female boxing in the Congo that took the Grierson Award for best documentary. I’m afraid to say I missed both films, though I particularly wanted to catch the latter.

    And with that, bearing in mind that I couldn’t see everything, I thought I’d hand out my own inaugural (and no doubt much-prized) awards for the best that I saw at the fest, starting with my own personal Top Ten:

    TEN BEST FILMS OF THE FESTIVAL: 1. “The Class”; 2. “Synecdoche, New York”; 3. “Il Divo”; 4. “Slumdog Millionaire”; 5. “Three Blind Mice”; 6. “Wendy and Lucy”; 7. “The Good, The Bad, The Weird”; 8. “The Wrestler”; 9. “Sugar”; 10. “La Belle Personne”

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  • LONDON: Filling in the gaps

    Whew. A fortnight and 60-odd films later, I have reached the end of the London Film Festival. It came to a rousing close today with “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film for which I can only echo the enthusiasm that has been expressed nearly everywhere else — a fresh, thrilling, beautiful marriage of classical (even fairytale-style) storytelling and edgy stylistic verve. Plenty will be written about this beguiling work in the months to come, but for now, I’ll just say that it satisfies and surprises on just about every level.

    I’ve tried to keep up with the pace with my review roundups, but inevitably, I’ve wound up with a backlog of films I haven’t mentioned yet. So what follows is a quick catch-up effort, looking over some of the lower-profile hits and misses in 100 words or less.

    I will get into some bigger films in due course — Steve McQueen’s harrowing “Hunger” and Rian Johnson’s undervalued if occasionally precious “The Brothers Bloom” are two titles that merit more detailed discussion. And, as I’ve said before, there’s no need for me to discuss films that are already old news in the US (though I will say I finally caught up with “Frozen River” and was impressed by its tight construction and Melissa Leo’s deeply felt lead turn), or have already been covered on these pages. (I have similar sentiments to Kris on Ari Folman’s exquisite but overly distancing “Waltz With Bashir.”)

    So here’s a rundown of the littler guys, ranging from (to filch from the title of one of my favourite festival pics) the good to the bad to the weird:

    SUGAR (***1/2): One of the strongest American entries in the festival, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s worthy follow-up to “Half Nelson” shares that film’s lyricism and humanism, but paints on a broader social canvas. The story of a young baseball pitcher from the Dominican Republic embarking on his Stateside career, it adds new textures to the sports-movie genre — no other baseball film has conveyed the knife-edge stakes of league politics more effectively. A rare portrait of the American Dream that skirts sentimentality, it benefits from the brooding, vulnerable presence of lead actor Algenis Perez Soto, and the hazy, summery tones of Michael Brooks’s cinematography.

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