There may well be a more charming and entertaining film to start the new year with than Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, but right now it’s difficult to think of one offhand. Since premièring at Cannes last year, a seemingly unstoppable head of critical and commercial steam has been building behind this effortlessly light and imaginative comedy, with many talking up its chances as a contender in February’s Oscars.

The Artist takes us back to the glory days of silent Hollywood, and into the life of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a handsome, moustachioed and ever-so-slightly ridiculous hero of big screen action and swashbuckling films, somewhat in the mould of Douglas Fairbanks.

We first encounter George at a screening of his latest film, as he, a starlet and his cigar-chomping producer, played by John Goodman (a man born to play a cigar-chomping producer), wait behind the screen to eavesdrop on the audience’s reaction.

It’s at this point that the central conceit of the film comes into play. As the music accompanying the film-with-the-film comes to an end, we’re flung into genuine silence. The assembled players and producers listen eagerly for the anticipated applause and then, we see from their reactions (but not from the soundtrack), they hear it. Soon a second silent movie score is struck up, this time accompanying the film that we’re watching. The Artist is both a film about silent movies and a silent movie itself, with ’20s-style intertitles for key lines of dialogue.

This being 1927, talking movies are just around the corner, and their arrival is heralded by the giddy appearance of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a young fan of George’s who, through an accidental meeting with her hero and his subsequent patronage, starts to rise up through the studio system.

Fast forward to 1929, and Kinograph Studios, George’s employer, announces that it is quitting silent movies to work exclusively on sound pictures. Dismissing ‘the talkies’ as a passing fad, the actor ups-sticks with his faithful Jack Russell and goes into production on his own, in the process losing a fortune and a wife just as the stock market crashes.

As George’s star wanes so Peppy’s rises, and she is thrilled and upset by this in equal measure. At heart The Artist is a bit of an old-fashioned love story about star-crossed lovers whose circumstances are reversed as their paths cross. It’s also, of course, a film about the movies and about the poignant fate of so many of the big stars of the silent screen, from Buster Keaton to Lilian Gish to Erich Von Stroheim.

This is territory that’s been well covered before, of course, in Singin’ In The Rain, in Sunset Boulevard and even in the manic re-imaginings of ’20s and ’30s cinema conjured up by Canadian director Guy Maddin.

What gives The Artist fresh wings, though, is its genuine, almost naïve sense of fun. There are visual gags aplenty about the fact that we’re watching a silent movie but, other than this, the director plays a remarkably straight bat, so that we could almost be watching a film from the era in question. A lot of the humour comes from watching the amiable and ridiculous George just being himself in an overblown ’20s-movie-star-style or from guessing how his ever-resourceful dog is going to save the day next. There’s a real chemistry between the two leads too, and one of the best scenes is early in the film as a series of takes and re-takes of a dance scene from a film called A German Affair slowly introduces the actors, and us, to the idea that they’re falling in love. The style of that scene – funny, touching, a little nostalgic – is the style of the film overall. 

So while The Artist isn’t quite the masterpiece that some have suggested it to be, it is probably the most solidly entertaining and determinedly different mainstream comedy-drama to be released in the last 12 months. And for that alone it certainly deserves Oscars aplenty.

The Artist is out in UK cinemas now 

On the other hand, my film-going habit has continued apace and at various points this year I’ve found myself spellbound, surprised, shocked and staggered in the cinema. Below then is my selection of the finest films released in the UK in 2011. 

As for 2012, well I can only promise to redouble (or perhaps even re-quadruple) my efforts in the new year, and to endeavour to share some thoughts on cinema with you much more often.

My Top Six

Le Quattro Volte / The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino)

A story of goats, goatherds, charcoal-makers and burly men who cut down trees. Set deep in the Calabrian countryside, Michelangelo Frammartino’s film straddles a fine line between fiction and documentary. Its four stories are based around observations of Italian peasant life and loosely correspond to Pythagoras’ ideas about the different states that the soul passes through during transmigration (or reincarnation): mineral, vegetable, animal, man.

There’s hardly any dialogue yet the film contains some of the most dramatic and involving scenes that I’ve witnessed in the cinema all year. A baby goat becomes lost from the flock and wanders bleating over the winter hillsides; a sick old man gathers dust swept up from a church floor and mixes it with water to drink as a medicine; a towering fir tree is chopped down in the forest, hauled into a medieval hilltop town and re-erected in the market square for a local festival.

Particularly staggering is a 10-minute scene featuring a Passion play, a sheepdog, a pick-up truck and some escapee goats, miraculously choreographed in one unbroken shot. An antidote to Terrence Malick’s overblown Tree of Life, this is a piece of work that should be sought out by film-makers, students of film and anyone else interested in the poetic power of cinema.

A Separation / Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (Asghar Farhadi)

Take one part Kiarostami, two parts Renoir, shake gently with a slug of Hitchcock and what do you have? This top-notch and twisty Iranian drama is the answer; a deceptively simple tale of middle-class divorce, Iranian style, and the fallout from an ill-advised shove.

Nader and Simin are a married couple aged around 40. Simin wants to move abroad so that their daughter can have a better education. Nader feels that he cannot move away and leave his elderly father, who is afflicted with Alzheimer’s, alone. A divorce is on the cards. Then Nader has an altercation with his father’s carer that results in a court case that will affect all of their lives.

Those are the plot points, and simple enough they are. The real genius of Farhadi’s film, though, lies in the way in which it causes us constantly to re-evaluate our sympathies and our understanding of the main characters and their motivations. A good comparison is the Australian TV drama The Slap, which was also on UK screens this year. There are no certainties here and nothing is spelled out for the audience. The lives of the characters in A Separation are like our own: messy, chaotic, full of hope and happiness and despair, and we feel that they will continue long after the credits have rolled.

Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)

Kenneth Lonergan’s much-delayed follow-up to You Can Count on Me is almost an American version of the film above, dealing, as it does, with an accidental moment of violence and its impact on a variety of contemporary characters.

This time the story is told from the point-of-view of a New York teenager (Anna Paquin) who inadvertently becomes involved in the run-up to a fatal bus crash and finds herself nursing the dying victim during her final moments. This experience sends ripples through the lives of the teenager, her actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron), the man driving the bus (Mark Ruffalo) and a whole host of other people in their lives. As in A Separation, the main characters are complex and unpredictable; at times sympathetic, at others petulant, wrong-headed and confused, often within the same scene. A great messy slice of life.

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

Lars von Trier’s films have provoked and divided audiences for more than decade now. Personally I’ve always had mixed feelings. His last film Antichrist, for example,was trite, ridiculous, unpleasant, beautiful and strangely compelling at the same time but ultimately a film that existed to shock its audience and then go home happy with having done so.

With Melancholia, though, the director seems to have struck out in a subtly different direction. While still based on von Trier’s own insecurities and personal problems (his depression) and while still conceived on a gigantic, some would say an overblown scale – it’s a film about the end of the world after all – there’s something more mature and universal at work here than in anything he’s made since maybe Breaking The Waves back in ’96.

In brief it tells the story of two sisters, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, one of whom’s crushing depression wreaks havoc at the wedding banquet planned for her and paid for by the other sister’s husband (Kiefer Sutherland). As the fallout from the wedding settles, the characters start to realise that an ever bigger disaster threatens: the collision of a planet named Melancholia with the Earth.

This is at once a magical fable about the end of the world as we know it and an intensely personal psychodrama about the relationship between two sisters, and it works perfectly on both levels. (Also was I the only one mentally humming “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, he said” whenever Sutherland’s sensible amateur scientist character appeared on screen?)

The Portuguese Nun / A Religiosa Portuguesa (Eugène Green)

A bit of an acquired taste this one, and probably the kind of film that most people will either love or hate. Personally, I liked it a lot and found that the all-pervasive and deeply odd mood of the piece left the cinema with me afterwards, following me back down the street and all the way home, and lingering somewhere still in the corners of my mind.

A French actress of Portuguese descent (Leonor Baldaque) arrives in Lisbon to shoot a few scenes for a film. In between shooting days she wanders the hilly streets befriending young boys and suicidal aristocrats, pondering the nature of love, having an affair with her co-star and becoming fascinated by the figure of a nun kneeling in a church.

Director Eugène Green tells his story with lots of lingering, loving shots of the city and fado music interludes. The style of acting is strictly neo-Bressonian, with stilted, somnambulant delivery from the leading players, who every so often turn and gawp into the camera like sleepwalkers who’ve just been woken up. Green himself makes a funny cameo as the director of the film-within-the-film, a man clearly suffering from a midlife crisis.

I wouldn’t recommend The Portuguese Nun to anyone who’s not into films that experiment quite boldly with narrative and mood, but for me it was perhaps the gentlest and certainly the oddest highlight of the year.

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)

The adaptation! The costume drama! Two huge man-traps lurking ready to swallow up the unwary film-maker. Happily Andrea Arnold manages here to resist any kind of novelistic treatment or teatime TV politeness in her approach to this most adapted of texts. Her vision is a stark one: people shaped and scarred by their environment; a howling wind cutting across the moors; mud, animals, people and animals living side-by-side, indistinct. Against this backdrop, Heathcliff and Cathy’s love for one another spreads and blooms like a bruise or an infected wound. Probably not a good date movie.

Also very good:

A Screaming Man / Un Homme Qui Cri (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)

Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)

Post Mortem (Pablo Larrain)

Poetry / Shi (Lee Chang-dong)

True Grit (Ethan & Joel Coen)

Mysteries of Lisbon / Mistérios de Lisboa (Raoul Ruiz)

The Salt of Life / Gianni e le donne (Gianni di Gregorio)

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)

The revisionist Western has been with us for so long now that it seems almost impossible to imagine any contemporary film-maker wanting to produce a piece of work on the old ‘good-guys-in-white-hats, bad-guys-in-black-hats’ template. From Clint Eastwood’s 1992 excoriation of his gun-toting past in Unforgiven to Jim Jarmusch’s brutal and chaotic Dead Man, from TV’s expletive-laden Deadwood to Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the Western has become a much more critical, questioning genre than ever before, with the old heroic certainties of the West long dead and buried somewhere out on the prairie.

The latest addition to the genre is Meek’s Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt, hitherto best known for her low-budget portrayals of contemporary American life (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy). In it, the director tells the story of a group of pioneers on or, more to the point, off the Oregon Trail in 1845.

As the film opens, the pioneers – three married couples and a boy – are well and truly lost. Having broken away from the main trail to follow the ‘cutoff’ suggested to them by their charismatic guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), they find themselves in an arid, almost featureless landscape of prairie grass and salt flats, with no obvious indication of which way to turn their wagons next.

Meek, one-part confidence trickster, two-parts storyteller, insists that he knows the land like the back of his hand, and that it’s only a matter of time before he leads them to their destination and receives his pay-off. As their water supply starts to run low though, the group increasingly starts to doubt the fast-talking, bullishly-confident Meek and his methods. In an early scene, we see the other men in the group taking a vote on whether to hang their guide from the nearest tree, and their feelings towards him hardly improve as his confident assertions continue to amount to nothing.

As the days pass, the search for water starts to take precedence over the search for the trail, so much so that when the pioneers stumble across a lone native American (Rod Rondeaux), they capture him and, against Meek’s advice, let him live so that he can lead them to a place to drink. This ‘savage’ speaks no English though, and Meek, for all of his dark tales of scalping and murder, seems to know precious little about ‘Indian’ ways. Nevertheless, necessity dictates that they follow their captive wherever he may lead them, and trust in him as their last hope against the rigours of the frontier.

Bruce Greenwood as Stephen Meek

The pioneers’ lives are presented to us in a stark, quietly realistic way. The men read from their Bibles, guide their horses and oxen and fix broken axles on the wagons; the women’s days consist of domestic chore after domestic chore, from baking bread to collecting firewood to stitching clothes. When the men (Paul Dano, Will Patton and Neal Huff) step away for the camp for an impromptu conference on navigation or whether or not to kill the Indian, the camera stays with the wagons and the women (Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan and Shirley Henderson). The world of the women is very much the world of the film, the discussions that will decide their fate barely audible on the prairie wind. (“What are they saying?” Henderson’s character keeps repeating at one point, straining to hear what we ourselves can barely hear.)

Reichardt brings a fitting physicality to the story of the feuding pioneers, giving us a sense of the sheer difficulty and tedium of moving wagons and livestock across this inhospitable terrain. The opening scene shows the group fording a river, the women wading across in their skirts. Later, we see the wagons being elaborately lowered down a hillside, the fate of the group hanging on the hauling of ropes, on its own sweat and muscle-power. At times, we see the pioneers doing little more than trudging stoically across dried-up salt lakes or green-brown grassland, utterly defeated by the scale of the land that they have wandered into. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God springs to mind as a comparison, as do the lost children in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout.

This is a West before the West was won, when the United States still clung solidly to one seaboard and uncertainly to the other, with vast, empty spaces inbetween. This is America before the Civil War and before the railways. Early on in the film we hear Meek and the other men discussing the future of the West around the campfire: will it go British or American? Time will only tell. The historical moment is evoked too in the speech, manners and even the faces of Reichardt’s characters, as surely as if they’d been assembled somehow from old photos of the time, or shortly thereafter.

The performances are great, particularly those of Shirley Henderson and of Bruce Greenwood who, as Meek, keeps his cards very close to his chest. Is he a conman who’s got himself in too deep? A natural leader? A fantasist? A criminal? We, along with the people he is leading, never quite know his secret, and spend most of the film trying to guess at it.

Meek’s Cutoff is shot in a ‘square’ 1.33:1 aspect ratio, an eccentric choice at the best of times, and especially so when dealing with the vast landscapes on display here. This lack of lush, widescreen beauty is certainly deliberate, focusing attention on the lost souls involved in the story and on the bleak future that seems to await them. At the same time, though, the film is strangely reminiscent of John Ford’s view of the West, or at least more so than are many other contemporary Westerns. The lyrical love of landscape may not be there, but a respect and a reverence for the toughness of the lives of frontiersmen and women is, as are echoes of the incomprehension and hatred felt by whites towards ‘Indians’, and vice versa, in The Searchers.

Meek’s Cutoff is out now in selected UK cinemas.

… And if you’re still game for pointless lists, here are the 5 posts that proved most popular on this ‘blog with you, the readers, in 2010:

'Paranormal Activity'

Location, Location, One Location December 2009
2 comments

Buñuel on set

The Luis Buñuel Film School February 2010
1 comment

Christoph Waltz in 'Inglourious Basterds'

Mind Your Language September 2009
2 comments

Draper thinks about smoking a fag

At The Movies with Don Draper March 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,

Bad Santa? Michael Haneke

Happy Haneke November 2009
3 comments

'Dogtooth'

And so, without further ado, here’s my pick of the best films released in the UK in 2010:

The Top 6 ½

Dogtooth / Kynodontas (Greece, Director: Giorgos Lanthimos)

A pot-bellied Greek patriarch keeps his wife and adult children under lock and key in this intriguing and somewhat kinky post-Fritzl fantasy.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Thailand, Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Filmed in the jungles of Northern Thailand, Uncle Boonmee… is both a continuation of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Phantoms of Nabua project, documenting the legacy of a bloody anti-Communist counter-insurgency in the ’60s and ’70s, and a film about the life, death and many re-births of one man in particular. Pure cinematic poetry.

Uncle B.

Another Year (United Kingdom, Director: Mike Leigh)

Nothing less than Mike Leigh’s Tokyo Story. Shorn of the mannerisms and the caricatures that often get in the way of this director’s storytelling, Another Year instead goes straight to the heart of what it means to be an ageing human being today; what it means to be a friend, a son, a lover and a parent; what it means to offer the hand of kindness to a stranger, and what happens when that kindness reaches its (necessary?) limits. In the grand humanist tradition of Renoir and Ozu, no-one is entirely to blame and no-one is entirely blameless for the compromises and half-truths and downright self-deceptions engaged in by the main characters here. The final, wintry section in particular is one of the best things that Leigh’s ever done.

'Another Year'

Certified Copy / Copie conforme (Iran, France, Italy, Director: Abbas Kiarostami)

Kiarostami’s first English- (and French-) language film is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a very pretty puzzle-box indeed. The poster shows Juliette Binoche putting on a pair of colourful earrings, but it may as well have shown a giant question mark instead, perhaps hovering over the rolling hills of Tuscany, where the film is set. A middle-aged art historian (William Shimell) meets a French antique shop owner (Binoche) and sets off with her on a journey of make-believe, deception and fakery across the Italian countryside. One scene doesn’t quite convince (could this be deliberate?) but otherwise Certified Copy is by far the trickiest, most self-contained and most playful piece of cinema released in the last twelve months.

Juliette Binoche, yesterday

The Social Network (USA, Director: David Fincher)

I’m going to go with the crowd on this one, if only for the trippy regatta scene midway through. The story of the rise and rise of Facebook, the revenge of the nerds, and the partial revenge of the non-nerds.

'The Social Network'

I Am Love / Io Sono L’Amore (Italy, Director: Luca Guadagnino)

Enter The Void (France, Germany, Italy, Director: Gaspar Noé)

Two films that are as mad as a sack of ferrets, and deserve to be seen on the biggest screen possible. The first channels pure DH Lawrence and Alfred Hitchcock, as it tells of the love, boredom and obsession that destroys a Milanese textile dynasty. The second takes us to the grave and beyond, as a young American in Tokyo is shot and dies, only to live on as a floating, disembodied ghost, watching over his little sister. Of the two, I Am Love is perhaps the more subtle, and Enter The Void is full of narrative holes, but both offer a vision of pure, boundless cinema and are absolutely unlike anything else released this year.

'I Am Love'

Other Good Stuff

Four Lions (United Kingdom, Director: Chris Morris)

“Rubber dingy rapids!” An inspired comic take on terrorists and ‘the war on terror’.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (USA, Director: Werner Herzog)

Nicholas Cage loses his shit in epic style. Werner Herzog is there to capture it on film.

Inception (USA/ UK, Director: Christopher Nolan)

Once again, Christopher Nolan shows himself to be the master of the chin-stroking action thriller, with this Leonardo DiCaprio-fronted sci-fi fantasy . (Whether it actually needed to be such a full-on action thriller in the first place is up for debate.)

A Prophet / Un Prophète (France, Director: Jacques Audiard)

A little overrated I thought, but still an involving, solid, slightly off-genre piece about the pains and perils of doing Bird at at the pleasure of Monsieur le Président.

White Material (France, Cameroon, Director: Claire Denis)

Elusive and subtle even by Claire Denis’ standards, White Material pushes cinematic storytelling into all kinds of new and intriguing shapes.

The Headless Woman / La Mujer Sin Cabeza (Argentina, Director: Lucrecia Martel)

A film that feels like a migraine. How can this be possible?

The Killer Inside Me (UK / USA, Director: Michael Winterbottom)

A deeply uncomfortable watch, Casey Affleck is a pure Southern gentleman of a psychopath in this hard-boiled, ultra-violent noir.

Of Gods and Men / Des dieux et des hommes (France, Director: Xavier Beauvois)

Who’d be a monk, eh?

'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives'

If a passing stranger with too much time on his hands were to ask me to make a list of the ten most important film-makers at work in the world today, then the name of the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul would be somewhere near the top.

Unfortunately, as I’ve discovered from bitter experience, the opinions of a semi-employable film ‘blogger count for little in this cold, hard world of ours. So it’s gratifying to see that Apichatpong (or Joe to his friends) is finally starting to receive the international recognition that he deserves for his work, with a Palme d’Or win at this year’s Cannes Festival and his latest film set to represent Thailand at next year’s Oscars.

The film in question is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which is released in UK cinemas today. It tells the story of the last few days in the life of an ageing man with kidney disease, who has chosen to end his days in a thickly-forested corner of Northern Thailand once riven by civil war. As the title suggests, Uncle Boonmee has a better recollection of his past lives than most and, as his final illness overtakes him, we find him mulling over both his present and his former existences and the great, insoluble mysteries of life and death.

It’s not long before Uncle Boonmee is joined by the ghost of his dead wife, and then also by his dead son, who has metamorphosed somehow into a hairy, Wookie-like jungle creature. We see glimpses of moments from the dying man’s previous lives as his feverish mind runs through them, including an already much commented upon scene in which a princess has sex with a catfish.

Now on paper this probably sounds a little bit odd. But if you’ve ever seen and loved an Apichatpong film before, then you’ll know already that on screen it will all make perfect sense. After all, this is a director whose films, if nothing else, are permeated by a sense of all-pervading, almost transcendental calm; a calm that allows pretty much anything to happen quite naturally, no matter how unexpected.

In Tropical Malady (2004) for example, a hunter in the jungle encounters talking monkeys and the ghost of a cow. In Blissfully Yours (2002) a quiet picnic by a stream turns into a sensual, sexual orgy before our eyes. In both cases, by the time that any of this unconventional ‘craziness’ has happened the viewer has already become like a hypnotised chicken in the director’s hands, lulled into a sense of acceptance and wonder by his gentle manipulation of the rhythms and sounds of human and animal life.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, yesterday.

Apichatpong’s films are self-contained, poetic and beguiling. Without wanting to sound patronising, he brings a uniquely Buddhist and a uniquely Thai approach to cinematic storytelling, in that the lives of his characters are always shadowed by parallel lives, or former lives, that slip effortlessly into the present. In Tropical Malady, a close, probably gay male friendship soon becomes a tiger hunt, with one character becoming a cattle-ripping beast, and the other a soldier, charged with tracking him down. In Syndromes and a Century (2006) two versions of the same love story – one possibly involving the director’s parents – play out in parallel in different times and places.

Such stories have their roots in folk myth, in family myth and in the stories that nations tell about themselves, as well as in the dreams of individuals. And it is in such stories and myths that Apichatpong’s films deal, and through and between them that they slip with such fluidity.

Uncle Boonmee… is no exception. On one level it’s a story about the bloody suppression of a Communist insurgency in 1965, on the other it’s a very personal meditation on death, and on yet another, it references both the traditions and the stock characters of popular Thai cinema (the ‘Wookie’ character in particular).

If you were looking for a comparison, you could maybe mention Jean Cocteau or Terence Malick. But for me the Thai director’s work surpasses that of even these great poets of the cinema in its scope and its achievement.

Let’s be clear: what we’re dealing with here is poetry, pure and simple; the poetry of images and sounds, of lives half-lived as they echo others, and of the teeming, squawking mystery of the jungle. If you want a nice, neat three-act structure, and a film full of conventional twists and turns, then you should probably go elsewhere. But if you want to see where cinema, still so young, can go next, and what it can still do,  then you should pay attention to the work of this modest Thai master.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is in UK cinemas now.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the films of Mike Leigh. On the one hand, the 67-year-old director’s work is unique, intelligent and ambitious in a way that other British films often struggle to be. On the other, in films like Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), High Hopes (1988) and Abigail’s Party (1977) there always seems to be an uncomfortably thin line between characterisation and caricature, a line which the director, with his famous, semi-improvised approach to performance, seems too often to stray across.

So it was with bated breath that I settled down to watch Another Year, Leigh’s latest film, and a contender for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Another Year tells the story of a year in the life of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happily-married, middle class couple drifting slowly and contentedly towards retirement. He works as a geologist, she as a counsellor; weekends are spent tending their allotment and cooking for friends and family.

Friends and family, it soon becomes clear, are both a burden and a blessing for the couple. Their 30-year-old son Joe seems to take the same laid-back approach to life as his parents, with no prospect of marriage or children any time soon. Their friends, by contrast, are anything but laid-back.

Mary (Leslie Manville) is a forty- or fifty-something divorcee who works as a secretary in the same medical practice as Gerri. Semi-alcoholic and silently petrified at the prospect of spending the rest of her days alone, Mary is drawn inexorably towards the warm hearth of her friend’s home, where she receives food, sympathy and, from Tom at least, some gentle, slightly mocking criticism.

Ken, played by another Leigh regular Peter Wight, is even worse. A boyhood friend of Tom’s and a confirmed alcoholic, Ken finds himself entering his autumn years alone, overweight and trapped in a dead-end job in Hull.

For both Ken and Mary, happiness is an elusive and a rare thing, and the kind of effortless, contentment that Tom and Gerri have in spades serves only to highlight their own loneliness.

Ciggies, booze and bleak moments

And so Another Year is a film about both happiness and sadness, and about the way that the one perhaps inevitably feeds off the other. The question of how much Tom and Gerri can, and should, help the various waifs and strays who turn up at their door is central. There’s no doubt that they’re both nice people, but nice people have their limits too, and can, we soon come to realise, be as guilty of unkindness as anyone else, by proxy, by error or by deliberate omission. The warm hearth of a happy family home, Leigh suggests, perhaps depends as much on exclusion as it does on inclusion; kindness towards others is always conditional, no matter how well-meant.

It’s never quite clear how much the couple are aware of this; whether when Tom says to Ken “What are we going to do with you?” he’s being kind, exasperated, a little bit unpleasant, or all three at once. As in the great films of Ozu or Renoir, everyone here has his reasons, and weakness and compromise exist side-by-side with virtue in the human soul.

In fact this is, I would argue, Mike Leigh’s own Tokyo Story, a deeply compassionate film about ageing, the ties of family and friendship, and the gentle compromises and disappointments of life. For once, the director seems happy to reign in his performers, and allow us simply to watch his characters as time and the seasons pass them by. We see them at spring dinner parties, summer barbecues and winter funerals and get the feeling that what we’re watching is life as it is actually lived, as funny and as tragic and as messy as anything that might happen to us, our friends, or our family. Without underestimating Leigh as a director, it perhaps also helps that, at his age, the subject matter here must all be pretty close to home.

What else is good? Well, the cinematography, by Dick Pope deserves a mention, as does David Bradley, who appears late in the proceedings as Tom’s taciturn brother from Up North, in an icy, brilliant final section.

But, overall, this is Leigh’s film; and a subtle and wise film it is too. One of the director’s best, and one of the best of the year so far.

Another Year is out now in all good cinemas (and some crap ones too)

It's all gone a bit Pete Tong... 'Enter The Void'

What happens to us after we die?: perhaps the oldest and most troublesome question known to mankind. A question, nevertheless, which Argentinian-French director Gaspar Noé (Irréversible, Seul Contre Tous) sets out to tackle with characteristic gusto in his intense new film Enter The Void.

Never one to shy away either from controversy or from mind-bending visuals, Noé casts his film as an unapologetic ‘trip’ movie, a staggering, high-concept piece that takes its cue from The Tibetan Book of the Dead as it recounts the premature death and ghostly wanderings of a young American in Tokyo.

The American in question is Oscar (Nathanial Brown), a skinny twentysomething drug addict and dealer who just about manages to scrape together a living selling his wares to other members of the expat community. The film is told entirely from Oscar’s point-of-view, the camera embedded in his skull for the first portion of the story, then cut loose after his death as the young man’s life flashes before his eyes and as he drifts around the streets of the neon-lit city.

In the first section of the film we find Oscar at home in his cramped flat, and watch as he chats with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) and gets high on his own supply. Immediately, the unique point-of-viewness of the film asserts itself, with Oscar’s blinks obscuring the screen every few seconds and his voice deepened and filtered through his skull. When his sister goes out, he fires up his crack-pipe, and we’re treated to our first trip in this movie of trips: blood-red retina patterns breaking out on the walls and ceiling of the apartment as Oscar hovers in and out of consciousness.

Later, and still a little drowsy, he heads out with his friend Alex (Cyril Roy) to complete a drug deal. Unfortunately for Oscar, the deal all goes a bit Pete Tong, and he soon finds himself lying in a pool of his own blood, dying from a gunshot wound.

As he dies, the internal monologue that we’ve been hearing so far continues, Oscar’s disembodied voice expressing surprise, confusion and not a little curiosity about what’s happening to him. He, and we, float above his lifeless corpse, as moments from his short life flash before his eyes.

Happier times.

Linda, it soon becomes apparent, is the most important person in his life; the sister from whom he was separated as a child after a car crash that killed their parents. Reunited in early adulthood they have resumed their intense, needy relationship in Tokyo, where Linda has become a stripper in a pole-dancing club and the plaything of her employer Mario (Masato Tanno), much to Oscar’s chagrin.

And it is to watch over Linda that Oscar’s wandering spirit seems to stay behind, silent and powerless to act as she goes even further off the rails, and as Alex runs from the cops. But gradually, as the spirit of the young man floats and swirls around the city, something else becomes apparent too: that his body is gone, that his spirit has to move on, and that some kind of re-birth is inevitable.

On its own terms, Enter The Void is a resounding success. Noé’s film sets out to take the audience on a journey, and on a journey it certainly takes us. The long takes, the effortless, flowing camera-work, the dizzying, skyscraper-high views of the city; these all create a hypnotic, almost addictive point-of-view that this viewer at least could watch for hours on end. Noé’s camera can, and does, go everywhere, fleeting backwards and forwards over the city, through walls and people, and, in one memorable scene, inside a young lady’s vagina as she’s being penetrated by her boyfriend.

Which brings us onto sex. There’s no way of getting around it; there’s a hell of a lot of extremely explicit nookie in this film, from Oscar’s sister being humped by Mario in the dressing room of the club where she works to the dozens of anonymous couples we see grinding and pumping away in the bedrooms of ‘The Love Hotel’. From Oscar’s (and therefore our) point-of-view though, all of this sweaty, explicit copulation is entirely devoid of its worldly connotations, instead appearing for what it objectively is: part of a desperate, self-perpetuating wheel of procreation and death that he’d like, but isn’t quite able, to escape.

Bad karma? Or good drugs?

In its ambition, scope and single-minded determination to explore the outer limits of human experience, then, Enter The Void is deeply impressive. It’s already been widely compared to Kubrick’s 2001, and the comparison is an apt one; at various points it also brings to mind Sokurov’s Russian Ark and Tarkovsky’s Mirror too. In terms of a unique, immersive viewing experience it’s hard to beat and is completely unlike anything else that you’ll see this year, or maybe even this decade.

And yet, there are flaws too. For all of its technical brilliance, Noé’s film is about as subtle as a punch in the face, and there’s something decidedly meat-headed about some of the plotting. When Oscar’s life begins to ‘flash before his eyes’ for example, it does so in a very convenient narrative arc, picking out exactly those key moments that we need to see in order to understand his back-story and his post-mortal motivations. So, out are the moments when he ate a great pizza or graduated from high school; in is a 20-minute montage showing the accident that killed his parents and the moment when he was separated from his sister.

This over-literalness infects the film in other ways too. Does Alex really have to have given Oscar The Tibetan Book of the Dead just days before his death? Do they really have to talk about it so much? And when Linda’s been out on a grief-induced bender, does she really have to wake up in a children’s playground surrounded by pills?

As for Tokyo, well, it’s pretty obvious that Noé is more interested in creating a fantasy landscape, a ‘Tokyo of the mind’, than he is in shooting the real city. But does this imaginary city really need to be quite so adolescent? Couldn’t the director have filled his night-time cityscapes with something a bit more interesting than relentless sex and drug abuse?

For all of its flaws though, Enter The Void is undeniably an experience, a journey and a bravura, roller-coaster piece of film-making. After 135 minutes, I left the cinema wide-eyed and buzzing and, like a particularly unenlightened, soon-to-be-reincarnated soul, wanted to go straight back in and start all over again. Which is surely A Good Thing.

Enter The Void is out now in UK cinemas.

JP, yesterday

A huge number of column inches has already been devoted to the question of whether Casey Affleck’s new film about the physical and mental disintegration of his brother-in-law and friend Joachin Phoenix, is a straightfoward documentary (as it says on the tin) or something far more contrived and mischievous.

Well, let me say straight away that I’m Still Here is very obviously not an ‘honest’, fly-on-the-wall record of events. Certain key scenes have quite evidently been scripted in advance, and Phoenix’s shambling, paranoid performance is simply too funny to be completely unplanned. To call it a spoof or a mockumentary is perhaps going a little too far though. Rather, it’s a record of a year-long tragi-comic performance, a living piece of installation art almost, for which Phoenix grew a big bushy beard, smoked a lot of dope and appeared in various stages of coherence in the US media. How far this performance spilled over into his off-camera life is anyone’s guess, but for much of the film the actor certainly seems to be pretty immersed in deep character, living and breathing the Method like some latter-day, hoodie-wearing Brando.

I’m Still Here opens in 2008, with Phoenix’s very public announcement that, following a highly-regarded performance in Walk The Line, he’s decided to quit acting and pursue a musical career instead. Casey Affleck is the faithful chronicler of this momentous decision, following his friend with a camera through a series of Hollywood events and interviews. Straight-faced, Phoenix announces that he wants to make the “hip-hop Bohemian Rhapsody”, busting out a series of increasingly weak rhymes and trying to secure the services of Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs as his producer. Surrounding him is an all-male group of friends, staff and hangers-on who become the target of his increasingly wild mood swings and delusions of grandeur.

A little like Curb Your Enthusiasm, a lot of the fun here lies in guessing where the truth of a character or a situation begins and ends. The mass media (clips from which we see throughout the film) are fed the line that Phoenix is dead serious about his change of direction. We see his now-infamous appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman where he chews gum, mumbles answers to questions and seems to have genuine difficulty responding to the expectations of audience and host. Whenever his new direction is questioned – is this, in fact, all a spoof? – he becomes angry and defensive, turning on interviewers and hiring private detectives to spy on supposed ‘enemies’ within his own camp.

At the same time, you suspect that many of the stars who have walk-on parts in the film are in on the joke, most notably Diddy, who Phoenix pursues with an almost childlike level of neediness, before finally managing to secure an awkward and ultimately disastrous audition. Phoenix also subjects real-life club-goers to his dubious vocal stylings, with mid-week bookings in clubs in Florida and LA at which he’s greeted with a mixture of curiosity and irony, hundreds of digital and phone cameras held aloft to record the fallen star.

‘JP’ the rapper is pretty funny, it has to be admitted, but there’s a serious side to the performance too. The child of hippy parents who brought him up partly in a Puerto Rican cult, Phoenix has, you sense, always been a bit of an outsider in Hollywood, even at the height of his success. I’m Still Here questions that success and what it means to be a ‘somebody’ in LA. A lot of the real-life media coverage that appears in the film is every bit as ridiculous as anything that the pot-bellied, chain-smoking Phoenix says or does. Indeed it seems that, perhaps inspired by Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Borat, Affleck and Phoenix have set out at least in part to provoke and ridicule the vapid and celebrity-obsessed US media.

There’s also the drama of a man who seems genuinely on the edge: an actor plagued with doubt about himself and about the worth of his profession; a ‘somebody’ who could very easily become a ‘nobody’ again overnight. It hardly requires a great leap of the imagination to recognise that this is probably the way that most movie stars feel at at least some point during their career. Affleck and Phoenix are smart enough to know that wealth, fame and celebrity count for very little in the grand scheme of things, that ageing and decline can only be redeemed by the kind of wisdom that’s not often found in Hollywood. And so, the final section of the film moves away from comedy and towards something more introspective and personal.

Writing in The Guardian Peter Bradshaw summed up I’m Still Here with the line: ‘Good film; dodgy career move.’ I’m not so sure that I agree. This is never quite Phoenix’s Brando-in-Last-Tango-in-Paris film, but it is maybe his Dennis-Hopper-in-Easy-Rider film: a performance to smooth the way from the pure sunlit uplands of youthful movie stardom to the more interesting cinematic diversions and detours that await the weather-beaten and the worldly-wise as they approach middle-age.

I’m Still Here is in UK cinemas now.