Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice.
Best demonstration that “business as usual” can be terrifying: The Grab, a documentary by Gabriela Cowperthwaite investigating the large-scale purchase of food and water resources by international concerns, with often devastating results for the local population. Cowperthwaite’s doc makes the case that protecting agricultural land and water should be considered a national security issue since they may play a larger role than oil in future wars.
Best diegetic piano playing: Paul Weller as the grandfather of Elliott Heffernan’s character in Steve McQueen’s Blitz. Weller comes by his talents honestly, considering he’s best known as a singer-songwriter and performer with The Jam and The Style Council.
Best portrayal of a despicable person: Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews, leader of a 1980s white supremacist terrorist gang that combined high-powered weaponry with remarkable ignorance and stupidity. Justin Kurzel’s The Order also deserves props for highlighting how American car culture, as well as gun culture, facilitated their crimes and continue to make it absurdly easy to kill a lot of people with very little effort.
Best special effects without making them the point: The Animal Kingdom by Thomas Cailley, which imagines a world in which genetic mutation causes people to morph into animal-human hybrids. The film is basically one giant “What if?” question and the visual effects (which are quite good) serve to explore the film’s philosophical interests rather than becoming the focus of the film (Fantastic Beasts, I’m looking at you!).
Best two-fer: Saoirse Ronan for delivering outstanding performances in two very different films, the unconventional WW II drama Blitz (she plays the mother of the film’s real star, Elliott Heffernan) and the psychologically complex contemporary drama The Outrun (she plays an Orkney native who returns home to try to put her life back together).
Best use of pre-exiting footage: Copa 71, whose heart is a treasure trove of coverage of the unofficial 1971 Women’s World Cup in Mexico. The Mexican media went all out in publicizing this event, resulting in substantial game footage as well as promotional material, and editors Arturo Calvete and Mark Roberts stitch it together expertly.
Cinematography so good you don’t realize it: Phedon Papamichael’s work in Daddio, which takes place almost entirely within a taxicab where two strangers (played by Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn) converse for the better part of the film’s 101 minutes. Here’s the kicker: all the in-cab scenes were shot on a sound stage using on-set visual production, but you’d swear you were watching Johnson and Penn actually traveling from JFK to Manhattan.
Film over two hours most worth its running time: Even at 152 minutes, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Ennio: The Maestro left me wanting more, because every minute of what’s there is so delightful. Also because the film’s subject, film composer Ennio Morricone, did so much (he has 527 credits in the imdb) and did it so well that there’s a lot more that could have been included.
Most meh film about a subject that should be anything but: The Apprentice by Ali Abbasi, a fictional portrayal of the rise of Donald Trump (a struggling Sebastian Stan) and his mentorship by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, the best thing in the film). It’s a villain origin story that remains ordinary and generic when it should be horrifying and insightful and is oddly less vivid than real life.
Weirdest inclusion of a PowerPoint presentation: Sleep, directed by Jason Yu, which uses a husband’s sleepwalking as a metaphor for the all the things that can’t be explained in any marriage. However much they love each other, two people can easily perceive the same thing very differently, and that can drive a wedge between the happiest of happy couples.
Worst artistic choice in a film whose subject deserved better: James Marsh’s decision in Dance First, a surprising dull documentary about Samuel Beckett (see what I mean about deserving better?) to have Gabriel Byrne portray two dueling Becketts. Because why? The man’s career is interesting enough without introducing gimmicks. | Sarah Boslaugh
