8 December 2014-12-08

The cartoonised Robin Wright in Ari Folman's The Congress

Out in the UK This Week The Congress (StudioCanal, cert 15) With Waltz with Bashir, director Ari Folman used Tintin-esque animation as the visual clothing to a set of sober taped interviews between himself and the buddies heā€™d served with in Israelā€™s war against Lebanon. The Congress does similar unusual things, propelling Robin Wright ā€“ playing an actor called Robin Wright who has elected to have herself digitised and therefore immortalised ā€“ into an animated world when she attends ā€œthe congressā€, the occasional gathering of other fictional figures. The real world looks like a workaday real world, as lived by rich Hollywood, leading to the suspicion that Folman is remaking Andrew Niccol’s digitised-actors … Read more

The Best Films of 2014

Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin

Of the 350+ films I saw this year, these are the best ones. Some of them were released last year and Iā€™ve been a bit slow getting round to them. Some of them were released even longer ago. The criteria are ā€“Ā I watched them in 2014 and I liked them. Thatā€™s it. The Best Computer Chess (2013, dir: Andrew Bujalski) Andrew Bujalski, inventor of mumblecore, proved thereā€™s life in the old beast yet with this retro-veritĆ© drama about geeks meeting in the 1980s to pit their programs against a chess-playing computer. Shooting on original video cameras in fuzzy-edged boxellated black and white, Bujalski catches the moment when the let-it-all-hang-out era died and our … Read more