2019 Round-Up

Whither the multiplex? One hundred and seventy-seven reviews in, in a blog that's covered everything from the biggest film on the planet, to a film made for peanuts in someone's room, a pattern is, unmistakably, beginning to occur. We're back in the Studio System. For the uninitiated, this accompanied that Golden Age of cinema recounted in Quentin Tarantino's underwhelming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where the Big Five Studios (20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), essentially divided the vast majority of releases, talent, and directors between them. 

We're back there, in short, and stark tones because Disney, in a year where they made a cool $11.4 billion (a haul that, in GDP terms would make them the 150th country in the world, in front of Fiji and most of the Caribbean), now hold, with just 9 films this year, a terrifying 38% of market share, not to mention their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in March of this year now gives them a veritable warchest of IPs and studios. Hell, this has largely been a decade where Disney have slowly closed a vice-like grip upon culture, through animated and live action cinema. 2020 will be no different, even as 2020 has seen two of their biggest franchises (Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe) end long-running chapters.

Are we living, thus, in a Mickey monoculture over which focus-testing, a bland universalism of squeaky-clean Americana and a faintly sinister military-industrial complex, and easily cuttable tokenism reigns? Not quite. Netflix and Amazon, for companies that have their own share of questionable industry practices are proving themselves a refuge for films that simply cannot hold clout against the might of the Disney Empire, and though Martin Scorsese's comments regarding the theme parkisation of cinema may have, at first felt like the rants of a director simply out of touch with the medium he continues to be a huge influence over-seen nowhere better than in Joker-but the fact that one of America's greatest directors now has to turn to a streaming platform and limited cinematic release to tell what may be his last great gangster epic, The Irishman-should send alarm bells ringing through the medium's creators.

Whether 2020 finally begins to show the gaps in Disney's armour, whether the world finally tired of superhero movies and endless remake, whether some new talent or masterpiece of the smaller screen, of the cinema experience being that of the front room, rather than the multiplex, as television's greatest decade rumbles on onto Netflix and Amazon to challenge it, that I cannot tell. But, whilst 2020 lies before us, 2019 lies behind us, and we cannot end the year without handing out some gongs (and no-so-gongs) to the best and worst that cinema offered us this year:

This year, I'm trying something a little different, so let's start with a few new little awards for a few sub-categories:

Best Thing I Didn't See: Tie (Midsommar/Parasite/The Irishman): One of the downsides of the multiplex, unfortunately, is that well-crafted little gems like these films rarely make it here, and, like mayflies, if they do it's a short engagement only-I am a great fan of both Scorsese and Parasite director, Bong Joon-ho, with both of these films right at the top of my to-watch list, whilst Ari Aster has already carved a niche for himself in creating suspenseful horror that plays on the minds of its audience and characters, with 2017's Hereditary, and now Midsommar, in which he takes the building blocks of horror and builds something fresh and memorable with it.

Best Comedy: Knives Out. In his intricate mechanism of a film, in which the great and the good of Hollywood play a dysfunctional family, and Daniel Craig's Southern Gentleman detective must uncover the murderer of beloved family patriarch, so Rian Johnson critiques, in blackly comic terms, the idea of race, white privelge, the American legal system, and the political landscape of Trump's America in wickedly funny terms, as well as battling his own detractors and internet trolls in a warmly self-referential homage to Christie and other mystery writers

Best Horror: Us: With Jordan Peele cementing himself as a master of social horror movies, after the success of Get Out, so Us is almost a microcosm of horror styles, from the psychological to the slasher, married together with an impressively taut, often funny, and occasionally terrifying story of a woman and her family haunted by her childhood demons, who manifest in perhaps the single most memorable group of horror characters this decade. A perfectly crafted manifestation of internal, and with its social commentary very much external fears and a perfect encapsulation of the fears of the African American community in the last few years

Best Animated: Missing Link. It's a real shame that Missing Link didn't do well at the Box Office, because, despite everything, Studio Laika seem like the one major animation studio still pushing hard at the envelope, not only in terms of what the venerable art of stop-start animation can do, but in their warm-hearted and perfectly crafted films. With a sumptuous visual style, an excellent voice cast, and a well-wrought story of a Sasquatch trying to find his way home, aided and opposed by explorers, it may well be one of the unsung gems of the year.

Best Action: Hobbs and Shaw. Though Johnson (Hobbs) and Statham (Shaw) may well be two alpha male actors going at each other, and eventually Idris Elba's Brixton, it's a remarkably fresh (for the ninth! film in the series) action movie, in which Hobbs and Shaw must put aside their differences in a globe-trotting adventure that takes them across the world to a final, and surprisingly heartwarming, reunion with Hobbs' estranged family in Samoa. The fact that the Fast And Furious is now perhaps one of the great-and impressively inclusive-franchises in the world is testament to their continuing mastery of action cinema

Best Drama: Mary Queen of Scots. In a year where multiple films have explored the concept of female power, few did so with such cinematic beauty and such pointed political subtext as this retelling of the rise and fall of Mary Queen of Scots, and her rivalry with Elizabeth, between the defiantly feminine Mary and the unsexed and manly Elizabeth, between England and Scotland. Josie O'Rourke is a new and interesting talent in cinema, bringing much of her vision as a theatre veteran to one of the most beautiful looking films of the year

Best Soundtrack: (Tie) Joker and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.  John William's final bow as composer for Star Wars is, much like the rest of The Rise of Skywalker, a spectacular re-run through some of his most beloved pieces of music, tying off the franchise that arguably catapulted him to the pantheon of cinematic composers in fine style. Joker's taut score, meanwhile, is a taut and unnerving work, from Hildur Guðnadóttir, capturing the chaotic mind of its protagonist in queasy cello sweeps and percussion, and confirms her, in a year where she's collaborated with drone doom supremos, Sunn O))), as one of the great new composing talents of cinema.

Disappointment of the Year: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: Whilst nothing truly could live up to the ending of forty-two years of hype, of perhaps the greatest cinematic journey our generation have ever experienced, JJ Abrams' kowtowing to the worst elements of the Star Wars fandom, to produce, what, in essence is a "greatest hits" compilation of old moments refracted to tell a disjointed story that fumbles its way for two hours before finally finding its perfect half-hour conclusion...is disappointing, his revisionism more so. Whilst by no means a bad film, its hatchet job on its predecessor and some of its characters, its blundering media strategy, its everything and the kitchen sink plotting approach leaves one questioning a cinematic future for Star Wars given how well its small screen counterpart, The Mandalorian has hit the ground running. Star Wars' saga of three generations of the most dysfunctional family in the galaxy, ends not with a bang but a fan-approved whimper.

Surprise of the Year: Shazam! I wasn't actually sure what to make of the appearance of Shazam! when the flotilla of trailers and stills began to appear; I'm glad to say that that initial fear that we simply had another Marvel-lite film from a floundering DC was entirely misplaced. Not to say that the film, in which a young orphan gains phenomenal powers from a mysterious old man and must battle to protect his city from ominous evil, whilst learning responsibilities along the way doesn't take a few inspirations from Marvel, but there is a great sense of fun, and a lightness that DC has hitherto seemed incapable of finding, in a film that never loses track of its hero's journey, and his childish enthusiasm and temperament, and a Spielbergian charm to match. Roll on 2021 and Shazam 2!

Now, it's time, inevitably, for, the worst films of the years, those who have disappointed myself, and in some cases, audiences around the world. But first!

Worst Performances of the Year.

5: Emelia Clarke (Kate), Last Christmas: This year, Emelia Clarke capped off a decade of playing strong-willed and increasingly tempestuous fantasy princess, Daenerys Targaryen, as Game of Thrones flumped into its eighth and final season. It's somewhat of a disappointment, thus, that Clarke's cinematic outings, for such a talented actress have seen her in such films as the headache inducing Terminator Genesys, the underwhelming Solo and now this. Kate is a Curtisine heroine, given so little likability and charm that whoever played this shambling mess was bound to struggle, and though her relationship with mysterious stranger, Tom, eventually redeems her, and her musical and dancing performances are superb, much like the rest of the film, she is charmless, ill-fitting and overly schmaltzy.

4: Gerard Butler (Mike Banning), Angel has Fallen: I ended my review of Angel Has Fallen by describing Butler as having the "presence of a cardboard cutout", which in hindsight is both inaccurate and unfair. Even in the Fallen series, he's a decent actor, and certainly his work in How to Train Your Dragon among other voice acting roles show a surprising breadth to him as a performer. What it is fair to say is that Butler has become increasingly typecast as what I can best describe as audience avatars, a generic, tough, slightly grizzled white guy for projects too low budget to attract another more major star, or too afraid to cast someone more idiosyncratic. Banning is simply too boring to find interesting, and whilst his scenes with his survivalist father do prove that there are some interesting quirks to the character, they are over far too quickly, and Butler runs the risk of simply eventually being replaced by a computer generated version of himself in upcoming sequels, so flat is his acting.

3: The Entire Adult Cast of The Goldfinch, The Goldfinch: I had the very great temptation of putting the casts of both Amazon Studios films on this list, but the sterling performance of Felicity Jones' (entirely fictitious) Amelia Rennes stopped me. The Goldfinch's cast is a mess, excellent actors, including a barely recognisable Owen Wilson, Ansel Elgort and the film's one saving grace,Aimee Laurence, basically thrown a madlibs version of the novel to non-chronologically pick through, with some extremely uneven results. The child actors, with the possible exception of Finn Wolfhardt who frankly wobbles throughout his entire performance in a terrible accent as a pallid proto-gothic stereotypical Eastern European, are excellent, whilst the adult actors, excluding Aneurin Barnard (ironically playing Wolfhardt's character as an adult) are in places hysterically miscast, making this section (or sections) of the film a complete mess. Whether this is some failure in the casting process, the disjointed narrative, or simply Amazon proving they have no idea how to cast big films, it stone-dead kills the film. 

2: The Entire Cast of Cats, Cats: Cats is a cinematic disaster. At time of writing, the film stands to lose close to $80 million, Tom Hooper's career resembles roadkill and he will doubtless be back to direct Hamilton in mid 2020. No-one gets out of Cats, from British acting royalty to international pop superstars, unscathed, in a series of performances that run the gammut from phoned in to barely corporeal in how little they care. Not to mention the fact that every single one of them is peering out from terribly CGI'd, and in some cases utterly horrifying, feline bodies, in what amounts to an end-of-pier cutout given life. Whilst some of the musical performances are somewhat decent-Taylor Swift sashays through her remarkably short appearance with a degree of glamour-hearing what amount to a bunch of comedians, and bemusingly, cinematic 'ardman, Ray Winstone, croak through songs that sound like lost Depeche Mode singles is execrable. Worst of all is Idris Elba, who should not only fire his agent, but perhaps take a career break and consider why a talent of his stature keeps ending up in films like this; short of everyone disavowing themselves from the film, this is certainly a career low for all of them.


1: Will Smith (The Genie), Aladdin. 2019 is the year Will Smith gave up. I honestly believe his brief appearance at the end of YouTube's self congratulatory back slapping Rewind at the end of 2018 broke the Jiggy Fresh Prince for good, for 2019 has been a series of disastrous performances for him. Gemini Man, whilst technically impressive, felt like a gimmick given a movie for two hours, and the very timing of Spies in Disguise, against not one but two Disney cultural behemoths, tells you all you need to know about it. But the nadir, the single worst performance of the year, is Smith taking on the mantle of Robin Williams' Genie of the Lamp. It is, excuse my language, fucking dire, for two simple reasons

Firstly, and most brutally, Will Smith has given up. He still seems charismatic, still flashes his winning smile, whether he's blue and CGI-the effect is, by the way, terrible-or human, and still raps a verse or two. Will Smith is 51. He was 27 when Fresh Prince ended in the autumn of 1996. And yet, he's still essentially pulling the same tricks, going through the same formula. It feels tired and stale and old-once you've seen Smith in one comedic role, you have seen him in every single one of them-he has no new material, he's still trying to be himself twenty-four years ago. It does not work. The Genie is a charisma vacuum, pushed to central placing over an actor who now struggles, despite being the title character to find work.

Secondly, Will Smith is not Robin Williams. I adore Williams, as an actor, a standup comic, and a performer, and still miss him. Yet, the film simply has Smith essentially play Genie as Will Smith playing Robin Williams, playing the Genie. It's...weird, it doesn't suit Smith, and because Smith is the Genie, the film cannot be visually inventive with its character, as it was in the original hand drawn style. We're stuck with Will Smith, and his live action...Smithness for well over half the film. The character is practically lost for much of the film as Will Smith busies himself being, well, Will Smith, charming but synthetically so.


Finally, the film is utterly beholden to its original self-it could have been interesting, as Jolie has been given the run of Maleficent as a character, to let Smith reinvent the Genie as he sees fit, or, failing that, to get an actor (or actress!) inhabit and bring the role up to date. But no. We get everything, down to large chunk of dialogue, recycled, thrown back at us like a version of the script fed through a shredder and tossed at us, devoid of Williams' charm-lines that had warmth and humour from Robin now seem crass or boorish in Smith's one-note delivery. This zombie performance is, perhaps, the nadir of a year Disney have ruled.

On we go to:

The Worst Films of the Year:

5: The Goldfinch: I've already mentioned the key issues with The Goldfinch, in its uneven casting, and disorientating plotted narrative, but perhaps its besetting sin is that this mess of a narrative is bolted onto the gorgeous camerawork of the master of cinematography, Roger Deakins. It is...almost upsetting that a visual story-teller of this ability is stuck peddling this Cliff-Notes esque distillation of Tartt's novel, his exquisite camera moves and still, painterly frames blundered through with the grace of school children at The National Gallery. If something good can come of it, I hope Deakins' next project is more warmly recieved.

4: Rambo: Last Blood: A painfully unlikable film, in which Sly grimaces his way through a narrative so dog-whistling it feels like Trump re-election propaganda, Mexicans are stereotypical violent rapists aside from the girl who feels like a deliberately foolish victim, and Rambo is old, grumpy and reactionary. The violence, including a brutal R-18 rendition of Home Alone pitfalls and traps may be an attempt to give John a Logan-esque sendoff, but there's no pathos, no earned end, no point to this presumably last outing for Rambo, in the one film this year I actively never want to see again.


3: Cats: Cats is a joyful mess, a complete carcrash of a film in which nothing is finished, including the horrifying fever-dream visual effects, the story makes no sense-did it ever make sense, even on Broadway?-and every second, your sanity slips away as your soft squishy human brain is assailed with countless strange and unsettling sights. Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, eat your hearts out. The ultimate psychedelic vision of the human mind has arrived, in all its mind altering glory. And it stars Rebel Wilson and James Corden. It is the one film that, if only to experience the terror of it on the big screen, I implore you to see before its too late. Or before it gets patched again. Either or.

2: Last Christmas: Like being trapped at a relative's with an increasingly drunken family, Last Christmas is almost certainly destined to be part of the festive calendar for years to come, and like Christmas these days, it is crass, annoying, features songs you and most of human civilisation have forgotten about for years, relies mostly on Chinese labour, and only has a passing nod to the deceased vaguely Mediterranean man it originally was intended to be about. It is a blunt object of a film, the rom-com not as enjoyable experience but as Christmas siege weapon, determined to ram as much Christmassy, George Michael-themed joy down into your empty cold heart as possible.

 1: Tie: The Lion King, Aladdin, Dumbo. The Disney remake is the final boss of late-stage capitalism. *sniff*. And so on. That two of Disney's Renaissance films have been remade this year (bringing this particular score to three, including the underwhelming Beauty and the Beast) is the start of the indiciation that these films are not merely attempting to keep Disney property from falling off the edge of intellectual property, although Disney have single-handedly restructured American copywrite law to avoid this ever happening to Mickey et all, but cannibalising their own nostalgia, remaking films to bring in the generation that grew up with the original films back in for a second helping with their children in tow, in films that feel faintly regressive and infantilised, a warm, reassuring and nostalgic hug from your favourite characters that just happens to make about a billion dollars a time.

These films simply put, feel like the end-product of launching multi-million dollar advertising campaigns for their classic animated movies, to bring familiar brands such as The Lion King and Aladdin in the laziest way possible, regurgitating entire films, with few changes-and what changes are made are either tokenism, a gentle wiping away of any moral greyness or nuance for the piece, to make as marketable and palletable for as large an audience as possible, or a headscratching backstep. All of these films are, bluntly, all three-whilst Aladdin is the worst, a musical made by a man who has no idea how to shoot a song and dance number, or indeed, it seems, how to write a comedy, all three are a pale shadow of their originals, Dumbo made too long, too dark, and too complex for a simple fairytale, whilst Lion King is a soulless bunch of effects work masquerading as a film.

In a decade, if not shorter, these films will look old, and tired and boring, whilst the originals will be as vibrant, as timeless, as well-crafted as they are now. Make 2020, and its onward march to a Disney World the last stand of these tiresome, cheap, exploitative marketing rollouts that call themselves cinema

With the bad out of the way, it's time, at last, to look at the best performances and films of 2019; it's certainly been a classic year in some respects; with no further ado:

Best Performances of the Year:

5: Ian McDiarmid and Adam Driver (Emperor Palpatine and Kylo Ren), Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker: It's a commonly accepted fact that Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine, in all his camp villain glory, saved the Star Wars prequels from being...well, worse, and he's back again, in the final outing for the space opera, to do it once more, stealing many of the moments he's in at his cackling mad best, and certainly getting the lion's share of the best lines. This time, however, he's not alone. Driver's Ren is almost the total opposite of this campy villany, a cold, often violent fanatic, quick to anger, and utterly seduced by the Dark Side, who the film steadily breaks down, despite Abrams' inconsistency, and steadily redeems, dismantling the mental and indeed physical barriers that this character has thrown up around himself, in several sequences that reveal once again the frightened boy behind the mask, and finally bring him in from the cold. If Skywalker is an ultimately disappointing film, this falls not on its passionate cast, but its writer and director's attempt to quell an overloud minority in an ever more toxic fandom


4: Lupita Nyong'o (Adelaide/Red), Us: To have one superb performance in a film is impressive. Two requires a rare talent. Such is Lupita Nyong'o's dual performance as scared and often neurotic mother, Adelaide, haunted by her past, and her nightmarish experience, and the subject of that experience, the doppleganger, Red, a haunting, disturbing reflection of herself, as dangerous and vengeful mastermind of a plan to unite the dopplegangers of America everywhere. This ying-and-yang performance practically holds the film together, as Adelaide attempts to defend her family from the Tethered, as these dopplegangers name themselves, and this question of identity, of race and upbringing, runs throughout the film itself, in a pair of powerful performances

3: Renée Zellweger (Judy Garland), Judy. Judy is, to my surprise, one of my favourite films of the year, and much of this is due to Zellweger, who inhabits Garland to such a degree that she almost becomes the performer and actresss, disappearing entirely into the role. She captures Garland at the end of her career perfectly, a mix of fragile, neurotic woman, broken down by the decades of drug addiction, the weight of the very nature of being famous, and the slowly disentrgrating world of her family life, and one of the single best performers ever to grace the screen, a fearless and remarkably outspoken women who is fiercely loyal to her fans, and to those she percieves as marginised and downtrodden as herself. We get, in short, a perfect encapsulation of Garland the performer and the person.



2: Olivia Colman (Queen Anne), The Favourite: Much as the film around her floats between serious drama, and bawdy comedy, so Colman's Anne floats between comic figure, a surprisingly poignant and broken woman, rocked by the effects of losing her children and her failing health, and a surprisingly erotic figure, capturing the interests of cousins Abigail and Sarah as they vie for her attentions and the power that this grants them. Rarely has a monarch-in the same year, Coleman has also played the reigning Elizabeth II-been portrayed with such unflinching focus, and tenderness, in a portrait of power, politics and passion that places Anne at its centre, a figure as much to be feared as to be loved, who wields and is beholden to power in equal measure-it is a film for this age, reflecting another.


1: Awkwafina (Billi Wang), The Farewell: At the centre of Lulu Wang's semi-autobiographical The Farewell is the figure of Billi, a young Chinese woman who has spent much of her childhood in the States and now returns home to, together with her family, bid farewell to family matriach, Nai Nai. What follows, in a film that is as funny as it is moving, with charm and warmth throughout, is essentially one young woman exploring her sense of self, of the selfish insular American and the selfless, collective Chinese, and finding herself between the two. Yet, what Awkwafina brings to this role above all, in a film that is largely in Mandarin, is that most important thing, a window, a surrogate at the lavishly laden table, a Western perspective on the matter-of-fact proceedings as Nai-Nai's life seems to draw to its close, and cements Awkwafina as a major talent in an industry slow to accept new voices into the fold; with an impressive set of films on the horizon for 2020, I can't wait to see her become one of the major talents in Hollywood in years to come

And thus we come at long last to the:

Best Films of the Year:

5: Ad Astra (Directed by James Gray) Ad Astra very much fell through the gaps, and that's a pity; it barely made bank, and despite critical acclaim, has barely been nominated for any awards. Yet I adored this beautiful, and remarkably unflashy film about space exploration that tackles things as weighty as the role of fatherhood, faith and the idea of intelligent life beyond the stars. In short, Brad Pitt's spaceman goes in search of his errant father (Tommy Lee Jones) across space in a film that inevitably draws comparison, with its exquiste visuals, slow moving sensibility and classical score with Kubrick's 2001 and Tarkovsky's Solaris, whilst the mechanics, ethics and clear dangers of space are brought to life in minute detail. Yet, where Solaris and 2001 end in cold contemplation, there is something warmly human about the ending of Ad Astra where Pitt considers the beauty of what we have on earth to be of equal importance to what we have in the skies above us, that makes this film feel all the more important in this day and age


4: Avengers Endgame (Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo). Ending a decade long story is difficult at the best of times, but with the weight of over twenty films atop it may have seemed insurmountable. Yet, Endgame ends the journeys of several characters an entire generation have grown up with, and with it, the reign of Thanos, in spectacular style in a film that pays homage not only to the previous movies, but the fanbase that made this franchise nigh unstoppable. With our heroes scattered and the Infinity Stones destroyed, so our heroes must pull off a time heist across multiple previous adventures to defeat Josh Brolin's Thanos and restore the world. If nothing else, Endgame is the end of an epoch of cinema, and behind it stretches a series of films that have changed the form of cinematic story telling forever. It may be the endgame, but one gets the feeling that Marvel, now armed with a whole new world to build, are only getting started


3: The Favourite (Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos): In its depiction of a battle for female power, so Lanthimos creates a tale that explores female relationships both interpersonal, in the case of warring relatives Sarah and Abigail (sterling performances from Weisz and Ston), whose relationship eventually turns violent and sours, and romantic, in the case of their battles for the hand and affection of the ailing Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman). Escewing the stuffy trappings of the period drama for the bawdy, the irreverent and the remarkably tender and nuanced, so this becomes a far more modern and far more complex tale, where each character finds themselves in a complicated set of political, sexual and emotional ties to each other, and where the film's resolution is both potent and bittersweet.  


2: Knives Out (Directed by Rian Johnson). Knives Out is a damning social satire disguised in the form of a murder mystery, with kindly patriarch Harlan Thrombey's apparent suicide rocking his complex and cantankerous family to the core, into which Daniel Craig's southern gent detective wanders to investigate, in a film that, through its heroine, Marta, (a tour-de-force of a performance Ana de Armas), explores race, power, class, and the political landscape in the United States, from hand wringing liberals to internet alt-righters, only to depict them all as bad as one another when their wealth and status is threatened. To see Johnson bounce back so strongly from the knives drawn on him by the ever more volatile geekdom is nothing short of edifying, but to create a work like this proves that the creator will always be more powerful than the critic, no matter how loud they shout.

1: The Farewell (Directed by Lulu Wang) For a film to meditate both upon culture and upon death with such a warmth, a deftness, to find its home, despite being regarded, like its heroine as too Chinese for the West, and too Western for China, for this film, almost entirely in Mandarin, to manage to move audiences across the world is remarkable. The Farewell is a beautiful film, not only in its warm, if utterly heartbreaking depiction of dealing with loss, not only of one's relative, but one's identity that that relative represents, but also in its depiction of family, of identity, of exploring what nationality and belonging to two countries feels like.

Most of all, though, The Farewell matters. To borrow my own words, since I feel much about this film as I did when I first saw it. [The Farewell] closes, perhaps in the way it needs to, with a compromise between these two worlds, in Billi coming to terms not only with her bi-culturality, but also in these two radically different ways of living, and ending, a life. The Farewell feels like a vital meditation upon living with a foot in two cultures, and few films before it have captured this with such care, warmth, and wit before, and few films have left me as utterly in love with cinema as a medium, as this tale of life, and how to end it, does 

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I would like to thank my readers for your continued support. The role of a critic, to borrow a few paraphrased words from the late great Sir Peter O'Toole, is not to tear down a film, even in the most merited of targets, but merely to give their views, to signpost towards the remarkable, no matter how small or meagre it may seem at first, and away from what they feel others will gain no benefit in viewing. If even one of my reviews has encouraged you to see a film, to part, after all with your well-earned income, to pick one of a bafflingly large number of movies and other forms of entertainment, all vying for your attention, then I consider my work done. Here's to 2020 and another year of these words, these signposts, a year where I hope I find many remarkable and interesting films to bring to your attention.. Thank you.