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Now the Guardian’s Top 50 countdown, as voted for by the whole film team, has announced its No 1, here are our chief critic’s personal choices
With afternoons still dark, woolly gloves and scarves retrieved from cupboards; housefronts flickering with neon Santas and mulled wine recipes getting Googled, it is time for me once again to present the “Braddies”, my strictly personal movie awards list for the calendar year coming to an end (as distinct from the film section’s collegiate best-of-year list).
This means top 10s for film, director, actor and supporting actor, best actress and supporting actress, directorial debut, cinematographer, screenplay and film most likely to be overlooked by the boomer mainstream media (MSM).
In Britain this year we celebrated the unlikely phenomenon of #Barbenheimer, something that began as a social media gag but actually put bums on seats. People were going to see Christopher Nolan’s searing A-bomb drama Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s comedy Barbie – seeing them together, that is, and usually in that order with Barbie the emollient dessert after Nolan’s chewy main course. Those two films gave a rocket boost to UK cinema admissions and hinted that audiences were getting a bit tired of superhero films and wanted new stories from original storytellers.
Of course, the cinema scene had its share of water-cooler disputes and op-ed quarrels. Ridley Scott’s spectacular Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, was coldly greeted by some. In interviews, Sir Ridley naughtily baited historians. They obligingly spluttered. I can only say this film’s inaccuracies were flagrant – and so was its excitement, energy, brio and glorious vulgar dash. It was nowhere near boring enough to be respectable.
But there was another more complicated film dispute to be found on social media: concerning Emerald Fennell’s movie of the jeunesse dorée Saltburn – a twist on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead with a bit of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. Now I wasn’t totally convinced by this film but if anything was going to bring me back round it was the clumsy attacks and quote-tweet putdowns aimed at Fennell’s privileged background. Her detractors seemed unmoved by or unaware of all the male posh people in the business. Emerald Fennell is posh. And? So was Visconti.
This was the year Hollywood’s actors and writers flexed their muscles with strikes, with actual industrial action: something rarely if ever depicted in a Hollywood movie, and only then usually as something tragically compromised or ineffective. And these strikes, unlike almost any other kind of strike, were treated more or less sympathetically in the media. The Writers Guild of America was out from May to September and the Sag-Aftra union, representing actors, from July to September. And they got a deal – securing understandings on residual payments from streaming services and restrictions on AI. It’s something that our British writers and actors, without that kind of industrial muscle, can only wonder at. The strike left behind a picture-gallery of #nofilter and #nomakeup Instagram shots of beaming, placard-wielding stars.
But a pantomime villain emerged from Hollywood cinema this year – a horrible baddie, what the world of American wrestling calls a “heel”, a snarling monster that everyone in the business was booing. And that was Mr David Zaslav, the man who last year had taken over as CEO of Warner Bros Discovery; he was initially praised for his avowed plan to pivot away from releasing films direct to streaming services. How we cheered Mr Zaslav when he announced his commitment to films in real-live cinemas. But our cheers died on our lips when it became clear that Mr Zaslav wanted to save cash by ruthlessly taking a tax write-down on a finished film: Batgirl. All that work, from all those creative professionals, simply locked away. And what made it worse was that Zaslav tried it again with another film, a Looney Tunes comedy, Coyote vs Acme – another piece of sweated labour that he wanted to lock away for ever against tax. This time, the uproar from the industry was deafening. Zaslav backed down, offering Coyote vs Acme to other distributors. He then defiantly insisted his move was “courageous”. The mood was clear. Don’t mess with your creatives’ hard work. It was a good message to end on.
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