Critical Week: 33rd Shadows Awards

Here's my top 10 films of 2013, and my top 5 picks in the other major categories. Full lists and a lot more are on the website...

T O P   1 0   F I L M S  

1. American Hustle (David O Russell)
2. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
3. Filth (Jon S Baird)
4. Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)
5. Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche)
6. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)
7. In a World... (Lake Bell)
8. Blancanieves (Pablo Berger)
9. Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass)
10. Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh)

D I R E C T O R  

1. Jon S Baird (Filth)
2. David O Russell (American Hustle)
3. Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave)
4. Sarah Polley (Stories We Tell)
5. Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty)

S C R E E N W R I T E R

1. Lake Bell (In a World...)
2. Asghar Farhadi (The Past)
3. Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha)
4. Eric Warren Singer, David O Russell (American Hustle)
5. Haifaa Al Mansour (Wadjda)

A C T R E S S 

1. Emilie Dequenne (Our Children)
2. Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Colour)
3. Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
4. Paulina Garcia (Gloria)
5. Meryl Streep (August: Osage County)

A C T O R

1. Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)
2. James McAvoy (Filth, Welcome to the Punch, Trance)
3. Matt Damon (Behind the Candelabra, Elysium, The Zero Theorem)
4. Johan Heldenbergh (The Broken Circle Breakdown)
5. Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips, Saving Mr Banks)

S U P P O R T I N G   A C T R E S S  

1. Margo Martindale (August: Osage County, Beautiful Creatures)
2. Kristin Scott Thomas (Only God Forgives, The Invisible Woman, Looking for Hortense)
3. Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire)
4. Nicole Kidman (The Paperboy, Stoker, The Railway Man)
5. Pernilla August (Call Girl)

S U P P O R T I N G   A C T O R 

1. James Franco (Spring Breakers, As I Lay Dying, The Iceman, Homefront)
2. Dane DeHaan (Kill Your Darlings, The Place Beyond the Pines, Jack & Diane)
3. Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)
4. David Oyelowo (The Paperboy, The Butler)
5. Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips)

W O R S T   F I L M 

1. Grown Ups 2 (Dennis Dugan)
2. R.I.P.D. (Robert Schwentke)
3. G.I Joe: Retaliation (Jon M Chu)
4. Bula Quo! (Stuart St Paul)
5. Run for Your Wife (Ray Cooney, John Luton)

I've only seen a couple of documentaries in the past week to fill in some viewing gaps - namely The Square, about the ongoing Egyptian revolution, and The Missing Picture, about the killing fields in Cambodia. I'll have a few more things to catch up with next week, but in the mean time I'm enjoying a bit of a holiday from the movies. or at least the ones that put me in work mode. Happy New Year!

Critical Week: This little piggie

The most striking film of the past week was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's notorious, acclaimed novel Filth, starring James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan, Jim Broadbent, Imogen Poots and Shirley Henderson. Comments on the film are embargoed pending the announcement of a release date (or perhaps a prominent festival slot?). Once the embargo is lifted, this is likely to become one of the most talked-about movies of the year.

Two films were screened very late to critics this past week: the fifth in the Bruce Willis franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard, was more of the same although slightly more coherent than the previous episode, and the teen-franchise launcher Beautiful Creatures caught us off guard when it turned out to be rather good, with strong rising-star performances from Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert. We also had Viggo Mortensen speaking Spanish as identical twins in the atmospheric Argentine thriller Everybody Has a Plan, Brady Corbet speaking French in the unsettling sociopath drama Simon Killer, an indie cast speaking Shakespearean English in Joss Whedon's enjoyable but awkward black and white version of Much Ado About Nothing, Mathieu Kassovitz marshalling the French military on a South Pacific island in the riveting thriller Rebellion, and the contrived but charming New York graffiti artist comedy Gimme the Loot.

There were also three documentaries this week, including Reincarnated, which follows Snoop Dogg's trip to Jamaica to reinvent his music and himself. It's a bit of a stoner comedy, but has some strong moments. And I caught up with two docs nominated for the Oscar on Sunday night: from Israel, The Gatekeepers is a brainy, inventive look at how the Israeli government tries to control Palestine, while The Invisible War is an urgent, stomach-churning exposé of the sexual assault epidemic in the US military.

This coming week we have Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper in the dramatic thriller The Place Beyond the Pines, another all-star Steven Soderbergh cast in the pharmaceutical thriller Side Effects, Richard Gere in the financial drama Arbitrage, Dominic Cooper in the art colony romance Summer in February, Michael Bay's found-footage thriller The Bay and two docs about Aids: Fire in the Blood and How to Survive a Plague, which is the final Oscar nominee for me to catch, just in time for Sunday's ceremony. Watch this space for my predictions as always...