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Tom Hiddleston in Joanna Hogg's sublime film Archipelago The best film of the year is not always the same as one's favourite film of the year. The former is destined to remain a classic, watched and studied (perhaps in film school) for decades to come. The latter is the film you are most likely to pop into the DVD player when you get home on a rainy Saturday night. In the spirit of today's Oscars, here's a look at some of our favourite films from the past year. Archipelago. Posh family tensions crack open over a getaway to the Isles of Scilly. Sounds unappealing as the subject matter for a film? Hold your horses. This film from English director Joanna Hogg was an utter surprise. Very few films are all about pleasure and the senses. This film ravishes, it is washed with such pale and cold browns and greens, it is wind and rain-swept. Every single shot is composed with a kind of sly joy: the film is like one long, extended still-life rupturing ever so slightly via change...

Antonio Banderas in The Skin I Live In This is the creepiest Almodovar film yet, and that's saying something for the great Spanish director. La Piel Que Habito is an uneasy blend of suspense/thriller and melodrama. To describe the plot is to rob the film of part of its considerable power. That said, the movie follows a crazed plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas in the performance of his career) and his experiments on a woman he keeps captive at his home. From the start, an overwhelming sense of mystery intrigues each scene. Slowly, bit by bit, Almodovar lays down plot pieces of a complex puzzle which coils into a frenzy of sex, violence, gore and murder. The film falters and lags, however, in its middle section, especially after Almodovar deploys the device of the expository conversation to reveal crucial plot points. Also, the film sometimes lacks the flair we expect from Almodovar. It's as though the weirdness overwhelms key plot sequences which, in an Almodovar film, normally...

TT Film Festival 2011:  Hit Me With Music  ( 74 mins, Directed by Miquel Galofre) Here is a film which understands all sides of its subject matter, dancehall. Miquel Galofre's sharp documentary examines how dance becomes a mode of expression, a realm of violence and, for some, an act of redemption. We eat, sleep, dream dance, one dancer remarks. In Hit Me With Music , this becomes poignantly true. The film, screening at the TT Film Festival makes keen social observations without coming to a didactic conclusion. It is an open, breathing, living thing that reveals its director's understanding and compassion for humanity. This is one the best films of 2011 and continues a winning streak for Galofre whose last film was Why Do Jamaicans Run So Fast? Here   is a director of great sensitivity whose films play like odes to the people who inhabit them. ***** SCREENS ON SATURDAY, 7pm, MOVIETOWNE Miquel Galofre

Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre THE LATEST film version of Charlotte Bronte's novel understands, perhaps more than those that have come before it, that the book's melancholic gothicism goes hand in hand with its eroticism. From the very opening of the film, there is an overwhelming sense of the more sensational aspects of Bronte's novel which is famous for defying genres and for hiding different strands of critique within its tightly wrought Yorkshire coils. Mia Wasikowska is the best Jane on film (there have been many fine renditions, including those by Samantha Morton (1997) and Charlotte Gainesbourg (1996)). She understands Jane's deeper conflict and temptations, as well as her purity, integrity and naivety. As Rochester, Michael Fassbender never quite manages to escape Orson Welles' shadow (1943) but he brings a sense of the scoundrel that is at the heart of a character who must be attractive, yet, in some ways, repulsive. Plus, he's easy on the eyes. Unlike pre...

1. Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In It's a bad title (reads better in Spanish: La Piel que Habito ) but Almodovar has been on a winning streak for the last decade starting with Habla Con Ella . A string of films: Bad Education , Volver and Broken Embraces have cemented his technical proficiency. Of these films, Bad Education remains my personal favorite with its particularly dark humour, kinkiness and treatment of a deeply taboo subject. The film resembles something of a personal fetish and a prayer; the tone is one of a hidden secret which the director is seeking to set free amidst a puzzle of plot devices. Unforgettable. Volver was a perfect film; perhaps a little too perfect. Broken Embraces was a stylistic tour de force that lacked something of the edge of the best Almodovar. The subject matter of The Skin I Live In (a plastic surgeon who keeps his wife prisoner) seems like the perfect antidote. 2. Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life I enjoyed Malick's The N...

True Grit is a better movie than you expect it to be. And it's truly great. It's not a remake but rather a reboot. A second adaptation of a 1968  bildungsroman by Charles Portis. At first blush, this is not material you expect to be a right fit for the Cohen brothers ( No Country for Old Men , Fargo ). There's Jeff Bridges in an eye-patch-wearing role first taken up by John Wayne. Bridges does not play Wayne here. He's Jeff Bridges playing Rooster Cogburn, a boozy hired vigilante with an apparent soft spot for little girls. Also with a soft spot for little girls is Matt Damon, playing LaBoeuf, who, with Cogburn, hunt down the murderer of Hailee Steinfeld's dad. There are enough Freudian impulses going on here to easily take over what could have been a simple wild wild American west movie. Instead, the Cohen brothers go for edge, for character, beauty, intensity and, ultimately, the bittersweet and sublime. It's like No Country for Old Men but with spanking! U...

Black Swan is a cruel and terrifying film. It plumbs the depths of one character’s fears and insecurities and makes us reflect on our own. It is not at all concerned with ballet, but rather the study of a character who achieves tragic proportions. And as with all tragedy, it is built upon one character’s fatal flaw. “The only thing in your way is you,” the artistic director of a New York ballet company tells Nina (Natalie Portman). The artistic director is Thomas Leroy (played Vincent Cassel) and he issues this advice at a crucial point in the film. One of the strongest aspects of Black Swan is how it is not about the world of dance, even though it is anchored in it. To say that it is filled with dance-movie clichés is to miss the point. Here is a thriller that is more Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion rather than The Red Shoes . The film is almost certainly set in Nina’s mind as she pirouettes to a breaking point that is possibly physiological or psychological—or even both. The plot f...

Intoxicating song which comes at a crucial moment of Almodovar's last film, Broken Embraces , starring Penelope Cruz. The film itself is standard Almodovar: dark, self-reflexive, profound and hilarious. It is, like all Almodovar films, essentially a soap opera with a plot so effortlessly convoluted and full of secrets that it cannot be summarised. This time, though, it lacks the edge and genuine complexity of some of the Spanish director's earlier work like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Bad Education and Talk to Her . But it is still unforgettable.

It's good. Thank goodness. And the fact that it ends mid-way through the action is a huge plus, avoiding all that sentimental wrapping-up that often accompanies the denouements of the prior films. If you have not read the Harry Potter books, you may at some points have NO IDEA what is going on. But this does not stop any of the fun. I sometimes found certain lapses of logic and then I snapped out of it: after all, it's a film about a bloody boy wizard flying around the place on a broomstick. HELLO! The acting in this film is also up a notch, the characters have matured a bit, though they remain stockish. The use of landscape in this film was incredible and, for the first time in a Potter film, I found the special effects completely convincing. Not spoiling things too much I will say this: like in the last film, a major character dies. Be prepared for tears. ALL IN ALL: **** 

It's looking like a cross between Iron Man and... Iron Man . With Chris Evans (the flame from Fantastic Five ...or Four ?) There are concerns over the tired tones: "There is a distinct whiff of Iron Man to the debut trailer for Green Lantern, which hit the web earlier this week. Cocky hero plunged unexpectedly into superherodom and required to shape up to new responsibilities? Check. Rousing hard rock soundtrack? Check. Attractive female discarded with wisecracking insouciance? Yes, Green Lantern even borrows an early scene from Jon Favreau's 2008 film--- Guardian, UK . We await with trepidation!

The year is almost over, and there is still plenty of time to see lots of films but I thought I'd mention which were among my favorites for 2010 thus far: 1) I must start with I Am Love , which I love. It's a deeply melodramatic, but stunning, stylish and bravura film with Tilda Swinton playing a Russian-Italian woman. Nuf said? It's all very glossy and beautiful, but with a deeper purpose and intention in mind. The closing scenes are unforgettable, and so is Tilda Swinton who suggests oceans of emotion without batting an eyelash. Amazing. The soundtrack features music by the great American composer John Adams.  2) Reading a summary of this film, you'd be forgiven for thinking this the  Brokeback Mountain for orthodox jews. Eyes Wide Open is so much more than that. This is one of the most fascinating, beautiful and compelling  films I have ever seen. The attention to craft is subtle and non-ostentatious. Discover it yourself. It's probably the best film of the yea...

(WARNING REVIEW HAS SPOILERS) I disagree with Roger Ebert who claims this is one of the best films of the year. My favorite films this year, thus far, are: Eyes Wide Open , Inception , The Social Network, The Ghost Writer and Stone . The American simply does not make the cut. It is not suspenseful and is rather slow-burning in a bad, predictable way. George Clooney is dreary in a dreary film with no life. I guess this mirrors the central character's dilemna, but alas, the film replicates this far too effectively. We sit and watch for minutes and minutes as nothing really happens, and then he dies at the end (or kinda) as he drives towards a woman he likes. People in the cinema walked out constantly. Sheesh. It's like the James Bond film when he gets married and then the wife dies. Cept this time its the man, not the woman, that goes down in the name of love. Rating: ** From the best film of the year, Eyes Wide Open . WATCH trailer here .

"It starts with the image of a woman’s eyes. Then, slowly, dancing plumes of white and pink smoke. Then the woman again, dancing. An opening title tells us the history of the indentured East Indians who came to Trinidad in the nineteenth century. Two narrators — one a young Indo-Trinidadian woman, the other an older man — use sometimes rhyming verse to weave the central conflict that is the subject matter of Coolie Pink and Green: a conflict left unresolved at the end of this poetic short film by the Trinidadian scholar Patricia Mohammed..." READ the full review at the Caribbean Review of Books' special section on Caribbean film here . FIND out more at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival blog here .

Hey guys, it's been a long week. But tonight I'm looking forward to having some fun blogging the Oscars live. In case you don't know what the Oscars are, click here . If you haven't heard as yet, Avatar and The Hurt Locker are going to win everything. So here we go! (Click 'Refresh' on your browser for updates). *** 9.15pm (Trinidad and Tobago time): There should be about one hour of pre-show stuff on the red carpet. I must say, of all the films nominated for Best Picture (there are ten this year) my favorite was Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds . I think Up In the Air  is the most overrated film of the year. 9.30pm: Things just started with Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Houser?) He's singing in a black, sparkling, sequin suit. Steve Martin and Alex Baldwin are our hosts. They were just lowered onto the stage. I'm feeling bored. Been working too much, as usual. Time for some tea...No wait can't miss the first two awards--the supporting actor categ...

Leonardo DiCaprio suffers from one hell of a migraine  The buried subject of Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island is more surprising than the film's final twist. While any viewer is likely to see the closing 10 minutes coming from the start of the movie, she is not likely, however, to have expected Scorcese's brilliant (and oblique) examination of World War II. True, Scorcese's source material, a novel of the same name penned by Denis Lahane (author of Mystic River) does deal with the aftermath of the war. But in this film, the director of Taxi Driver  and The Departed  is doing far more than being faithful to his source material. In 1954, U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio in his best film performance to date) is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Boston's infamous Shutter Island Ashecliffe Hospital. With his partner Chuck (the undervalued Mark Ruffalo), he sets off to the island and arrives to find one hell of a creepy institution. ...