Art visual np2

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...

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. ...

Ouch. Now that's a tough one: naming the best films of a decade. Most people miss the majority of great films in any given year, far worse over the course of a decade. For me, 'the noughties' were filled with some really, really wicked films that were produced in era which began with questions of the threat of terrorism and ended with a black man sitting in the Oval office. In between, there was renewed concern over the role of technology in human society and of the impact of human beings on the environment. Somehow, all of these issues, if you look carefully, were reflected in the collective aesthic, film or otherwise. But anyhow, enough of that. Here are my personal favorites. FIRST TEN: 1. Cache (2005) It starts with deception. We see the exterior of a house; it is a typical suburbian street in a city. But then we realise that we are watching the image of a video; the video is being watched by two characters whose family home has been filmed over the course of a day. The...

This was a good year for films, especially if you lived in Trinidad and Tobago where the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (TTFF) really hit new highs, screening strong international films, and good local stuff like: The Solitary Alchemist , Coolie Pink and Green and Bury Your Mother . I've picked my favorite films for the year and judging from how many of you  LOVED James Cameron's Avatar  (which does not make my list I'm quite afraid to say) I figure I'm in for some serious slack for these choices. First of all, how DARE I declare Tomas Alfredson's  Let the Right One In to be the best film of the year, when most people never even heard of it or missed its screening here in Trinidad at studiofilmclub earlier this year? And why is fellow vampire flick  Twilight: New Moon NOT on my list? Didn't I get the memo about the pale and undead being HOT this year? 1. Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) You're getting beaten up in school everyday. It...