CAN WE TALK? (THE MOVIES IN 2013)
2013 was the year when cinema went into an existential crisis.
Hollywood studios bombarded audiences with noisy, overblown blockbusters, so-so animations and a succession of lame comedies.
But some of cinema's most respected actors and directors began to openly question whether the studio system was broken. Some even started to migrate to the small screen in search of decent work.
After releasing 'Behind the Candelabra' in European cinemas but on US television for HBO, Steven Soderbergh was so dispirited, he announced his retirement from making movies.
Whether Soderbergh was right to abandon cinema was questionable as a rash of strong independent movies at the end of the year proved.
But there was no doubt that Hollywood's studios seemed less inclined towards funding decent mainstream feature dramas and more inclined towards effects driven blockbusters like 'Iron Man 3' and 'Man of Steel'.
The rise of quality longform TV dramas like 'Breaking Bad', 'Game of Thrones' and 'House of Cards USA' and TV movies like 'The Girl' and 'Game Change' offered writers, directors and actors greater creative control.
But what were the highs and lows of 2013 and who were cinema's heroes and villains?
BIGGEST SURPRISE: I've never been much of a fan of horror movies but I do appreciate a well made one.
However James Wan's 'The Conjuring' wasn't just well made, it was thrillingly executed. Moving away from the torture porn genre of 'Saw', Wan delivered old school thrills in this tale of demonic possession in a dilapidated Rhode Island farmhouse and he milked every creaking floorboard, clap and thud until its spine tingling climax.
Add into the mix John R Leonotti's creeping camera, Kirk M Mori's astute editing and top notch performances from Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor, Shanley Caswell, Hayley McFarland, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy and Kyla Deaver and you had one of the scariest movies of the past decade.
Ben Affleck's gripping Iran hostage thriller 'Argo' was a popular Best Picture winner - although if we were being really honest, Michael Haneke's 'Amour' should have won. But for a dreadful moment, Steven Spielberg's 'Lincoln' looked like it could lift the top prize.
Expectations were high for Spielberg's biopic about one of the US's greatest Presidents but it was a curiously stodgy and pompous affair, featuring a buttoned up and quite irritating Oscar winning performance from Daniel Day Lewis.
There was a typically grating turn from Sally Fields as Lincoln's wife Mary Todd and a surprisingly wimpy performance from Joseph Gordon Levitt as the President's son, Robert.
Only the gruff screen presence of Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens managed to breathe some life into Tony Kushner's Norwegian Blue of a screenplay. 'Lincoln' was so dull it made sitting through the entire Second Reading of the Northern Ireland Assembly's Road Traffic (Speed Limits) Bill appealing.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's work leaves me cold and the penchant for shows like 'Mamma Mia!' and 'Jersey Boys' fashioned around pop stars' back catalogues doesn't impress me much.
So after all the hoopla over Susan Boyle's rendition of 'I Dreamed A Dream a couple of years ago on ITV's mind numbing 'Britain's Got Talent', I was actually dreading Tom Hooper's big screen treatment of Alan Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg's musical.
How wrong was I? Who couldn't be impressed by the lavish spectacle of Hooper's film of the musical of Victor Hugo's novel, from the stunning opening sequence where Hugh Jackman's Jean Valjean and fellow chain gang captives pull a ship into a dock from a storm tossed sea to the stirring scenes of revolution on the streets of Paris?
The Oscar went to Anne Hathaway for her committed Best Supporting Actress performance as the tragic Fantine and deservedly so.
With Paco Delgado's eye catching costumes and Danny Cohen's majestic cinematography, Hooper delivered a wonderful effects laden follow up to his Oscar winning 'The King's Speech' and his Brian Clough drama 'The Damned United', confirming him as one of the most assured directors working in Hollywood today.
'Les Miserables' made a whopping $441 million at the box office on a budget of $61 million and gave us much more bang for our buck than the tired superhero blockbusters that invaded our multiplexes this year.
MOST UNDERRATED MOVIE: 'Good Vibrations' may have been a record store in a past life. it may have become a movie but it was also a way of life for Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa.
The husband and wife directorial team crisscrossed continents during 2012 and 2013 to promote their wonderfully uplifting biopic of the Belfast record store owner, punk impresario and rebel spirit, Terri Hooley and for those who waited until its 2013 cinema release, it was well worth it.
The movie had a witty and extremely imaginative screenplay from Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson. It had a blistering soundtrack and a charismatic central performance from Richard Dormer as Terri Hooley. It had strong supporting performances from, among others, Jodie Whittaker, Liam Cunningham and Kerr Logan. And it also had Adrian Dunbar in a wig.
Championed by Mark Kermode and Ron Howard, Leyburn and D'Sa's deserved a much better promotional campaign than it got in the UK and Ireland. But it was nevertheless a triumph of smart directing, razor sharp acting and committed storytelling that bodes well for the careers of Leyburn and D'Sa.
It deserves a cult following in universities, in arthouse cinemas, on DVD and on streaming platforms and it should be Northern Ireland cinema's 'Teenage Kicks' moment.
A friend once told me the Yogi Bear movie was so bad he would have had a much better time gouging out his eyes with spoons.
However 2013 was spectacularly bad for family movies - particularly those of the animated variety.
Despite getting off to a decent start with 'Wreck It Ralph', audiences were subjected to preachy and bland animations like 'Epic', racial stereotypes in 'Planes' but mostly wiseass comedies like 'Despicable Me 2' and 'Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2'.
Thank God, therefore, for Disney's 'Frozen' with its strong plot, its well developed characters, its show stopping catchy tunes, its stunning animation and its delightful cast. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee's animation was not just the best family movie by a country mile but by the length of a whole continent.
So imagine our excitement when, on one of the hottest days of the year, we made the pilgrimage to our local multiplex to see the long awaited prequel, 'Monsters University'.
On paper, 'Monsters University' had everything going for it - a back story about how Sully and Mike first met, John Goodman and Billy Crystal returning to some of their best loved roles as Sully and Mike and, of course, the Disney-Pixar pedigree.
Onscreen, it was a huge disappointment, however, with director Dan Scanlon failing to match the humour, the pace or the guile of the original.
BIGGEST LOSS TO CINEMA: 2013 ended with the deaths of the screen icons, Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine but also saw cinema say goodbye to Richard Briers, Richard Griffiths, Ray Harryhausen, Dennis Farina, Eileen Brennan, Elmore Leonard, Karen Black and Tom Clancy.
However, without a doubt, the biggest surprise was the passing of James Gandolfini at the age of 51 while holidaying in Rome. Gandolfini's signature role may have been as the troubled Mobster, Tony Soprano on the small screen.
But he left behind him a host of strong movie performances, sometimes in otherwise iffy films.
On the cinema screen, he impressed as a tormented detective in Sidney Lumet's 'Night Falls On Manhattan', a gay hitman in Gore Verbinski's 'The Mexican', a grotesque businessman in the Coen Brothers' 'The Man Who Wasn't There', an arrogant military prison colonel in Rod Lurie's 'The Last Castle', a jumpy New York Mayor in Tony Scott's 'The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3' and as the voice of a manic depressive monster in Spike Jonze's 'Where the Wild Things Are'.
It was fitting that Gandolfini left us with three of his best movie performances as a depressed Mafioso in Andrew Dominick's hugely underrated 'Killing Me Softly', as a CIA director in Kathryn Bigelow's Bin Laden drama 'Zero Dark Thirty' and as an unlikely romantic hero in Nicole Holofcener's delightful comedy 'Enough Said' in a role that might just land him a posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
In 'Behind the Candlelabra', Richard LaGravense generated laughs when Michael Douglas' Liberace responded to news that his boyfriend was bisexual: "Which half likes women? I haven't met that half yet."
Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry gave Richard Dorner's Terri Hooley a distinctively Belfast movie catchphrase in 'Good Vibrations': "Up yer hole, EMI!"
But the line that raised the hairs on the back of the neck were delivered by Barkhad Abdi's gun toting Somali pirate to Tom Hanks in 'Captain Phillips' after he seized control of his merchant ship: "Look at me! I'm the Captain now!"
Paul Greengrass's 'Captain Phillips' boasted two edge of your seat boat chases as Somali pirates tried to storm Tom Hanks' merchant ship.
But for a moment of absolute beauty and serenity, it was hard to beat Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy sitting in a harbour quietly watching the sunset on a Greek island in Richard Linklater's 'Before Midnight' - the third instalment of Jesse and Celine's love story.
It was a rare moment of silent reflection in a dialogue fuelled movie about a romance now fraying around the edges and the gorgeous sunset was exquisitely captured by director of photography Christos Voudouris.
Special mention should go too to Ben Wheatley's groundbreaking 'A Field in England', with its disturbing sequence where Reece Shearsmith's alchemist Whitehead emerges from a tent tethered to a rope by Michael Smiley's sinister Irishman.
MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT: As is the case every year, there have been many lows in cinema but the bad taste comedy 'We're the Millers' really took the biscuit for the way it demeaned its cast.
Not only did English actor Will Poulter, as the gormless teenager Kenny, feature in a toe curlingly awful gags about fellatio and incest but he was also forced to don prosthetic swollen testicles in this spectacularly lame road movie.
Even those indignities were not as excruciating as the highly embarrassing striptease that Jennifer Aniston had to perform in a movie that relentlessly plumbed the depths of bad taste and laddish sensibilities.
Even more depressingly for critics, it performed well at the box office.
It began with a Best Actress Oscar for her role last year as a damaged dancer in David O Russell's 'Silver Linings Playbook' and a much praised self-deprecating acceptance speech.
It saw her reinforce her box office clout as the bow and arrow wielding Katniss Everdeen in Francis Lawrence's enjoyable 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire'.
The 23-year-old Kentuckian ended the year as a contender for a second successive Oscar. And although it has not yet hit these shores, US critics are hailing Lawrence for her performance in David O Russell's 'American Hustle'.
ACTOR OF THE YEAR: Who would have believed it? Cinema in 2013 saw Steve Coogan emerge as a prolific and effective screen actor.
Not only did he impress as the Soho porn baron Paul Raymond in Michael Winterbottom's 'The Look of Love' but he turned in a spot-on performance as a fickle father in David Siegel and Scott McGehee's divorce drama 'What Maisie Knew'.
The first big screen outing for his best known comic creation 'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa' matched the sharp wit of the original and he turned up as the voice of a spy chief, Silas Ramsbottom in 'Despicable Me 2'.
Coogan saved the best till last, though, with a stirring, committed and nuanced performance as the journalist Martin Sixsmith in Stephen Frears' 'Philomena' which he co-wrote with Jeff Pope.
Honourable mention should go though to Richard Dormer for his charismatic performances as Terri Hooley in 'Good Vibrations' and as a tortured gangster in Kieron J Walsh's stylish low budget City of Culture drama, 'Jump'.
BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE: It takes a lot of chutzpah to take on a major role as a screen debutant against a Hollywood heavyweight like Tom Hanks.
But it is even more impressive to hold your own against that Hollywood heavyweight when he is turning in one of his best ever performances.
arkhad Abdi was compelling as the Somali pirate leader Abudwali Muse in Paul Greengrass's real life tale 'Captain Phillips'.
Not only did he have some of the best lines in the film but he perfectly caught the confusion of a gang leader who pulls off an amazing raid, only to realise he is way out of his depth.
Abdi should be an Oscar contender on March 2.
Rufus Norris's 'Broken' was an independent coming of age film about a teenager in suburban London. But it also heartbreakingly shone a spotlight on what Prime Minister David Cameron once called Broken Britain.
Working from Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe's adaptation of Daniel Clay's novel, it featured a marvellous central performance by Eloise Laurence as the diabetic tomboy Skunk.
But the cast were uniformly impressive from the anti social Oswalds headed by Toby Stephens to the fragile Buckleys and their damaged son played by Robert Emms.
Cillian Murphy turned up as a bewildered school teacher and it was great to see Tim Roth back in an English independent film as Skunk's dignified dad, Archie.
Cate Blanchett also turned in a towering performance as a Blanche Dubois-like socialite in Woody Allen's flawed 'Blue Jasmine'.
However two performances stood out this year and they were in the same movie.
Tobias Lindholm's Danish drama 'A Hijacking' dealt with Somali pirates storming a merchant ship long before Paul Greengrass's 'Captain Phillips' hit multiplexes and interestingly it eschewed action sequences to focus on two men - the ship's cook played by Pilou Asbaek and the CEO in Denmark played by Soren Malling.
Both characters were effectively in captivity - Asbaek literally held at gunpoint on the merchant ship and Malling remaining in the confines of his office until he concluded the negotiation to secure the crew's release.
Asbaek conveyed the heartbreak and fragility of a hostage being kept from his family. But Malling probably just about edged it as the hard nosed exec feeling the strain back in Denmark during the whole ordeal.
BEST DIRECTOR: There were many candidates for this honour this year. At the start of the year, Tom Hooper and Kathryn Bigelow made the early running for 'Les Miserables' and 'Zero Dark Thirty'. Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa flew the local flag for their intelligent and entertaining 'Good Vibrations'.
Richard Linklater was in sparkling form over the summer with 'Before Midnight', as was Ben Wheatley with his sinister English Civil War drama, 'A Field in England' which was simultaneously screened in cinemas and on Film Four and released that day on DVD.
Later in the year, Stephen Frears was as assured as ever with 'Philomena', while Tobias Lindholm and Paul Greengrass impressed with their Somali pirate dramas, 'A Hijacking' and 'Captain Phillips'.
But the most jaw dropping direction came from the Mexican director, Alfonso Cuarón who took a B Movie plot in 'Gravity' and somehow managed to turn it into an amazing sensory experience.
'Gravity' showed how 3D cinematography and sound could be deployed to thrilling effect and is probably the first movie in ages to give us the sense of wonder that early cinema audiences must have felt watching the films of Lumiere Brothers, George Melies, DW Griffith and Buster Keaton.
BEST FILM: For Generation X, the blossoming romance of Julie Delpy's French backpacker Celine and Ethan Hawke's American would-be novelist Jesse in Richard Linklater's 1995 movie 'Before Sunrise' was their 'Brief Encounter'.
Then nine years later, the trio returned with 'Before Sunset', with a married Jesse and single Celine on the boulevards of Paris picking up where they left off in Vienna.
This year, we got our third fix with Delpy and Hawke turning up on a Greek island as a couple with two daughters and a stepson, jaded by domestic duty, self sacrifice and bubbling with resentment.
Richard Linklater's 'Before' trilogy is a rare escape from the relentless violence, noise and titillation of mainstream US movies. Instead of loud explosions, frantic pursuits and lame one liners, we have two characters just walking, talking or in conversation while they travel on trains, boats and cars. But boy, are they good.
Sometimes the conversation is pretentious and vain, sometimes very funny. However there is more wit and intelligence in one minute of these films than any Tony Stark blockbuster. 'Before Midnight' was gripping because its characters were so life like.
Its verbal ping pong revealed a poster couple suddenly fighting the reality in middle age that not everything turns out in the way you might have imagined it in your 20s. Brilliantly crafted by its two leads and its director, 'Before Midnight' hoisted the flag for intelligent US cinema along with Paul Greengrass's excellent 'Captain Phillips'.
But it had as much tension as Greengrass's film without having to rely on bombast.
Linklater's greatest achievement with this movie was leaving us wanting more. So here's hoping in another nine, eighteen and twenty seven years we get to follow what becomes of Celine and Jesse well into old age.
Richard Linklater was in sparkling form over the summer with 'Before Midnight', as was Ben Wheatley with his sinister English Civil War drama, 'A Field in England' which was simultaneously screened in cinemas and on Film Four and released that day on DVD.
Later in the year, Stephen Frears was as assured as ever with 'Philomena', while Tobias Lindholm and Paul Greengrass impressed with their Somali pirate dramas, 'A Hijacking' and 'Captain Phillips'.
But the most jaw dropping direction came from the Mexican director, Alfonso Cuarón who took a B Movie plot in 'Gravity' and somehow managed to turn it into an amazing sensory experience.
'Gravity' showed how 3D cinematography and sound could be deployed to thrilling effect and is probably the first movie in ages to give us the sense of wonder that early cinema audiences must have felt watching the films of Lumiere Brothers, George Melies, DW Griffith and Buster Keaton.
BEST FILM: For Generation X, the blossoming romance of Julie Delpy's French backpacker Celine and Ethan Hawke's American would-be novelist Jesse in Richard Linklater's 1995 movie 'Before Sunrise' was their 'Brief Encounter'.
Then nine years later, the trio returned with 'Before Sunset', with a married Jesse and single Celine on the boulevards of Paris picking up where they left off in Vienna.
This year, we got our third fix with Delpy and Hawke turning up on a Greek island as a couple with two daughters and a stepson, jaded by domestic duty, self sacrifice and bubbling with resentment.
Richard Linklater's 'Before' trilogy is a rare escape from the relentless violence, noise and titillation of mainstream US movies. Instead of loud explosions, frantic pursuits and lame one liners, we have two characters just walking, talking or in conversation while they travel on trains, boats and cars. But boy, are they good.
Sometimes the conversation is pretentious and vain, sometimes very funny. However there is more wit and intelligence in one minute of these films than any Tony Stark blockbuster. 'Before Midnight' was gripping because its characters were so life like.
Its verbal ping pong revealed a poster couple suddenly fighting the reality in middle age that not everything turns out in the way you might have imagined it in your 20s. Brilliantly crafted by its two leads and its director, 'Before Midnight' hoisted the flag for intelligent US cinema along with Paul Greengrass's excellent 'Captain Phillips'.
But it had as much tension as Greengrass's film without having to rely on bombast.
Linklater's greatest achievement with this movie was leaving us wanting more. So here's hoping in another nine, eighteen and twenty seven years we get to follow what becomes of Celine and Jesse well into old age.
(This review of the year originally appeared on eamonnmallie.com at http://eamonnmallie.com/category/film/).
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