Lee has worked for Screen International since 1996 as an Italy-based film critic. He also writes on travel, design and culture for a range of UK, US and Italian publications.
Click here for more Screen critics’ top films of 2015
Top Five
- The Assassin
Dir Hou Hsiao-hsien
Quite simply the most beautiful new film I’ve seen for a long, long time. Set towards the end of the Tang dynasty, the Taiwanese director’s ravishing story of an expertly trained female killer sent to rub out the man to whom she was once betrothed takes the normally frenetic wuxia martial-arts genre and turns it into a slow-moving Chinese opera, a succession of tableaux staged with a painter’s attention for detail, colour and composition. But this is no empty exercise in style. A circumspect dance between two highly ritualised forms of consent — that of the court and that of the monastery-trained wushu warrior — it subtly undermines the moral certainties that underpin traditional cinematic tales of avenging heroes.
CONTACT Wild Bunch edevos@wildbunch.eu - Carol
Dir Todd Haynes
CONTACT HanWay Films info@hanwayfilms.com - Anomalisa
Dirs Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
CONTACT HanWay Films info@hanwayfilms.com - Arabian Nights Trilogy
Dir Miguel Gomes
CONTACT The Match Factory info@matchfactory.de - Inside Out
Dirs Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen
CONTACT Disney www.movies.disney.com
Best Documentary
Behemoth
Dir Zhao Liang
Inner Mongolia’s plundered steppes form the backdrop of captivating, dreamlike documentary Behemoth (Beixi Moshuo) by Chinese anti-establishment film-maker Zhao, which played in competition at Venice. Locals become mute, downtrodden slaves to vast open-cast mines and fire-breathing steelworks in a cinematic reworking of Dante’s Inferno that is both poetic and polemical.
CONTACT INA www.ina.fr
Best UK Film
45 Years
Dir Andrew Haigh
The growing critical consensus that formed around Haigh’s sensitive 2011 romantic drama Weekend upped the stakes for this prestige-cast follow-up. The director passed the test magnificently. Featuring quietly powerful, slowburn performances by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as an ageing couple coming to terms with a revelation that rocks their relationship, 45 Years is a delicately scripted study of a marriage jolted from its sleepwalking state.
CONTACT The Match Factory info@matchfactory.de
Undiscovered Gem
Family Film
Dir Olmo Omerzu
Programmed by several of this autumn’s smaller festivals but yet to score significant distribution deals, this ironically titled drama about a hip, modern family unit’s slow disintegration impresses across the board. Czech director and co-writer Olmo Omerzu’s cool, clinical approach is veined with dark irony but steers clear of Ulrich Seidl-esque misanthropy; rarely have aridness and sympathy been so strangely wed.
CONTACT Cercamon www.cercamon.biz
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