Charles joined Screen International in 2015 as a London-based critic. The film editor of Heat magazine, he also writes regularly for The Guardian, Sight & Sound and the BFI’s Film Audience Network.
Click here for more Screen critics’ top films of 2015
Top Five
- Brooklyn
Dir John Crowley
It would be an easy mistake to dismiss director John Crowley and writer Nick Hornby’s Brooklyn as narratively slender and cosily middlebrow. The first hour is propelled by conflicts that are mild by any standard, as smalltown Wexford girl Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) relocates to the titular New York City borough, finds a room, a job, a place on an evening course and love with a handsome Italian-American plumber (Emory Cohen). In fact, Crowley’s film is a high-wire act of risk: trusting in the characters and the performances alone to pull the audience into deep emotional engagement. I was hooked — and, to be sure, charmed, delighted and smitten — long before some recognisably movie-like conflict arrives in Brooklyn’s final third.
CONTACT HanWay Films info@hanwayfilms.com - The Revenant
Dir Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
CONTACT 20th Century Fox www.foxmovies.com - Room
Dir Lenny Abrahamson
CONTACT FilmNation Entertainment info@filmnation.com~ - Tangerine
Dir Sean Baker
CONTACT submarine info@submarine.com - The Diary Of A Teenage Girl
Dir Marielle Heller
CONTACT K5 International info@k5international.com
Best Documentary
Amy
Dir Asif Kapadia
Banishing cameras from his interview room offers two great benefits to Asif Kapadia’s Amy: the intimacy of the testimony that emerges, and the rich diversity of the visual archive material that now becomes a necessity. The result is a celebratory film that reminds us Amy Winehouse was funny, original, complicated and talented, and not just, as is so often mentioned, tragic and troubled.
CONTACT Cornerstone Films office@cornerstonefilms.com
Best UK Film
The Lobster
Dir Yorgos Lanthimos
Some critics at Cannes rather dismissed Lanthimos’s English-language debut as somehow less of a creative accomplishment than Dogtooth, with a second half that doesn’t match the first. The two parts are different, but equal, and the film is a beguiling treasure that has happily exceeded all expectations at the UK box office.
CONTACT Protagonist Pictures vanessa@protagonistpictures.com
Undiscovered Gem
Radiator
Dir Tom Browne
Premiering with rather muted impact at the 2014 BFI London Film Festival, Browne’s micro-budget directorial debut found its feet in 2015, finally reaching UK cinemas in November. The smart, subtle family drama rings achingly true as a grown-up son tries to intervene in the chaotic lives of his parents in their jumbled Lake District home.
CONTACT Starline Entertainment info@starlineentertainment.co.uk
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