Lee Marshall joined Screen in 1996 as an Italy-based film critic. He also writes on travel, design and culture for a range of UK, US and Italian publications.
Best film
1. Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat
Dir. Johan Grimonprez
The veteran Belgian cineaste and provocateur delivers a rich, shape-shifting documentary that manages to be both fiercely intelligent and rousingly indignant. Patrice Lumumba, Khrushchev at the UN, Malcolm X and bebop jazz combine in a formally dazzling rereading of a dark chapter in Europe’s postcolonial history that is as cool, articulate and devastating as a Thelonious Monk solo.
2. All We Imagine As Light
Dir. Payal Kapadia
Like many of those at the Cannes premiere, I knew little or nothing about Indian director Kapadia, who had been catapulted into the main Competition with her fiction feature debut. This just made the joy of discovery all the more intense. A plot summary makes this Cannes grand prix-winning film sound like a melodrama: it revolves around three nurses who grapple with romance and displacement in the urban vastness of present-day Mumbai. But in this ravishing, absorbing work, Kapadia makes their woven stories transcendent.
3. Anora
Dir. Sean Baker
It is a joy to see Baker maturing with every film without losing his anarchic soul. In Anora, he not only brings the screwball comedy back from the dead — he also hands Mikey Madison a role to light up the screen with energy and empathy. Baker tears up all the rules about script structure, and gets away with it.
4. April
Dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili
Dark, atavistic forces generate monsters beneath the surface of an advanced, well-regulated society in this Georgian director’s surprising, unsettling second feature, about a female obstetrician who performs illegal abortions for rural women. It’s a tough watch, but I loved its unapologetic abrasiveness.
5. A Want In Her
Dir Myrid Carten
One of the standouts of this year’s IDFA competition, Irish visual artist Carten’s first documentary feature circles around a family trauma with pain and delicacy in uneasy balance. Witnessing the beauty in the hurt, it transmutes it into something life-affirming.
6. Kinds Of Kindness
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
7. The Substance
Dir. Coralie Fargeat
8. Nickel Boys
Dir. RaMell Ross
9. Caught By The Tides
Dir. Jia Zhangke
10. Grand Tour
Dir. Miguel Gomes
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