2.25.2016

gARTh's 2015 Movie Awards: Winners

gARTh's 2015 Movie Awards

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W I N N E R S

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Film:

     Spotlight

02. The Revenant
03. Mad Max: Fury Road
04. The Martian
05. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

06. The Hateful Eight
07. Ex Machina
08. Creed
09. Bridge of Spies
10. Sicario

11. Straight Outta Compton
12. Carol
13. Steve Jobs
14. Room
15. The Big Short

16. Brooklyn
17. Inside Out
18. Dope
19. Trumbo
20. It Follows

21. Kingsman: The Secret Service
22. 99 Homes
23. Black Mass
24. Beasts of No Nation
25. Anomalisa

Note: Do not let anyone ever get away with saying that any year in film was "not a good year for movies." The above list features 25 of the best reviewed, most well received, and most unique films of the year, and still there are so many others worthy of praise that remain unlisted. The fact is, every year is a great year for movies... if you love movies.
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Director:

George Miller - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Actor:

Leonardo DiCaprio - The Revenant
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Actress:

Brie Larson - Room
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Supporting Actor:

Sylvester Stallone - Creed
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Supporting Actress:

Jennifer Jason Leigh - The Hateful Eight
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Adapted Screenplay:

Drew Goddard - The Martian
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Original Screenplay:

Quentin Tarantino - The Hateful Eight
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Editing:

Margaret Sixel - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Cinematography:

Roger Deakins - Sicario
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Stuntwork:

Guy Norris - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Production Design:

Colin Gibson, Richard Hobbs & Lisa Thompson - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Costume Design:

Jenny Beavan - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Hair & Make-Up:

Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega & Damian Martin - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Visual Effects:

Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Neal Scanlan & Chris Corbould - Star Wars: The Force Awakens
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Sound Design & Mixing:

Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff & Ben Osmo - Mad Max: Fury Road
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Music - Original Score: (select link to listen)

Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace) - It Follows
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Music - Original Song: (select link to listen)

Lady Gaga - "Til It Happens to You" - The Hunting Ground
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Music - Use of Previously Recorded Song; Feature:

Dire Straits - "Money for Nothing" - Kingsman: The Secret Service
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Music - Use of Previously Recorded Song; Trailer:

The Action Band/L'Orchestra Cinematique - "I've Got No Strings" - Avengers: Age of Ultron
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Animated Feature Film:

Inside Out
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Documentary Feature Film:

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
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Foreign Language Film:

Son of Saul - Hungary
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Animated / Vocal Performance:

James Spader - Avengers: Age of Ultron
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Villainous Performance:

Adam Driver - Star Wars: The Force Awakens
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Comedic Performance:

Michael Peña - Ant-Man
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Cameo / Bit-Part Performance:

Channing Tatum - The Hateful Eight

* Special Recognition in the Art of the Secret Cameo:

Daniel Craig - Star Wars: The Force Awakens
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Breakthrough Performance:

Abraham Attah - Beasts of No Nation
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Breakthrough Filmmaker:

Alex Garland - Ex Machina
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Cast:

The Hateful Eight
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Scene:

Kingsman: The Secret Service - Battle royale at the South Glade Mission Church.
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Quote:

The Martian - "I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."
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Tagline:

Mad Max: Fury Road - "What a lovely day."
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Poster Art: (select link to view)

It Follows


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"Grindhouse" Film Award:

Films that uphold the "Grindhouse" traditions of off-beat, exploitative, and taboo subjects, guerilla filmmaking techniques, and unconventional narrative structures, without which filmmaking as a whole cannot move forward.

         Victoria

- Directed by Sebastian Schipper. 
- Written by Sebastian Schipper, Olivia Neergaard-Holm & Eike Frederik Schulz. 


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Most Underrated Film:

A film that did not receive a wide release, was unsuccessful at the box office, was not nominated for any major awards or receive acclaim at any major film festivals, and was generally unknown to mainstream audiences at the time of its release... but was well-liked by most critics and audiences that did happen to see it.

         The Forbidden Room

- Directed by Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson. 
- Written by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Robert Kotyk, with additional writing by John Ashbery & Kim Morgan.


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Special Achievement Award for Excellence in Filmmaking: :

        George Miller & the Cast and Crew of Mad Max: Fury Road

* Special Mention:

        Guy Norris, Stunt Supervisior, and his team of 148 stunt performers, coordinators, drivers, riggers, and advisers.

1985. Michael Jordan was named Rookie of the Year. Calvin and Hobbes debuted in newspapers. Microsoft released Windows 1.0. Nintento released the NES in the US. Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. The first blood tests were approved to detect LAV and HTLV-III, later discovered to be one and the same affliction and renamed HIV.

In the middle of the year, a movie three-quel titled Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was released in theaters to mostly positive reviews. It featured a much larger budget ($10 million) than its two predecessors, 1979's Mad Max and 1981's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Beyond Thunderdome also featured the title hero, Max Rockatansky played by Mel Gibson (in the role that got him noticed in the first place), taking his character into a much larger and more detailed world, full of a wider array of characters and bigger action set pieces. The film wasn't a smash success, but over the years it, like the series as a whole, further developed its cult status.

In the years following Beyond Thunderdome's release, director George Miller, a pioneer of Australia's independent "Ozploitation" cinema, had steadily become a more mainstream director, with such films as The Witches of Eastwick, Lorenzo's Oil, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet (which won him the Best Animated Feature Oscar), and Happy Feet Two. Actor Mel Gibson saw his star rise in 1987 when he co-starred in Lethal Weapon, and would become one of the biggest movie stars of the 1990s, even earning Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for his 1995 film Braveheart. However, in 2006, after alcohol-fuelled tirades and Religious-fuelled hatred, his career would hit a wall and his reputation would suffer.

Miller tried, unsuccessfully, to make a fourth Mad Max film in the early 2000's. Gibson, still the star at that point, was ready-to-go and production was going to start in Australia - when all of a sudden a terrorist attack on the United States changed the world. Of the numerous repercussions from those attacks, one was the way the value of the US dollar around the world plumetted and, in this case, how that affected the money raised for film. Overnight, the budget of Miller's Mad Max 4 collapsed, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The movie was shelved, and everyone went on to work on other projects.

Miller and Gibson attempted to return to the film again in 2003, but after initially receiving the go-ahead, security concerns became an issue as the upcoming US Invasion of Iraq took the world by storm, and so the film was once again shelved.

In 2006, while making the rounds promoting Happy Feet, Miller mentioned in interviews that he had been given a new Mad Max script, written by comic book artist and writer Brenden McCarthy. Over the next few years, this screenplay would be re-worked and fine-tuned into a large-scale action film both completely in-line with the original films, and yet monumental in scope and phenomenally more intricate in detail. However, the idea involved a younger Max, set in a non-specific 'sometime' in and around the events of The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. Therefore, Mel Gibson would not be playing Max, and his public image troubles that year were the final nail.

Early discussions for re-casting the iconic role revolved around Heath Ledger, although those talks were short lived due to Ledger's untimely death. In 2009, after the release of the Nicolas Winging Refn film Bronson, up-and-coming actor Tom Hardy's name was tossed into the hat. Eventually, as Hardy's big-screen follow-up film, Inception, hit theaters in the summer of 2010, Hardy was confirmed as the new Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road. Oscar winning actress Charlize Theron was added to the cast, in what was being described as a 'female equal to Max.' Preparations for the film would take a long time, however, and word on the project during this time became sproradic, at best.

Filming finally began in Namibia in June 2012, and took a gruelling seven months - 120 days initially, then back again after an extended break. In November 2013, they completed reshoots. For the next two years, the film would go through a lengthy post-production process, full of further reshoots and additional technological wizardry. The time taken with this film is mostly unheard of these days, but the care and attention to detail it received paid off.

2015. Thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Max: Fury Road was released to universal acclaim and box office success.

While not everyone understood the love of the film, and the over-hype might have tainted the way later viewers approached the film, during the time just prior to the film's release the question of whether it would even be any good still hung in the air. After the first trailers, the visually striking images and the teases of amazing action - straight from the film's Ozploitation roots yet wholly different with the addition of the film world of the 21st digital century - the series' core fans were tearing themselves apart in maddening anticipation.

What some understand and many might not, is that the film, while big-budget and featuring Hollywood stars and the latest technology, is just a giant-sized version of a cult "B-movie." That's not a slight, because it's a B-movie done to absolute perfection. It features every single thing that made the original films great and loved. The gritty no-holds-barred action, the use of vehicles in character development and as characters themselves, the post-apocalyptic attitude through thick black clouds of smoke and filth and lunacy. And chases. Mad Max: Fury Road is a giant chase movie. Some say that like it's a bad thing, or as if that were all the film is... but, that's where the Mad Max series, as a whole, has always thrived. On the road.

The first film's most memorable scenes took place on the road. The second film topped that, and featured almost non-stop vehicular movement as the villains hovered and hissed around the gas-rich town. The third film topped that, in many ways, with a deeper story, a larger world, and crazy off-beat characters to inhabit it, all building to one of the largest chase scenes ever filmed at that time. And, now, Fury Road takes the sum of those parts and pushes it all to its inevitable and obvious evolution.

The sixty "star" cars, each and every one of them hand-crafted into a detailed character (some were begun as early as 2003); the beliefs of the Warboys and Immortan Joe's doctrines of control; the Valuvian women and their relationship to the stilt-walking 'Crows' of the bogged-down former Green Place; the story of the haunting memory of Glory the Child and how she ties into Rockatansky's past that we've yet to see on screen; there are so many finely crafted and insanely detailed things about this film that make it much, much more than just a simple chase movie.

In the same way that Star Wars: A New Hope was much more than a simple space western, due to the overload of little things and background details that created a much richer world than was actually needed to tell the story. The world created for Fury Road is the same world of the other Max films, yet its richer and packed-to-the-brim with little things - none of them needed to tell the story of the chase, yet all of them needed to tell the story of the characters, the world around the characters, and thus the story of the movie... a movie that just happens to center around a chase.

And what a chase it is.

George Miller has seemingly crafted the impossible... An exploitation film that stays true to its roots, while improving on them and taking the exploitation film genre in directions at odds with its own very specific niche (a mainstream blockbuster exploitation B-movie is a contradiction). A film that creates a deep, intricately woven narrative full of social, political, and moral insights extremely relevant to our world today, yet that narrative remains mostly in the background; there if you want to pay attention to it, but rarely the focus if you don't. A film that features some of the most breathtaking action scenes of recent memory, but in particular one that doesn't look or feel like any action movie before or since (including, in many ways, the other Mad Max films).

It's simultaneously a movie of 2015 - filmed in the latest 3D ultra high definition digital with the best visual effects artists working tirelessly to seamlessly blur the lines between what is real and what is not, creating striking and memorable scenes throughout its entire 120 minute runtime. And, a child of 1985 - and before - with its throwbacks in tone and style (and nods to the previous movies thrown in at every opportunity, without drawing attention in a self-aware way), and throwbacks in filmmaking techniques. There were almost 2000 CGI visual effects shots, yet 90% of the major effects were still done on the set, in camera, on the day of shooting. This marriage isn't altogether revolutionary, but it is rare. And the biggest throwback of all, the proverbial gas-powered-elephant in the room...

The stunts.

If ever there were a film to motivate the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to take the art of stuntwork seriously enough to award these teams of people - who work on every single movie to some degree or other, but especially all of the blockbuster films that the film industry survives off of - it should have been Mad Max: Fury Road.

One hundred and forty-eight stuntmen and stuntwomen, including members of Cirque du Soleil and Olympic athletes, creating some of the most death-defying images ever put on screen in a single film. All of the people jumping from vehicle to vehicle, flying through the air, hanging on wires and balancing on poles; all of the car explosions, flips, jumps, maneuvers... all of it is real. Digitally enhanced later, at times, for maximum cinematic impact, but real nonetheless. Driving a modified larger-than-life tanker truck at high speed and making it flip on its side in a precise way, slide in a precise way and in a precise direction, and then having it stop sliding at a precise place, all without injuring the stunt driver or anyone else... this takes skill. In fact, I don't even understand how it's done the way it's done. While amazing digital wonders can be created today with a computer, I (and I am not alone) am still in awe of what can be accomplished when skilled artisans who are the best at what they do are allowed a large enough playground to do their absolute best work.

So, the stunt team of Fury Road gets special recognition for their standout work, even in a year that saw other film franchises do amazing things, (from free-falling cars out of an airplane to A-list movie stars hanging off the outside of military aircraft). This is not, however, to say that the amazing work from the production design team on Fury Road, the costume team, the hair and make-up team, the visual effects team, the camera department under the great John Seale (out of retirement to shoot this film), and every other department, are not without their own special merits. Everyone brought their A-game to this film, and that's why it's as good as it is.

Most amazing of all is that, honestly, no one expected a film like this to reach the levels of excellency that it did. If the film had been a typical Mad Max film in 2015 - as in, a low-budget, small-scale cult movie centered around a few ramshackle buildings, with a few dirty leather-clad characters, and a handful of cars doing a few cool tricks, no one would have faulted it for doing that, and it would still have been enjoyed by the core fans. But, to take the risk of creating such a symphony of chaos on such an epic scale as this, and then to actually pull it off beautifully... that's an achievement. 

Even if the film wasn't your thing, if it's not your favorite and you don't understand the hype, you can at the very least appreciate the amount of time, effort and work that went into creating such a beast. It is possible to be indifferent to a film as a whole, due to the story or characters simply not appealing to or resonating with you, and still enjoy and appreciate aspects of it, especially those that were done extremely well.

George Miller, now 70 years old, has created one of the seminal arthouse action films in cinematic history. The film gets better, as more details and meanings and little things in the background reveal themselves, with every viewing. I personally look forward to what sort of insanity Miller's got in store for the franchise going forward, and I wait with bated silver-tinged breath for the next lovely day to arrive.


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Special Achievement Award for Excellence in Performance: 

        Alicia Vikander 

        The Danish Girl
        Ex Machina
        The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
        Testament of Youth 
        and
        Burnt

Swedish actress and dancer Alicia Vikander made a splash on the world cinema stage in 2010, co-starring in the Academy Award nominated Danish film A Royal Affair, and later that year appeared in the ensemble cast of Joe Wright's 2012 adaptation of Anna Karenina. A year later, she was a part of the ensemble for the Julian Assange inspired The Fifth Estate. She also had a few other small roles in the Swedish drama Hotell, the Australian crime thriller Son of a Gun, and was among the ensemble cast of the troubled Holywood fantasy epic Seventh Son (filmed in 2012, shelved for two and a half years).

Going into 2015, though, Vikander was set to take the world by storm.

First, she starred as Vera Brittain in the BBC Films adaptation of Testament of Youth, based on Brittain's autobiography of her time as a nurse during World War I. The film was well reviewed, and earned a few nominations - including a Best Actress nomination for Vikander at the British Independent Film Awards - before landing in theaters on January 16, 2015.

Less than a week later, on Januray 21st, her breakout film hit theaters. Alex Garland's science fiction thriller Ex Machina was immediately lauded for its unique style, it's intelligent screenplay, and it's remarkable acting. Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson were praised for their work, but it was Vikander's portrayal of the humanoid robot Ava that won over, well, everyone. A beautiful and haunting and subtle and unexpected performance, by year's end Vikander would be nominated for it specifically in thirteen different awards competitions, of which she would win five, and earn her first Golden Globe Award nomination. The film itself ended up on many year-end Best Of lists, and remains one of the highets rated films of 2015.

In August, Vikander followed up with the female lead in Guy Ritchie's adaptation of the 60's spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. While the film wasn't a hit, it did receive decently positive reviews (7.3 on imdb, 6.2 on Rotten Tomatoes). One of the best things about the movie was Vikander's performance as Gaby, the woman in between the two leading men. In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said that she "...is having a hell of a year. And you can see why. Gaby isn't much of a part, but Vikander makes her a live wire. Her impromptu dance with Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) that ends in a wrestling match is, well, something to see." I agree, that's one of my favorite scenes from any film this year, and it's not even an important scene in context... but she owns it with such confidence, humor, and adorability that it becomes instantly memorable.

In October, Vikander was asked by The Weinstein Co. producer Harvey Weinstein, who was a huge fan of Ex Machina, to join the ensemble cast of his small cooking comedy Burnt. The screenwriters worked in a small role for her just because Weinstein wanted her to be a part of one of his films. Burnt received a mixed critical reception and didn't do well in theaters, but Vikander's amazing year would go unfazed by the film's lackluster performance.

Finally, opening in November, was The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper's biopic of Lili Elbe, who was born  Einar Wegener and became the first known recipient of sexual reassignment surgery. Vikander plays the important role of Gerda Wegner, loving, intelligent, creative, and supportive wife of Eddie Redmayne's Elbe. The film itself received mostly positive reviews, but it was the performances that garnered all the praise. While Redmayne's transformative performance received the most attention, it was Viaknder's performance that many believed rooted the drama and was "the heart of the movie." For The Danish Girl, Alicia Vikander was nominated for twenty-six awards, one of which was her first Academy Award nomination (at age 27), and her second Golden Globe nomination. (She also joins a list including Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Sigourney Weaver, and Kate Winslet for being nominated for Golden Globe's for Leading Actress and Supporting Actress within the same year).

With a staggeringly successful breakout year in Hollywood now behind her, Vikander moves on to 2016 starring alongside Matt Damon in the upcoming Jason Bourne, alongside Michael Fassbender in the Derek Cianfrance (The Place Beyond the Pines) directed The Light Between the Oceans, and alongside Dane Dehaan and Christoph Waltz in the Justin Chadwick (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) directed Tulip Fever. I have absolutely no doubt that her name will be coming up again and again in the years to come.


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Special Achievement Award for Excellence in Writing:

        Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer - Spotlight

For years, the real life journalists at The Boston Globe tried to get their story into the right hands in Hollywood, because they felt there was a really compelling story to be told, if told correctly. Eventually, screenwriter Josh Singer ("The West Wing"), straight off of The Fifth Estate, another movie featuring journalists and controversy, was given the chance.

Singer himself wasn't happy with The Fifth Estate, knowing that he'd made some decisions, in an attempt to appeal to wider audiences, to cut down the focus on journalism that actually intrigued him most. So, with Spotlight, Singer now had the chance to write the type of movie he wanted. Director and writer Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent) was circling the project, as well, unsure if he wanted to take it on, and while Singer began researching, McCarthy eventually tagged along.

Singer first met with Mike Rezendes (played by Mark Ruffalo in the film), and he spent a week running through the events and the timeline, in fine details, ending up with 54 pages of notes. Singer persuaded McCarthy to accompany him once again, and the two ended up flying back-and-forth to Boston six or more times, meeting with the key journalists at The Globe, as well as interviewing anyone else that was around during the time and was involved in the scandal. Singer later said, "Just about everyone on screen, we’ve talked to. From the very early stages, Tom's vision was, 'Let's get it right, let’s really get it right.'"

Singer began his outline and a first draft in late 2012, and by the end of that year McCarthy joined him and the two completed the first finished version in June 2013. They each left, at that point, to work on previously committed separate projects, and then returned in 2014 to tweak the script further. Filming began in September 2014 with an all star cast, but, Singer and McCarthy continued to work on the screenplay "until the last day of production."

"I think if you had told me beforehand how much rewriting on set we were going to do, I probably would have fainted and maybe gone home and cried for a solid 24 hours. But Tom is relentless when it comes to scene-work. It’s one of the things he’s so good at. He just doesn’t stop until it is just right."

The screenplay is meticulously detailed, yet moves along at a pace not unlike the inherent built-in dramatic tension of a court-room thriller. Feeling like a cross between Ron Howard's 1994 journalism dramedy The Paper (co-starring Michael Keaton), David Fincher's 2007 journalism mystery Zodiac (co-starring Mark Ruffalo), and Alan J. Pakula's legendary 1976 journalism film All the President's Men, in which journalists took on one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Not bad company, for sure.

Spotlight is as much an accurate (about as accurate as one can get telling a true story on the big screen, it won't be 100% perfect, but let's say 90% right) re-telling of the events surrounding a group of journalists searching for the truth no matter how impossible the task, as it is a love letter to real investigative journalists that take the time to do a job correctly, because if one doesn't stand up for the truth in the right way, what's the point.

The level of detail and inclusion of mundane tasks, filling the screen at any given point yet still managing to be compelling - people waiting for clerks to retrieve documents, people reading things, people typing things - all of this could have been boring, eye-rollingly dull. But, it's not. It's, against all odds, tense and ever so slowly building in momentum and stakes as the scope of their investigation expands and the implications become more life-shattering.

The film is emotional, it's disturbing, it's hopeful, and it is most interested, just like the characters within it, in telling the story right. With as many of the facts as it can muster, and with as little sensationalism and/or insensitivity to the real-life counterparts of the tragic circumstances surrounding the story as the the film can allow for without being a documentary, Spotlight is a triumph of realistic cinema.

The result of Singer and McCarthy's hard work is a harrowing tale of everyday people taking on a powerful institution, in this case the Catholic Church, with determination, intelligence, and empathy for the victims, that resonates as a shining example of the grand quest for that which is most noble of all pursuits: truth, and justice.


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Special Achievement Award for Technical Innovation:

        Sebastian Schipper & Sturla Brandth Grøvlen - Victoria

German actor-turned-director Sebastian Schipper, most known for 2006's A Friend of Mine (which helped launch up-and-coming German actor Daniel Brühl), had a pretty wild idea for his fourth feature film: 

Tell the story of a girl who goes out one night, meets a boy and his friends and gets caught up with them in a bank heist and a shootout and all sorts of mayhem - but filmed completely in an unbroken single take - without tricks or editing cleverness. A twelve page script was written, with almost no written dialogue, letting the actors improvise their lines for almost the entire film.

And, together with his cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (The 11th Hour), this idea was pulled off spectacularly. A 138 minute take, stretching across Berlin in a single night following Victoria (Spanish American actress Laia Costa). Production was achieved between the hours of 4:00 am and 7:00 am on the streets of Berlin,  and was completed on the third attempt.

Not since Tom Tykwer's 1998 film Run Lola Run (also German, curiously) has a film come out of the gate sprinting with such energy attached to such an interesting gimmick that was pulled off with such precision. The fact that the gimmick is not the sole reason to watch the film, as is the case with other single-take films such as 2002's Russian Ark (which is beautifully shot, and the historical ideas are insanely ambitious, but as a cinematic feature film it is a rather dull affair), is reason enough for the film to deserve its high praise.

Victoria was universally acclaimed, and at the Berlin International Film Festival it won the Prize of the Guild of German Art House Cinemas, the Reader Jury Award (audience award), and Grøvlen won the Silver Berlin Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for his cinematography. Grøvlen also won the German Film Award for cinematography, and the film went on to win another 10 awards at various worldwide festivals and end of year competitions. It was submitted to, but not accepted by, the Academy Awards as a possible contendor for Best Foreign Language Film, however, it was rejected due to its abundance of English dialogue.

The Hollywood Reporter said it was a "...kinetic, frenetic, sense-swamping rollercoaster ride," and Variety said that is was "...suffused with a surprising degree of grace and emotional authenticity." I say, it's a remarkable achievement that lands it forever on a particular and very short list of films in cinematic history.

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Thanks to everyone that participated. See you next year.

- gARTh -