Tim Grierson is Screen’s senior US critic, based in Los Angeles,  and has written for the publication since 2005.

Best film

A Real Pain

Source: Sundance

‘A Real Pain’

1. Nickel Boys
Dir. RaMell Ross
Ross’s poetic 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening suggested the makings of an auteur. His feature narrative debut, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner, more than confirms that promise. Utilising first-person PoV to take us inside the perspective of two Black teenagers trapped at an abusive reform school in the 1960s, Nickel Boys shatters storytelling conventions while finding new ways to depict the everyday racism that threatens to destroy so many young lives before they can begin.

2. A Real Pain
Dir. Jesse Eisenberg
For his second feature, writer/­director Eisenberg crafts a hilarious, moving study of two very different Jewish-American cousins on a trip to Poland to confront their family’s history with the Holocaust. Kieran Culkin is marvellous as a troubled, likeable charmer who barrels through life with his anguish on his sleeve, while Eisenberg delivers one of his most poignant performances as an anxious, uptight family man who both envies and resents his cousin’s unfiltered honesty.

3. Challengers
Dir. Luca Guadagnino
Guadagnino often focuses on matters of the heart, but never as entertainingly as he does with this horny romantic triangle between best friends Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist and the confident tennis prodigy (Zendaya) they both covet. Highlighted by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s juiced-up electronic score, Challengers dazzles on and off the court, finding humour and sorrow in the games we play to find love.

4. The Seed Of The Sacred Fig
Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof
 Translating the cruelty and fear inflicted by Iran’s theocratic government into a domestic drama about one unravelling family, this Cannes standout has the slowburn tension of a thriller. Acclaimed writer/­director Rasoulof fled his homeland to escape imprisonment, and The Seed Of The Sacred Fig serves as a sombre testament to the oppression he left behind.

5. The Brutalist
Dir. Brady Corbet
Adrien Brody gives his best performance since The Pianist as a Hungarian Jew who escapes the camps during the Second World War, landing in the US with the hopes of continuing his career as a celebrated architect. Corbet’s staggering epic takes the full measure of the American Dream, finding only cynicism, exploitation and xenophobia.

6. The Room Next Door
Dir. Pedro Almodovar

7. Caught By The Tides
Dir. Jia Zhangke

8. Grand Tour
Dir. Miguel Gomes

9. A Different Man
Dir. Aaron Schimberg

10. September Says
Dir Ariane Labed

Best documentary 

1. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air In Moscow
Dir. Julia Loktev
Loktev documents the end of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, as Putin prepares to launch his war against Ukraine and crack down on his enemies, including the press. The you-are-there intimacy allows not just for an engaging snapshot of the channel’s vigilant journalists but also the suffocating sense of a brutal regime tightening its grip.

2. No Other Land
Dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
A chronicle of suffering but also hope, No Other Land takes the viewer to Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, where a battle between Palestinian residents and Israeli soldiers has waged for years. Out of that clash came this film, spearheaded by a Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist working together to alert the wider world about these atrocities.

3. Intercepted
Dir. Oksana Karpovych
A formally audacious documentary combining images of everyday Ukrainian life with intercepted audio of Russian soldiers calling family and friends back home. That juxtaposition brings us the horrors of war as narrated by those causing the devastation, who often question their actions.

Performance of the year

Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths
Dir. Mike Leigh
Any of us can have a bad day — but what about a bad life? Reuniting with Secrets & Lies filmmaker Leigh, Jean-Baptiste leaves bruises as Pansy, a woman full of contempt and paranoia, stomping through the day convinced the world is out to get her. Cinema boasts myriad misanthropic characters, but Jean-Baptiste never allows this disenchanted mother and wife a glimmer of wit or tenderness. Instead, Hard Truths is an unblinking portrait of depression, guided by a formidable actress who respects Pansy’s volcanic misery.

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