CineSkinny Awards: The Best of GFF15

Films of the festival

Eden: On its surface, Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is about the rise and fall of the French house music scene of the 90s and 00s. At its core, however, it’s a coming-of-age film – only in this case the coming-of-age takes two decades. The joy of Eden is in its finely textured emotions and lived-in feel. Hansen-Løve’s focus is often on the mundane – the end of a party or the aftermath of a breakup, when the hangover or heartbreak is just kicking in – but the effect is all the more resonant. 

Land Ho!:It’s a minor miracle that Aaron Kats and Martha Stephens – two young filmmakers both barely out of their 20s – have made such a wise and witty film about getting older. The film centres on a pair of 60-something buddies who go on a trip across Iceland, and like all good road movies, the characters are on a metaphorical journey as well as a literal one. But its themes of ageing are worn lightly. At first it seems you’re watching a homemade travelogue, such is the hazy approach to drama and narrative propulsion, but Land Ho!’s emotional heft has a way of creeping up on you.

Mommy: Xavier Dolan doesn’t do things by halves. His latest comes at you full throttle; it beats you round the head with its emotional punches. While watching, you feel drunk on the exuberance and energy of its filmmaking. That might be the only explanation as to why Dolan’s use of tired 90s pop songs from the likes of Oasis and Dido feel fresh and vital.

Warsaw Uprising: Jan Komasa's archive film brings history to life with heart-stopping immediacy. Through painstaking colourisation, film restoration and a meticulously forensic approach to the found footage of Polish documentarians, we witness the short-lived and hard-won resistance of the Poles stuck between the genocidal Germans and the Russians who left them to fight and die before occupation.

While We’re Young: While making the effervescent Frances Ha, his billet doux to feckless Brooklyn hipsters, Noah Baumbach clearly amassed enough material to create this affectionate takedown of the skinny-jeans-wearing, nostalgia-reappropriating youth of today. No film at GFF had more jokes, but there's plenty of insight and pathos here too. And, like The Graduate, it has an ending that’s spikier that it first appears.

Honorable mentions: Girlhood, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, It Follows, Spring, The Clouds of Sils Maria, Appropriate Behaviour, The Falling, Wild Tales, Force Majeure, White God

The Skinny Readers Award

It’s the first time we’ve polled our readers on the best movie at GFF and they’ve chosen wisely. There was a wide range of films voted for but two came out on top with the same number of advocates for each: Xavier Dolan’s Mommy and Daniel Wolfe’s Catch Me Daddy

Best rep screening

Glasgow-set Small Faces, which still feels zesty after 20 years. The film's cast and crew were out in force for a Q&A on the final day of the festival, and this post-film chat proved most fun when Small Faces' creators, brothers Billy and Gillies MacKinnon, started arguing about what the film actually means. In these heated moments it was clear where the film's inspiration for warring gangs came from.

Runner up: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in Imax

Best party

The Dazed and Confused roller disco, which saw GFF co-director Allison Gardner show off her skills on eight wheels.

Runner-up: Stop Making Sense, where the space in front of the screen became a makeshift dancefloor.

Best soundtrack

It Follows. Think Goblin playing shoegaze.

Best guests

A dead heat between two dapper gents:

William McIlvanney: The godfather of Scottish crime fiction had the GFT audience in his pocket as he discussed his career following the world premiere of Living With Words. He was particularly witty when discussing the robust reviews he gets from fans in the street and proved himself as vivid a storyteller in person as he is on the page.

Richard Johnson: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas star was as handsome and charming as ever at the premiere of Radiator. He championed the egalitarian atmosphere on Italian film sets, with a lighting technician just as likely to advise him on line delivery as Lucio Fulci. We guess that’s why Christian Bale doesn’t do giallo.

Best quadruped actors

The sadly uncredited patch tabby cat in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – wonderfully convincing as a vampire’s animal familiar; a newly born foal gambolling playfully through Warsaw’s deserted streets in Warsaw Uprising; and Body and Luke, who between them play Hagen, the Spartacus-like leader of a pack of street mutts that take back the city of Budapest from their two-legged overlords. Andy Serkis wearing a leotard covered in ping-pong balls couldn't have done any better.

Best performance from a Y.A. actor who we knew could act

Shailene Woodley, who’s loose and charismatic in White Bird in a Blizzard as a teen coming to terms with her mother's disappearance.

Best performance from a Y.A. actor who we thought couldn’t act

Kristen Stewart, who’s loose and charismatic in Clouds of Sils Maria as the personal assistant to Juliette Binoche’s ageing movie star.

Best music video director turned filmmaker

Daniel Wolfe. His debut, Catch Me Daddy, was as vivid and visceral as his music promos.

Best music video director posing as a filmmaker turned filmmaker

Xavier Dolan’s cinematic rehabilitation began with last year’s Tom at the Farm, but his maturation into a smart and sensitive filmmaker is complete with Mommy. Like in earlier films Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways, much of the film takes the form of handsome vignettes set to familiar pop songs, but here these moments add to the emotion on screen, rather than take you out of the movie.

The CRISPIN GLOVER award for lack of subtly

Eva Green is quickly becoming our favourite OTT thespian, and her berserk turn as a frustrated wife and mother in White Bird in a Blizzard was glorious. Her character’s alienation is all the more enhanced for Green playing her as a vamp from a gothic horror movie rather than a suburban housewife in an 80s coming-of-age story.

Festival mascot

It seemed like Brady Corbet was present at as many films screenings as co-directors Allison Gardner and Allan Hunter. The Simon Killer star popped up in the opening and closing film, as well as Clouds of Sils Maria and Eden. He's clearly a lucky talisman, as all are excellent. If you combine his screen time for all four movies you’d barely clock ten minutes, but what’s most remarkable is that he looked exactly the same in each film, down to the length of his hair. They could have all been shot on the same weekend.

---

The Skinny at Glasgow Film Festival 2015:

Read our daily updates from the GFF at theskinny.co.uk/cineskinny