Sunday, February 20, 2011

The My Cinema Award Winners


For the first annual My Cinema Awards our writers got together to honour the best of the best in the 2010 film landscape. Out of the 4 or 5 nominees in each of our 12 categories, these are the ones who stood out the most to us this year. Some are multi-award winners or Oscar shoe-ins, others are lesser known gems that we think made a huge contribution to cinema this year. So without further ado, here are the 2010 My Cinema Award Winners:

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

My Cinema Recommends: Barney's Version

You probably didn't see it. It's only up for one Oscar (makeup?! really?!) and though Paul Giamatti won Best Actor at the Golden Globes for his truly extraordinary performance, no one really lends much weight to the comedy/musical categories or even pays attention to the Globes if the Oscars don't seem to agree. But here's what I'm saying: they're wrong, you REALLY SHOULD see it.

Barney's Version is one of the most touching films of the year, one of the wittiest, one of the most complex,  one of the most evocative. It's expertly acted with the incomparable Paul Giamatti at its core delivering what I think is easily the performance of his career so far. He's joined by the beautifully understated Rosamund Pike and the beautifully overstated Minnie Driver as well as Scott Speedman, who is excellent as Barney's enigmatic friend Boogie, and the always-wonderful Dustin Hoffman as Barney's eccentric father. The script by Michael Konyves, adapted from Modercai Richler's novel, is superb, telling a fascinatingly funny and heartbreaking story.

That's all I can say, I've run out of adjectives. Just see it, you can thank me later.