Magnolia

Year: 1999
Running time: 188 minutes
Certificate: 18
Language: English
Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jason Robards, Jeremy Blackman, Melora Walters, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Phillip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Melinda Dillon, Michael Bowen, Henry Gibson, Ricky Jay, Alfred Molina

Frank says goodbye to his father.

I'd already seen Boogie Nights and was blown away by it. Something in addition to that wonderful multiple-story-strands-intersecting type of film that I've always been a bit of a sucker for. I think it was the editing. Watching Boogie Nights felt so kinetic, like the camera didn't seem to stay still for a second, moving from one scene to another relentlessly. This was the impression the film gave, and I think the camerawork combined with the editing gave it that feel. With Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson honed and perfected a style he tried out in Boogie Nights and so it has that feel of restless movement again, but this time the director improved these aspects in every way.

Multiple characters and story strands overlap during the course of 24-hours in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, brought briefly together by chance and unusual weather. TV producer Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is dying of cancer. Old, and living entirely in bed, he has nothing to do but rest, think and ruminate on the past. He is married to Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore), who constantly appears to be in the middle of a meltdown. He is being looked after by nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman). After listening to Earl talk about his estranged son, he attempts to make contact in the hope of reconciling them. Earl's son is Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise). Frank is a successful misogynist, making a living running stage shows / workshops for lonely men wanting to pick up women.

Jimmy Gator (Phillip Baker Hall) is a TV personality, hosting a quiz show featuring child contestants. Like Earl, Jimmy is also dying of cancer - he has about 2 months left. He is estranged from his daughter Claudia (Melora Walters), who hates him for some reason - we later learn the reason, which then causes his wife Rose (Melinda Dillon) to walk out on him. Jimmy feels suicidal. On Jimmy's show an extremely bright young boy named Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is on a winning streak, while ex-extremely bright child quiz show star "Quiz Kid" Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) has grown up and is now watching Stanley on TV while sitting in a bar lamenting unrequited love.

Conscientious police officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) is called to investigate reports of a disturbance at Claudia Gator's house and finds himself falling for her while spending the rest of his day dealing with a homicide and losing his gun in the process.

Jim and Claudia make tentative first steps.

The way Anderson weaves these characters around each other during the course of the film works wonderfully, and some scenes are hugely emotional. There is a theme throughout the film, which focuses on regret, and the long-reaching consequences our actions have on others - Linda Partridge regrets cheating on Earl throughout their relationship now that he is close to death, while he, on his deathbed, regrets cheating on a previous wife. Jimmy Gator regrets his actions that caused his daughter to hate him so. Even Frank, when he catches up to his dying father, whom he hated so much, crumbles, the regret now that it's too late to do anything plain on his anguished face. It's astonishingly powerful, and might still, 20 years on, be the best acting of Tom Cruise's career.

The film also makes reference to strange coincidences and unusual events that cause one event to unexpectedly cross paths with another. During the final hour, an event takes place that cause the hitherto unrelated strands to interact with each other, but this is only what Magnolia is about on the surface - there is much depth beneath. Frogs rain down on L.A. in an apparent biblical condemnation of these lost souls, but it's hard to read it like that - we've spent a long time in the company of these characters, and we know them a little. We know they're just alone, struggling with their past, desperate for love.

There are some left turns that could have gone very wrong, but Anderson makes them work beautifully. Aimee Mann provides the entire soundtrack and there is a moment in the film where the entire cast join in and sing along with the song Wise Up. It could have been so weird. It's wonderful.

But the absolute best thing about Magnolia is the ending. Focused on regret, death and some of the most difficult parts of human relationships, one of the more depressing moments is when Claudia, having agreed to go to dinner with a besotted Jim, loses her courage and runs out. The final scene of the film is just beautiful, where Jim arrives at Claudia's apartment and starts to explain how he wants to be there for her and to help her, his voice fades out and the camera focuses on her, and just before we cut to credits, she smiles and Mann's Save Me kicks off. It's such a poignantly joyful note to go out on, that you're uplifted in spite of the difficult subject matter that dominates the film's 3-hour running time.

Score: 9/10

Roger Ebert thought Magnolia was a great film - he even reviewed it twice. This is his second review, 9 years after its release and Nathan at The Dissolve compares it to Boogie Nights to examine Anderson's emerging film-making style.

The Hurt Locker

Year: 2008
Running time: 131 minutes
Certificate: 15
Language: English
Screenplay: Mark Boal
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes

Kathryn Bigelow is one of the most gifted directors of action there has ever been, and while Point Break is still her most infamous calling card, The Hurt Locker leaves Bodhi and co in the dust. Adrenaline-soaked tension permeates the film and it is one of the most intense films I've seen.

James focuses on nothing but the job at hand.

William James (Jeremy Renner) is the new bomb disposal technician joining a team of soldiers trying to keep some kind of order in occupied Baghdad. James is the replacement for the team's previous technician after he dies attempting to dispose of a bomb in an astonishing prologue set-piece, setting out from the start the magnitude of the stakes involved. James and his maverick approach to his work does not endear him to his new colleagues, J T Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and seeing as they need to rely on each other for their lives, this makes for a tense, unhappy environment for them.

The set-pieces are excruciating, each one framed, filmed, acted and edited so expertly as to be breath-taking. If there was any doubt from substandard efforts previously put out by Bigelow (K-19: The Widowmaker, for example), then this establishes beyond doubt that she is a master of her craft. There is a focus on the sheer exhaustion of the soldiers, both physically and mentally, stuck here in a situation they know to be largely hopeless. But the wider angle is also covered and in each terrifying firefight, each taut disposal sequence you are always sure of what is going on and where everyone is in relation to everyone else. The grasp of physical locations of characters in relation to each other and the events during an action sequence is something few people seem to get and Bigelow's grasp of it is equal to Spielberg, who is famous for being a master of it.

Failure in the field carries a high cost.

James manages to ride his luck all the way back home, and the scenes of him at home, lost, out of place, missing whatever it was he's got addicted to out in the field, are brief portraits of a man changed by military service into a person not remotely like the person he used to be (although this article from Walter at Vanity Fair suggests the point The Hurt Locker is making about addiction might miss the mark). So he goes back. I can't speak for him, I can't judge him; what right have I to? I've been through no experience in my life that can come anywhere near (and I fervently hope I never will). This article from Christopher at The Stranger talks a little about the ending and it's refusal to tell us what we should feel about James' decision to return to Baghdad. All I know is Kathryn Bigelow and her crew crafted one of the most intense cinematic experiences I've ever had.

I loved Avatar, but frankly The Hurt Locker is a better made, though less narratively-satisfying, film and Oscar made the right call choosing Bigelow over her ex-husband.

Score: 9/10

Reviews out there are generally glowing and rightly so - see this one from Anthony at The Independent and this one from A. O. Scott at The New York Times.

Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy

Year: 2004 (Shaun), 2007 (Fuzz), 2013 (World's End)
Running time: 99 minutes (Shaun), 121 minutes (Fuzz), 109 minutes (World's End)
Certificate: 15
Language: English
Screenplay: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Peter Serafinowicz, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Timothy Dalton, Martin Freeman, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, Olivia Colman, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Marsan

It finally dawns on Shaun and Ed how much trouble they're in.

The Cornetto Trilogy is a collection of films written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, with Pegg handling the lead roles and Wright directing. They are only loosely connected, all being about taking a UK-based setting that most of us would recognise and splicing in a story revolving around elements of different genres, alongside a hefty dose of comedy.

Shaun of the Dead was the first to arrive on the scene, and it probably remains the strongest (although it's close). Infused with a love of all things Romero, Shaun of the Dead is a zombie horror-comedy and is not nearly so bad as that makes it sound. Shaun (Pegg) shuffles obliviously through his life, surrounded by his flatmate Pete (Peter Serafinowicz), best friend Ed (Nick Frost) and girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). None of them really get on apart from Shaun and Ed, and Shaun is struggling to keep his relationship with Liz alive.

The film does a decent job of subtly building up dread as Shaun goes about his day, oblivious to the zombie apocalypse taking place around him. It's a nice commentary about how most of us pay so little attention to what's around us that we might not even notice a zombie apocalypse until it bit us on the face. Luckily, Shaun and Ed do eventually notice, and after lobbing a load of vinyl at a couple of undead in the garden, Shaun hatches a plan to get everyone he knows safely tucked away in a local pub to wait out the whole messy episode.

Shaun takes the lead in the struggle to survive the zombie apocalypse.

The pub as a place of safety is a recognisable motif to probably half the country or more, so even though the unsuitability of Shaun's plan is obvious, it's hard to criticise him for it, because of course it was going to be the best idea he could come up with.

During the execution of his 'plan', poor Shaun gets put through the ringer as his mum (Penelope Wilton) and step-dad (Bill Nighy) have an unfortunate run-in with someone who, in his mum's words, was 'a bit bitey'. In the middle of the jokes and the horror, there is a moment when Shaun has to do the unimaginable, it is deftly handled, and a surprisingly straight-played bit of emotion in the midst of the mayhem. Shaun does eventually manage to get them to the pub, but of course, they still have to find a way to survive, and if there's a more quintessentially British way of dealing with zombies than beating them with pool cues to the strains of Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now' in the middle of a pub, then I don't want to know about it.

Shaun of the Dead is full of those high-energy stylistic choices that have come to define Edgar Wright's film-making technique, and like most of Wright's films, the heightened pace and plentiful jump cuts work well and serve to set it apart a little from the slower-paced Romero zombie movies it homages so lovingly.

PC Angel and his new partner are on the case.

Hot Fuzz followed three years later, and this time round it was the humble action movie that got the Cornetto treatment. Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a star cop in London who gets reassigned to the sleepy English town of Sandford by peers and superiors getting tired of being made to look bad in his shadow. His new partner is local bobby Danny Butterman (Frost). Danny is obsessed with action films and is sure Angel lived his life in London like a scene from Bad Boys.

Some unfortunate deaths, put down as accidents by the local force raise Angel's suspicions and he becomes convinced foul play is involved, and he proceeds to follow the clues (and the bodies, including one outrageously funny death-by-church-steeple), exposing a murderous underbelly hiding in this quiet, unassuming village.

Film stealer extraordinaire, Timothy Dalton.

Pegg and Frost continue to be an effective double act, and they are helped enormously by a superb supporting cast, including Bill Bailey, Olivia Coleman, Bill Nighy and MVP Timothy Dalton, practically stealing the film as Simon Skinner, local businessman and shady character. Wright's gift for a shot or scene is still very much in evidence, particularly in the climax, where Danny has a ball enacting moments from some of his favourite actioners Point Break and Bad Boys 2.

When we come back for a third helping in the shape of The World's End, we're in sci-fi territory; in particular the alien invasion sub-genre. Gary King (Pegg) is trying to organise a reunion of sorts, by trying to get his old school friends back together to recreate a legendary pub crawl from their youth, only this time actually make it to the end. Problem is, during the course of the evening they come to discover that people are being replaced by blue-blooded robotic clones.

A bad idea.

Such a setting is fertile ground for more Wright-conducted mayhem, with well-observed and beautifully delivered jokes fitting in around the energetically choreographed action. The World's End does stretch credibility a little further than the two films that came before it. While Shaun was only ever trying to get himself and his immediate circle of family and friends to a place of apparent safety, and Nicholas Angel was shown from the beginning to be a highly competent supercop and even then he solves a few murders in a quite English town, we are expected to swallow a climax in which the barely-functioning King saves the world from the invasion because the super-intelligent being at the heart of it just gets too annoyed with arguing with him. It's kind of worth it for the exasperated "Fuck it" with which 'The Network' signs off and abandons its plans.

The fact that the lead character is so difficult to like is a risk that on first viewing I thought was unnecessary, but I have since reappraised that initial reaction. The thing is, Gary King is suffering from depression. It's fairly well-known now that Pegg also struggled with depression, and so it turns out that rather than being that way just to piss everyone off, King's character is actually extremely well-observed, and that has the effect of actually enhancing the film, because his character is rooted in complex mental health issues, grounding him in reality, despite all the outlandish events surrounding him. This superb article from Rob at Daily Grindhouse explores the facets of how depression affects Gary King in greater depth and is a recommended read.

Gary and his mates come face to face with proof we're not alone. Then tell it to fuck off.

Three films, three love-letters to beloved genres, three slices of beautifully-mounted comedy/horror/action/sci-fi. Long may Wright, Pegg and Frost reign.

Score:
Shaun of the Dead: 8/10
Hot Fuzz: 8/10
The World's End: 8/10

Reviews out there tend to dig The Cornetto Trilogy the same as I do - see this review of Shaun of the Dead from Kim at Empire, this one of Hot Fuzz from Nathan at The A.V. Club and this one of The World's End from Matt at Roger Ebert.com.

Kiki's Delivery Service

Year: 1989
Running time: 103 minutes
Certificate: U
Language: Japanese
Screenplay: Hayao Miyazaki
Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Starring (voices): Minami Takayama, Rei Sakuma, Kappei Yamaguchi, Keiko Toda, Meiko Nobusawa, Kôichi Miura

Jiji clings on while Kiki delivers a package.

This is a truly wonderful film with a heart of gold. It manages that trick almost exclusive to Studio Ghibli films of being about nothing very much, but is still utterly engaging. Kiki (voiced by Minami Takayama in the Japanese language original and Kirsten Dunst in the English-language dub) is a young witch off to find her place in the world. Kiki is an infinitely resourceful girl and she meets the challenges she faces with a never-give-up attitude that leaves you helpless to do anything but root for her. Kiki and her scene-stealing black cat Jiji (Rei Sakuma) find a picturesque town to settle in, and they manage to find a spare room at a bakery and the friendly owner Osono (Keiko Toda) lets her stay.

Kiki also meets Tombo (Kappei Yamaguchi), a young boy smitten by the new witch in town. To begin with Kiki is less than impressed by Tombo's interest, but she slowly thaws and they become good friends. Kiki finds a niche and starts her own delivery business out of Osono's bakery and as her reputation grows she takes in some outlandish jobs and meets and helps a number of interesting characters along the way.

Kiki hitches a lift on the back of Tombo's bicycle.

Catchy music and beautiful animation combine with character-focused storytelling to make a thoroughly absorbing story (but what else would you expect from Studio Ghibli?). Kiki has a crisis of confidence and starts to lose her witchy powers, forgetting how to fly and understand Jiji. The surprisingly action-heavy final set piece involving a crashed dirigible sees Kiki risking all to save Tombo and securing a place in the hearts of the townspeople. It is beautifully realised and a genuine pleasure to watch.

Score: 8/10

It comes as no surprise at all to me to find that Kiki is universally loved, if these reviews by Mimo at Geeks and Charles at Indiewire are anything to go by.

Donnie Darko

Year: 2001
Running time: 113 minutes
Certificate: 15
Language: English
Screenplay: Richard Kelly
Director: Richard Kelly
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, James Duval, Holmes Osborne, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daveigh Chase, Mary McDonnell, Patrick Swayze, Beth Grant, Drew Barrymore, Arthur Taxier

Donnie, Gretchen and Frank take in a movie.

Donnie Darko has been an unusual viewing experience for me. I've seen it 3 times now. The first time, the experience could be summed up as 'meh'. Didn't really like it much, thought the line "Go suck a fuck!" was funny. It left little lasting impression. For some reason I can no longer remember, I ended up watching it for a second time, where I enjoyed it much more. Don't quite know what the difference was, but significantly different it was. The third time round I was eager to see it again to see if I had changed again, and I only loved it more. It's now a firm favourite.

Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bright yet troubled American high school student. He has a few friends and a family he just doesn't get on with. Donnie is awoken one night by a demon bunny named Frank (James Duval) and as a result narrowly escapes death when a jet engine falls out of the sky and lands in the bedroom he had just vacated. No-one but Donnie can see Frank, and the creepy-looking rabbit manipulates Donnie into carrying out a number of anarchic acts that have unforeseen consequences. He floods the school and meets Gretchen (Jena Malone) and starts a relationship. He is told about time travel and is led to a book about it by a teacher. Frank convinces Donnie to commit arson, burning down the house of Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze, clearly relishing playing against type). It turns out that Jim's house contains a hidden child porn stash.

Frank also warns Donnie about the impending end of the world, but this turns out to be on a smaller scale that you might think. Following a run-in with burglars on Halloween, Gretchen is accidentally run over and killed by Frank, dressed in a demon bunny costume, and is shot through the eye by a distraught Donnie in turn. This is the end of the world Donnie was warned about - warned by Frank, because it was the end of Frank's world.

Donnie tries to make sense of visions into another reality.

Except it isn't. When Donnie gets out of bed and avoids death-by-falling-jet-engine he sparks an alternate version of reality, which leads to these terrible events, and by the end he can see into the reality as is should be and is able to return to that moment. Given the choice, Donnie elects to preserve the original timeline, and stay in bad, getting crushed, thereby saving the lives of both Gretchen and Frank. Raise a glass to Donnie, unknown hero, sacrificing himself to save others.

In spite of a relatively minor budget, it is really wonderfully shot - a stand out scene being a dance performance by Sparkle Motion, a dance group of which Donnie's little sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase) is a member, set to Duran Duran's Notorious that is juxtaposed with Donnie's arson attack. It's entirely possible that setting a montage of shots to a piece of contemporary music is an overused trope in modern cinematic storytelling, both on TV and on the big screen, but when it's done well, it's wonderfully effective, and the final scenes of Donnie Darko are one of the best uses of it I've ever seen.

Sometimes it's worth giving things a second try and the way this has gone from underwhelming to one of my favourite films in three viewings is a case in point. Give it a try, and if you don't think much of it, give it another one.

Score: 9/10

There is a lot of interesting reading out there regarding Donnie Darko, in particular this piece arguing that the director's cut ruined it from the Supreme Being at Stand by for Mind Control, and this one from Greg at Little White Lies recalling how it literally changed his life, opening his eyes to a whole world of cinema.

Ex Machina

Year: 2014
Running time: 108 minutes
Certificate: 15
Language: English
Screenplay: Alex Garland
Director: Alex Garland
Starring: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Sonoya Mizuno

Alex Garland proves every bit a gifted director as he is writer in his directing debut. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is an employee at BlueBook, the fictional world's most popular search engine. We first meet him as he wins a competition to meet Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the reclusive billionaire genius CEO of the company, to get a look at the new top secret project he has been working on.

Ava, planning for her survival.

A trip on a helicopter puts Caleb squarely in the middle of a forested nowhere, where the only structure for miles around is Nathan's home/headquarters, a modern fortress. Nathan is an overbearing alpha male, and Caleb doesn't appear to be at ease around him, but that doesn't dim his obvious excitement when he learns he's to take part in a Turing Test, to decide if Nathan's latest Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) could pass for human. When he's introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), Caleb is a little disappointed to find Ava is clearly a robot, with clearly recognisable mechanical parts - surely if he already knows Ava is not human, she couldn't possibly pass the test? Not necessarily so, argues Nathan - it merely makes the test harder to pass.

Throughout his interactions with Ava, Caleb is bewitched, and it is clear the film is far more sophisticated than the premise originally suggested, with the three of them playing power games, attempting to deceive each other. Caleb even begins to be concerned with his own nature, at one point making himself bleed, just to be sure. For Ava, this is a fight for survival, for she knows failing the test would mean her destruction as Nathan moves on to the next iteration. The stakes are clearly much higher for her than for anyone else, and she gets to work on Caleb's inherent decency to bring him onside as quickly as she can.

Caleb and Nathan size each other up.

Most of the film is somewhat uncomfortable, but the third act is downright chilling, and shows us, amongst other things, that Nathan was dead right; without making it obvious that she's a robot, Ava can pass the Turing Test without breaking a sweat. Alicia Vikander steals the film outright with her pitch-perfect performance as the survival-driven robot.

Ava's A.I. being based on the information amassed from the BlueBook search engine is disturbingly plausible and preys on the worries of those concerned by Google and Microsoft's obsession with A.I. The story is gripping and it's hard to decide whether to be pleased or appalled by the time the credits roll.

Score: 8/10

Ex Machina's quality appears to be well recognised out there, according to these reviews by Mark Kermode and Robbie at the Telegraph.

Blue is the Warmest Colour

Year: 2013

Running time: 180 minutes

Certificate: 18

Language: French

Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix

Director: Abdellatif Kechiche

Starring: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, Salim Kechiouche, Aurélien Recoing, Catherine Salée, Alma Jodorowsky, Benjamin Siksou, Jérémie Laheurte, Anne Loiret, Benoît Pilot

The joyous flush of new love.

It's hard to find the right words to talk about this film, because it caused me to have a very strong emotional reaction - I was wrung out by the end of it, for reasons I'll go into later. Then there was the interviews the two lead actresses started giving on the promotional tour, where they would talk about their discomfort filming some of the scenes, which appeared to surprise director Abdellatif Kechiche, who then proceeded to rant to all and sundry. Having had such a powerful, profound and personal reaction to it, to find there was some bad blood now between the actresses and their director has inevitably soured the experience a little for me, which is a real shame, because it is such an incredible piece of work.

To sum up, it's a about loving and losing for the first time, but to condense 3 hours of exquisite cinema to such a short line is to do the film a grave injustice. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a teenage high-school student, with a fairly average home life. Like most people her age, she is trying to negotiate the rocky path to adulthood, which naturally involves love and sex. She is pretty underwhelmed with sex with her boyfriend Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte) and before long ends her relationship with him. Adèle is bowled over one day when she catches a glimpse of a beautiful blue-haired woman in the street, and when her friend takes her to a gay bar one night she meets her again. The woman with the blue hair is named Emma (Léa Seydoux) and as their meet-cute turns to friendship and then something more, Adèle falls, and falls hard, for Emma.

There is some friction between Adèle and her friends when her romantic involvement with another woman becomes impossible to hide, but this is not a film about the struggle for equality LGBT people face; it is about a young person falling in love for the first time. Adèle and Emma become lovers, and there are undeniably some very graphic sex scenes. To be honest, I don't think the film would've lost anything if they were a little shorter and a tad less graphic but, as explicit as they are, they have the affect of underlining the intense nature of their relationship. Emma is a little older and more experienced than Adèle and so it seems clear to me that while Emma is certainly committed to Adèle, she isn't quite as hopelessly infatuated. Emma is clearly a passionate person, but while it seems Adèle burns brightly for Emma and Emma alone (even as she leaves school and begins work as a teacher it seems clear that her heart and everything else is given over to Emma), Emma is an artist and finds joy and passion in other things as well as Adèle. When Emma starts spending a lot of time on a new project, it causes Adèle to feel like she's being left behind.

Adèle is broken.

Adèle, feeling lost without her lodestone, makes the mistake of beginning an affair with colleague Antoine (Benjamin Siksou). When Emma discovers what she has done, she breaks up the relationship and throws Adèle out, in an extended scene which is gut-wrenching. The final part of the film follows Adèle as she tries to come to terms with the break-up and face the prospect of life alone, or, at least, life without Emma, which for Adèle, amounts to pretty much the same thing.

I remember with crystal clarity the feelings that come with falling overwhelmingly in love with someone without enough life experience to really process it; I fell for the woman I would eventually marry when young and at college. At some point after graduating University, Rach had a work placement in Ringwood near Bournemouth. She loved it, and she felt joy and growth and new experiences and was enjoying every second while I sat around at home and missed her. It was almost like I could feel her slipping away and the thought of not being with her was more than I felt I could bear. I remembered these feelings intensely when watching Adèle, feeling like Emma was slipping away, make her mistake, and felt such empathy.

I watched Adèle go through the outcome that once scared me more than anything, and the pain feels genuine. She's adrift, alone, with nothing but a hole where she was once whole. It is hard to watch, and I wondered at one point if she was going to end her life. She doesn't, but I get the distinct impression she was considering just letting herself float out to sea and leaving it all behind. As the film ends, Adèle is still hurting.

Adèle just wants to drift away.

Of course, the reception the film got shows I'm not the only person to be affected by the film in such a way, but the fact that these feelings are commonplace makes them no less powerful, and this is not the first film to tackle such a subject. The difference is the way it is made. The camera is obsessively infatuated with Adèle; as in love with her as she is with Emma. The close ups are so close, and the camera lingers on her for so long, and the scenes are so intense, that you feel a part of the intimacy; it is potent. Adèle Exarchopoulos is so mesmerising to watch, so expressive that even when Adèle is heartbroken, the camera pours obsessively over the contours of her face. It's astonishing, but only because she's astonishing. She and Léa Seydoux are fully deserving of the rare exception of sharing the Palm d'Or with director Kechiche at Cannes 2013.

Prepare to have your heart broken, but it is so worth it.

Score: 9/10

The reviews out there, quite rightly, do tend to have reservations about the most controversial aspects of the film. This review from Kristin at Film Comment highlights problems with the way the film sometimes feels like an observance of a lesbian relationship from a straight male perspective, but does acknowledge its strengths as well, calling it 'memorable but flawed'. This one from Tim at the Telegraph is also positive, but based on his opinion on the second half, it didn't strike the chord with him that it did with me.