2013 Film Review – Rober Awards

Perhaps the biggest surprise of 2013 was the notoriously high quality and quantity of the films on release, which has pushed out of our Top 50 countdown recent works by such acclaimed directors as Baz Luhrmann, whose flamboyant take on The Great Gatsby opened Cannes to critical approval and audience acclaim; Carlos Reygadas, adopting full experimental mode in the challenging Post Tenebras Lux; Matteo Garrone, who followed up his acclaimed ‘Gomorrah’ with a satirical study of our obsession with celebrity in Reality; Andrzej Wajda’s epic account of the life of influential Polish Union leader Lech Walesa; Abas Kiarostami re-enacting the rules of romance in the witty Like Someone In Love or the mix of social realism with over the top goth in Basque genre master Alex De La Iglesia’s latest, Witching & Bitching.

Although a few dissonant voices are now claiming the opposite, there’s a certain consensus on declaring 2013 a vintage year for cinema. And a quick look at what it has brought cannot but confirm that statement.

From the early months, when perhaps due to the gap created by the Olympic Year, a bigger than usual backlog of fine festival titles hit our screens gave that usually dry period a welcome qualitative boost. Critical favourites such as Romanian religious drama Beyond The Hills; Jeff Nichols’ Mississippi rites of passage tale Mud; Francois Ozon’s farcical In The House; Austrian miserabilist Ulrich Seidl’s notable Paradise Trilogy; controversy-friendly Harmony Korine with his hyper real look at teenage debauchery in Spring Breakers; Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach joyous portrait of arty,twentysomething New Yorkers hoping for a break in Frances Ha or the charming debut of Iran’s first female director with Wadjda, a censor-beating look at female inequality in Arab society, camouflaged under the deceptively simple story of a girl who defies the rules by saving to buy a bike.