My favourite films of 2017 #10-1

Body snatchers: Daniel Kaluuya's Chris is in big trouble in Get Out

We've reached the final leg of our journey through my favourite films of 2017 and some of you are probably going to want to biff me on the nose for omitting certain movies from my top 40 list. Call Me By Your Name? Admired it more than I liked it – couldn't warm to either of the main characters. Good Time? Robert Pattinson's superb, but it isn't a patch on the Safdie brothers' previous movie, Heaven Knows What. Blade Runner 2049? Beautiful visuals but an unnecessary sequel that bored me to tears. Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Probably my favourite SW film since The Empire Strikes Back, but it only really clicked in the final hour. And that's the beauty of film – there are no right or wrong answers. Like what you like, watch what you want. As long as you enjoy it, it's really none of mine nor anyone else's business. That said, feel free to remonstrate with my choices in the comments. I have a thick skin, I can take it...

10. Personal Shopper
Director: Olivier Assayas  UK release date: 17 March
Kristin Stewart reunites with Clouds Of Sils Maria director Assayas for this strange and horror-inflected meditation on grief, loneliness and, quite possibly, madness. Stewart is Maureen, an American living in Paris and working as a general dog's body for Kyra, a ghastly celebrity model. She is also a medium, desperate to make contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother, who has passed away following a heart attack (she shares his condition). Maureen's life is sad and absurd; discussing ectoplasm-spewing spirits one minute, writing huge cheques for her employer's obscenely expensive outfits and accessories the next. A lengthy scene in which Stewart goes to London and back again on Eurostar, all the while exchanging texts with a mysterious person or entity, is Assayas at his most audacious.

9. mother!
Director: Darren Aronofsky  UK release date: 15 September
The year's most divisive film fully deserves its reputation as Noah director Aronofsky serves up a feast of religious allegory, radical green politics and Grand Guignol. Javier Bardem is Him, a poet who lives with his young bride, the titular Mother (Jennifer Lawrence), in a big, beautiful, isolated house she has renovated from scratch. Their seemingly idyllic existence comes under threat with the arrival of Ed Harris and his wife Michelle Pfeiffer, spinning out of control altogether when Lawrence becomes pregnant and Bardem attracts a cult following, who not only turn up at the house but move in and start smashing it up. And just when you think matters have got just about as unhinged as they can, we career into an hysterical final act that'll make you question your sanity (or Aronofsky's). Love it or hate it, mother! takes more risks than any film I've seen this year and nearly all of them pay off spectacularly.

8. I Am Not A Witch
Director: Rungano Nyoni  UK release date: 20 October
In I Am Not A Witch, Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Nyoni gave us one of the year's most startling feature debuts, which she wrote as well as directed. It's a surreal social satire set in the country of Nyoni's birth and focuses on Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), a nine-year-old girl accused of witchcraft, who is shipped off to a "witch camp" in the Zambian desert. The camp is populated with women of all ages and, like Shula, they have all been interned on spurious charges. Attached to a long white ribbon and bulky spindle, like the other prisoners, Shula is told if she ever tries to escape she will be cursed and transformed into a goat. She is soon noticed by a government official who exploits her supposed abilities to his own ends. Nyoni's target is the misogyny that exists in Zambian society, with an added wrinkle... witch camps are in fact real and she visited several in Ghana and Zambia during research for the film. Mulubwa gives a restrained performance well beyond her tender years, while Nyoni's writing is full of acerbic wit.

7. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins  UK release date: 17 February
Jenkins' Best Picture Oscar winner is probably too subtle for its own good at times and it took me a couple of watches before his movie's considerable charms inveigled their way into my heart. But, once you get past those early doubts, Moonlight is a beautifully judged and entirely powerful piece of work boasting great performances (especially Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Alex R Hibbert), superb storytelling and seductive visuals. It follows the same African-American character, Chiron, at three different but crucial stages of his life – child, teenager and man – as he strives to come to terms with both a difficult upbringing (Harris plays his crack-addict mother, he has no father) and his sexuality. We've all seen moving love stories before but Moonlight is a rarity – an on-screen exploration of masculinity and homosexuality that is warm, intimate, and sensitive.

6. The Handmaiden
Director: Park Chan-wook  UK release date: 14 April
Sumptuous adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, The Fingersmith, which relocates the action from Victorian England to 1930s Korea. As part of a criminal scheme, a young pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), is sent to work for a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) betrothed to her repulsive uncle (Cho Jin-woong). Instead of fleecing her employer, however, she falls in love with her and the two commence an affair. The Handmaiden is all about deception – during the film's three separate chapters, it time and again picks the pocket of your expectations. Park deliberately withholds information and skews perspectives, making for a discombobulating ride that keeps you on your toes every step of the way.

5. The Florida Project
Director: Sean Baker  UK release date: 10 November
Baker's follow-up to 2015's Tangerine (aka the movie filmed on an iPhone) is set in the Magic Castle, a Floridian motel just a hop, skip and a jump from the nearby Walt Disney World resort. Intended for tourists, it is also home to a great many low-income, short-stay families including, in this case, single mum Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her six-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). Precocious Moonee spends her summer days getting into scrapes with her friends, Scooty and Jancey, while her mum desperately tries to make ends meet. The irony here, of course, is that the motel and its surrounding area is a wonderland of fun and frolics for the kids but a penniless nightmare for Halley. Likewise, the garishly-painted façade of the motels may make them look like part of the Disney empire but the grim reality is light years away. Baker's visually sumptuous film – which doesn't overly concern itself with matters of plot – makes you laugh, makes you think, and isn't afraid to break your heart too. Willem Defoe, as the motel manager, hasn't been this good in years.

4. Raw
Director: Julia Ducournau  UK release date: 7 April
"Visceral" is a word thrown around by film critics to describe any bit of old tat with some violence in it these days. It's a word that has lost its power through repetition but one that nevertheless fits this extraordinary French cannibal film like a bloodied glove. A teenage vegetarian (Garance Marillier) is made to eat a rabbit heart as part of her initiation at a veterinary college and soon develops a taste for meat, including the human variety. Ducournau's unsparing film can be viewed as a straight-no-chaser horror flick or a coming of age yarn about a young woman transitioning into dog-eat-dog adulthood, but it adroitly juggles many other themes too, including sexual awakening, teenage rebellion, and sibling rivalry. Those reports of walk-outs and fainting at its festival showings only tell half the story because, underneath its blood and guts, Ducournau's film has smarts to spare.

3. Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele  UK release date: 17 March
Anyone who only knows US comedian Peele from his part in 2016's limp cat comedy, Keanu, is likely to be knocked out of their seat by this whip-smart combination of horror and satire that tackles the notion that America, even under Obama, was ever a post-racial society. British actor Daniel Kaluuya is in a mixed race relationship with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and one weekend she takes him to meet her moneyed, progressive parents at their remote country estate. They're initially friendly but clearly uncomfortable in his presence and that soon gives way to something far more sinister. Peele (previously best known in the US for the Key & Peele sketch show) combines Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers to give us a startling piece of work that puts liberal white America under the microscope and really doesn't like what he sees there.

2. Manchester By The Sea

Director: Kenneth Lonergan  UK release date: 13 January
Excoriating, heart-rending drama starring Best Actor Oscar winner Casey Affleck as a grief-stricken janitor returning home to the titular Massachusetts seaside town following the death of his older brother. There he has to confront a terrible secret from his past whilst struggling to forge a path into a more hopeful future. Director Lonergan's sharp script balances the bleakness with occasional stabs of wry humour, Michelle Williams is dependably superb as Affleck's estranged wife, while the actor himself turns in one of 21st Century Hollywood's great performances. The scene in which the pair bump into each other in the street, and the full weight of their shared history and suffering bears down upon them, is not only extraordinarily moving but also genuinely upsetting.

1. Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven  UK release date: 10 March
A provocative revenge fantasy of sorts which sees Isabelle Huppert's icy CEO, Michèle Leblanc, raped in her Paris apartment before commencing a strange and erotically-charged game of cat and mouse with her attacker. It's a divisive film that no one seems to entirely agree upon. Is it suggesting that women secretly enjoy the experience of sexual violence? Or is it an anti-rape statement skewering the male need to subjugate difficult, powerful women? For me, Elle entertains both notions, but seeks to discuss them as part of something else – the way in which his characters exploit, degrade and hurt each other on a regular basis, and how such behaviour ultimately coarsens and cheapens their relationships and society in general.

On the surface, Elle is only a short walk from the likes of Basic Instinct (director Verhoeven's 1992 potboiler, starring Sharon Stone), but it's a far more complex and rewarding work than that, helped enormously by Huppert's total immersion in one of modern cinema's most unreadable characters. Based on the novel Oh... by Philippe Djian, Verhoeven's film toys with viewers' expectations – at what point does Huppert's character Michelle really know the identity of her rapist? Is she telling the truth about a terrible incident from her childhood? Is she a sociopath and as much a villain as the man who attacked her? Ultimately, though, this is a film about violation, sexual assault being the most extreme form of that.

With one notable exception (Michele's son, Vincent, played by Jonas Bloquet), the characters here are all pretty ghastly – from the cheating husband of Michele's best friend to the gold-digging gigolo who moves in with her mum, from the sleazy meme guy in her office to Michele herself, a rape victim who, in her day job, is happy to develop, produce and sell a video game containing repulsive images of sexual assault.

The veteran Dutch director's point seems to be that his characters (and, by extension, we, the viewing public) step all over each other's needs and feelings so much, all the time, that it has become normalised – almost a default setting. Moreover, eventually, we come to not just accept it and expect it, but perhaps even to like it. A chilling thought upon which to end...

PREVIOUS WINNERS
2016 - The Witch (director: Robert Eggers)
2015 - The New Girlfriend (François Ozon)
2014 - Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer)

My 25 favourite films of 2017 so far: Part Two #10-1

After yesterday's appetiser, here's the main course - my top 10 favourite films of the year so far. To be considered, movies had to have been released into UK cinemas between 1 January and 30 June 2017. Releases exclusive to VOD, Blu-ray and DVD did not qualify for inclusion.

10. Prevenge
Director: Alice Lowe UK release date: 10 February
Director/writer/star Lowe makes the tricky art of comedy-horror look easy in her filmmaking debut, shot when she was seven months' pregnant. She plays Ruth, newly widowed and bearing a child that exhorts her to take bloody revenge on those responsible for her partner's death. Yes, it's funny (Lowe earned her comedy chops on the likes of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, so how could it not be?) but Prevenge is also joyously grisly, at times channelling the likes of Rosemary's Baby and Andrzej Zulawski's deranged Possession to great effect. I can't wait to see what she does next. 

9. I Am Not Your Negro
Director: Raoul Peck UK release date: 7 April

Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, Peck's fascinating documentary about black novelist, playwright, poet and activist James Baldwin focusses mainly on an unfinished book - Remember This House - which was to feature his memories of three great black American leaders: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, as well as ruminations on US history. Baldwin - a startlingly brilliant orator and formidable intellect - knew all three men well and stood by horrified as one by one they met violent ends during the 1960s. As a result there's a mixture of anger and sadness in Peck's film, feelings perfectly articulated in Baldwin's oratory, particularly lines such as: "The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story." Bringing Baldwin's writing bang up to date, Peck shows us how that story hasn't got any prettier.

8. Personal Shopper

Director: Olivier Assayas UK release date: 17 March
Kristin Stewart reunites with Clouds Of Sils Maria director Assayas for this strange and horror-inflected meditation on grief and loneliness. Stewart is an American living in Paris and working as a general dog's body for a ghastly celebrity model. She is also a medium, desperate to make contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother, who has passed away following a heart attack (she shares his condition). A lengthy scene in which Stewart goes to London and back again on Eurostar, all the while exchanging texts with a mysterious person or entity, is Assayas at his most playful and audacious. 

7. La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle UK release date: 13 January

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone can't sing or dance like Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds but this musical love letter to old Hollywood, romance and jazz is utterly charming. Gosling's a struggling pianist, Stone an unloved actress, but the pair's passion for each other acts as rocket fuel for their ambition and self-belief, much improving their career fortunes even as the relationship founders. Yes, it's corny and whilst Gosling and Stone certainly have chemistry, their actual relationship is oddly chaste. That said, the song and dance numbers are mostly terrific (especially the opener, Another Day Of Sun), and Chazelle serves up a bravura ending a million miles from the saccharine-fest I was expecting.

6. Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele UK release date: 17 March

Anyone who only knows US comedian Peele from his part in last year's limp cat comedy, Keanu, is likely to be knocked out of their seat by this whip-smart combination of horror and satire that has its sights firmly trained on the notion that, since Obama, America is a post-racial society. British actor Daniel Kaluuya is in a mixed race relationship with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and one weekend she takes him to meet her moneyed, progressive parents at their remote country estate. They're initially friendly but clearly uncomfortable in his presence and that soon gives way to something far more sinister. Peele (previously best known in the US for the Key & Peele sketch show) puts liberal white America under the microscope and really doesn't like what he sees there.

5. Raw
Director: Julia Ducournau UK release date: 7 April

"Visceral" is a word thrown around by film critics to describe any bit of old tat with some violence in it these days. It's a word that has lost its power through repetition but one that nevertheless fits this extraordinary French cannibal film like a bloodied glove. A teenage vegetarian (Garance Marillier) is made to eat a rabbit heart as part of her initiation at a veterinary college and soon develops a taste for meat, including the human variety. Ducournau's unsparing film can be viewed as a straight-no-chaser horror flick or a coming of age yarn about a young woman transitioning into dog-eat-dog adulthood, but it adroitly juggles many other themes too, including sexual awakening, teenage rebellion, and sibling rivalry.  

4. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins UK release date: 17 February
Jenkins' Best Picture Oscar winner is probably too subtle for its good at times and it certainly took me a couple of watches before his movie's considerable charms inveigled their way into my heart. But, once you get past those early doubts, Moonlight is a beautifully judged and entirely powerful piece of work boasting great performances (especially Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Alex R Hibbert) and superb storytelling. It follows the same character, Chiron, at three different stages of his life as he strives to come to terms with his difficult upbringing and also with his sexuality. It's a delicate, low-key film, and I was therefore astonished - but delighted - the Academy gave it the nod over La La Land.

3. The Handmaiden
Director: Park Chan-wook UK release date: 14 April
Sumptuous adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, The Fingersmith, which relocates the action from Victorian England to 1930s Korea. As part of a criminal scheme, a young pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), is sent to work for a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) betrothed to her repulsive uncle (Cho Jin-woong). Instead of fleecing her employer, however, she falls in love with her and the two commence an affair. The Handmaiden is all about deception - during the film's three separate chapters, it time and again picks the pocket of your expectations. Park deliberately withholds information and skews perspectives, making for a discombobulating ride that keeps you on your toes every step of the way.

2. Manchester By The Sea
Director: Kenneth Lonergan UK release date: 13 January
Excoriating, heart-rending drama starring Best Actor Oscar winner Casey Affleck as a grief-stricken janitor returning home to the titular Massachusetts seaside town following the death of his older brother. There he has to confront a terrible secret from his past whilst struggling to forge a path into a more hopeful future. Director Lonergan's sharp script balances the bleakness with occasional stabs of wry humour, Michelle Williams is dependably superb in a supporting role and Affleck turns in one of 21st Century Hollywood's great performances. You'll cry, you'll laugh, you'll cry some more. You'll carry on crying until you realise everyone in the cinema is looking at you...

1. Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven UK release date: 10 March
An outrageous and audacious revenge fantasy of sorts which sees Isabelle Huppert's icy video game executive raped in her Paris apartment before commencing a strange and erotically-charged game of cat and mouse with her attacker. It's an incredibly divisive film that no one seems to entirely agree upon. Is it suggesting that women secretly like sexual violence? Or is it an anti-rape statement skewering the male need to subjugate difficult, powerful women? On the surface, Elle is only a short walk away from the likes of Basic Instinct (director Verhoeven's 1992 potboiler starring Sharon Stone) but it's a far more complex and rewarding work than that, helped enormously by Huppert's total immersion in one of modern cinema's most unreadable characters. Oh and, SPOILER ALERT, I think she knows who her attacker is from the moment she first lays eyes on him.

Finally, a few mid-year awards...
Best straight to VOD/DVD/streaming film: Macon Blair's I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore on Netflix.
Most pleasant surprise: Matt Damon is miscast as a grizzled mercenary and the quality of the CGI is variable but The Great Wall gives good blockbuster. 
Tip for the top: Julia Ducournau, the director of Raw (see #5), is going to be HUGE.
Worst film: Take your pick from Assassin's Creed or Power Rangers (although I'm yet to see Transformers: The Last Knight).
Biggest disappointment: Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is a lot of fun but hardly worth all those five-star reviews. See also Toni Erdmann.
Most ill-advised acting choice: Jake Gyllenhaal as a grotesque Aussie TV animal-wrangler in Okja. Ruined the whole film and reminded me of Robert De Niro's similarly OTT turn in The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Not a good look, mate. 
Wish for the rest of the year: That adult fans of comic-book movies finally start to engage their critical faculties and stop declaring every bit of super-powered tat that comes their way  "awesome" or "amazing".

Manchester By The Sea: A bleak, blistering drama in which 'redemption' is a dirty word

Deep blue Sea: Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck

Please note: This review contains mild spoilers

Manchester By The Sea
Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler
Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes

If true horror is being trapped forever in a loop of grief, guilt and self-loathing, then Manchester By The Sea is, by any measure, horrific. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's third film is excoriating stuff; it's emotionally draining to watch, it burrows under your skin and digs its fingers into your very soul. Great cinema has always been able to make you feel, but this makes you hurt.

Casey Affleck is Lee Chandler, called home from Boston, where he works as a janitor, to the titular US seaside town after the sudden, but hardly unexpected, death of his older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler). Lee is a bitter, angry and unlikeable man but the reasons for his abject demeanour and awful behaviour aren't immediately apparent (they involve ex-wife Randy, played by Michelle Williams, and are eventually revealed in full heart-shattering detail). In something of a shock for Lee, Joe's will stipulates he be named guardian of his teenage nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), and return home to Manchester full-time to take care of him. But Lee can barely look after himself, let alone a headstrong young man whose thoughts rarely stray beyond girls and ice hockey...

You can just imagine how this would play out in some hands. There'd be learning, hugs, redemption, forgiveness, and a final scene with everyone sat round a Thanksgiving dinner table. If you're expecting that, please don't. Manchester By The Sea doesn't do heart-warming and it certainly doesn't do redemption. Lee has no idea how to function in the real world, what's more he doesn't want to function there either. He has pretty much given up. His character barely develops, not because Lonergan's writing is poor, but because he has been dealt a blow from which he can not only never recover but doesn't feel he has the right to. The purity of his suffering is almost religious, like something out of Martin Scorsese's Silence.

What's interesting, though, is how Lonergan teases the kind of movie this could be, before deftly disappearing off in another direction altogether. In fact, he delights in confounding your expectations at every turn. The contents of Joe's will (a way of trying to yank Lee back to some kind of reality) and Patrick, the scrappy nephew with whom Lee banters and bickers, are, on the face of it, typical Hollywood fare. There's even an opening scene in which we see 'Paddy' as a young boy on a boat, fishing and joshing with his uncle (dad Joe almost unseen in the background in a portentous bit of foreshadowing). You fully expect Manchester to centre entirely on Patrick and Lee's blossoming relationship and how this surrogate dad and his surrogate son save each other. But it doesn't, it's a far more turbulent, far grittier film than that, in which easy solutions are as rare as rocking horse poop.

Get your bleak on: Manchester is a tough watch at times

Flashbacks are often a blunt instrument when it comes to cinematic storytelling. I can think of several recent films where the way in which they are utilised is beyond clumsy, as if Edward Scissorhands had had one too many crème de menthes and stumbled into the editing suite. No such concerns here; Lonergan grants the past and present equal heft and importance, and the flashbacks seamlessly and organically bleed into the main narrative, as Lee recollects memories both painful and joyous. And it is a flashback that provides the movie's crucial scene. The lengthy sequence in which we are shown what happened to upend our protagonist's life, and its terrible aftermath, is suitably agonising, the fact it's set to Albinoni's beautiful Adagio in G minor only making it all the more so. (A couple of critics, including The New Yorker's esteemed Anthony Lane, have suggested this piece of music is overused in cinema and, whilst I'm inclined to agree with him, it's hardly a deal breaker. Let's just say Lonergan makes rather better use of Adagio than The Inbetweeners 2 or Flashdance ever did.)

Astonishingly, the big set-piece isn't even Manchester By The Sea's most powerful moment. That comes later on when Lee bumps into Randy in the street and the two share a brief and utterly torturous conversation that is notable not only for what is said but for what is left unsaid. It is a tough watch as two people who have hurt each other dreadfully try and find the words to make it all right again. Of course, Lee is at a loss here too, this shambling shell of a man who died a long time ago but never got around to informing his body of the fact. You'd think that such an inert character would give Casey Affleck little to work with but he makes a feast from such unappetising scraps. The haunted look in his eyes, the sag of his shoulders, the palpable self-loathing he wears like a badge of dishonour tell you everything you need to know about what Lee feels and all that he has endured. It is a raw, deeply moving performance. Williams is only in the film for a short time but her presence looms large in virtually every scene. We see little of her own suffering but somehow imagining it is far worse.

Manchester is only Lonergan's third film as a director in 16 years and it is comfortably his best work. It has certain similarities with his debut, 2000's underrated You Can Count On Me, which saw a troubled Mark Ruffalo returning home to a small town to tap his older sister (Laura Linney) for money. He bonds with her son - his nephew - while the siblings grow closer than they have been in years. But, ultimately, he decides to move on. It's bitter sweet with rather more of the latter than you'll find here. At times, Lonergan's latest also reminded me of Pedro Almodovar's recent Julieta - that overwhelming pall of grief, of absence, is similar but even more discernible in this case. Both are about finding a way to carry on, even after life has thrown its absolute worst at you.

Home is where the hurt is: Patrick and Lee both battle demons

Although Manchester is a bleak film in many ways, Lonergan leavens its darkness with the odd scene of relatable humour and clumsily human interaction. There's a great bit in which Lee forgets where he's left his car and he and Patrick have to tromp through the snow-bound streets of Manchester looking for it, whilst shivering ever more violently in the cold; and an intense disagreement about Star Trek is hilariously incongruous in the immediate aftermath of Joe's death. Lee's complete refusal/inability to engage with people is even mined for laughs occasionally, including in an excruciating sequence when the mother of one of Patrick's girlfriends (he has two) tries to make small talk. Lee is like a rabbit frozen in headlights and Lonergan makes great play of contrasting that reaction with how utterly at ease Patrick is in the company of women.

Perhaps it's a bit overwrought, maybe Lonergan slathers on the symbolism a little heavy-handedly at times ("Oh look, it's bitingly cold, just like the aching void of grief at the centre of Lee's shattered heart"), but these are minor matters that in no way derail a film as visually beautiful as it is emotionally brutal. The notion that life itself is a force of nature just as untameable as the weather or the ocean is hardly original but it's one that is articulated with great humanity and considerable elegance by Lonergan. You can see how easy it would have been for it to become 'pity porn' but it never does - its characters, situations and refusal to do the easy, crowd-pleasing thing are far too convincingly 'real' for that.

Of course, there's a shadow that hangs over Manchester By The Sea or, more specifically, Affleck. He has been accused of various acts of sexual harassment and some have quite rightly questioned why he has been nominated for an Oscar. With the pussy-grabbing POTUS ensconced in the White House, I totally understand that seeing an alleged sexual predator picking up a Best Actor nom just adds insult to injury. The problem is, if you block Affleck, where do you stop with the exclusions? Hacksaw Ridge is up for six Oscars, including best director for Mel Gibson, the man who memorably proclaimed: "Fucking Jews... the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Now, he said those words and there's no allegedly about it. If we're ditching Affleck for something he might have done, surely we have to ditch Gibson for something - anti-Semitic hate speech - he definitely did. And if not, why not? Where's the line? Is there a statute of limitations on appalling behaviour? I've no idea and sure as hell wouldn't even know where to begin working it out. Until someone squares that circle (and good luck to them), it was right to nominate Affleck for his superlative work here, however distasteful many might find it.

Rating: WWWW

Manchester By The Sea is in cinemas now (UK), and released on DVD and Blu-ray on 21 February (USA)

Ratings
WWWW - Wonderful
WWW - Worthwhile
WW - Watchable
W - Woeful