No surprises at the 35th Cesars, as A Prophet cleaned up in all major categories it was nominated in: Best Film, Best Director (Audiard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Stephane Fontaine), Best Editing (Juliette Welfling), Best Art Direction (Michel Barthelemy) and last but not least, one of my top 5 performance of the year, Niels Arestrup won for Best Supporting...
This year I've decided to not include titles that were introduced in 2009 and are having their theatrical release this year: they include top of the list we find A Prophet and Fish Tank, a pair of cream of the crop titles showcased in Cannes, and films such as Dogtooth, Hadewijch, Tales From the Golden Age, Father of My Children, City of Life and Death, I Killed My Mother (J'ai tue ma mere), Mother, Mother and Child, Lebanon, Micmacs à tire-larigot are all worthy titles to look out for.
Similar to the Golden Globes because it is a foreign group of film journalists who conduct the voting (though I'm sure they have no mandate to prefer films loaded in stars), this year's the 15th Lumiere Awards has a pair of films in the top tier that recently that duked it out for the Louis Delluc award. Philippe Lioret's Welcome (which just got picked up by Film Movement this week) and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (a SPC release next February) received five and four noms respectively.
Following up on from the vault releases of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (a pair of films which I have criminally still yet to see), Milestone Films has restored and presenting what is labeled as a Venezuelan Masterwork called Araya.