If the stamp of a good critic is their ability to predict award-winning hits, then my detractors will be pleased to know that I'm probably out of a job. Last summer I was confidently declaring that the wonderful British movie Made in Dagenham (2010, Paramount, 15) would become "this year's Full Monty": a solid drama which coated its serious subject matter (equal pay for women) in enough feelgood froth to appeal to mainstream multiplex audiences on both sides of the Atlantic while also garnering multiple statuettes. In the end, having been shamefully overlooked at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars, the movie turned out to be more like "this year's Brassed Off", another home-grown gem which has grown in stature since opening to only moderate box-office success in 1996, and which is now rightly regarded as one of that decade's very best Brit pics.
Set against the backdrop of the Ford Dagenham strike in 1968 which established the principle of gender pay parity, Made in Dagenham has several cinematic trump cards up its sleeve, not least an ebulliently earthy script by William Ivory, my favourite "original screenplay" of the year. Strong central performances are an essential ingredient too, with Sally Hawkins excelling as the patently skilled worker Rita O'Grady who becomes the figurehead of an historic fight, and Rosamund Pike hitting just the right tone as her unexpected upmarket comrade. Top turns, too, from Bob Hoskins as the union rep who spies an opportunity for change, and Miranda Richardson as the flame-haired Barbara Castle who feels the hand of history upon her shoulder. Rated 15 for strong language in the same month that the effing and blinding of The King's Speech was allowed through at 12, this is surely the kind of movie which kids (particularly young girls) could only benefit from watching – perhaps parental policing will turn out to be rather more relaxed. As for my own verdict, I remain convinced that this was one of the underrated gems of 2010, and certain that history will prove me right.
Equally baffling to this writer was the unconditional praise heaped upon Tamara Drew (2010, Momentum, 15), a quaintly spiky adaptation of Posy Simmonds' popular strip which wowed them in the aisles at the Cannes film festival, but which remains notable for its wildly uneven tone and faintly smug middle-class satire. Director Stephen Frears, who brought the same televisual sensibility to his similarly overpraised chamber piece The Queen, doesn't seem to know whether he's making a comedy, a tragedy or an arch parody, and gives every impression of having not really "found" the movie until he got into the editing room. Only Roger Allam seems to have the measure of the piece, as the pompous philandering writer whose country home hosts a retreat for wannabe bestsellers, and whose casual duplicity brings the cattle train of the apocalypse down upon his big head. Plaudits are due to Tamsin Greig and Gemma Arterton for their respective excellently judged bittersweet turns, but considering the central theme of middle-aged spousal deceit, it seems strange to be marketing this as "the perfect gift for Mother's Day".
Stranger still that the bleak Mexican drama We Are What We Are (2010, Chelsea, 15) should be marketed on DVD as "a cannibal gore-fest", a phrase which will surely cause splatter fans disappointment when they discover that this low-key nightmare is more a dysfunctional family drama. Following the death of their father, a close-knit brood with an awful secret are left to forage for the forbidden food which has long nourished their damned clan. Eschewing both laborious explanation and overcooked backstory, Jorge Michel Grau's deeply unsettling film owes a thematic debt to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but is closer in grim downbeat tone to Jaime Rosales's deadpan Spanish serial-killer drama The Hours of the Day. If it's insane splatter you're after, you're much better off with the satirical Hong Kong bloodbath Dream Home (2010, Network, 18) in which director Pang Ho-Cheung takes a brutal swipe at the waterfront property market with queasily flesh-ripping results. Iconic screen presence Josie Ho stars as the seemingly demure telemarketer who uses household utilities to achieve her home-owner ambitions, neatly summed up in the tongue-in-cheek tagline "She'd kill for a harbour view". Longstanding horror fans will see a sardonic line of descent between this and the 70s schlocker The Amityville Horror ("think of the bills!"), the 80s Tom Hanks "comedy" The Money Pit, and the 90s yuppie frightener Pacific Heights. Others will be reminded of the heyday of the video nasty, when films containing this level of untrammelled mayhem were regularly impounded by the police. Extras include booklet notes by longstanding genre stalwart Billy Chainsaw.
Time to cleanse the soul with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, New Wave, 12), the delightful surprise winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or which (like Made in Dagenham) similarly passed under Oscar's reliably faulty radar. A magical, melancholic, metaphysical fable about the everyday coexistence of the living and the dead, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's indefinable oddity is a thoroughly positive experience which elicits wonder, amazement and (quite probably) laughter in equal measures. Some viewers may well smirk at the apparition of a glowing eyed ghost-monkey, or scenes of catfish sex which frankly defy description, but viewed with the same open heart which the writer-director brings to the project the film provokes unalloyed joy.
