Evening Standard British Film Awards: Close up on the winners

From Ken Loach’s passionate polemic to Bridget Jones’s return, our judges look at the cinematic talent that triumphed last night

The Evening Standard British Film Award judges weigh in on who won and why.

New West End Company Award for Best Actress

Kate Beckinsale, for her performance in Love & Friendship

Cinema is notorious for not giving interesting roles to older female stars — or younger female stars, or female stars of any age. So when a really juicy role comes along, it is great to see someone wringing out every drop. Kate Beckinsale is glorious in the role of upwardly mobile widow Lady Susan in Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship. Beckinsale has elegance, style and a certain kind of sexiness with nothing understated about it.

She showcases Lady Susan’s armoury of weapons: wit, beauty, survival instinct and a lively sense of the material potential in every situation. And yet she is no mere cynic. Beckinsale’s line readings are terrific as she fires off a fusillade of putdowns and zingers. That’s a real heroine.

Peter Bradshaw

Best Actor

Hugh Grant, for his performance in Florence Foster Jenkins

In Stephen Frears’s hilarious comedy about the worst singer ever to make it on to the public stage, Florence Foster Jenkins, Hugh Grant delivers what may just be the role of his life — never mind all those previous greatest hits: Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones, Love Actually and the like. As the failed English Shakespearean actor St Clair Bayfield, Florence’s financially dependent husband and deviously supportive manager, Grant is wonderful: hammy, dubiously aristocratic, not the gent he appears yet not entirely cynical either, with tenderness despite his infidelities.

No other actor could have pulled off this funny-sad acceptance half so well. As he says in his credo: “You think I didn’t have ambition? I was a good actor but I was never going to be a great actor. It was very hard to admit that to myself, but once I had I felt free from the tyranny of ambition, I started to live! Is ours not a happy world? Do we not have fun?” In Florence Foster Jenkins we certainly do.

David Sexton

Everyman Award for Best Film

I, Daniel Blake

The most impassioned film of 2016 has also been the most passionately debated. In our jury discussions, however, there was remarkable consensus. Through the experiences of the fictional Daniel Blake, this meticulously researched film tells the true story of many British lives, a story which we felt urgently needed to be told.

Several critics spoke about the huge emotional impact of Ken Loach’s second Palme D’Or winner, while the performances of both Dave Johns and Hayley Squires were praised for delivering moments of humanity and humour which sparkled, even in the film’s bleakest moments. We are not all Daniel Blake but now, at least, we cannot deny the reality of his existence.

Ellen E Jones

Best Supporting Actress

Hayley Squires for her performance in I, Daniel Blake

One immediately celebrated scene in I, Daniel Blake falls almost wholly on Squires’ shoulders — it’s the one in the food bank, when single mother Katie gives vent desperately to hunger and elicits a shocked compassion from both the staff and the audience.

The role as written could have felt a bit cloying and neo-Dickensian — especially her slide towards the oldest profession at the end. It’s her brilliantly disciplined performance, one of the best Loach has ever got out of an actress, that makes it sing. At 28, Squires has an exciting career opening up right before our eyes.

Tim Robey

Evening Standard Film Awards 2016: Winners

1/17

Best Supporting Actor

Arinzé Kene for his performance in The Pass

You only see the back of his head on the poster, but The Pass just wouldn’t be the same without Arinzé Kene.

The multi-talented actor, 29, has so much ground to cover in this spare adaptation of John Donnelly’s taboo-busting play. His character, Ade, is a bubbly, budding premier league footballer whose life is transformed by a forbidden kiss with machiavellian colleague, Jason (Russell Tovey). Ten years later, Jason’s a toxic Peter Pan and Ade’s all grown up. Or is he?

Thanks to Kene it’s clear how seductive self-loathing behaviour can be. Kene is straight, but has two gay sisters. You wonder what his family make of this performance. Hopefully they agree: the boy done good.

Charlotte O’Sullivan

The Peter Sellers Award for Comedy

Bridget Jones’s Baby

As usual, Bridget Jones is torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool in this third outing for the loved, Chardonnay-soaked franchise which has become the best selling romantic comedy ever at the British box office.

Smartly directed by Sharon Maguire, who helmed the first film, and written by Helen Fielding, this who’s-the-daddy caper stars Renée Zellweger, with Colin Firth as Mark Darcy, and Patrick Dempsey as an American millionaire. With its combination of wit, pure slapstick and affectionate chaos, the movie was exactly what women who had grown up with Bridget wanted.

Kate Muir

Editor’s Award

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

J K Rowling is already the wellspring of arguably the best-loved British film franchise since Bond, and now takes even greater charge of what’s to come. Her own screenplay for Fantastic Beasts lays out this parallel wizarding world with ingenuity and flair. And novelty: for the first time a Muggle or “No-Maj”, played with amiable comic gusto by Dan Fogler, gets to be one of the main characters, even if it’s Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander who proves zookeeper-in-chief. Prohibition-era Manhattan, grandly reimagined, is a playground to attract a whole new generation of Rowling fans, ushering them in to a saga with heaps of epic potential.

Tim Robey

Malone Souliers Award for Breakthrough of the Year

Florence Pugh, for her performance in Lady Macbeth

What is it about certain screen performances that allows them to “break through” and leave a lasting impression? In her relatively short career to date, our winner’s most prominent roles have been characters possessed of almost mystical charisma.

In Lady Macbeth, Florence Pugh delivers a performance which the jury felt could stand comfortably alongside the work of any more experienced actor on our shortlist. Period dramas are a traditional route for British movie stars on the make, but in William Oldroyd’s stylishly stark thriller, Pugh subverts that convention. Her Katherine contains both a dream of feminist empowerment and a nightmare of unrestrained self-promotion. No mere corset, however tight, could contain such talent.

Ellen E Jones

Kristy Sparow/Getty Images

Best Documentary

Before the Flood

The words “climate change” can cast a soporific spell. Luckily, Leonardo DiCaprio, who dominates every frame of this quirkily personal polemic, is something of a magician.

Explaining why our planet needs protecting, the actor covers the usual bases, but he does it in such a nimble way that you find yourself at the edge of your seat. We see famous figures from unusual angles (Obama seems shifty, the Pope shy). Leadership itself is explored.

There’s been a recent backlash against political celebs and DiCaprio faces the issue head-on. Clearly, the guy has a thick hide. His sturdiness, as much as his sensitivity, makes this a fantastically inspiring watch.

Charlotte O’Sullivan

Amanda Elisach Best Screenplay Award

Guy Hibbert for Eye in the Sky

Drone warfare, which takes place at arm’s length on blurred screens and military and ministry offices, is tricky to make nail-biting and compelling on screen. But Guy Hibbert’s screenplay for Eye in the Sky took the human toll and moral dilemmas, added a touch of Yes Minister, and created dialogue which brought the story into sharp focus.

Starring Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman, the tense film exposed the questionable workings of the “kill chain” of decision making, as British, Kenyan and American officials decide how much “collateral damage” is acceptable.

Kate Muir

International Film of the Year

Lion

Based on a true-life memoir, A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley, Lion has the most extraordinary and heart-wrenching story to tell.

Aged five, Saroo (adorably played by Sunny Pawar) accidentally ends up on a train that takes him a thousand miles from the central Indian province where he lives, leaving him hopelessly lost in Kolkata.

Illiterate and unable to understand Bengali, he cannot explain where he has come from and is declared abandoned. A kindly couple (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham) adopt him and transport him a world away, to Hobart in Tasmania.

In a second act, 20 years later, Saroo (Dev Patel, showing a new seriousness here) begins determinedly to search for his family, using Google Earth in an attempt to recognise the remembered features of his remote home town.

That he eventually succeeds in such an improbable reunion could easily have been the stuff of soap, but director Garth Davis, in his debut feature film, keeps it real and grounded — and all the more heart-breaking for it. This phenomenal tale nonetheless rings true at every moment.

David Sexton

Technical Achievement

Max Richter, for the contribution of his music to Arrival

The music of the German-born, British-raised composer Max Richter has been widely used in films from Waltz with Bashir to Testament of Youth — whose director James Kent noted “there are very few composers who retain their own voice in film like Max”. His combination of classicism, minimalism and electronica is like no other.

His heart-rending lament On the Nature of Daylight had already been featured in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island among other works — but when director Denis Villeneuve explained its integral role to the architecture of Arrival, the deeply moving science fiction film which it both starts and finishes, Richter immediately agreed, personal although the piece is to him.

Drawing on the fantasias of Purcell and the late quartets of Beethoven “to make something luminous out of the darkest possible elements”, this music transforms the viewer’s whole experience of the movie, as much about time and inevitability for us all as it is about alien contact.

A contemporary classic.

David Sexton

Destroyed by the system: I, Daniel Blake

And your winner… Most Powerful Scene created by Finch & Partners and powered by Dean & DeLuca

I, Daniel Blake

The awards were held at Claridge’s and decided by an advisory judging panel comprising Evening Standard film reviewers David Sexton and Charlotte O’Sullivan; Evening Standard film and TV writer Ellen E Jones; Kate Muir, chief film critic for The Times; Peter Bradshaw, Guardian film critic, and Tim Robey of the Daily Telegraph. The panel was chaired by Evening Standard editor Sarah Sands

#ESFilmAwards

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