The Ford On Film Awards 2022

As some of you will have already noticed, 2022 was the year I decided to wind down the blog. After writing blogs for over eight years, including 52 entries in 2021 and early 2022 for My Year of Schlock, I needed a break to focus on other pursuits, and the blog was put on hiatus. I still might return to it from time to time, but Ford On Film is done as a regular blog.

However, I couldn’t resist returning for the 10th (!) annual Ford On Film Awards. It’s been a pretty damn good year for cinema: great directors returned with masterful works, debuting directors offering up fresh surprises, amazing documentaries and first class sequels. I’m going off of UK releases, so presumably great works like TAR and The Fabelmans are off-limits, while great films that seem like 2021 releases but only made it across the pond this year, like Red Rocket and Licorice Pizza, are still eligible.

Like last year, I’ve opted for a more streamlined approach, so all the awards will be in this article. I’m sure there will be some contentious picks and at least two omissions from Best Picture that are sure to cause upset. But where’s the fun in everyone loving the same films? Without further ado, here are the Ford On Film Awards 2022:

Best Film

The Banshees of Inisherin

The year’s bleakest, most despairing laugh-out-loud comedy, The Banshees of Inisherin is yet another hilarious and tragic black comedy from Martin McDonagh. Harkening back to the stage plays that made McDonagh famous, Banshees… doesn’t necessarily sound hilarious on paper, the story of a dull little man on a dull little island who loses his only friend for being too dull. However, in the writer-director’s twisted hands, the film becomes a stunning, melancholic treatise on friendships, mortality, and wanting more from your time on Earth. The dialogue is sharp as ever, and the ensemble of Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon give some of the best performances you’ll see all year as the war between Farrell’s Padraic and Gleeson’s Colm spirals out of control in one of the most demented revenge stories you will ever see. Time will tell whether The Banshees of Inisherin is greater than McDonagh’s beloved In Bruges, but for anyone who hasn’t loved his more recent US-set films, this is an amazing return to form.

Honourable Mentions

Red Rocket

Memoria

Aftersun

RRR

My Year of Schlock #52: The House by the Cemetery (1981)

I started My Year Schlock back in January 2021 with Lucio Fulci’s hallucinatory The Beyond. We checked in a few months later on his utterly repulsive slasher The New York Ripper. So what better way to close a year of gore, chills, sex, bad taste and occasionally bad films then with another of Fulci’s cult classic? It has beheadings, zombies, bad dubbing and buckets of blood. I’m of course talking about 1981’s The House by the Cemetery.

My Year of Schlock #51: Black Christmas (1974)

Isn’t it interesting how a film can spawn thousands of imitators, yet still feel entirely unique and original nearly 50 years after its premiere? Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is credit as being one of the very first slashers, as well as the key inspiration for big horror franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th. It’s all here: POV murders, a group of friends getting picked off one by one, a few red herrings and false leads. A Bay of Blood may have got there first, but in America at least, Black Christmas is the film that kickstarted the slasher boom.

My Year of Schlock #50: Star Time (1992)

Davids Lynch and Cronenberg are two of the most unique, singular minds in cinema history, so it’s little wonder that few film directors have tried to ape their respective styles. Lynch’s television classic Twin Peaks has influenced almost every ‘mystery box’ series released in the last 25 years, but only a handful of films (like David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake) could accurately be described as Lynchian, while Cronenberg’s obsession with the corrupting powers of the media and grotesque brand of body horror has only just had a resurgence with the Cannes triumph of Julia Ducournau’s Titane.

If Lynch and Cronenberg’s style seems difficult to replicate, combining the influences of both directors should be impossible. However, director Alexander Cassini took on the challenge in 1992 when he made Star Time, a truly bizarre surrealist horror that merges Videodrome’s gory television satire with Lynch’s uncanny depictions of cityscapes-as-hell. Is Star Time a total success? Not even close. Does it deserve credit for its mad ambition? Absolutely.

My Year of Schlock #49: Sole Survivor (1984)

Does this sound familiar? Following a deadly premonition, a woman survives a plane crash that kills every other passenger. As she attempts to recover from her brush with death, she finds herself haunted by the spectre of death itself, seemingly reminding her that she slipped through the cracks and should be dead herself. 16 years before Final Destination kickstarted one of the most successful horror franchises of the 2000s, Thom Eberhardt’s directorial debut, 1984’s Sole Survivor also looked at what happens when someone cheats death – and pisses Death off.

My Year of Schlock #48: Titane (2021)

‘Elevated horror’ has been a controversial phrase in the last decade. A phrase that recognises the incredibly high quality of recent horror releases whilst simultaneously dismissing lots of horrors for not being ‘worthy’ enough, the label nevertheless points out an undeniable fact: the horror genre has never been treated with more respect than it has right now. Take the case of Titane, Julia Ducournau’s Palme D’Or winning follow-up to her terrific cannibal feature Raw.

How many other horror films have taken the Cannes Film Festival by storm or earned their way onto an Oscar shortlist? And yet, one of the many reasons Titane was such a critical hit and earned so much respect was because it often tries to hide from its own horror leanings. This may be a brutally violent, skin-crawling story of body transformations and serial killings, but it also has enough dysfunctional family relationships and challenging portrayals of sex and gender to fuel a thousand arthouse dramas.

My Year of Schlock #47: The Norliss Tapes (1973)

Welcome back to My Year of Schlock. The feature originally began late January 2021 with the aim of wrapping up by New Year, but travel plans and work commitments mean it’s going to keep running until the end of February.

For a 1973 TV movie that acted as a makeshift pilot for an NBC series that was never picked up, The Norliss Tapes is a surprisingly dark affair. Packing in ghouls, bloodshed, and Egyptian sacrificial rituals into its slim 70 minute running time, The Norliss Tapes may not be as lively as its plot synopsis suggests, but its impressive to see a mainstream channel broadcasting something so bleak.

The Ford On Film Awards 2021

2021 was a strange year for cinema. The first half felt like the COVID-stricken 2020, where big releases were in short supply and the cinema felt like a thing of the past. However, the silver screen slowly rebounded in the second half of the year, as cinemas reopened, delayed films were finally released, and some of the greatest living directors made triumphant returns.

Of course, not all these triumphant returns have made it to the UK yet. Just looking at the consensus best films of the year, we will have to wait until 2022 for such acclaimed films as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, Julia Ducournau’s Palm D’or-winning Titane, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tilda Swinton-starring Memoria, among many others.

For me, personally, 2021 was not my greatest year for viewings. Despite regular trips to my beloved Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, there were a number of acclaimed films that I failed to see, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. While I’m sure these films would have worked their way into my lists, they will sadly have to miss out.

In light of having seen less films than usual this year (and due to the fact I’m in Brazil with limited writing time), I present a shorter, tighter Ford On Film Awards for 2021. While I’ve covered the usual categories, I am confining them all to a single post, and only mentioning a few honourable mentions alongside the winners. There may be less contenders than usual, but there are still some absolute gems here. Thanks for supporting the blog for another year, and keep going to the cinema.

Best Film

The French Dispatch

My favourite Wes Anderson film in 20 years, The French Dispatch of the Kansas, Liberty Evening Sun (to give it its full title) is a gorgeous, melancholic ode to the power of storytelling and the written word. While some found its precise framing, stunning colours, and miniature short story format to be a bit too Wes Anderson, I found his staggering use of black-and-white and fast paced yarn spinning to be a completely joyous, dizzying experience. Some may accuse Anderson of being style over substance, but in ‘The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner’, he presents a story as moving and humane as any he’s ever told.

Honourable Mentions

Pig

Annette

Censor

First Cow

My Year of Schlock #46: Prom Night (1980)

Paul Lynch’s 1980 slasher Prom Night is exactly the kind of film I imagined writing about when I started My Year of Schlock. Is it a classic? Absolutely not. The camerawork is televisual, most of the actors never went onto success for a reason, it has a twist so obvious you convince yourself it must be misdirection, and there’s far more disco dancing than should be featured in a horror film.

But there’s so much to discuss with Prom Night. The charismatic leading performance from Jamie Lee Curtis, fresh off the back of her breakthrough role in Halloween. Pre-Naked Gun Leslie Nielsen, always risking getting accidental laughs as a grieving Dad. The almost total lack of violence for nearly an hour of the runtime, which is instead devoted to creating a believable, realistic portrayal of early 80s high schoolers. The knife-heavy climax, which comes closer to recreating classic Giallo than any film not made by Brian De Palma. And of course, there’s more disco dancing than should be featured in a horror film.

My Year of Schlock #45: One Cut of the Dead (2017)

For much of the last decade, I was convinced there was nothing left to do with zombies. It felt like every possible gimmick, trope, and style had been thoroughly worn out. Once you’ve seen Cockneys vs. Zombies (zombies attack a retirement home in East London), Goal of the Dead (zombies attack a football team), Zombeavers (zombie beavers attack college students), or Anna and the Apocalypse (zombie Christmas musical), it’s hard to imagine anyone finding a new approach.

And then comes along a film like One Cut of the Dead, one of the most creative and impressive low budget indies I’ve seen in years. The directorial debut of Shinichiro Ueda, One Cut of the Dead defies any kind of labels. Is it a horror? Is it a comedy? Is it a zombie film? I’m going to go into more detail about what makes this genius film so great but be warned: this is a film best experienced if you know absolutely nothing going into it. If you haven’t seen the film, go watch it, then come back.

Ready?