2018

Leave No Trace

From Spike Lee’s to Léonor Serraille’s Guillermo del Toro’s of Water and Lynne Ramsay’s

You Were Never Really Here, 2018 provided UK critics with plenty to enthuse about. My favourite was an American indie gem from Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik – an overwhelming account of a father and daughter living on their wits in the US wilderness. For me, this was the very essence of “show-don’t-tell” moviemaking. Thomasin McKenzie [with Ben Foster, below] won the National Board of Review award for breakthrough performance, and she’s gone on to make good on that promise with starring turns in films including Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. My review of Leave No Trace hailed it as “a work of overwhelming, understated power that quite simply took my breath away” and that’s a verdict by which I still stand.