Highly Recommended: Frost / Nixon

Frost/Nixon thrillingly documents a confrontation between two men: one trying to make his name and the other attempting to clear it. Both men undergo a journey which results in Michael Sheen’s David Frost stumbling from playful anchorman to political interrogator and Frank Langella’s Richard Nixon being momentarily pulled out of a quiet retirement by a broadcasted expose of his criminal deception.

Sheen and Langella are equally remarkable in a film which presents two imposing characters. Sheen plays Frost as a charismatic and disarmingly naive presenter with a vaulting ambition driving him through the obstacles that he encounters. Meanwhile Langella truly inhabits the now notorious Nixon, achieving an unsettling aura of menace as the fragile looking old man bats away all arguments with meanderingly mundane anecdotes.

In this film about a television programme everything points towards the televisual. The opening images are taken from real news footage from the time; firmly locating the drama to follow and reminding us that the original audience were sitting at home, tuning in to see their president on trial. There are interesting topical resonances for the study of the media’s influence on politics and the extent to which the fate of a leader is influenced by their ability to present themselves in a favourable light.

One criticism of the film would be its dogged reliance on the narrative trajectory of the underdog who meets failure after failure before ultimately overcoming the odds. Like Rocky, Sheen’s Frost is bruised and battered after every round with the heavyweight Nixon but eventually picks himself up and lands the sucker punch.

Ron Howard has adapted the Peter Morgan stage play which featured the same leads and the film undoubtedly has a taste of the theatrical about it. No frenetic camera work is required to add a sense of urgency to proceedings as the two protagonists engage in close verbal combat. The claustrophobic sets reflect the game of cat and mouse enacted before us, as the predatory ex-President intimidates Frost out of the ring again and again. But in the last round the mouse finally fights back, trapping Nixon against the ropes and extracting those chillingly infamous words: ‘When the president does it, it’s not illegal.’

and the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role goes to...

Forget wrinkly wrestlers, dairy campaigners, and chronologically challenged button boys, the most captivating character on screen this year was a mobile rubbish bin. Wall-E, the earth division Waste Allocation Load Lifter inspired audiences to both laughter and tears with a cosmic performance spanning loneliness, love, loss and liberation as the determination of this lowly refuse collector eventually saves the entire earth and gives humanity hope of a future.

It is a timeless tale of a friendless soul stuck in a dead-end job whose world is turned upside down by the arrival of a girl who gives a meaning to his existence. Wall-E lumbers along carrying out the futile task of endlessly compacting the mountains of debris left behind by the humans who abandoned the mess they created over 700 years previously in favour of a sanitized existence in space. This rusty robot not only carries heaps of rubble but also the weight of the entire film; with large portions of it consisting only of his warbling bleeps and Chaplin-esque clumsiness.

Wall-E falls for the mysteriously graceful EVE, a shiny emissary searching for signs of life, but just as she seems about to let him into her circuit-board heart the two lovers are cruelly pulled apart by forces stronger than gravity. In a masterful performance this endearing service machine transforms himself into the most unlikely of heroes, who, simply by following his heart manages to rescue both his beloved and the planet, as well as somewhere along the way reminding the humans what it is to be human.

I would have printed his acceptance speech here, but it was just a load of rubbish.