To France: for dynamic social comment and cinematic verve in Mathieu Kassovitz's debut, La Haine. To the old Yugoslavia: for the complex and compassionate Before the Rain. And even to Britain: for Benjamin Ross's The Young Poisoner's Handbook, whose dark wit was underpinned by intellectual daring.The year's best films were both documentaries. Hoop Dreams's account of two would-be basketball players brought a scope and realism to black lives, rarely, if ever, seen on the screen before. But the movie's power lay as much in the charm and resilience of its young subjects as in the conventional liberalism of its admirably dogged directors.That is why Terry Zwigoff's Crumb (left) shades Hoop Dreams as Film of the Year. This carefully organised portrait of scabrous comic-book artist Robert Crumb was dangerously intimate.
By including Crumb's dysfunctional and deranged family, it illuminated shady crannies of the human psyche - the places where creativity and genius reside, along with deviance and madness. Crumb stimulated, appalled and enlightened us, in ways that no feature this year could match.Previous winners: 1991 `Edward Scissorhands'; 1992 `The Double Life of Veronique'; 1993 `Groundhog Day'; 1994 `Schindler's List'.SCREEN ACTOR OF THE YEARBY QUENTIN CURTISFalling in love againON THE evidence of 1995, the age of heroic acting is at an end. What did the Royal Ballet do before it found Tetsuya Kumakawa? The central, shoulder-shrugging Fred Astaire role might have been made for him As the curtain falls, he's spinning like a top As it lifts its skirts again he is still spinning. But typically, it is also a compact study of academic dance, based on just five steps which are ingeniously reversed, inverted and developed by different groups of dancers, building to a bravura display of fast pirouetting that would drill a hole through the thickest of ice. Les Patineurs, created in 1937 with a very young Margot Fonteyn as the glamorous dancer in white, sums up Ashton's gift to the world in just half an hour of bliss.On the surface, it is a modish conceit - a stage set like an outdoor ice-rink and ballet dancers pretending to be on skates. When Una needs rescuing from the belly of a whale (a miracle on the tiny stage), the Sidh reappears as a clattering, clog-dancing warrior horse. These solo dance sequences (performed with a fine sensuousness by Marianne March) make the dramatic highpoints of the piece, and surely come as close to the true spirit of Celtic dance as the overblown Riverdance.The Royal Ballet rounds off a year of devotions to Frederick Ashton with a double bill reviving his neat, one-act "skating ballet", Les Patineurs, as an elegant foil to his Tales of Beatrix Potter, a work which survives more for its amazing fairy masks than for its gambolling and frisking.
Polka has a reputation for meticulous research and its value is felt in every minute of The Starlight Cloak, which succeeds in telling a complex tale with wit and pace and offers a vivid picture of Celtic culture too.When Una needs a carriage to go to the ceilidh, her godmother summons help from the fairy folk, the Sidh ("shee"), and out of the eerie gloom a delicately prancing girl-horse trips a measure of soft-shoe to the sound of pipe and drum. There are, the programme claims, around 600 variants of Cinderella. This one dates back to 12th-century Ireland and stands out by having the abused heroine (here named Una) married by the interval. The rest of the tale describes her furious sisters' revenge.The production finds mention here for the inclusion of striking choreography based on traditional Irish dance, accompanied on stage by some very nifty tin-whistle playing and haunting ballad singing.
