The Iron Lady (2011) by Phyllida Lloyd

Synopsis: old lady going gaga pottering about her London house talking to her dead husband and having occasional flashbacks to her days as a governing monster… I was rather bored by the whole thing and yet at the same time totally transfixed by Meryl Streep’s tour de force — not that it should come as a surprise…still, it was quite impressive to watch… Although, did I mention how dull and lacklustre this film is?

Tyrannosaur (2011) by Paddy Considine

Synopsis (via MUBI):

Joseph (Peter Mullan), a tormented, self-destructive man plagued by violence, finds hope of redemption in Hannah (Olivia Colman), a Christian charity-shop worker he meets one day while fleeing an altercation. Initially derisive of her faith and presumed idyllic existence, Joseph nonetheless returns to the shop and soon realizes that Hannah’s life is anything but placid. As a relationship develops, they come to understand the deep pain in each other’s lives.

Sundance Film Festival 2011:

An unconventional love story, Tyrannosaur transcends its bleak circumstances through Joseph and Hannah’s vigorous impulse toward redemption. Shouldering the weight of burdened lives with great humanity and a deep understanding of our capacity to heal, Mullan and Colman deliver two of the most outstanding performances of the year. Considine’s portrait of these two lost souls, bloody but unbowed, is a devastating and profoundly beautiful experience

Peter Bradshaw for the Guardian:

Six years ago, Paddy Considine gave an interview to the Observer in which he talked about Dog Altogether, the short film he was developing with Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman; it was to be the starting point for this debut feature. Considine used an expression that was new to me: saying his lead character “goes out on the rage for the day”. Not on the booze, or on the pull, but on the rage. Rage is not merely a boiling inner inferno, but a socially created habit, a taste, an addiction, something to be indulged or kept under control like drink: an addiction that erodes the spirit the way chronic bulimia rots the teeth. More than this, rage is a poisonous way of managing or regulating your relationship with the world. For many, particularly those lowest in the food chain, rage is the last pleasure left, or the last respite from unpleasure, and the last source of anything resembling self-respect. For those with no voice, it is a kind of language, but one that distorts and obscures and locks the user into his own unhappy world. And rage is the subject of this powerful, painful and very serious film.

[…] 

I have heard Tyrannosaur criticised as a movie that comes too close to miserablist cliche, but that isn’t true: it’s a visceral, considered dissection of abuse and rage and the dysfunctional relationships that rage creates, which, in turn, perpetuate that rage, and an examination of people who create their own eco-system of anger and unhappiness. The performances of Mullan, Colman and Marsan are excellent and create a compelling human drama. Tyrannosaur is far from a love story, but it is not a simply a hate story, either; it is certainly a very impressive debut from Considine.

Fantastic debut from Paddy Considine but it’s really the superb work by the lead actors that makes this film so powerful, especially Olivia Colman’s mind-blowing performance (there are a couple of scenes in which she breaks down that completely floored me).

[Seen @ the Curzon Soho, London]