Jane Campion leads roll-call of worthy winners as Baftas hit all the right notes

The Energy of the Canine, the story of a troubled household of ranchers in Nineteen Twenties Montana, is an essay in dysfunction, a movie within the enterprise of upending social and generic norms. It's a massively satisfying, intriguing, stimulating drama with a whiplash of an ending that took us from the realm of alt-western to alt-body horror. It was this movie’s mythic high quality, its dreamlike knight’s-move away from the world typically represented in westerns, that little doubt resonated with Bafta voters, who awarded it finest movie and gave finest director for the more and more celebrated Jane Campion.

On a night that celebrated dissident, revisionist westerns, the excellent debut prize went to the ultraviolent gonzo revenge film The More durable They Fall, starring Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz and Idris Elba. It's a headbangingly, flesh-splatteringly freaky debut from Jeymes Samuel that reclaims the African American facet of the style. The drumbeat of brutality grew to become a bit too uniform for me, however it's stylishly made.

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Baftas 2022: Insurgent Wilson hosts awards as Energy of the Canine wins finest film – video highlights

Denis Villeneuve’s colossal science fiction journey Dune, taken from Frank Herbert’s basic novel, is a giant movie in each manner and appropriately it was an enormous winner on the Baftas, together with for Hans Zimmer’s thrumming musical rating. This was a film that benefited from the reopening of cinemas, a film a few doomed colonial tyranny on a mineral-rich planet, a film whose ineffable vastness needs to be skilled on the massive display. These awards really feel like justice, though they could reinforce the impression that Dune was a cloudy impressionistic expertise: one large visible impact whose precise narrative is fading within the reminiscence. But it surely’s a massively audacious movie and a part of a vibrant custom of epic motion pictures.

I used to be very happy to Kenneth Branagh’s enormously heat – subversively heat – film Belfast choose up finest British movie, and perhaps it’s a measure of how emollient this film is that labelling a movie concerning the Troubles as “British” isn’t as controversial because it may need been. This can be a movie whose streak of sentimentality has alienated some: some Belfast-dwellers have written it off as inauthentic, others from Belfast have discovered it solely actual. I personally responded to its richness and heartfelt humanity.

So far as the performing prizes went, Joanna Scanlan’s Bafta for finest actress within the fascinating After Love was a reward for work of the very highest high quality: a posh, painfully actual and trustworthy examine of a lady who makes horrible discoveries about her husband after he has died. It's a career-best for Scanlan, and massively properly deserved.

Will Smith’s finest actor Bafta for King Richard (beating the early favorite, Benedict Cumberbatch for The Energy of the Canine) was a testomony to his old style movie-star efficiency and an emotional connection to film audiences. It’s inconceivable to overstate simply how a lot heat Smith can generate in the correct function – and this one was the juiciest.

The crowdpleasing heart-of-gold dramedy Coda (remade from the French movie La Famille Bélier) had a extremely good evening, with wins for finest tailored screenplay and supporting actor. It's a movie a few younger listening to lady with hearing-impaired dad and mom: a “CODA” or “baby of deaf adults”. It’s a film broadly felt to be well-intentioned if a tad micro-engineered – maybe it performed properly on streaming video with Bafta voters at house. Ariana DeBose was a completely deserving winner of the perfect supporting actress prize for her fiercely engaged and theatrically exuberant efficiency in Spielberg’s West Aspect Story.

Elsewhere, it was good to see Paul Thomas Anderson win finest unique screenplay for his satirically outrageous and gorgeously atmospheric age-gap comedy Licorice Pizza, set in 70s LA. It deserved extra, however this unclassifiably good movie was all the time at risk of slipping by the cracks solely. And it was pleasing to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s splendidly clever Murakami adaptation Drive My Automotive named as finest foreign-language movie.

I used to be unhappy to see nothing for Guillermo del Toro’s noir thriller Nightmare Alley (a movie superior to his a lot prize-garlanded The Form of Water) and nothing for Joel Coen’s excellent model of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. However this was a well-judged and satisfying Bafta record of winners.

Be part of Peter Bradshaw and fellow Guardian movie critics for a Guardian Stay on-line occasion forward of the Oscars on Thursday 24 March.

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