Lovely, flawless film.

Rating: 10/10 (8 January 2012)

Every once in a while a film comes along which is so charming, so feel-good and so flawless that you leave the cinema feeling happier than when you went in. The Artist is a once in a generation piece of film-making which will hopefully pick up the Best Picture Oscar.
We've been bombarded with remakes, sequels and based-on-a-comic films for years now, there's a general lack of imagination and an overuse of CGI. Films sometimes have multiple script-writers and you just know that things have been tweaked and changed to please preview audiences of teenagers. The Artist takes us back to a time when cinema was about entertainment, when new technology was used to improve things rather than swamp the product with an 'aren't we clever with computers?' attitude.
It has moments of great humour and great poignancy, many of these moments enhanced by a mere facial expression from the fantastic Jean Dujardin (Best Actor Oscar with any luck), ably supported by Berenice Bejo and ....Uggy the Jack Russell in a scene-stealing performance. The great music score, of necessity due to the lack of dialogue, takes a central role and it works beautifully.
It's a lovely film, brilliantly executed and deserves whatever accolades it will surely gain.