Lean on Pete

Andrew Haigh made his name with two intimate English films, Weekend and 45 Years, and Lean on Pete takes his patient, attentive method a long way from home. Adapted by Haigh from Willy Vlautin's novel and produced by Tristan Goligher's The Bureau with Film4, it is a British film set entirely in the American Northwest. It premiered in the main competition at Venice in 2017, where Charlie Plummer won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor, and went on to Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival.

Plummer plays Charley Thompson, a fifteen-year-old who has just moved to Portland with his affectionate, unreliable father, Ray (Travis Fimmel). Out running one morning, he finds casual work at the racetrack with Del Montgomery, a cantankerous trainer played by Steve Buscemi, and is soon caring for Del's ageing horse. Chloë Sevigny is Bonnie, the jockey who rides for Del, and Steve Zahn and Amy Seimetz fill out a cast of drifters and hangers-on. The film was shot over four weeks in Portland and Burns, Oregon, with the old Portland Meadows track standing in for Portland Downs; Magnus Nordenhof Jønck's photography gives the eastern Oregon landscape its full, indifferent scale, and James Edward Barker's score is sparing.

Critics admired how firmly it declines the comforts of the boy-and-his-horse film. It holds a 90 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the National Board of Review named it one of the ten best independent films of 2018, and Time's Stephanie Zacharek called Plummer's unstudied grace its greatest gift. Arriving in the same year as All the Money in the World, it made 2017 Plummer's breakthrough.