I do enjoy a good gala. The red carpet, the frocks, the people who dress up to the nines in the hopes that someone will take their picture…it’s all delightful. And the films aren’t bad either. I’ve seen five films at the LFF this year, and it has been a particularly woman-friendly year.

Suffragette This unabashedly feminist film stars Carey Mulligan as a working class woman who gradually gains political consciousness and seeks suffrage. She does excellent work, as do Ben Whishaw as her husband and Anne-Marie Duff as a fellow washerwoman and activist. Meryl Streep has a cameo role (seriously, it’s shorter than Judi Dench’s screen time in Shakespeare in Love) as Emmeline Pankhurst, and Romola Garai is a middle class woman who helps to fund the movement. It’s an important film, and a well-made and well acted one. There’s nothing particularly surprising if you know anything about the history of the suffragette movement and the film is more competent than extraordinary, but I hope that it is a success and that young women (who are among the least likely to vote) will exercise the right that their great-great-grandmothers suffered and died to gain.

He Named Me Malala I have long been an admirer of Malala Yousafzai, the young activist who was shot by the Taliban for being an advocate for girls’ education and who has recovered and made her life in Birmingham (because she hadn’t suffered enough before) (wee joke). This documentary is effective and uses beautiful illustrations to tell stories of life in the Swat Valley, where the Yousafzai family lived before being forced to leave. But the most effective scenes are those where the Yousafzai family reveal themselves as a charming family, and Malala a normal teenage girl with crushes on Shane Watson, Shahid Afridi and Roger Federer. Albeit a normal teenage girl who (spoiler alert) wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Room I read Emma Donoghue’s 2010 book on which this film was based, and could never have imagined how they would make a half-decent film about it. This is the story of 5-year old Jack and his Ma, who live together in Room. They are kept there by Old Nick, who kidnapped Ma seven years before and has kept them confined (as with Josef Fritzl and Ariel Castro) ever since. The book was told entirely from Jack’s perspective, a difficult feat that Donoghue somehow managed to pull off. The film achieves similar miracles, which is partly down to the filmmaking and mostly down to astonishing performances from Jacob Tremblay as Jack and, especially, Brie Larson as Ma. Larson is absolutely extraordinary, making her love for Jack, her despair at the situation and her frantic desire to escape crystal clear. I have no idea how a 26-year old pulled off that performance. This is a film that really does not benefit from spoilers, so I will not say too much about what happens next. But there is wonderful work from Joan Allen as Ma’s mother and William H. Macy from her father as well. One scene where Ma says to her own mother, words to the effect of, “If you hadn’t taught me to be so nice, this wouldn’t have happened to me,” hit me like a punch in the gut. We do teach our daughters to be too nice. We need to encourage them to fight back. An extraordinary film, one of the best I have seen in this or any other year. I hope it, and Larson’s performance, get the recognition they deserve.

Brooklyn After Room, just about anything would have seemed trite. But Brooklyn was a charming palate cleanser. I read and enjoyed the book, but I maintain that had it been written by a woman instead of Colm Toibin, it would have been relegated to the “chick lit” section of the bookstore, instead of being feted as literature. (See also Jonathan Franzen). Saoirse Ronan is Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who is given a chance to emigrate to New York in the 1950s. Homesick at first, she grows to love the city and a young Italian-American man named Tony (Emory Cohen). But when she is forced to return to Ireland, she must decide whether to stay and move forward with local boy Jim (Domnhall Gleason) or return to Brooklyn. I very much enjoyed the exploration of how one’s notion of “home” can grow, and change, and perhaps be expanded rather than limited. It was beautifully shot and had excellent performances throughout. But it felt lightweight. A diversion.

Carol Well, I suppose I should have known what I was getting into with a Todd Haynes film. However, I enjoyed Far From Heaven enormously and the cast list for Carol was very intriguing. Cate Blanchett is Carol, a wealthy woman in 1950s New York with a husband (an excellent Kyle Chandler) and a young daughter. She’s also bored to tears, at least until she meets Therese (Rooney Mara) in the doll department of a department store (groan). From there, it’s all wide eyes and close-ups of exquisite cheekbones until they (finally, after many too many longing looks) get it on. But I could have done with rather less longing and rather more passion (and I don’t mean more sex scenes). It was a very idealised view of a lesbian relationship, and it seemed to me to come from the perspective of someone who really wasn’t interested in showing them wanting to be with each other in a sexual way. It also must be said that Mara, while beautiful, and thin, and possessed of lovely cheekbones, has rather a blank face. Blanchett, of the thousand facial expressions, did her best, but even she couldn’t create chemistry out of thin air. Frankly, I would have been much more interested in watching a film about the relationship between Carol and her (presumably) ex-lover and present friend Abby, gloriously played by Sarah Paulson. Watchable, but missable.