The Films of 2024

[Never Cursed]

Feel free to move this to a hypothetical Films of 2024 thread, but Richard Linklater's Hit Man (one of the best films of last/this year) will likely release worldwide mid-May, since it's coming out May 16 in Brazil.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Just noticed that Abderrahmane Sissako's Black Tea (about the romance between an Ivorian woman in China and a local man) is due for release in France on February 28th. I assume it'll be part of the Berlinale competition lineup.

[brundlefly]

Orion and the Dark is a kids’ movie based on a kids’ book (which I have not read), but as Charlie Kaufman did some of the adapting it’s a kids’ movie where everyone is either openly or secretly terrified, where Sleep assaults people, and where death is a meaningless abyss that awaits us all. There is a David Foster Wallace joke and a voice actor who is apparently not Seth Rogan and a voice actor who is very much Werner Herzog.

Though the anxiety is sympathetic and amusingly overthought – at the behest of the school therapist, young Orion has turned a sketchbook journal into a catalog of his fears – it's at its best when it feels like Kaufman is thinking about storytelling. The movie seems to open, as way too many do, with the character addressing the audience. But then it turns out he is not, until he seems to be doing so again, until it turns out he is not. Standard-issue childhood conflicts are trotted out as set-up – a bully, a nascent crush – and are allowed to be resolved offscreen or not at all. Instead of contriving complications, story elements keep coming to early understandings. IRL interruptions (and in the film, phones are blinding, carcinogenic) forced me to pause frequently, a weird boon: Wait, how much more time is left? The story moves breezily, but is allowed to re-set, is allowed to be real and not-real and both those things carry equal weight. And while it rotates through ambivalent messaging and tentative conclusions and not-endings, its surest decision is to show how we need to help each other through this terrifying life through creative collaboration.

There are partnerships, there is teamwork. The world keeps turning. Surely someone will come along to help us fix this crazy thing.

So it’s extra unfortunate that Kaufman’s collaborators in this seem a bit less-than. Orion and the Dark is about literal darkness and literal light and can't summon more than standard-issue glowiness. Other than quick turns at sketchbook and cut-out animation, it’s mostly cut-and-paste CGI. A team of color-coded nighttime entities feel like alt-Inside Out designs. It never looks expressive, and opportunities for surrealism settle on arms-length goofiness. Sometimes the sweet turns cuddly, and sometimes the winning andthenandthen and yes-and storytelling (“I like it. And I like what you said. Both things.”) gets blindsided by punched-up dramatic beats. Which could be Kaufman, or the book, but it feels easier to blame the “additional screenplay material” by Lloyd Taylor – who, like director Sean Charmatz, is a graduate of Dreamworks’ Trolls franchise.

[Never Cursed]

Lois Patiño's Samsara proved a weirdly comforting sit in spite of my aversion to the physical and spiritual processes it so viscerally presents, and I recommend it equally to people who have similar fears and are willing to try some exposure therapy, and, more pertinently, to people who want to debate what the outer bounds of a "film" can be. The film's most impressive moments are the 20 or so minutes in its middle which depict the passage of a consciousness through an otherworldly realm as an avalanche of shifting sounds and flashing lights that intertitles ask the viewer to experience with their eyes closed. In an IMAX theater, at least, the effect is really powerful: the strong lights diffuse through the eyelids and, I guess, "stain" the patterns that usually move around when one's eyes are shut, giving the impression of sourceless colors and images. The corresponding sound collage is frenzied, static-like, cleansing, providing the structure for the segment (the intertitles tell you to open your eyes when the sounds subside) in a way that the director assumes that the visuals themselves could not. Is this still a film if even the ability to see it (or anything) is withheld by design from the audience? The film certainly expects this section to stand on its own merits, and on balance I think the movie offers enough to traditionally admire before and after the closed-eyes parts to make these parts traditionally meaningful. A slim and universalist (almost to the point of offending the poor Muslim residents of its second half with its belief in the cyclical one-ness of all things) narrative persists through this transitory passage, tracing the life of two interconnected living beings, but its importance is stylistically downplayed as much as possible. However non-visual the visual pleasures of the segment are, they're worth experiencing. Readers with the patience for slower (if not quite "slow") cinema could probably reproduce the effect pretty well by watching on a laptop or desktop with the screen brightness turned up, headphones on, and with one's head closer-than-usual to the screen just for the closed-eyes part.

I can offer one further (subjective) proof of Samsara's relevance to the cinematic experience: I watched S. J. Clarkson's Madame Web the following day in the same auditorium, and I can definitively state that Patiño's film offers more to visual art with a viewer's eyes closed than Clarkson's does in the act of watching. Madame Web falls into the Suicide Squad/Justice League/Rogue One/Fant4stic/The Snowman/(insert more titles here) ironic entertainment zone, where it's far more rewarding to try and sense the palpable stitches and seam lines in a hastily-cobbled-together-at-the-last-minute epic than it is to follow or revel in anything the film has to offer, and given this film's astonishing six-month, six-unit shoot, I suspect the state of the movie during production was probably as dire as some of those previously-cited examples. Without doing a 40-minute deep dive, the setting of the film was changed from the 1990s to the 2000s, and Tahar Rahim's villain was completely ADRed at A Night to Dismember quality (his mouth doesn't move half the time he speaks), so I suspect that some executive panicked and had the villain's motivations and arc, and thus everything else, re-written mid-filming. (Compare this track record to Oppenheimer, which got the material for a globe-trotting epic in 55 days with one unit at the same budget.) It's also the culmination of every stylistic and tonal half-measure taken by the blockbusters of the past two decades, displaying a, well, Oppenheimerian inability to commit to one approach. It's an origin story that fails to show its superheroes getting powers, putting on costumes, and fighting crime; it's a horror movie with no scares, bumps, fight scenes in the traditional sense, or defined antagonists; it's a star vehicle that completely mishandles its name talent, subjecting poor Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney to lines that no actor could possibly sell;

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it's a Spider-Man movie depicting the actual birth of Peter Parker, the kid that becomes Spider-Man, without naming him on-screen or hinting at which Spider-Man he might be.

Like a lot of the disaster movies mentioned above, this film contains multitudes for an ironic, reactive, or cruel viewer while offering a sincere audience member nothing - and depending on who you are, that might just be its selling point.

[thirtyframesasecond]

From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

[domino harvey]

From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

I mean, she fired her agent when the trailer dropped, so she’s probably only doing the literal required legal minimum to support it

[beamish14]

From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

She dumped her entire management team weeks before it came out

[Never Cursed]

From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

It's the latter, and people who call it the former are probably mis-identifying the type of ironic pleasure they got from the film. There's very little that the film itself offers you to enjoy; it is not a The Room-esque experience where the creative choices are so wrong that they horseshoe into their own twisted aesthetic sensibility, but rather a movie aiming for a very specific (and dull) genre or mode that is mostly notable for how badly it misses the mark given the amount of time and money wasted. Part of that is how nakedly reshot and slapped-together the work is, but I think it also has to do with ambition: most of the so-bad-it's-good canon is either trying for energetic lurid excitement or is genuinely striving to be a film imbued with the passion of Tennessee Williams. The most Madame Web wants to do is blend seamlessly with the house styles of two separate micromanaging producers (Avi Arad and Kevin Feige). I kind of think a movie with such limited horizons can't be "so bad it's good."

[reygar5]

I can’t wait to see Hit Man when it comes out in May. I’m a huge fan of Richard Linklater and Glen Powell, and this film looks like a blast. It’s a rare combination of action, comedy, romance, and suspense, with a clever twist on the hitman genre. The reviews from Venice and Toronto have been glowing, and I’ve heard it’s one of Linklater’s most entertaining and original films. Plus, Adria Arjona is stunning as the femme fatale.

[therewillbeblus]

Evil Does Not Exist

Though I liked his last two overall (not so much what I’ve seen before that), I never got the fuss over Hamaguchi until now. This is a film that dares to be so elliptically humanistic in its approach, that it consistently succeeds at walking very challenging tightropes across contexts: channeling both deep sadness and warm inspiration for the limitations and potentials of individual action in a social world. With pitch-perfect performances by the ensemble, a tremendous, sparsely used score, and objective yet intimate direction, this feels like a recontextualization of slow cinema techniques into something new, haunting and exhilarating. The Godardian score-drops alone signify this split between tones and our varying engagements with drama.

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I take the film’s title at face value. Hamaguchi feels sorry for the CEO, even if he feels way more compassion for everyone else. And even if violence is considered immoral, it is not evil to protect your daughter, though the ambiguity over how much is fueled by anger versus survivalism is part of the film’s power, and perhaps reflects Hamaguchi’s own confusion over what emotion he feels strongest towards the world and individuals in a post-covid world. But he does know what’s most important to him. Maybe recently discovered, as so many opportunities for emotional engagement yielded revelations in the last four years, not all good...

This feels like like ultimate post-covid movie, well beyond the surface content.

[therewillbeblus]

Immaculate

I'm convinced most audiences and critics either don't get what this movie is doing to begin with, or don't care to in our modern climate of abundant horror films seeking to make a point, but I loved this tight, self-conscious neo-giallo. The film strikes a balance between brazenly indulging its campy dressings and sincerely engaging with its sociopolitical themes, so the visceral predicaments are validly unsettling but it never pretends to take a new torch to patriarchal or religious systems, even if it does go about it with a slightly-bent originality. The whole film basically functions like a convent version of Suspiria's coven, just without as much juicy filler - even if this is lean and propulsive, if could've used maybe five more minutes in the middle adding small layers to briefly enrich relationship dynamics, etc. but that's a small quibble.

A huge bow goes to Sydney Sweeney, who's potentially as much of an auteur as the creative juices behind the script and camera (I haven't followed the project as closely as others, but I believe she was the driving force behind this getting made at all, which adds layer of meaning to an already-fun ride. Sweeney is an actress who is so keenly aware of her body and how it's commodified by others, that her choices to not simply hide it behind a nun outfit, but flaunt it in the ways she does are surprisingly creative and subversive, culminating in what may be the biggest middle-finger to the Wades of the world captured on film thus far. The last three minutes of this movie are a direct emulation of

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Adjani's perf in the tunnel scene of Possession

and Sweeney nails it; and -like the film- consciously and conscientiously pays tribute while also making it entirely her own. The whole thing is worth watching just to see that. Calling it now: She'll be competing for Best Actress a few years from now (hopefully in good company alongside Zendaya and Hunter Schafer!)

[therewillbeblus]

Furiosa

This seems primed as an unpopular opinion already, but I thought this was easily the best film in the franchise, distilling the highlights of every prior film to their sublime essentials and expanding upon them and more to create an epic of robust narrative satisfaction. That latter sensation I've never gotten so 'completely' from prior entries as other viewers (it should be noted I consider myself a massive fan of the franchise, I just don't think Fury Road should've won BP or anything). And while this might not be quite as 'action-y' as Fury Road (but what is? And even if not in such a 'relentless' sense, in another it's even more action-packed!), the set pieces and cleverly-imagined sequences we do get feel even bigger and more cathartic than anything in that film, or the others for that matter. Not everything works all the time - I can already predict complaints of overplotting, though the actual 'narrative' engagement is where the strengths lie - but this feels like the boldest outing yet in terms of both an ambitious scope fulfilled ten years ago and full-measured risk in storytelling and mythologizing, and hits nearly every mark it attempts. And even if all the parts together form a whole that would have suffered from any piece omitted, its episodic structure basically gives us five thrilling short films of captivating lore and witty visual ideas at a base value. Movies rarely have a fraction as many rich ideas as this does, nor do they execute them with an ounce of its unbridled glee. It's a blast.

[Yakushima]

Re: Furiosa

Furiosa had particularly big shoes to fill, so I was not too surprised that my first impression was mostly mixed.

First, what really worked was the imaginative, lived-in setting and the numerous intricate and campy details of the costumes, vehicles, and surroundings. They also introduced some great new secondary characters. The film is such a rich tapestry of interesting details and characters that I will be revisiting it despite all the shortcomings.

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They did a very good job with the younger versions of some characters. Immortan Joe, in particular, was so convincing that I was shocked to learn afterward that he was played by a different actor.

Now to the disappointing aspects. Furiosa mostly fails to establish an emotional core that was so integral to the success of Fury Road, in large part because Anya Taylor-Joy's acting abilities are a far cry from Charlize Theron's. To me, Furiosa was most engaging in the first third, where Alyla Browne played the Furiosa part.

Another issue was that the story defied logic a bit too much. Whether in Fury Road we were riding at the very edge of believability, in Furiosa , they abandon the constraints of logic completely.

Of course, the rather uninspired and cliché-ridden plot does not help. Lastly, there were some particularly poorly executed visual effects, especially in the first part. As a result of all these shortcomings, the film felt unnecessarily long, and at times plain tedious.

[therewillbeblus]

Whether in Fury Road we were riding at the very edge of believability, in Furiosa , they abandon the constraints of logic completely.

How so, comparatively?

[Yakushima]

Whether in Fury Road we were riding at the very edge of believability, in Furiosa , they abandon the constraints of logic completely.

How so, comparatively?

Off the top of my head,

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Furiosa escapes her captors after loosing her arm, but it doesn't seem to slow her down much, despite loss of blood. She builds her prosthetic arm with no prior skills. Her hair does not catch fire even when engulfed by it. In this installment most characters breathe freely while in a sand or dust storm, while in Fury Road they at least took care to cover their faces. All the produce looks like it was purchased in a supermarket, not grown hydroponically in a cave. All vehicles and sophisticated weapons seem to be in top working order despite sand, lack of infrastructure and very few skilled technicians still around. The chases and fighting scenes in Fury Road at least appeared plausible, while in Furiosa everything looked cartoonishly exaggerated.

Again, I am not saying this was the major issue with this film, just something that made me slightly less invested in the proceedings. Still plenty to enjoy here.

[liam fennell]

I got out of Hit Man a few hours ago and I find myself kind of bowled over by the hard to read moral complexity I found in it at the end. This movie is pretending to be one thing, a breezy fun little bit of time-passing, complete with stock dirty-talking buddy cops — the Gary/Ron character in it is (absurdly) a part-time pretend 'hit man' working alongside a bantering team of undercover cops in order to pay bills in between university lectures on philosophy and psychology (his dogs are named Ego and Id) — but it really seems to be doing something else entirely and I couldn't be more pleased with the weird mixed message! That said, I don't know how it makes me feel, aside from pleased that I find these things there to be interpreted and puzzled over (so I write a bit). I wonder are the trees obscuring the forest. I wonder am I lost in the forest. I'd say this is the mark of a good movie. It was also entertaining and well made.

Too much about too little, perhaps, and a few spoilers possibly:Show

I don't know Linklater's work except Dazed & Confused so I don't know if this is familiar territory for him or not, if the political dimension is really there or if I'm just projecting like crazy. The first movie here, the breezy fun one, was what I expected; naturalistic but highly controlled, beautiful photography, clever, lots of laughs, good music, etc. The second movie hidden under the surface — the bitter and desperate political movie — is something else entirely. Again, I might be projecting but the timing is interesting. Why this story now.

The story is fun, I very much admire the relatively sober treatment of the absurd premise, and the movie's quality overall is exceptional. Excellent actors. Particularly impressive for me was a masterful and ingenious scene en route to the denouement, a scene which involves a tense situation that is unusually cinematic — both aesthetically with the staging and performances, and also from a storytelling point of view — in that it portrays in a single sequence the two lead characters themselves balancing on a high wire directing, acting, improvising, and collaborating in the brilliant staging of a scene for the cops' hidden microphone as part of the plot machinations!

The movie, unless I'm wildly misreading it (which isn't impossible, I'm an idiot), seems to be advocating for essentially the adoption of short-term fascistic solutions for dealing with problems, in particular those presented by the types of people who are the sort who endorse, at least tacitly, the tenets and mindsets associated with fascism: the racists, the crooked cops, the spousal abusers, the blackmailers, the would-be employers of hit men. Secret police spying and deception are here shown as good if they catch 'bad' guys or help you get a date with a pretty girl; blurring the line between entrapment and a legit sting is similarly portrayed as well worth doing. The people who get murdered in this picture aren't themselves murderers, and the committed murders are not exactly done in self-defense. They are committed out of self-interest and desperation. The murderer-heroes are only portrayed superficially as good (we're told they're good people but we don't see much evidence, and the woman in particular seems willing to commit crimes at the drop of a hat) and we never do see any sound justification for their actions; instead the couple are directly depicted as talented/clever/attractive, and thus deserving. The only difference between the murderous woman and her murderous ex-husband — they both try to hire the hit man — is we spend more time with the woman. This is so gray. It then goes on to advocate for embracing and integrating the newly revealed fascistic side into your personality after it earns you rewards; Gary/Ron's hit man identity is too valuable/useful for him to ever again fully repress.

So it's a fun breezy movie about an identity crisis that turns into, by dint of the new identity so casually assumed, one about fucking murdering people we don't like in order to become (from our perspective) better people and live better lives. It's saying, to me, that sometimes this is necessary, and, I guess, that if you have draw a line then a self-preserving one is okay, even if you kind of deserve it. This seems to me very complex! Kant is name-dropped briefly in the movie; one's categorical imperative is of course situation-dependent, but a clear-thinking person's moral compass is generally not going to point in the direction of murdering people for selfish reasons, not even to escape the earned consequences of one's own prior actions. A desperate person isn't necessarily thinking clearly. I imagine, reductio ad absurdum, a sequel where they kill the mailman for delivering the overdue bills they still (desperately) don't want to pay. Where does this behavior stop.

Now, the endorsement of fighting fascistic fire with fascistic fire thing that I perceive (and I mostly perceive it so clearly because Gary/Ron explicitly states the necessity of murder, historically, to his class during a lecture scene about half-way through; he doesn't use the F word, but it's expressed by him more than once that some people just need to die) is for most of the runtime secondary to the identity theme, but it's in the end so very central to the synthesized Gary/Ron identity that it for me dominates the movie. To use the movie's own terminology, this is a movie where the movie's ego allows its id out of its cage in order to solve problems, and then when, free of its cage and the problems freshly solved, the id refuses to go back into the cage, the ego is left handcuffed to it instead as a compromise. The movie claims it is stronger for this newer, better id-ego combination. It has become a 'real person'. When you break it down to those terms, look at the whole thing as symbolism, and apply a historical and political perspective, then it IMO turns into a kind of realistic depiction of how reality actually works. You really do have to fight fire with fire sometimes, and you don't exactly do it because you want to. You sometimes even have to burn down the whole forest to clear out the undergrowth and allow it to grow back healthier and stronger. Sometimes perhaps it doesn't grow back at all; I wonder if the movie is both an illustration of the necessity for action, and also a warning.

That the ultimate callous murder is depicted as hot/romantic, and that they live together happily after after, is just kind of beyond the pale in an interesting way. With time I might even find it profoundly unsettling. Gary/Ron is a nice guy; I like him, you know? The behavior on display at the end is just so casually disturbing, and then it doubles down and goes into a not at all obviously ironic voice over (maybe I'm tone deaf) where Gary/Ron tells us how they lived happily ever after, complete with shots of them in their new super nice house, with their new kids and so on. Again, these are murderers who murdered out of pure self-interest; I'm convinced the movie is too well crafted and Linklater is too intelligent for this to be simply what it appears to be, a cliched use of stylized movie glamour. It's telling us (okay, me) something, and the message I'm receiving is a strong one, maybe even a good one, but not a particularly palatable one. Strange movie!

[The Curious Sofa]

Immaculate

I'm convinced most audiences and critics either don't get what this movie is doing to begin with, or don't care to in our modern climate of abundant horror films seeking to make a point, but I loved this tight, self-conscious neo-giallo. The film strikes a balance between brazenly indulging its campy dressings and sincerely engaging with its sociopolitical themes, so the visceral predicaments are validly unsettling but it never pretends to take a new torch to patriarchal or religious systems, even if it does go about it with a slightly-bent originality. The whole film basically functions like a convent version of Suspiria's coven, just without as much juicy filler - even if this is lean and propulsive, if could've used maybe five more minutes in the middle adding small layers to briefly enrich relationship dynamics, etc. but that's a small quibble.

A huge bow goes to Sydney Sweeney, who's potentially as much of an auteur as the creative juices behind the script and camera (I haven't followed the project as closely as others, but I believe she was the driving force behind this getting made at all, which adds layer of meaning to an already-fun ride. Sweeney is an actress who is so keenly aware of her body and how it's commodified by others, that her choices to not simply hide it behind a nun outfit, but flaunt it in the ways she does are surprisingly creative and subversive, culminating in what may be the biggest middle-finger to the Wades of the world captured on film thus far. The last three minutes of this movie are a direct emulation of

SpoilerShow

Adjani's perf in the tunnel scene of Possession

and Sweeney nails it; and -like the film- consciously and conscientiously pays tribute while also making it entirely her own. The whole thing is worth watching just to see that. Calling it now: She'll be competing for Best Actress a few years from now (hopefully in good company alongside Zendaya and Hunter Schafer!)

Immaculate and The First Omen is one of those baffling cases of film synchronicity, like Capote and Infamous or Deep Impact and Armageddon, where two films in production at the same time have exactly the same plot. While I enjoyed Immaculate, I'll give the edge to The First Omen, which is a more stylish and atmospheric film and which I also found a little more creepy. Like the recent reboots of long-in-the-tooth horror franchises The Evil Dead, Scream and Saw, this prequel to The Omen is made with more care than one might expect. Its evocation of 70s Rome is spot on, down to Mark Korven's score, which evolves from the incongruously upbeat, melodious pop you would hear in an Italian exploitation film of the period to the full-blown Ave Satani. Nell Tiger Free, best known as the mysterious nanny from the Apple+ horror show Servant, is excellent in the lead role. She has a more otherworldly presence than Sydney Sweeney, and can look plain, scary or breathtakingly beautiful, depending on what's required. If you thought Immaculate has a reference to Adjani's freak-out/birth from Possession, just wait until you see the equivalent here.

In keeping with the times,

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the Catholic Church is the big bad in both films, and the only major difference between them is that Immaculate turns out to have no overtly supernatural element, while this, tying into the mythology of The Omen, does.

For me, both films are better at the build-up than the action-packed final act and Immaculate has the better last shot. The ending of The First Omen hints at a sequel (and "sidequel" to the original The Omen) that we'll probably never see, as the film didn't do well at the box office, but director Arkasha Stevenson, whose first feature this is, is a talent to watch.

[hearthesilence]

I got out of Hit Man a few hours ago and I find myself kind of bowled over by the hard to read moral complexity I found in it at the end...

I'm going to see Hit Man this coming weekend, but FWIW, Jonathan Rosenbaum (who I imagine will post a bit more about it down the road) made this comment:

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As with BERNIE, it's about hypocrisy, and as with Varda's LE BONHEUR, it's designed to make us uneasy and conflicted about our desire to believe in mythology. It's fun with a bitter aftertaste.

(Doesn't really need spoilers, but some people can be a bit sensitive.)

[therewillbeblus]

There’s definitely something to analyzing Hit Man as a meditation on the relativity of morality and identity, but I also think it really is just a delightfully-absurd rom-com. Its absurdism might be the watered-down kind, but it does fit with existential absurdism, and it decides to be optimistic for our potential instead of cynical in a binary sense when matching action to outcome (e.g. a lie is bad so now this person is too). Linklater has spent his career either just having fun or investigating these philosophical topics, and here’s a nice fusion that doesn’t go too far in one direction on the surface while never compromising with half-measures in either. I loved it.