The Films of 2024

[pianocrash]

I know her mainly from Game of Thrones where she had precisely one expression, a worried pout from under raised eyebrows.

To be fair, I didn't even realize Hannah Waddingham was even on that series until recently, because it was Game Of Thrones, wherein every character was practically a statue/chess piece, each with only one discernible emotion and/or expression.

[beamish14]

The Brothers Quay’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

[spectre]

Really looking forward to this one. Just hope I won't have to wait all the way until next year's Melbourne International Film Festival in August (or longer!)

[Never Cursed]

Posters on the antagonist awards forum think this means A24 is giving up on Queer (and they may have already realized they blew Sing Sing), so perhaps y’all are right and I am mistaken— I want to believe the hype for this one being a masterpiece, at any rate

Oh-kay, A24 gave up on Queer (and bought the Corbet) because it is not much of a marketable awards season film, which is hardly a demerit against the film - or the one I'd apply to it first! Much of Guadagnino's recent work (Challengers exempted) has been characterized by an ellipticality that comes with the director's expressive if shy attitude towards fleeting, sensual pleasures, but it is rare to find a conventional film that so forcefully jettisons narrative and relies so completely on a twitching, id-controlled lead performance to carry a film as Queer. Its first hour is formless, which works in the moody, needle-drop-scored early scenes of Daniel Craig wandering around the streets, but quickly that pump-up energy is lost as the movie descends into a repetitive blend of bar visits, dreams, and chance encounters. (That said, even if he isn't given much more to do than complain about ex-partners, Jason Schwartzman kills during his limited screen time in said repetitive bar visits). Thankfully, Craig is completely magnetic and displays a withering, self-contemptuous charisma opposed to the conventional hero roles found his recent film work. His gusto imbues the quadtych of sex scenes with an energy that their relatively conventional staging (and their over-editing, a problem that the movie is burdened with more generally - exactly one sexual act, performed on Craig and communicated through his intensifying facial expression, is captured in a single long take, and that scene is far superior to all the others) would not otherwise provide, and connects his high sex drive with his addictive tendencies in a surprisingly sour fashion. By so effectively being a frayed wire, he sells the film's many and unexpected jaunts better than the story itself deserves, culminating in a truly confusing trip to Lesley-Manville-in-freakish-hag-makeup in the jungle that resolves with some of the strangest uses of visual effects that filmgoers will see outside of Megalopolis. An Oscar nomination appears to be in the cards for Craig, thanks in part to the field being relatively weak and other challengers for the wild-card fifth slot (Phoenix, John David Washington, Sebastian Stan) repping movies that appear to be terrible, but I wouldn't complain even if he won.

[flyonthewall2983]

Red Rooms was a pleasant surprise, in how tense everything is but gives way to its fascinating twists, a word I am loathe to use usually, but I found there to be some twists within itself that push the very fabric of cliches you find in these types of movies into a different light. Immediately questioning everyone and everything, and being replenished by maybe not the direct answer but the feelings behind the truth, behind the blank faces, and ultimately confronting an evil itself that is as clearly corrosive to those closest to this particular crime.

It’s also a kind of warning about human nature and how it all becomes monopolized and manipulated. By the media, by the ignorant masses of public given to whatever injustice they perceive. This is embodied in the main character, at least on the surface. Her own motivations do not read clear, even through to it’s perhaps too tidy of an ending but is at least in complete harmony with the choices Juliette Garièpe brings to the role to Kelly-Anne. Much credit to Pascal Plante for assembling this puzzle in a way that exudes our worst instinct about humanity, while keeping its heart beating true to what is still noble about it.

[Mr Sausage]

I didn't mind that Red Rooms had a tidy plot resolution, because for me the ambiguities were all in the main character's layered, fascinating psychological state than the court case at hand. There were so many ways the film could've opted for a flat, easy satire, and instead invested in a character whose mental state becomes harder to read the more we learn about her. A non-judgemental movie about an increasingly common fascination in our culture.

Did it just get released in America or something? I remember watching it last year.

[flyonthewall2983]

Just made available to stream, not in 4K yet but I will spring for it if it comes out (this was a rental).

[Yakushima]

Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron documentary by Kaku Arakawa is by far my favorite film of 2024. It is a delicate but piercing look into Miyazaki and his team's creative process by the filmmaker who gained Miyazaki's complete confidence and became essentially a fly on the wall during some of the most dramatic moments of the production, including the stretch during the pandemic. Absolutely essential viewing for anyone even remotely interested in Hayao Miyazaki's work and life.

[Never Cursed]

Blitz is now but the latest Oscar hopeful to fizzle out once screened. Every year always has a couple would be misses, but I have never seen such a high degree of high profile award failures in the decades that I’ve been following this kind of thing. Incredible. I have no clue what the top ten for Best Picture will look like, but my guess is it will closely resemble that first year when things like District 9 made it in, because no top ten I can come up with seems plausible right now

Having now seen it, I'm surprised that the huge and generic movie in question found little purchase with film-fest frequentees and easily-impressed trade critics. Hell, 1917 almost went the distance a few years ago, and that's a similar and superior film. So what's the problem here? I don't mind necessarily that the film feels "stock," that it is an attempt to make a big Spielberg disaster movie (War of the Worlds is the obvious point of comparison, but one can make others very easily) where each setpiece bleeds into the next and communicates the texture of a huge Event through the eyes of likeable ordinary people, but its construction is very shoddy and extremely old-fashioned, moreso than the serials that Spielberg emulates. The characterizations are mostly grating, with Benjamin Clementine exempted and Stephen Graham and his gang of circus freaks by far the most annoying, but that's not a dealbreaker in a film that depends upon these people being easily digestible archetypes. Honestly, the political angle of the film is more self-destructive, with any anti-elite, anti-imperial subtext mostly nullified by the nationalism inherent to McQueen's nostalgia for a liberal-multicultural London that was itself the product of horrific imperial abuses. It's great that McQueen got to make a film highlighting the government's incapacity or apathy towards many of its citizens, controversy over Tube station shelters and all, but he's still romanticizing the events from a different perspective.

I was far more shocked to watch a McQueen film that largely eschews the long takes central to the most interesting scenes in his previous films (there are a couple, but mostly in quite bad spots for them) - I don't know if he was working more around the limitations of the main kid actor or the period-accurate but inflexible sets, but some creative element that he decided to protect prevented him from employing the fluid camera work so essential to Spielberg's approach. In its place is a hodgepodge of traditional coverage and duplicate angles; watch this movie and you'll know what it would look like if Yorick Le Saux's pretty colors were employed in a Chaos Walking-esque project. The editing is uniformly bad as well, with lots of hypercut action scenes, transitions that aren't very intuitive (one major piece of exposition is delivered in a flashback in a flashback in a cross-cut, a early scene at a factory begins in a big master shot with a lot of choreography that immediately fades into an unrelated scene of a train), and even one straight-up mistake, where a shot of some bombs falling is placed before bombs start falling.

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And I don't know exactly what words to use to criticize this, but the movie also just, like, ends with zero wrap-up? Like, the kid gets back to his house, sees his dead grandfather, finds his mom, they embrace, wide shot of destroyed London, THAT'S IT.(?) Paul Schrader can get away with adding or deleting the button from his recent movies because he's both a better screenwriter than McQueen and one who embeds a feeling of pained finality into those projects. In this movie, it feels like the DCP accidentally skipped a scene.

[John Cope]

Wow. Caddo Lake was absolutely fantastic, a really wonderful surprise, the kind any cineaste longs for. Produced by Shyamalan, so that gives you I suppose some idea of what you may be in for, but far greater than anything he's given us lately or maybe ever. The central conceit, which I won't give away and around which the entire narrative revolves, could have easily been just a stock device or even a gimmick in lesser hands but here its revealing is handled with sublime sensitivity as we only gradually discover it along with the characters. There is both space and pace to be able to do that and for it to then have effective, naturally emerging meaning and that makes a world of a difference (somehow something this good doesn't even get a theatrical run but goes straight to Max--do not be fooled by that in terms of quality). Co-lead O'Brien has been to similar territory before with the equally superb but still underseen and under appreciated Flashback. This also reminds me somewhat of The Outwaters with the flow of it all, the endlessly unraveling and all encompassing reveal. Film has a welcome ecological theme, once again handled with real care and artistry, in which ecosystems are seen as precarious and fragile and at risk of constantly collapsing into chaos (and here yet again this film excels on Shyamalan's similarly themed one). A perfect ending too, and deeply moving without being forced. See it by all means.

[vibeway]

Blitz is just heartbreakingly and shockingly bad. Fails on every cinematic level: story, pacing, character, directing, editing. So sad. Endless minutes of scenes that have nothing to do with the "story". Ronan is given nothing to work with in the script, no emotional place to inhabit. The score is completely off, wrong. Characters are all kept apart for most of the movie when for emotional impact they should be together for most of the movie. B stories that bring nothing, many even disturbing and offensive. Exhausting and preachy racial tropes and "Hamilton" like historical rewriting. This literally could be taught in film school for how to do everything wrong in a film. Bombs and planes should not have been shown. What is unseen is scarier than what is seen. The flat expository time jumps served little purpose and there were too many of them, took the audience continually out of the "story".

[Aspect]

Wow. Caddo Lake was absolutely fantastic, a really wonderful surprise, the kind any cineaste longs for. Produced by Shyamalan, so that gives you I suppose some idea of what you may be in for, but far greater than anything he's given us lately or maybe ever. The central conceit, which I won't give away and around which the entire narrative revolves, could have easily been just a stock device or even a gimmick in lesser hands but here its revealing is handled with sublime sensitivity as we only gradually discover it along with the characters. There is both space and pace to be able to do that and for it to then have effective, naturally emerging meaning and that makes a world of a difference (somehow something this good doesn't even get a theatrical run but goes straight to Max--do not be fooled by that in terms of quality). Co-lead O'Brien has been to similar territory before with the equally superb but still underseen and under appreciated Flashback. This also reminds me somewhat of The Outwaters with the flow of it all, the endlessly unraveling and all encompassing reveal. Film has a welcome ecological theme, once again handled with real care and artistry, in which ecosystems are seen as precarious and fragile and at risk of constantly collapsing into chaos (and here yet again this film excels on Shyamalan's similarly themed one). A perfect ending too, and deeply moving without being forced. See it by all means.

Watched this too based on your recommendation and, while I didn’t like it nearly as much as you did, I will say that the point of comparison is not so much Shyamalan’s work (even though he produced it) but rather

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Christopher Nolan’s, especially Interstellar.

Once I made that connection, which didn’t take long (how are these characters connected?), I predicted how the whole movie would play out. It takes a very silly concept and plays it very seriously, which is fine because a lot of movies do that, but I definitely wished it was more original.

[Mr Sausage]

Woman of the Hour discussion moved here.

[The Curious Sofa]

Whenever I tell people that I like horror films, they either recoil or respond with something to the effect that they don't like gore and that horror movies work better when they are suggestive rather than explicit. But a film like Terrifier 3 is the most primal expression of the fear of dying and one's own mortality, which to me is the key to the genre. You can work through a worst-case scenario from the safety of the cinema or your sofa in the knowledge that in the end, your death will probably not be as painful and messy as this.

While no one here seems to have written about these movies yet, I noticed that in 2022, Terrifier 2 showed up on a number of the year's best lists (including mine). Terrifier (2016) was notable for its memorable villain and some genuinely shocking gore, aided by appropriately gnarly and convincing makeup effects. Apart from its sleaze appeal, it didn't have that much to offer for anybody but the most devoted gorehounds. But one of the great things about this horror franchise is that you get to see a filmmaker come into his own and each film in the series has been a significant improvement over the previous one. Terrifier 2 was a huge step up in quality. It was a far more polished piece of filmmaking, with better character development than I've seen in most "elevated" horror. Lauren LaVera has rightly received praise for being one of the better final girls the slasher genre has seen, but Elliot Fullman as her younger, troubled brother is just as good. The relationship between these two gives the film its emotional core. It's a miracle what Damien Leone achieves on a $250,000 budget. Halloween Ends was released the same year and is not only a toothless slasher movie, it doesn't look that much better on a budget of $33 million.

This time Leone had 2 million, still minuscule by Hollywood standards but not only does Terrifier 3 look like it cost ten times as much, it is also the most profitable movie of the year, kicking Joker: Folie à Deux's butt at the box office and as the best homicidal clown movie of this (or any) year. Terrifier 3 has great cinematography and an excellent score, it's tense, it's as gory as these movies have ever been, and best of all, it never loses sight of its characters. Much of the movie is about the PTSD that the heroine suffers as a result of the events of the previous film. I can't think of another slasher sequel that deals so much with the trauma of its surviving heroine, not the Scream movies and not Halloween H20 (which was the best attempt at dealing with trauma in a slasher sequel I've seen and was the best thing about an otherwise mediocre movie). Despite her fantasy heroine alter ego, LaVera's Sienna Shaw never falls into any "strong woman" tropes. She's smart, courageous, and empathetic, but also deeply vulnerable and emotionally scarred.

At the same time, for a true horror fan, there's something deeply satisfying about how ruthlessly gruesome these movies are, something that mainstream Hollywood horror can't compete with. I was both (pleasantly) grossed out by the gore and in awe of the technical wizardry with which these gags are pulled off. As modern grindhouse movies that restore some disrepute to the horror genre and pay homage to 70's and 80 exploitations, they also put Rob Zombie's efforts to shame. The Terrifier movies go much further when it comes to delivering the gory goods, but unlike Zombie's movies, they understand that for a horror movie to be scary, you have to be invested in the victims.

This movie doesn't suffer from the pacing problems of its predecessor. While I admired the ambition and commitment to excess of a micro-budget slasher sequel that's nearly 2.5 hours long, it's easy to see where the movie could have been trimmed down (the whole Clown Cafe sequence for one). Terrifier 3 is still long, clocking in at just over 2 hours, but it moves along at a brisk pace, keeping several plots going until they all converge at the climax. While I look forward to the inevitable Terrifier 4, I hope that Leone will soon branch out and make a horror movie that doesn't rely on Art the Clown. He produced and did the makeup effects on this year's Stream, but that movie lacks the style and talent that Leone brought to the last two Terrifier movies.

[Red Screamer]

What if Eastwood saves the day and Juror #2 is another Million Dollar Baby?

Like a bad comedy skit, this year won’t stop: WB is dumping this with no ad campaign whatsoever in 50 theaters on Nov 1st, and with no plans to expand. So no, this isn’t coming to save us

Even beyond the disrespect to Eastwood, Warner is soon going to realize this is a mistake: I just saw it with a nearly packed audience that was vocally appreciative the whole way through. It’s intentionally minor genre fare without the director’s screen persona to give it that movie-myth gravitas that some cinephiles cherish so much, but it’s effective on its own terms. I’d personally put Juror #2 above Cry Macho and the Mule, finding it more robust / less sloppy formally despite its theatrical four-set framework. The generally overbright images (dogged by slight DTV touches, like cityscape stock footage with mismatched color correction) are actually cut through nicely by doses of the high contrast Eastwood noir style, particularly when it comes to how the flashbacks are deployed. It winds up being kind of the old-fashioned, no-subtext companion to Hit Man’s satire of hypocrisy. With some awards push maybe there could’ve been some traction for Hoult’s performance or Jonathan Abrams’ brisk, economical screenplay that knows how to exploit both the “12 Angry Men with a twist” template and the expected courtroom rhetoric without wearing out their welcome. But in the end, it’s really not that kind of movie; it’s a fun family holiday weekend hit waiting to happen.

[therewillbeblus]

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran) – Is this great contemporary filmmaker finally going to get his due? This is an impossible movie to ignore. In this film, Rasoulof turns his attention from the obvious victims of the Iranian regime to the establishment, and finds characters subject to the same means of suppression and control. Set against the backdrop of the popular protests following the state murder of Mahsa Amini (the documenting of which in this film via phone footage would have been more than enough to send Rasoulof to prison), we observe the slow motion conflagration of an investigating judge’s family. As tensions escalate, the film itself transitions from genre to genre in unexpected ways.

I thought this was a masterpiece, with three of the best lead female performances I've seen in recent memory, particularly Soheila Golestani as the mother figure whose diverse reactions are complexly rooted in elided family dynamics clashing with sociopolitical unrest. While resisting subtlety and emerging as perhaps the angriest Iranian film I've ever seen, I admired the gradual progression that hints at subtext regarding unseen interpersonal family history and the exact strength of personal allegiances.

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It's a bold move to begin by aligning the audience with the father's predicaments. He seems genuinely troubled by his unjust assignments to seal fates, and when the gun is lost we are trained to feel for him as a symbol for the entire family unit's stability.. but then as actionable information graces us, we witness just how divorced the father is from the family unit, and we couldn't be less aligned with him by the film's end. There are all sorts of minute hints that the daughters are aware of their father's "true colors" without ever overstating them beyond the extreme, removed actions taken - and how much of those actions are deeply personal vs. political is graciously kept hidden, because how can such complexity possibly be explained in any succinct manner?

[Red Screamer]

Magnus von Horn's The Girl with the Needle.

I hated this so much I had to skip the screening I had tickets for afterward: miserablist, calculated melodrama recycled from 19th-century fiction magazines that pretends to provoke with its endless escalations of punishments and screaming while looking like a Saint Laurent ad. The Euro equivalent of the worst A24-type artsy trends while searching for extremes of unpleasantness. It also has one of the most insulting endings of recent memory, where

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a literal serial killer of babies is given a gloss of pathos as she justifies herself in speech with the gist that society was the real criminal all along. Really makes you think! Then we get an utterly syrupy happy ending with a shot of a child smiling serenely as she's adopted from an orphanage, all of the horrors somehow forgotten.

You've been warned.

[brundlefly]

Wow. Caddo Lake was absolutely fantastic, a really wonderful surprise, the kind any cineaste longs for. Produced by Shyamalan, so that gives you I suppose some idea of what you may be in for, but far greater than anything he's given us lately or maybe ever. The central conceit, which I won't give away and around which the entire narrative revolves, could have easily been just a stock device or even a gimmick in lesser hands but here its revealing is handled with sublime sensitivity as we only gradually discover it along with the characters. There is both space and pace to be able to do that and for it to then have effective, naturally emerging meaning and that makes a world of a difference (somehow something this good doesn't even get a theatrical run but goes straight to Max--do not be fooled by that in terms of quality). Co-lead O'Brien has been to similar territory before with the equally superb but still underseen and under appreciated Flashback. This also reminds me somewhat of The Outwaters with the flow of it all, the endlessly unraveling and all encompassing reveal. Film has a welcome ecological theme, once again handled with real care and artistry, in which ecosystems are seen as precarious and fragile and at risk of constantly collapsing into chaos (and here yet again this film excels on Shyamalan's similarly themed one). A perfect ending too, and deeply moving without being forced. See it by all means.

Watched this too based on your recommendation and, while I didn’t like it nearly as much as you did, I will say that the point of comparison is not so much Shyamalan’s work (even though he produced it) but rather

SpoilerShow

Christopher Nolan’s, especially Interstellar.

Once I made that connection, which didn’t take long (how are these characters connected?), I predicted how the whole movie would play out. It takes a very silly concept and plays it very seriously, which is fine because a lot of movies do that, but I definitely wished it was more original.

Wouldn't scare people away from this, though if your end-all is puzzleboxing things away I guess I can see how you might shrug. I appreciated how much time this spent on its characters, protagonists perpetually out-of-sorts, struggling for answers and connection, and I found far more emotional payoff in this than in the work of the director you cited. I enjoyed its modesty and its restraint and the use of its twisty location -- first time in a while I haven't audibly gone ughhh at god's-eye drone shots -- though I never bothered mapping everything out.

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I think viewers are meant to be well ahead of the film by the time Ellie gets to the internet cafe, but that's a place where the rescue quest turns into the awe of acceptance, an appreciation of how people can adjust and reconfigure their lives and go on under the most extraordinary circumstances. Profound difference from Nolan's gung-ho can-do 5D game-playing. It's also a whole hour shorter than Interstellar, which is an hour I'd rather spend watching "The Girl in the Fireplace." (Though aspects of Caddo Lake may be closer to "Blink," even has a similar hospital scene.)

Simply by staying low to the ground, Benson and Moorhead may be closer touchstones than Nolan or Shyamalan.

[The Curious Sofa]

In terms of plot, Caddo Lake plays like the first few episodes of

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the German Netflix series Dark, which over three seasons, a couple of centuries and four families linked by a time portal

takes this kind of premise so much further. The beginning of the series also revolves around the mystery of a missing child, and the revelation, which is pretty much identical to the end of Caddo Lake, is only the first major plot twist in Dark.