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!)