Movies/Streaming
2024 wasn’t an outstanding year for movies, but it was a pretty good year for pretty good and very interesting movies. It proved that, yes, original scripts and fresh takes on old properties can exist in the American mainstream alongside superheroes and popcorn schlock. And biopics (A Complete Unknown had its moments for sure; The Apprentice was flawed but better).
Conclave was a hoot, despite its “do you see” on-the-noseness re its echoes of the mechanisms of American government. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance smuggled in bold and emotionally true feminist Euro sci-fi through Mubi backchannels, and the ending didn’t quite work but about 75 percent of the film shook me in a way I wish Marielle Heller’s wishy-washy, needlessly silly adaptation Nightbitch (its closest 2024 cinematic parallel) had focused its obvious intelligence long enough to do. Fargeat and Heller explored the fears and anxieties of aging women — and Hard Truths does too, and I couldn’t make it to early local screenings so I’m eager to watch how the ever-lovely Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays “angry and isolated” when Mike Leigh’s latest releases for real on January 10th. But Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour for Netflix and Annie Baker’s Janet Planet both do a beautiful job of navigating the deep, vigilant unease in the lives of women and girls.
It’s so wonderful when movies about kidhood feel like kidhood, as Janet Planet does. Not whimsical, but attentive, the way a child makes big mental maps of little moments as it learns what’s important. Not cloyingly “out of the mouths of babes,” but precocious in how a particular kind of child never stops absorbing and reflecting, becoming sponge and mirror. What we like to recall years later as endless summers and vast room to roam are often actually, in the throes of kidhood, abrupt and cramped and the crackling junebug mysteries are just things we wanted answers to and are sad we never got, bids for connection met by turning away. The people we romanticize from a distance as “free spirits” are the ones our growing, individuating selves see up close as chaotic, broken, stuck in perma-loops of bad choices. And even if you can’t articulate that as a child, it’s in your bones. I would like to buy tickets in advance to everything Annie Baker ever makes; her storytelling and directorial intuition are impeccable.
Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu bet big on slow-rolling Gothic dread and German Expressionist heightened affect and ancient Romanian tongue and vacuum-sealed it so tightly in its world and its utmost belief in its world that it was impossible for it not to be excellent. Almost unsurprisingly, 2024 was a strong year for dread. And ache and compulsion. The divisive Luca Guadagnino adaptation of Burroughs’s Queer offered grand delight amid the raging need and searching. Found communities, however tenuous, in the loneliness of midcentury exile. Refuges in the chemical dream space and on the material margins. It’s not nothing. The magic of Jane Schoenbrun’s Lynchian YA trans allegory I Saw the TV Glow is in those old cathode-ray sets as sites of warmth and referred light and interference and self itself, aspherical glass abutting womblike and fragile into our living quarters and on the verge of breach.
The Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey finds ghosts imbued in objects (if not machines), in her meditation on West African royal artifacts finally deaccessioned from Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly and returned to Benin over a century after they were looted under French rule. Far from merely being concerned with the objects or the past, Diop knows that art continues to move and breathe within its correct provenance and now shares oxygen with meaningful living traditions that Benin’s citizens have carried across generations, and that humans must do the labor of involvement in the items’ post-return processing (logistical, archival, curatorial, emotional).
Bookending Dahomey is my favorite film of the year, Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. The ongoing project of complete African liberation from European colonialism and resource extraction and white greed in general is a key theme of both movies. Soundtrack‘s hook is the jazz connection. It has Louis Armstrong sent into the Congo by the U.S. State Department on a feelgood cultural ambassadorship mission to distract from Belgium’s plot to reestablish rule and protect its lucrative uranium supply. It has Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach tearfully protesting Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s murder by Western interests. The jazz connection is maybe overpromised in historical terms, but Grimonprez recognizes correctly that as tone-setting, it’s powerful as hell. The music is tenacious and siren-on-top ambulatory, reminding us of history barreling forward and the inextricable bond between the early sixties civil rights movement and the arts. Jazz is as capital-M Modernist a music as any, and Soundtrack notes the bitter irony of Modernism having been (maybe) used as a CIA Cold War psyop and of the Museum of Modern Art’s then-president having had significant investment in the Belgian uranium mining industry.
Speaking of the Modernist midcentury, The Brutalist worked until it didn’t, a problem I have with a lot of cinema these days. But it looked beautiful, and hit all the right Andrei Rublev notes of duty and process over a long timespan, and was generous, and the best filmmakers are generous. Director Brady Corbet is generous with his time (asking ours in return), and a knowledge born of what seems like boundless curiosity amid the very American drudgery of the terminally incurious. My favorite thing about The Brutalist, apart from the subject matter and the tricksy foreshadowing of the title, is Corbet’s Highsmith-like understanding of how fucking boring the wealthy benefactors/clients are. But yeah, in general, “a slow-cinema combination of Barton Fink and PTA’s The Master with a Weimar-architect lunatic Jew lost in the wilds of the U.S. Northeast” is my kind of flick.
I jumped at the chance to see it in 70mm at the Village East, a 1920s Yiddish theater that still uses its main screening room for big titles shown big. My rule of thumb: DCP is swell, but if there’s a print circulating, whether in 70 or 35 or 16 or 8, I try to see the print. I went out of my way to catch Nosferatu at its one local 35mm run, at the Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse. It was a special treat to be able to watch that and The Brutalist on film at least once; when I revisit them in digital formats down the road, I’ll remember the significant expense, supreme expertise, and neurotic leaps of faith required to shoot the way shooters once shot their shot.
Honorable Mention
Leos Carax — It’s Not Me
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi — Evil Does Not Exist
George Miller — Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Vera Drew — The People’s Joker
Gary Hustwit — Eno
Haley Elizabeth Anderson — Tendaberry
Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt — Magic Mountain
Streamables
Hacks Season 3; 3 Body Problem; Ripley; True Detective: Night Country
Still Need to See
The Room Next Door; Hard Truths; Nickel Boys; Anora; Wicked; Babygirl; Lisa Frankenstein; Problemista; The Fall Guy
My Other 2024 Tropic of Entropy Film Writing
November (The Substance, MoMA stuff)
October (NYFF62 roundup including Queer, also notes on The Apprentice and Megalopolis)
September (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and other new releases, Caligula restoration, revival stuff)
May (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist and the Brandy Melville doc on Max)
April (Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s Tendaberry and Chachia/Voigt’s Magic Mountain, Netflix’s Ripley)
February (Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days)
January (the 2023 Godzilla, Gerwig’s Barbie, Lothar Lambert and Wolfram Zobus’s 1 Berlin-Harlem)
