NorwoodEye: 2024 Hat Tip

This year there were 13 films that made the HT list (my version of that weird place between “best” and “favorite”).

Later than most years, also…I did not get access to a few key films until after January 1st.

13. Green Border (dir. Agnieszka Holland)

“…20 minutes into Green Border, I was emotionally wrecked. By the end I was equal parts angry, hopeful, and wrecked…the craft on display is excellent...though to be clear I don't feel a need to re-watch this one…”

12. Made in England (dir. Martin Scorsese)

At 60, I only discovered the Powell & Pressburger films in 2024, and was bowled over by the crisp precision, rich beauty, and wholeheartedness of their work. I had only seen The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes when I learned of Scorsese’s documentary, which is as lovingly thorough as it is cautiously worshipful. It is a worthy accompaniment to the filmmakers’ careers.

11. The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)

“The film opens like few can: churning darkness, overwhelming audio, a gentle narration that is almost consumed by the sounds, all culminating in a rapturous explosion of daylight, jubilation, and the Statue of Liberty, though to the viewer that symbol is askew, upside down, shaken...the composition, scoring, acting, the scale and scope and intent, were all amazing. I think this almost becomes the new epic I've been searching for…”

10. Pictures of Ghosts (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

“…a fondly pieced-together scrapbook of a man's home, family, passions, and the shifting landscape that surrounded him…the overall vibe is one of deep appreciation and love for fixtures that move with time, sometimes built upon and improved, sometimes gutted and left to rot, and occasionally holding steady with new generations…what struck me about the film was how simultaneously confident and relaxed it felt…a comfortable ride through someone's world, but one made with just as much precision as care…”

9. Oddity (dir. Damian McCarthy)

“A highly satisfying mix of craft, performance, atmosphere, mood, and writing.”

8. Conclave (dir. Edward Berger)

“As visually attractive as it is tightly wound, Conclave comes across like a murder mystery, with a faintly arch score underlying layers of papal subterfuge. But damn it, the cast and writing are equally impressive. It's a standout for the year. And that rarity, a film I can recommend to my aging mother.”

7. Thelma (dir. Josh Margolin)

“I cannot remember the last film that combined jubilance, poignancy, and laugh-out-loud comedy so effortlessly. It was immensely satisfying and hit home in a number of ways.

The cast is perfect. Everyone is on point.

Just wonderful.”

6. Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik)

In 2022 I reviewed this and placed it in my end-of-year list. At the time I said: "I didn't know a slapstick film about observation and problem-solving was what I needed this late in my life…a film so creative, hilarious, and giddily in love with the oldest of old school. It's one of the most inventive comedies I've seen since A Town Called Panic. I absolutely love this film."

5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (dir. Radu Jude)

“…the film is successful in its three-hour biting assessments of gig economy, Tik-Tok culture, the insensitivity of corporations (rivaling that of governments), and the impact of everything wrong with the country on those of the lowest societal strata…it's brilliant, and increasingly uncomfortable…”

4. Flow (Straume) (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)

“I can't tell you how intently I was leaning forward during this, and how many times I clasped my hands over my mouth. I thought it would just be a charming piece of animation, but it really got under my skin. What a beautiful, lovely surprise.”

3. Evil Does Not Exist (dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)

“…this film is beautiful…light and colors, exquisitely framed, and thoughtfully edited…and not concerned with your sense of urgency…the town meeting scene was one of the most invigorating this year…”

2. Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders)

“…simple, elegant, and powerful…providing me rare, profound emotional reactions that maybe happen with a film once or twice a year…”

1. Anora (dir. Sean Baker)

Something darkly familiar becomes a rollicking, chaotic comedy, unexpectedly touching, cast with a crew of on-point actors, with visual vibrancy to match its slick pacing. Sean Baker is the director you may not be aware of but should be seeking out. He has a remarkable winning streak, you just have to appreciate the kind of people who populate his stories.

Notables (alphabetical):

Alien: Romulus was pristine in design, atmosphere, and even some of the acting was on point. That it was an almost carbon copy of the best of Alien films was its only real flaw. Fede Alvarez is one of the genre guys to watch.

Anselm, technically a 2023 release, was Wim Wender’s remarkable look at the artist's work, frequently doing justice to the scale and texture of every piece within the confines of the screen.

My gosh, I got a kick out of Coup!, Austin Stark & Joseph Schuman’s social satire wrapped in dark comedy. When I wasn’t gut-laughing, I was riveted.

Adam Rehmeier’s Dinner in America was made before COVID, with a very limited release in 2022, but only broadly available to American audiences until it was placed on VOD this year. Any other year it would be in the proper list: it's a wildly entertaining, smartly written, enthusiastically acted film, and funny, and touching, and funny. I absolutely love this film and hope people will seek it out.

Disco Boy is lush, vibrantly scored, exquisitely acted (Franz Rogowski cannot miss, y'all); an all-around beautiful film with just the barest wisp of an actual plot.

Dogman may seem generic at times, but I would argue that Caleb Landry Jones' performance elevates the film, and I hope he is remembered for his stunning work.

Exhuma offers up a supremely good genre package: a supernatural procedural; an exquisitely paced horror tale; a set of well-drawn characters brought to life by a crackerjack cast; and it's all filmed and edited to perfection.

The Invisible Fight: "Delirious...an Estonian project that steeps kung-fu desires in religious vigor, with a decidedly 70's vibe, an original score by turns funky and ethereal that surrounds a deep love of Black Sabbath, characters draped in Jodorowsky and The Silent Flute, and a sly sense of humor that never really goes away but sometimes is as quiet as a monk."

Passages meanders a bit but has both Rogowski - again, wow - here as a less sympathetic character, buoyed by Ben Whishaw, who absolutely ruins you with his performance. It's a dour romantic triangle, but supremely well done.

And lastly, The Zone of Interest, which I would have included in last year's list (at the top) if it had been available to me earlier. What can you say? Glazer is masterful; the cast is impressive; the sound design and mood are borderline oppressive in their respective impacts. Truly amazing cinema. Just not terribly funny.

Oh, and I probably should mention that one film I really wasn’t looking forward to, do not like its kind, yet still found it to be perfectly mesmerizing, dizzying, and even made me laugh out loud a few times. Yes…

The Substance.

Y’all take care in 2025.

-Steve

FLOW Comments

https://letterboxd.com/norwoodeye/film/flow-2024/

Michael Nesmith Appreciation Society

Here I am, riding out 60 years, and I just last year discovered the late Michael Nesmith’s solo catalog, including this beauty that I snagged for Christmas (on vinyl). His easygoing country-rock style is really hitting me in the right way.

Scenes That Make Me Sit Up Straight - Asteroid City

Sometimes I don’t respond in a wholly favorable manner to a film made by and cast with people I somewhat - or even largely - adore. Surely this is not uncommon? After finding two thirds of The French Dispatch to be more remarkable than anything the director had made up to that point, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City left me in a shrug two years later. It was fine, in the way most of his films are fine. Cheery, colorful, quippy, and cast supremely well, even if the characters are frequently given little to do (though as the opening of The Grand Budapest Hotel shows us, sometimes the ones with less than five minutes of screen time impact us the most).

But in Asteroid City there is a backstory that I quite liked, which is infrequently shown, where the creators behind the televised play we are watching go about their processes, voicing concerns with how characters are to be played, and What It All Means. Here, we find Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Edward Norton, discussing with a class of actors how to approach “a sleeping scene/a scene of sleep”. Of all the comfortably B&W behind-the-scenes pieces of Asteroid City, I love this one the most…

…because words and gestures and movements within the scene feel so off-the-cuff and natural, occasionally giddy, that it doesn’t at all feel as tightly wound and precise as I know Anderson’s films are.

McGinnis - The (Cinematic) Goods

Before Christmas hit, I bought myself an early gift of the Robert E. McGinnis art collection, an excellent “coffee table book” that has an extensive review of the artist’s history. What caught me by surprise was how many movie posters used his art. For your review: concept pieces for Arabesque, A Fistful of Dynamite, and Live and Let Die, and the final version of Comes a Horseman.

NOSFERATU Comments

https://letterboxd.com/norwoodeye/film/nosferatu-2024/

NorwoodEye: 2024's Biggest (Cinematic) Disappointments

It’s been years since I made a Worst List, as there seemed to be a tide of caution about being unnecessarily harsh to filmmakers. But I don’t know why we can’t talk about films that disappoint, whether because of sheer mountainous missed potential or just good ideas gone stale. I’m breaking these down into several groups, because it’s not just “they’re all bad”…some of these films came close to their targets, while others blew up on the pad. (Quotes from my Letterboxd entries at the time of viewing.)

A for Effort

Eureka (dir. Lisandro Alonso)

“…the opening segment's stark, old-photograph-etched style of black & white photography is striking, while the latter segments are lush in their density and natural beauty.

But even as someone who urgently defends long films and long takes, there were too many scenes where literally nothing happened, and the almost frozen images wore me down greatly in Eureka.

The second segment, cast entirely with what I assume were non-actors, was the most compelling, mounting an almost endless string of narrative complications but leaving almost every one ambiguously discarded, and I loved this despite how troubling much of it seemed.”


Monkey Man (dir. Dev Patel)

“…there is a pacing problem with the film. It is two hours long and feels like twice that. It effectively gives slivers of the character's backstory but then spends long stretches belaboring those same points. It has some beautiful shots, but never whole scenes I can point to as memorable. Something always feels off. And something always feels familiar. Patel really gives it his all, but apart from an early sequence where his character works his way up through a night club's waitstaff ranks, and that finale, it never consistently hums along in a satisfying manner.”


Maxxxine (dir. Ti West)

“It's hard not to walk away from Maxxxine disappointed: gone are the supremely creepy horror scenes of X, and the uneasy uncertainty in every moment of Mia Goth's Pearl performance. The final film in Ti West's trilogy, admirable as it is, does only one thing well - provide an 80s vibefest - but to the point that it becomes the film's only characteristic. Maxxxine is not a scary film, or creepy, or dread-infused, or unsettling, and the dark humor is all but lost here (Kevin Bacon's Seedy-With-A-Capital-"S" detective did provide some laughs, though they were mostly at the expense of his health).

…I had the sad sense that what I had watched was more of a flashy epilogue than a compelling feature. And the worst of it? The film felt as plywood-thin and inconsequential as the film’s Hollywood backlot facsimile walls, just with none of the magic those structures have helped produce.”

B for Broken

Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)

“About an hour into Longlegs I muttered "Jesus Christ, does anyone turn on a fucking light in this movie?" Beautifully framed but too dark. Creepily acted, but why is everyone except for Blair Underwood so affected in their behavior? The slow/stare approach is annoying, and this film is stuffed with it. And while the film almost exclusively sets you up for cheap jump scares, there are two exquisite shots: an empty room behind a character that I stared at, ignoring the actor; and an edit to someone in a car, and back to them a moment later with someone else behind the car, almost out of view. Great non-jump jump scares.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wes Ball)

Technically expert, from the cinematography to the seamless effects work. But holy mackerel, Kingdom was a boring film, one that never gets you invested in any character. It’s a shame the writing wasn’t as sharp as the craft.


Abigail (dirs. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett)

“Abigail gets off to a solid start and pleasingly takes its time before a 40-minute-mark turn that would have been a great surprise had the studio not allowed the marketing team to give everything away. The latter half is shouty, sloppy, and irritatingly repetitive.”


Saturday Night (dir. Jason Reitman)

“I laughed a lot more than I expected…some of the performances were solid, given how reed-thin almost every character is...if you're older like me and you're working on nostalgia fumes for the duration of the film, something will eventually connect. But I don't know that a younger audience is going to feel compelled to stick with this. And the frenetic energy became dulling. That anyone could stand out was kind of amazing…Sennott, Morris, and O'Brien, for me, were all aces.”


Twisters (dir. Lee Isaac Chung)

“It kills off several perfectly likable characters to jump-start the protagonist's plot trauma. It spends the first hour surrounding the viewer with aggressively unlikable characters and predictable scenarios. Then with a couple of lines of dialogue and humane gestures it flips everything, becomes rather charming and satisfying, if still perfectly predictable and utterly disposable.

And why was this film made other than to make bank? No reason whatsoever. Oh well? (shrugs)”


FU for Failure, Utter

Red One (dir. Jake Kasdan)

When you take all that money, all that star power, all those holiday cliches, and you come up with a frenetic, loathsome piece of shiny trash that hasn’t one iota of charm. How dare you pretend this is anyone’s new Christmas tradition?

Wolfs (dir. Jon Watts)

“...two guys who resent having to be in the same space as each other, barely communicating…then it ends with the impression someone intends for there to be a sequel, but this film doesn't leave you wanting more…this was so very tiresome.”

Argylle (dir. Matthew Vaughn)

“Frontloaded with so much predictability, transparency, eye-rollingly lazy writing, and a penchant for gimmickry that irritates quickly and often, Argylle has few flashes of goodness and absolutely no greatness, and much of what is good is thanks to Sam Rockwell.”

Borderlands (dir. Eli Roth)

“It is a lazy film. It looks cheap. It relies on noise and frantic motion, but without good results. Its dialogue is lowest common denominator stuff. The ADR is frequently clunky. Cate Blanchett is ill-suited to her character, a human eyeroll. Other performers are just embarrassingly bad or miscast.”

Boy Kills World (dir. Moritz Mohr)

“…is not short on cartoonishly despicable characters or dulling action…the story and acting made me roll my eyes so much that my optometrist busted through the wall like the Kool-Aid man and told me to knock it off.”

Tarot (dirs. Spenser Cohen, Anna Halberg)

“It's remarkable that Tarot has such a well-shot, exceedingly atmospheric, surprisingly satisfying setup, and in quick fashion roars into some of the most insipid writing I've seen in a film. The latter half of the film is visually murky to a problematic degree.”


Worst of the Wackadoo Failures

Pandemonium (dir. Quarxx)

“Pandemonium is the cinematic equivalent of taking a lovely 15-minute walk while thinking about some lofty issues and then stumbling down a flight of stairs until you land face-down in shit.

That setup is just so good…then you veer off into one sinister, unsettling story, and then a second, worse one. We return to the initial character only to find that the filmmaker doesn't have much of a plan for them.” I was left repelled and frustrated. I hate Pandemonium.


Best of the Wackadoo Failures

Kinds of Kindness (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

“Kinds of Kindness is the sort of near-inscrutable film that poses questions like ‘why does a man desire the attentions of an indifferent, vengeful, micro-managing god rather than embrace his own free will’ and creates faintly Lynchian scenarios with largely deadpan characters…but also avoids giving satisfactory answers to such questions or redeemable reasons for its stories. It leaves you with distasteful possibilities (like the man who seems to be drugging his cult-devoted wife to - I assumed - get her deprogrammed, but instead rapes her unconscious body).

With all its puzzling motivations and characters that seem to be playing at what, let's say, dogs might interpret humans to be, I won't begin to understand the themes in the director's head. I do appreciate the commitment to the bit, and the actors giving it their all.

Maintaining this weirdly unsettling vibe for three hours was quite the achievement, but I doubt I will be watching it again.”

WEREWOLVES Comments

https://letterboxd.com/norwoodeye/film/werewolves-2024/

CONCLAVE Comments

https://letterboxd.com/norwoodeye/film/conclave/