Monday, January 27, 2025

Best of 2024




Best I Can Come Up With For The Year List

Too much life going on, had an extremely limited viewing selection this year, a more mainstream list than I’d like. In ascending order, the best of what I saw:

24. Trap (M Night Shyamalan, 2024) -- Surprisingly effective; Josh Hartnett for once in all the years I've watched him (well there's De Palma's criminally underrated The Black Dahlia) comes to life onscreen as a cunning quick-witted monstrously entitled serial killer. 

23. Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024) -- not so much a great dystopian future as a pretty good photojournalist thriller in the tradition of (tho not as good as) Under Fire or Platoon, set in the near future. With excellent performances by Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny among others, and-- for a dramatic highlight the rest of the film doesn't quite live up to-- a terrifically tense sequence involving the always terrific Jesse Plemons. 

22. Emila Perez -- Well... it's generally well made. And entertaining. But how many trans drug lords do we know or have heard of? How many trans folk do we know are interested in being more than casually active in the drug trade, or aspire to be rising stars? How big are the problems in one's life if one has tens of millions to throw at them? Zoe Saldana is terrific and so is her co-star Karla Sofia Gascon, but Selena Gomez is undone by one plot twist too many (can't comment on her accent, alas). 

21. Conclave -- Edward Berger's ecclesiastical pomp and circumstance thriller is more fun than it has any right to be, a marked improvement over his overelaborate remake of All Quiet on the Western Front. The cast has sly stylish fun, the highlights including an irrepressibly liberal Stanley Tucci, a beautifully slimy John Lithgow-- and Ralph Fiennes, never better, bearing the burden of choosing a pope (and leading a good-sized Hollywood production) effortlessly in the palm of his hand. 

20. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) – A charmer about a stripper who marries a spoiled Russian rich kid. Not much here beyond the Eat (or F*ck) the Rich messaging, but Mikey Madison as the eponymous character is easy to fall in love with.

19. Drive-Away Dolls -- raunchier and funnier and far less sentimental than Baker's take on girls gone wild, Ethan Coen's solo effort comes off as gaudily pointless, the best kind of road trip. 

18. The Killer (John Woo, 2024) -- Not actually as big a fan of the 1989 original as most so I actually like this recent remake with its eponymous killer gender-flipped, and the homoerotic frisson generated between her and her unintended victim. Still made with Woo's inimitably exuberant style tho now executed with an uncharacteristic dispassion. Woo and his style have aged, apparently, and done so like fine wine. 

17. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024) -- Beautifully crafted three hour film about an architect that flees Nazi Germany to set up shop in America. Excellent performances all around, but especially from Adrian Brody as the eponymous architect; not a big fan of the film's dramatic climax, but recovers nicely afterwards. 

16. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) – hot take: didn’t think The Godfather films were all that great, so don’t think this latest is all that precipitous a quality drop. As ambitious as any of his later more eccentric more personal works, this whatever it is has the courage of its convictions and – alas – not much else.

15. The Colors Within -- Where Naoko Yamada focused on sound or its absence in a deaf girl's ear in A Silent Voice here she focuses on color, and a girl's ability to perceive it in other people's personalities, or soul if you like. Quiet but not quite to the point of tedium, this understated little drama is more in the spirit of Nabuhiro Yamashita's underrated Linda Linda Linda, about disparate folk pulling together to form a band, and has similar charms and strengths.  

14. Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl -- any occasion to watch a new Nick Parks is an occasion to celebrate. The nefarious Feathers McGraw (from The Wrong Trousers) makes a reappearance as the incarcerated master thief plotting revenge on the eponymous pair, the whole a hilarious parody of Scorsese's Cape Fear remake, with allusions to James Bond and Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice tossed in (all things being equal I prefer the parody). But visual jokes, thrilling action sequences, and eyepoppingly detailed stop-motion animation aside, the meat of the film is and has always been the bond between perennially clueless Wallace and his heroically loyal Gromit (seriously I don't know what the mutt sees in that guy). 

13. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 2024) – in my book, the rare shameless cash grab that actually works: Winona Ryder bravely shows her age and exhaustion as our heroine wearing her trauma on her sleeve, and Michael Keaton after a hiatus of over 30 years plays The Ghost with the Most as if he’d just stepped out for a bathroom break and stepped right back in to pick up where he left off. Easily Burton’s liveliest most inventive work in years.

12. Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024) – is haunted by three ghosts: the eponymous serial killer (Nicholas Cage in an unnervingly unhinged performance, even by his outrageous standards); the director’s father Anthony Perkins, who portrayed perhaps the most famous serial killer in all of cinema; and Perkins Sr.’s director Alfred Hitchcock, from whom Perkins Jr. has learned a useful tip or two, even come up with a few clever tricks of his own. Does not stick the landing, but for a while there like nothing I’ve seen all year.

11. MaXXXine (Ti West, 2024) – Pearl was my favorite of the trilogy but as a conclusion to the eponymous character’s tortured character arc as satisfying a conclusion as any. Maxine (Mia Goth) during her adventures realizes, in her relentless quest to achieve stardom, that one does not easily escape the shadow of one’s father, nor does one fail to learn from him accordingly.

10. Exhuma (Jang Jae-hyun, 2024) -- terrific Korean horror film about exhumed graves (with a helping of Korean workplace drama, for that touch of realism) that just (for once) gets better and better the deeper the shamans and geomancers and gravediggers dig. 

9. The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024) – forget The Substance or Heretic or even Nosferatu: this is the most terrifying film of the year. That’s it, that’s the post.

8. Isang Himala (A Miracle, Pepe Diokno, 2024) -- under any other circumstance this anti-religious drama about a miracle worker in a small Philippine town would be considered an excellent film, perhaps even best of the year, if it wasn't a remake of the Ishmael Bernal masterpiece. All that said, a far superior far more substantial musical compared to Wicked and even-- dare I say it?-- Emila Perez.

7. Scavengers Reign (created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner) -- eerie haunting science fiction that takes off from the Sea of Corruption of Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, then morphs into an identity all its own. O are you suggesting it's only a Netflix mini series? No-- it's cinema.

6. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024) – less an action epic than an origin fable, a myth made in the telling. Where Fury Road was a hurtling bristling juggernaut, Furiosa is the decades-long odyssey of a woman seeking revenge, home, finally herself.

5. Flow -- Forget The Wild Robot or Inside Out 2; this is the animated film of the year, a wordless, explanationless tale of a cat and friends trying to survive constant climate change. 

4. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar, 2023) – Greg Kwedar’s film features lovely performances by Colman Domingo and Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin as convicts who join, and struggle to stay in, a prison-based drama group – but arguably the true stars are the real-life convicts, who lack the art or skill to present themselves or their material otherwise. They are themselves, and this is their story.

3. Aku wa Sonzai Shinai (Evil Does Not Exist, RyĆ»suke Hamaguchi, 2023) – film thrives on uneasy confrontations between cagy townsfolk and clueless urbanites but breathes in the scenes where nothing much happens, as when father and daughter study a nearby bush. But beware: some bushes hide a poisoned spine, some fairy tales a secret jolt of horror.

2. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024) -- Never mind Demi Moore or Lily-Rose Depp; Marianne Jean-Baptiste's Pansy Deacon is the performance of the year. Complex, subtle, beautifully modulated, she dominates Mike Leigh's latest film the same way David Thewlis dominated Leigh's masterpiece Naked-- I can think of no higher praise.  

1. Phantosmia (Lav Diaz, 2024) – Diaz’s latest turns on the simple conceit that a man carries his trauma for the rest of his life, sometimes in the form of a smell. Doesn’t have to be a real smell – the stink is in his mind, a manifestation of guilt for sins committed during the Marcos dictatorship. Master Sergeant Hilarion Zabala of the First Scout Ranger Regiment, who spends much of the film’s running time working out his psychological burden, may be the capstone of Ronnie Lazaro’s acting career – hard to tell, he’s done so much tremendous work – but the film is also a celebration of Batangueno and Cotabatuan cooking, ironic for a film featuring someone with an overwhelmed sense of smell.

And of course there are the restorations and revivals, of which my favorites would include the 4k digital revivification of Lino Brocka's Bona-- in my book Brocka and Nora Aunor's best-ever collaboration and arguably the definitive film portrait of an exploitative relationship between a man and a woman (but in this film who's really exploiting who?)-- and ABS CBN's regrading of their restored copy of Mario O'Hara's Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God) to glorious black and white, not meant to supplant the original color print but to stand alongside, as a fascinating experiment and way to look at it with fresh eyes. 


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