Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)

Succession

Edward Berger's Conclave is more fun than the process of choosing a world leader has any right to be. 

Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

For better or for worse

Sean Baker's Golden Palm-winning film Anora is arguably the most enjoyable of the year, by turns funny, sexy, profane. 

But a great film? Well let me tell you.

Viy (Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov, 1967)

A comedy of horrors

Not that Viy (Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov, 1967) is the first-ever Soviet horror film (There's A Spectre Haunts Europe (1923)) or even the first adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol story (the first was 1909, considered lost)-- but it's the rare Soviet horror film so visually striking and tonally bizarre it's at least worth a look.

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Birth of a supervillain

Calling it: there will not be a more terrifying film to come out this year than Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, a startlingly evoked, reasonably entertaining, essentially accurate biopic of the former and possibly incoming president Donald J. Trump.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

The lower depths

There's David O. Russell's approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is-- sexy, funny, fluid, profane-- and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way.

Joker: Folie a Deux (Todd Philips, 2024)

That's entertainment

Saw Joker: Folie a Deux and-- well I liked the ending. 

Todd Philips can't direct traffic to save his life and the movie still looks like a recycle bin of older better films, among others Umbrellas of Cherbourg, One From the Heart, Pennies from Heaven, and (a Scorsese, can't not have a Scorsese) New York, New York and you can feel the droplets of sweat showering down like a morning thunderstorm from Joaquin Phoenix's brow as he strains to make a profound statement out of yet another $200 million comic book villain movie-- but I did like that ending. 

Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Megalomania

Came out of Megalopolis feeling a lot of things but what I did not feel was disappointed-- not a bad thing but not necessarily a good thing either. 

I run hot and cold on Francis Ford Coppola. Thought his first two Godfather films were classically well-written if visually conventional, too-carefully curated portraits of a corrupt  American family, thought Apocalypse Now was a vividly directed Vietnam war movie that had little to do with the actual war, thought The Conversation (easily his best early work) was a nicely done portrait of loneliness and introverted paranoia. 

I actually prefer Coppola's wilder less disciplined later works: the lowkey monochromatic Rumble Fish, the emotionally extravagant One From the Heart (my favorite), the beautifully mounted Bram Stoker's Dracula (despite Keanu Reeves as an alleged British solicitor, and a haphazardly grafted love story), and now this, his wildest most undisciplined yet, basically a retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy transposed to modern-day New York.