David Vicari's Best of 2024
There were some gems in 2024, even though it wasn't a great year for cinema. You just had to go looking for the good ones, as they mostly weren't the super blockbusters with major ad campaigns that saturated them all over the place.
First, here are some Honorable Mentions:
Lake George is a neo-noir comedy-thriller about a down-on-his-luck ex-con, Don (Shea Whigham), hired to kill Phyllis (Carrie Coon), the girlfriend of a crime boss. However, Don the con just can't bring himself to do it. Most of the film is a psychological cat and mouse between Phyllis and Don, and you are never sure which way it's all going to go.
Inside Out 2 is the best animated Pixar film in quite a while. 13-year-old Riley's "Puberty Alarm" goes off and the group of emotions living in her head are kicked out of their headquarters by a new gang of twitchy emotions. The portrayal of teenage confusion is smart, funny, and thoughtful.
Thelma is a winning comedy about an elderly woman (June Squibb) who is scammed out of her savings, but with the help of her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree), who has a motorized scooter, she plans to get her money back. This joyful little movie was the final film for actor Roundtree.
Woman of the Hour is a crime thriller based on the true account of serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) appearing on The Dating Game television show a year before he was captured. Anna Kendrick stars as the contestant who picks Alcala as her date, and she also directed this tension-filled film.
Now, here are my personal top five movies of 2024:
5. We Grown Now
Writer and director Minhal Baig's stirring drama concerns
two young best friends making the best of it while living in Chicago's poverty-stricken
Cabrini-Green housing projects. After the violent death of a boy their age,
Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) worry about their
own existence. This is a story of hope in a sea of hopelessness, as well as the
power and joy of true friendship. Young James and Ramirez give exceptional
performances.
4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Here is the best action picture of 2024, but nobody went to
see it, rendering it a box office bomb. This prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road
is an origin story of that film's Furiosa character, here played by Anya
Taylor-Joy. Yes, it's another post-apocalyptic car chase movie from director
George Miller, but the sensational action scenes are creative, and the story is
character driven. This is a movie built for IMAX screens because it's big,
bold, and intense.
3. Heretic
Hugh Grant is absolutely terrifying in one of his best
performances as the venomous Mr. Reed, who has trapped two young Mormon
missionaries (Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East) in his house. He says he will let
them go if they can prove that they truly have faith in their religion. This is
a thinking person's horror film as it debates the legitimacy of religion while
still delivering some gnarly blood and gore.
2. The Outrun
Movies about alcoholism is nothing new, but it's all about
how they are presented. The Lost Weekend (1945) and Clean and Sober
(1988) are two different approaches on the subject, and so is The Outrun.
Anchored by a blistering performance by Saoirse Ronan as a young woman on a
path of self-destruction because of her penchant for partying and hard
drinking, Nora Fingscheidt's film is told in a fractured narrative akin to a
drunken haze.
1. Flow
A co-production of Latvia, France, and Belgium, this
wondrous and gentle computer animated fantasy adventure is about a little grey
cat trying to survive a massive flood. He soon teams up with a Labrador
Retriever, a capybara, a secretarybird, and a ring-tailed lemur, and together
they try to navigate their way in the world after the climate change
catastrophe. It took director Gints Zilbalodis and his production crew over
five years to complete this film, which Zilbalodis says is inspired by Jacques
Tati and the post-apocalyptic science fiction series Future Boy Conan. Flow
is wordless, with a delicate beauty in its imagery, and the climate change
message is never heavy-handed.
Fritz Esker's Best of 2024
2024 was not as good of a year for movies as 2023 was. In this writer's opinion, The Holdovers, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, and The Teacher's Lounge were all better than any film released in 2024.
That's not to say there were no good or worthy films last year. There were some good ones, but there was a very frustrating commonality among many of them: their studios gave them little to no marketing and, in some cases, buried them in an extremely limited release even though they were quite accessible for mainstream audiences. Moviegoers didn't even get a chance to discover many of them, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for studios regarding the disappointing box office of these movies.
Honorable Mentions:
Anora is too long in its 1st and 3rd acts, but the story of a Brooklyn stripper impulsively marrying the son of a Russian oligarch contains some of the biggest laughs of the year. Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov deserved their Oscar noms for their performances.
Conclave is a noteworthy exception to the trend discussed earlier. The studio gave this drama/mystery about the selection of a new pope a modest marketing campaign and it performed respectably at the box office. Take note, studios: adults still want to see movies for grown-ups that aren't either superhero movies, horror, or biopics.
In the Land of Saints and Sinners has a well-known star (Liam Neeson) headlining what's essentially a riff on the Western genre in a small town in 1970s Ireland. Kerry Condon gives a great performance as the leader of an IRA cell Neeson battles. But the studio barely told anyone they were releasing it, so no one saw it.
The Return is an adaptation of The Odyssey that focuses solely on what happens after an exhausted, shell-shocked Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) returns to Ithaca to find his homeland reeling and his wife fighting off the advances of greedy, murderous suitors. It's a striking take on an old story, but did it get a wide release? Of course not.
A Real Pain starred Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins looking for their grandmother's house while on a tour of Poland. It's a funny and poignant ensemble comedy.
Top Five:
5. Hit Man
Netflix has spent millions on its Oscar campaign for Emilia
Perez (only to forget to hire someone to read through its star's old
tweets). However, they already had a funny, thoroughly original film that
deserved award consideration. The New Orleans-shot Hit Man stars Glen
Powell as a UNO professor moonlighting as a fake hitman for the police's
undercover sting operations. He ends up falling for one of his potential
"clients" (Adria Arjona). Powell and Arjona have fantastic chemistry and it's
nice to see a movie where it's truly hard to figure out how it will end.
4. Civil War
Detractors of Alex Garland's film about a United States wracked
by civil war felt he should have been more explicitly political, but that's not
the film he's making. He resolutely refuses to pat viewers on the head and tell
them, "If this ever happened, your side would be the good guys." It's more
about the day-to-day terrors of living in a war zone and the toll sustained
exposure to violence has on combat journalists. As the lead, Kirsten Dunst does
a terrific job of portraying a woman who lost the light in her eyes a long time
ago.
3. Thelma
June Squibb should have received an Oscar nomination as the title
character here. Nonagenarian Thelma loses her savings to a phone scammer, so
she sets off on a mobility scooter to get it back (yes, it's sort of a comic
version of Jason Statham's The Beekeeper) in a story that is funny,
poignant, and life-affirming. Movie criticism is inherently subjective. One
person's trash is another person's treasure and vice versa. But this is a film
where every friend who saw it on my recommendation came back to tell me how
much they enjoyed it.
2. September 5
ABC sports journalists are covering the 1972 Olympics in Munich when Black September takes Israeli athletes hostage. In the current political climate, journalists are often either viewed as noble, saintly heroes or devious purveyors of "fake news." But the journos in September 5 are completely human; they're neither good nor evil. The movie's not interested in the Israel-Palestine question as much as the questions the journalists face as they scramble to provide live, continuous coverage. Whose story are they telling? Are they making the situation worse? How much confirmation do they need before running a story?
It received a deserved Oscar nomination for Best Original
Screenplay, but Paramount abruptly pulled the plug on its wide release. The
decision was so out-of-nowhere that while advance tickets had gone on sale on
local theaters' websites, Paramount refunded the money from ticket pre-sales
and kept the film from reaching more theaters. A baffling decision especially
after the same studio had just given a huge American release to Better Man, a
biopic of a singer (Robbie Williams) most Americans have either never heard of
or are only vaguely aware of and is portrayed as a CGI chimp in the movie (seriously).
It bombed, of course, but the fact it got a huge release and one of the best
films of the year got swept under a carpet is infuriating.
1. Juror #2
94-year-old Clint Eastwood made an excellent critique of the
American justice system with Juror #2. A juror and recovering alcoholic
(Nicholas Hoult) realizes the deer he thought he hit on a dark, rainy road a
year earlier may have been a woman. He now sits in judgment of a man accused of
her murder. The film shines at showing all of the perverse incentives the
American judicial system places in front of the accused, the jurors, and the
lawyers. The characters are all portrayed with depth and humanity. Unfortunately,
new Warner Bros. chairman David Zaslav buried the film because he was mad
Eastwood's last film, Cry Macho, underperformed at the box office. Cry
Macho wasn't very good, but Eastwood's made a lot more money for Warner
Bros over his epic career than he's lost, and if Warner Bros. was so concerned
about the box office, they shouldn't have released it simultaneously on
streaming. But no matter Zaslav's grudge against Eastwood or the film, Juror
#2 is a movie worth discovering and discussing. And it's a movie that
likely would have found an audience if it had been given a robust release and
marketing campaign.
