Dec 24, 2024
Dec 11,2024
Was it a good year for movies? Call me biased, but every year is a good year for films, whether you're streaming them or sitting in the cinema. I’ll always stand by the latter; but as long as we keep embracing them, they’ll keep making 'em.
Though, please, don’t watch them on your phone. Get yourself a 3.1 soundbar and a forty-inch television (at the bare minimum). Leave phones to their intended use, ie. to make films on. Next year we’ll see the results of Danny Boyle shooting his sequel 28 Years Later on two dozen iPhones. No doubt a must-see cinema experience.
But what of this year? In order of viewing, these are the best times I had at a picture house in 2024.
Occupied City: at four hours and twenty-six minutes, Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Bianca Stigter’s non-fiction book was a monumental start to the year. Narrated by Melanie Hyams, McQueen takes his camera to a succession of addresses across Amsterdam and recounts what happened there during the Nazi occupation. The result, even at that challenging length, is mesmerising. So potent, in fact, that I left the film wondering about all the buildings I pass on my Dublin commute, and what awful history played inside them during Ireland’s revolution and resulting civil war. At the screening I projected, McQueen and Stigter said that there is a thirty-six hour version of the documentary: they filmed every address in the book (the released cut includes only a cross section). They hope all the footage will see the light of day in the near future as a visual installation.
Then there's Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in which nobody shoots action like George MIller, wielding his camera with the sleek purity of a nutso silent movie director. This origin story of Charlize Theron's Furiosa from 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road (here played by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor Joy), took nine long years to reach the screen (Fury Road took seventeen) thanks to COVID delays, among other things. Playing out like a revved up, five-act, very graphic novel, any CG action accusations are easily countered by the sheer virtuosity of the storytelling. People didn’t show up in theatres for this one, waiting for Blu-ray and streaming. Big mistake. If there was a movie vehicle built for cinemas this year, Furiosa was it. Watch out for revival screenings.
Rolling Thunder was a Blu-ray experience, albeit one on the big screen. Since Blu-ray players are sometimes used in cinemas for educational screenings, short film showcases and what have you, they need to be calibrated a couple of times a year. I play a classic movie to check for sync sound, subtitles etc. Written by Paul (Taxi Driver) Schrader and directed by John Flynn, and long championed by Quentin Tarantino, this film about a Vietnam veteran seeking vengeance after a violent home invasion lives up to its cult reputation. Its appeal to fan-boy filmmaker Tarantino becomes apparent on a big cinema screen. William Devane’s bottled-up non-performance requires the large canvas for full impact, with 1977's winner of the ‘There Are No Small Roles, Just Small Actors’ award going to the great Tommy Lee Jones, in a supporting role with little dialogue. Really, he just owns it with the uttering of one particular sentence. I’ve now added this one to my essential 70s cinema pantheon.
Longlegs came to cinemas on a hype train, carrying the additional baggage of belonging to one of the most difficult genres to be original in: serial killers and the search for them. It delivers the expected tropes that might come with the scenario to hand - a FBI agent (Maika Monroe) on the trail of the titular killer, while dealing with her religious mother and tragic childhood. That’s all you need to know if you haven’t seen this one yet. Know this, though: Nicolas Cage is Longlegs. And, boy, is he, with a look he says was inspired by his mother(!), coupled with a body language and cadence only a true original such as Cage could bring. Made for under ten million dollars in a near-poetic shorthand by writer/director Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony), this unsettling tale makes for perfect counter-Christmas viewing, filled with clues you'll likely miss on your first viewing. I watched it twice up at the Odeon in Coolock. There are literally moments where if you blink you’ll miss something.
I saw I Saw The TV Glow having become intrigued by a few scenes watched from in the booth while projecting it. The main attraction was that I could not figure out what the hell this film was actually about. So I made time after work, and watched the whole thing. I was rewarded with what is ostensibly a coming of age film about a boy who becomes obsessed with a canceled 90s TV show, told in a sort of marshmellowy Donnie Darko style with an excellent central performance from Justice Smith. An accumulative experience that gets under your skin the deeper you get. Which is kind of the point, I
think. In the spirit of non-disclosure, I won't speak of its intended theme and metaphor, which you can discover for yourself, but writer/director Jane Schoenbrun has crafted a tale with a unique and insidious vibe.
Everything you heard about Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis being both the best and worst film of the calendar year is true, depending how you literally look at it. A science fiction movie set in an alternate twenty-first century New York about the struggle between a visionary architect (Adam Driver) and the corrupt mayor of the city (Giancarlo Esposito), the fun and fallout comes in the unarguably dazzling execution of the concept, playing with its stellar cast (which includes Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LeBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight) as if they were pieces in an Orson Welles’ Mercury ‘experimental’ theatre piece from the 1940s. This is a good thing in my book, often a great thing. You will leave the cinema - well, get off the couch - and stick on the kettle with a single question, more of a mantra: What the hell did I just watch? Which, by the way, is the acknowledged proper reaction from anyone who sees 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, too.
I knew what I had just watched when I saw Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man - the funniest film of the year. Sebastian Stan’s slow-burn performance as Edward, an aspiring actor with a disfiguring facial affliction, neurofibromatosis, pays huge dividends the longer you stick with it. Following an experimental procedure, he’s cured and reinvents himself as a semi-successful stage actor. Edward begins to regret his decision when he gets involved in a sort-of-love-triangle with his neighbour, emerging playwright Ingrid (The Worst Person In The World’s Renate Reinsve) and an audience crasher, Oswald, played by Adam Pearson (Under The Skin), who has actual neurofibromatosis in real life. Pearson owns his performance and almost steals the picture. Call it the blackest comedy Woody Allen film never made.
Juror #2, or the return of the mack - behind the scenes, that is. Director Clint Eastwood's legal drama and vivid moral conundrum, received the briefest of cinema releases, and we are all the worst for it. When ninety-four- year-old Eastwood read the script during his search for one final film to direct, he reportedly turned over the last page and immediately said, 'This is the one.’ It’s a humdinger of a premise: the juror (Nicholas Hoult) in a murder trial realises the accused is actually innocent. He knows this as he himself accidentally killed the victim. Eastwood has the chops - and good sense - to let his potentially melodramatic material play out at a steady pace, right until its riveting ending, leaving you with the question: ‘Japers. What would I do?’
Misercordia makes the cut, fresh from this year's annual IFI French Film Festival. The set up reads thusly: 'Returning to Saint-Martial for his late boss's funeral, Jérémie's stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions." So far, so French. But almost halfway through, you’re going, ‘Wait... what?’ and then, ‘But why?’ followed by ‘Really?’ All these head-scratching turns were accompanied by gales of laughter from the audience. The screening reminded me of how much I miss this sort of all-too-rare communal cinema experience. I left the show fascinated by how a filmmaker could create such a genre-hopping cornucopia. Then I found a Q&A with writer/director Alain Guiraudie, in which he said he wanted to make an erotic film without any sex, and depict how, often in small villages, people talk about who's sleeping with who, when in reality nobody is sleeping with anybody. The legendary film journal Cahiers du Cinema has chosen this as their best film of 2024 and it should get a wide cinema release in our neck of the woods next year.
Speaking of sex, and love. Mostly love. Though there is a fair amount of sex (and drugs) in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs semi-autobiographical novel, Queer, in which an American expat (Daniel Craig) living a solitary life in 1950s Mexico City, writing and haunting cafes and bars, finally makes a meaningful connection with someone he could spend his whole life with. Craig passionately personifies the human curse of unattainable desire, while director Guadagino delivers an intoxicating tableaux exploring what happens when you finally encounter the love of your life, someone forever beyond the reach of mere words. No matter one’s sexuality, I found the journey a moving experience; sometimes trippy, often hilarious and deeply sad. Sinead O’Connor’s version of Nirvana's All Apologies is baked into the film, along with other anachronistic but unobtrusive songs, woven with the skilled ears of Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. Love IS queer: no apologies.
A few films just outside my ten I still had a great time at the pictures with:
Blitz - Steve McQueen again, and hugely underrated.
Gladiator 2 - Scott, Mescal, Washington, tons of fun.
Conclave - Ralph Fiennes' face at the end.
And finally, Rebel Ridge - the best action thriller of the year, and it never saw an actual cinema screen.
Onwards we go into the new year… The double tap of January 2025 has to be Robert Eggers Nosferatu on 35mm and Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist on 70mm. As ever, I’ll be up either up in the projection booth or sitting in the stalls. Sometimes both. See you there.
