2024 Mini-Review Roundup, Part 5: The Nominated

Now we’re getting to the acclaimed stuff. My 2024 award season blitz continues. In this post, I review some of the year’s Oscar nominees, albeit lesser nominees: no Best Picture candidates. In fact, none of the below films have above-the-line nominations. But they’re part of the Oscars Death Race (which I am not hardcore enough to complete) nonetheless.

2024 Mini-Review Roundup:

• Part 1: The Panned
• Part 2: The Shrugged
• Part 3: The Debuted
• Part 4: The Snubbed
• Part 5: The Nominated
• Part 6: The Best?

---

Sugarcane

The entirety of this exposé on child abuse at church-run Canadian Indigenous schools is angering, but the most personal portions are downright soul-shearing: A son (co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat) tries to piece together his parents’ story — his own story, in fact — against the backdrop of a systemic act of racial cruelty bordering on genocide. It puts a face on the horrors, which shuts down the tragedy-vs.-statistic mechanisms in your brain and forces you to face it head-on. You witness broken humans reckoning with the cruelty that shaped them in real time in a way that feels like it shouldn’t be caught on camera or microphone.

And then there’s a lot of stuff here that doesn’t work quite as profoundly as that, which is maybe good; 105 minutes of that level of darkness would be too much. But whenever the film focuses on the grave site search logistics or narrates archival articles, I got that vaguely detached feeling I often do when I watch documentaries, even good ones about sad historical events. I was learning and engaging in a way that is similar to how I read magazine articles. Some of the associated background material is provocative — the Pope’s cheerful apology is almost darkly comic in how sharply its tone contrasts with the scenario — but plenty of it is just fine.

When I hear the phrase “Oscar-winning documentary,” this is pretty much exactly what I imagine: a worthy, persuasive, well-articulated, well-researched investigation into a real-life event I should know more about, told with a gripping human touch. And Sugarcane is occasionally even more than that.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

---

The Girl with the Needle

To talk about The Girl with the Needle is almost necessarily to spoil it. The marketing and discourse hasn’t really tried to avoid it. It’s the same problem that Abigail faced earlier this year: the hook most likely to draw in an audience is dramaturgically designed as a twist. But I am going to discuss it freely the rest of this mini-review.

The Girl with the Needle is a brutal slog of a post-World War 1 misery. Is a character at least 5% content at any given moment? Don’t worry, it will be upended in some cruel turn of fate next scene. The film builds to the punchline that the person that Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) leans on for support is in fact a serial baby murderer, real-life killer Dagmar Overbye.

Director and co-writer Magnus von Horn has pitched the film as “a fairy tale for grownups,” which suggests a whimsy and playfulness that I simply did not detect. The nonstop cruelty is not rendered with any sense of pitch-black irony, but po-faced art-film miserabilism, with only minor exceptions, like a couple of scenes at a creepy carnival.

So I kind of hated its dour mood, and even with some morbid curiosity about just how bleak it would go, I might not have finished the film, but for a singular redeeming trait: The Girl with the Needle features some of the most enrapturing black-and-white digital photography I’ve ever seen. It’s truly stark and innovative, and I loved every second of it… almost enough to recommend suffering through the brutal story.

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

---

A Different Man

Consider for a moment how similar the stories are for A Different Man and The Substance: In both, an actor humiliated by their physical appearance injects a cutting-edge serum allowing an attractive form to emerge from literally shed skin, with nobody recognizing the new body as the same person. The metamorphosis is a career- and romance-boosting blessing that gradually sours to the point the actor regrets making the change in the first place, with a bleak on-stage meltdown near the finale as a culminating tragedy.

What is crazy is just how opposite the movies are in tone and presentation within that narrative framework. It’s almost like the cinematic gods engineered an experiment to determine how divergent two films could be with the exact same elevator pitch.

The Substance is an arch, glittery, maximal French splatter horror satire; A Different Man is a grungy, brown American 1990’s-style indie dramedy. The latter has made a late surge among best-of-the-year evaluation and ended with an Oscar nomination for makeup. There had been some speculation Sebastian Stan might sneak into Best Actor (indeed, I’ve seen it proposed by an Academy member that Stan’s Apprentice nomination is honoring his work in both films).

I honestly can’t get all the way there on A Different Man’s adoration, and a lot of that is because of The Substance. A Different Man has a biting sense of humor with some terrific scenes and gut punches — lots of cruel irony — and I like the cast a lot (Renate Reinsve, wowza). It’s just… the finale is not the cathartic masterclass of The Substance’s final half hour. But what could possibly hope to be?

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

---

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is one of the most formally inventive documentaries I’ve seen in years: It blends archival tele-journalism footage of Cold War political events with jazz performance to an almost impressionistic effect deeply unusual for dense nonfiction. The jazz itself is beautiful, the editing and assembly an overwhelming feat yet always watchable. Occasionally, the film’s swirling approach to the material generates the kind of ineffable emotional-intellectual tension of discordant ideas working in harmony that is what the best art is made of.

And yet I spent the whole arduous runtime thinking this was the wrong nail for such an inventive hammer. Too often, the material’s connection to jazz is so weak and superficial that I suspect director Johan Grimonprez pre-determined his project’s form before realizing during production that he wanted to tell a different story, one more about neo-colonial economic conspiracies than racial and cultural subjugation, though it is indeed all interconnected. I also would have had no objections to halving the runtime; it really starts to feel like eating your vegetables as we round the second hour of names and events and still have a half hour to go. Grimonprez straddles halfway between assuming you know the material and overexplaining it to the point that I think nobody will be satisfied.

I’m glad it exists, and I’m sad I don’t love it. I just wish it had figured out the right scope of story to tell, or maybe a different emotional texture: perhaps one more like a heartbreaking memoir and less like a 900 page history book.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

---

Memoir of a Snail

I spent its opening half hour quite fond of Adam Elliot’s stop-motion Memoir of a Snail. It’s a gauntlet of misery, but told with a special brand of restrained, non-cloying whimsy and crafted with such inviting bespoke claymation that I was immersed and sympathetic. The narration by Sarah Snook provides wonderful personality.

And then it turns out that that’s really all that Memoir of a Snail has up its sleeve, and it gets old. The cruel contrivances against its characters pile up and become more and more outlandish and silly, just dragging on.

So I was griping as it reached its conclusion, but the last five minutes tie up the story into a little bow about the value of storytelling as a means of shaping your identity and processing your grief that doesn’t quite justify the relentless suffering of the previous ninety minutes, but at least spins it into something a little more meaningful.

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

---

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

It’s Wallace & Gromit, so of course I liked it, to the point it almost cracks my top 10 favorite movies of the year. But I don’t love it, which means I can’t help but think of Vengeance Most Fowl as a minor failure. A bunch of factors — no clear reason to make this a Wrong Trousers sequel, some repeated beats from past Wallace & Gromit films, perhaps even my own burnout and malaise watching films with a critical eye — make this the least I’ve been won over by a Wallace & Gromit project to date.

But the magic is not entirely gone. Many of the individual moments deliver at a high level. The climax in particular is a triumph: that the showdown chase is between two slow boats is very funny, e.g., and the warmth of the bond between the two main characters is affirmed in a great way after decades of Wallace’s lack of appreciation for Gromit starting to accumulate into shtick. I really love the horror imagery in this — it’s not as prominent as it was in Were-Rabbit, of course, but it’s still a strong flavor.

The claymation is terrific, to the point it almost passes through the veil of being too good and clean to feel tangible and physical on screen — “any sufficiently advanced stop-mo is indistinguishable from CGI,” I think Arthur C. Clarke once said. But even when its homey humility is reduced, the direction itself is so good, it’s a real treat to watch. Nick Park hasn’t entirely lost his distinctive, cozy touch, though the returns are diminishing.

Plus, it’s a brisk 79 minutes, with an unceasing momentum that makes it feel even shorter than that. But you can watch the original golden trilogy of shorts in that time, so you definitely want to start there.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

---

Elton John: Never Too Late

---

Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.