2024 Mini-Review Roundup, Part 6: The Best?

(Wipes sweat off of brow.) We did it, folks. From critical turds to award season heavy-hitters. To conclude my spurt of mini reviews, I watched every Best Picture nominee. And below you will find my thoughts on all ten of those films. Spoiler: They are not all, in fact, best pictures.

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?

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Dune: Part Two

Previously reviewed here.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

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The Substance

It’s the best movie of the year and nearly a masterpiece. I will be reviewing it at some point. You can hear me talk about it in detail with Brian on an episode of The Goods: A Film Podcast.

Is It Good? Exceptionally Good (7/8)

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I’m Still Here

About 45 minutes into I’m Still Here, I started to get a nagging itch in my brain. I grabbed my phone and pulled I’m Still Here up on Wikipedia, and my heart sank a little: based on a true story.

It means that I’m Still Here is bound to being “important” rather than just a portrait of a family trying to make do against a backdrop of political turmoil. The opening half hour or so of this film is so good in a slice-of-life, hangout vibe sort of way, like you want to be a part of this family and explore their wonderful 1970s Brazil house and swim in their backyard beach and help the oldest daughter pack for college, even with the occasional harrowing close call with military coup forces.

There’s not even enough narrative material in the historical incident to make for a good story, so once it occurs, the movie is basically the same beat repeated and stretched out over the rest of its taxing 135 minute runtime: A family led by resilient mom tries to make life go on with steely-faced determination and half-forced smiles. There are some really great moments in the film’s second half, like the awkwardly cheerful photo shoot when the photographer insists they be sad, but it’s overall a whole lotta not too much that insists upon its political relevance.

Honestly, if you just hit “stop” at the time jump, you maybe even bump this rating up a point — I’m not sure that the two flash forwards really add much except 30 minutes and explicitly closing a narrative loop whose outcome had been strongly implied anyways.

All that said, the movie still works for its duration. It’s not hard to see why Fernanda Torres is getting showered with awards attention. She is carrying the material. But the whole cast is good. The family’s personalities and chemistry are rendered well enough that even the sloggier material hits home.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

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A Complete Unknown

I’m a well-documented musical biopic skeptic (in part because of what James Mangold previously did to crystallize it into a narrative formula), so I expected to totally shrug at this. And I guess this is a shrug, but one of those Jim Halpert smirking shrugs, tilted ever-so-slightly positively.

That (tempered) enthusiasm comes mostly from the first half, which ends with a perfectly ambivalent moment: Bob Dylan debuting “The Times They Are A-Changing” to an adoring crowd who immediately adopts it as a cheerful sing-along. Bob looks confused; this doesn’t seem quite right. The various women in his life, all watching, feel a shift, too, like Bob’s and their lives are about to become even stranger. In that moment, protest folk music has become so widely embraced it’s no longer protest music or folk music; it’s a pop anthem for the people, Dylan’s vast success undercutting the very soul and image he meticulously crafted, such that he has no choice to become something else, his instinct to shut everyone out and discard everything around him, vanish into his own enigma, validated.

And then we spend another 75 minutes hitting those points with a hammer!

The film is too long by at least a third, and Timothee Chalamet takes the straightforward route of mimicking Dylan’s look and mannerisms, with tiny flickers of humanity underneath it. It’s less self-indulgent than Jamie Foxx in Ray (good), less dangerous and charged than Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line (bad). My favorite performance is naturally the one without a nomination, Elle Fanning as Suze Rotolo Sylvie Russo, who serves as a proxy for American ’60s youth trying to make sense of how Dylan does and doesn’t capture the essence of their generation.

(Tangential thought: What do you think will be the final line pillaged from “Like a Rolling Stone” to be used as a title for Dylan-related property when all the others have been taken? “Chrome Horse With Your Diplomat”? Shoutout the late, peerless comic Imogen Quest by friend-of-The Goods Olivia Walch who made this joke about Hamlet’s Act 3 Scene 1 soliloquy years ago.)

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

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Emilia Perez

I’m in a weird place where I feel straddled between the film’s rapturous reception early during the award season that projected it as a Best Picture heavyweight (I genuinely thought it would win for a week or two) and its current backlash where it might not even win Best International Feature anymore. It’s surely not the worst Best Picture nominee of the 21st century, as I’ve seen claimed (cough); it might not even be the worst nominee this year. But I can’t call it a good movie. It is such a baffling film.

The story sounds like provocative, trashy fun on a logline basis: a musical about a trans Mexican drug lord who returns to her old stomping grounds to Mrs. Doubtfire her ex-wife and kids and clean up the crime wave she helped kick off in the first place. Sure, sign me up. I’m imagining shootouts and Troy Bolton-esque mental breakdowns and telenovela-style mistaken identity twists.

But the final product is deeply corny and morally righteous and oddly absent narrative thrust. The tone is so discordant, so self-congratulatory, that the moments that lean into pulp silliness are nails on a chalkboard. Zoe Saldana is dynamic (especially in the fun “El Mal”), but I found Karla Sofía Gascón’s self-gratifying performance to be emblematic of the film’s tonal catastrophe. Emilia Perez occasionally works in flickers and snippets and moments; but not often enough.

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

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The Brutalist

The Brutalist is much more accomplished as a film of big ideas — using characters and plot points to refract the complicated ways Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) does (and doesn’t) represent the immigrant experience, the Jewish experience, the tortured artist experience, and more — than it is as a story. And yet this is a miracle of editing for narrative flow, as it blazes by as much as any 3 hour 35 minute epic, complete with an overture and intermission, possibly could. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually wouldn’t mind watching this movie again in the not-too-far future.

If only there was anything compulsive in the story to latch onto: I kept waiting for the story swing, the apotheosis, the payoff to the film’s cerebral intensity. If you’re going to make a fake biopic, make something pop; Tar‘s top 5 moments blow anything here out of the water. Yet pretty much every scene is good and interesting and purposeful and all that, even it sprawls out into metaphor land in the second half. (I do wish it had stuck the landing on the construction story; I would’ve preferred a grand reveal of a monument to the loopy self-contradictions of the coda.)

The film is shot on a lean budget for such lofty cinematic ambitions. Kudos to the filmmakers (though I suspect the one special trick accountants don’t want you to know is that everyone worked for minimum wage). It’s not the production scope that impresses me so much as the polish and thought; the real shocker is that some people actually know how to use their filmmaking equipment, how to plan and execute a shot and a scene with a cohesive, thematically-driven look. Imagine that.

The acting is all very good and all very serious; I wish there was just a little more gaps in there for some fun to shine through. But Brody is all-in; I won’t begrudge him his statuette. Guy Pearce deserves credit for bringing to life the film’s most fascinating and troubling character.

Overall, I couldn’t shake the sensation that Brady Corbet and co. have made a film too insistent upon itself. To watch The Brutalist is to know that it is a great work. It bludgeons you with its self-diagnosed greatness. Yet I can’t even hold its pretentiousness against it. Is it really a sin to try and make profound and uncompromising art, to build something from nothing as a reflection of your complex life story and worldview? Hey, they should make a movie about that!

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

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Anora

What to do with Anora? It has some electric moments and live wire energy. It also has some major storytelling problems and baggage. My main issue is that the characters offer almost no surprises, with the possible exception of Igor (Yura Borisov), though once you peg him as “the quietly humane one” even he follows the exact arc you’d expect. Maybe the lack of surprises is the point — class fairy tales are just that: fairy tales, outlandish fiction, something you tell at bedtime before you wake up and face the real world. But even then, it’s a flat and short-lived fantasy; some sex and partying, then, like, 90 minutes of flailing.

Mikey Madison has lightning in a bottle energy in the title role, which is good, because the character is extremely underwritten. She has a lot of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny in her performance, her confidence and feistiness a natural counterpart to being outrageously attractive and a sex worker rather than a contrast to it.

And that bumps up against the moral tumult of the story; in fact, all of Baker’s films I’ve seen face this dilemma: The grungy auteur essentially posits that sketching an ignoble and flawed version of a character is “good” representation, which I guess is a subversion (middle-class male protagonists get to be those very often), but doesn’t result in anything especially sympathetic. It’s a complicated question — is it “good” to let characters be naturally flawed and messy even if such unconventional and unflattering honesty isn’t the most fun to watch, and makes you kinda hate the subject? I don’t know. I might need to binge Baker’s filmography and write my way through these questions.

The fuel that drives the movie’s engine is this specific skill that Baker has, maybe better than anyone making movies right now, to construct tense, flowing scenes that feel organic bordering on naturalistic, the dialogue ragged as if parts of it are improvised, though it clearly never is (you can tell because the writing is too precise to be off-the-cuff, often reflecting previous dialogue or illuminating some dramatic irony the character hasn’t processed yet). His films have some of the inviting rhythm of good mumblecore films where little, lived-in details and shifts in dynamics tug you along, hook, line, and sinker.

Anora crests too early, during the first arrival of the goons at Ivan’s house. I couldn’t take my eyes away; I could barely breathe, and yet it’s so funny as a cinematic machine of escalating chaos. Shrieking and flopping and violence are elevated with precise blocking and pacing to comic gold.

The runtime is indulgent, especially once it’s clear Baker is mostly using the last 45 minutes to sweep up the mess from the first two acts, and I think there are some sinewy moral questions that the film doesn’t ask; or else shouts it in your face so it essentially is not asking; but I enjoyed watching Anora nonetheless.

(For conflicting takes on Anora, I recommend podcaster Devan Scott’s rapturous tribute as well as friend-of-The Goods Hunter Allen’s venomous takedown.)

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

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Nickel Boys

Ten minutes in, I thought the experimental style was a distracting gimmick.

Forty minutes in, I thought the experimental style was a distracting gimmick that occasionally allowed for intensely emotional moments.

At the end of the movie, I thought the experimental style was a distracting gimmick, and that the result was a near-masterpiece only possible because of the distracting gimmick.

I genuinely don’t know what to rate this. Like Here from earlier this year, it seems designed in part to alienate its audience. But there’s some stuff it does that simply could not be pulled off without the commitment to its formal conceit. For example, there’s a single POV shot in a driving car takes us through a segregated prison camp and reveals, without cut, the stark differences in the white sections vs. the Black sections through the eyes of its Black protagonist. You feel the dehumanization. Profound, mind-blowing, moving.

When Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor hugs a broken, lonely boy, it’s all the more heartbreaking because you are that boy. It’s not just the subjective camera itself, but the relentlessness of it; you can’t escape these perspectives, so everything that happens to the characters hits you like baseball bat between the temples. And it builds to a dark and complicated and immensely moving final half hour. Even the elliptical moments are disorienting and effective because of the emotional connection we have to the camera; we are the hallucinating ones.

I’m not even sure the flaws end up really harming the film. The story is 80% rote racism-is-bad drama, and yet getting to experience a familiar theme in such a unique presentation makes it all the more bracing; if this had been an unconventional story, it might have been too much novelty for the brain. The 140-minute runtime is entirely too long, and yet the visual style takes some time getting used to, so the length almost feels necessary to build the audience up and allow the ending to land its wallops.

I have absolutely no idea how well it will replay. I will not begrudge anyone giving this any rating, including bottom marks. Parts of it sure feel like you’re watching the opening cutscene of an American-set Elder Scrolls game, with all the stiff, airy acting that suggests, and some of the revelations of the tricky ending are a bit awkwardly conveyed.

But for me, Nickel Boys is one of the most unique and electrifying films of 2024.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

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Wicked

Imagine me trying, through sheer force of will like Tim Robinson in I Think You Should Leave, to push this into “Good” territory. I want to like it, damn it! So desperately! It’s a big colorful high budget musical, the pink-green sensation of the year! (That title will be bitterly contested in 2025 by Wicked 2 and Zombies 4.)

And, truthfully, parts of Wicked are quite good. Both Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are delightful. It’s tough to imagine anyone could have played Galinda better than Grande, whom people sometimes forget had her breakthrough as a tenured Nickelodeon sitcom star. She is funny and charismatic, evoking that specific Chenoweth cute-pompousness without feeling like a cheap imitation. And, of course, she’s Ariana Grande and can sing the shit out of showtunes. Erivo is a great complement, more interior and gentle, her voice a frisson-inducing revelation every single time she gets to wield it.

Whenever the movie decides to be fun, it is indeed a pretty good time. That’s when they’re singing and dancing in cool settings, duh-doy. This is not often enough; there’s a respectable number of songs on the soundtrack (11), but they’re spread across an egregious runtime, and many of them are chopped up like Jon Chu wanted to make sure we didn’t smile too much. Why is it that dime store DCOM/DPlus musicals are more creative with kinetic choreography and staging than a tentpole by the guy who cut his chops in the Step Up franchise?

The half-story and belabored runtime are just outright movie-ruining, the narrative a watery Harry Potter knockoff with inane and confusing lore despite the script’s concerted effort to over-explain it for minutes at a time. It assumes I care way more about Oz iconography than I do, way more than I can imagine anyone caring. My wife pointed out that it’s basically the Surf Dracula meme in movie form. The two racism allegories are dumb (Green skin) and dumber (animals aren’t human… ok?).

Michelle Yeoh is outright bad, and Jeff Goldblum probably would be too if his natural demeanor weren’t a perfect fit for the Wizard. The cinematography is bafflingly dim and ugly for how colorful the production is, filled with backlighting and lens flares and mellow grading. But it still is better-produced and more fun to look at than your average 2020s blockbuster, so, hooray?

Imagine me pounding my fists on the desk right now in frustration. Have some damn fun! Make it sillier and dancier. Give me more moments like the bizarre silent pantomime where Grande and Erivo enact various versions of the Arrested Development chicken dance — an absurd and weirdly effective moment. That’s what I want! “Absurd and weirdly effective!”

I guess I quasi-like it similar to how I quasi-liked Barbie last year — swept away in a colorful mess, even if almost all of my specific bits of feedback are delivered with grumbles. I probably should have given Barbie a thumbs down like I’m about to Wicked. But so long as these movie sensations continue to be about something other than whether the one masked guy can punch the other masked guy hard enough to save the universe, I’ll try not to complain.

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

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Conclave

Uh oh.

Conclave is nearly a delight. That is a load-bearing “nearly.” It’s just flawed enough to annoy me. Or, rather, it is just self-righteous enough to annoy me. The first two thirds of Conclave have the potboiler intrigue of an airport novel, and yet it’s rendered with a gripping intensity that tricks you into thinking it’s serious stuff. I mean this as a compliment. Ralph Fiennes is so subsumed in his role, his aching desire to be Pope crossfiring with his moral center with such stormy power that it might be my favorite performance of the year.

But then the the Sistine Chapel gets targeted with some light terrorism, and the film shifts into a more direct political parable that is just too self-satisfied to pay off on the feuding and scheming of the previous 90 minutes with panache. And yet the very final twist bends backwards towards “pulpy” without actually committing. It’s a head-scratcher, as if the film is afraid to be too woke or too batshit. Swing that dick with your ending, Edward Berger. Don’t be a coward.

Oops, I liked Volker Bertelmann’s widely-panned (yet Oscar-nominated), silly, overdramatic score. I laughed every time it thundered in.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

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