This ballot I really tried to err on the side of movies that spoke to me personally when selecting and ranking nominees. Goofy little things that lit up my heart place better than some of the awards magnets.

A couple of rules/reminders: I have not yet seen many movies I predict would place in several of these categories. In the feature-length categories (animated/doc/international), I only nominate if I passed them at “Good” or higher; hence some blanks, as I haven’t seen enough to fill all five spots. Feature-length is 40+ mins for OFCS (relevant for Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, which qualifies by 18 seconds.)

One more proviso: Last year, I bent myself in a pretzel trying to independently reason what roles were Lead vs. Supporting. This year, I’m just deferring to FYC campaigns; though I’m subject to change my mind on this.

(Pictured: KPop Demon Hunters)

Best Picture

1. Twinless
2. Eephus
3. The Phoenician Scheme
4. Sorry, Baby
5. One Battle After Another
6. Weapons
7. Sinners
8. F1
9. Sacramento
10. The Woman in the Yard

Best Animated Feature

1. KPop Demon Hunters
2. Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical
3. Zootopia 2
4. The Bad Guys 2
5. —

Best Director

1. Wes Anderson – The Phoenician Scheme
2. Paul Thomas Anderson – One Battle After Another
3. James Sweeney- Twinless
4. Ryan Coogler – Sinners
5. Zach Cregger – Weapons

Best Lead Actor

1. Dylan O’Brien – Twinless
2. Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon
3. Paul Walter Hauser – The Luckiest Man in America
4. Michael Angarano – Sacramento
5. Benicio Del Toro – The Phoenician Scheme

Best Lead Actress

1. Eva Victor – Sorry, Baby
2. Danielle Deadwyler – The Woman in the Yard
3. Julia Roberts – After the Hunt
4. Elizabeth Olsen – Eternity
5. Molly Gordon – Oh, Hi!

Best Supporting Actor

1. Josh O’Connor – Wake Up Dead Man
2. Benicia Del Toro – One Battle After Another
3. Michael Cera – The Phoenician Scheme
4. Paul Rudd – Friendship
5. Andrew Scott – Blue Moon

Best Supporting Actress

1. Blake Lively – Another Simple Favor
2. Teyana Taylor – One Battle After Another
3. Aisling Franciosi – Twinless
4. Maya Erskine – Sacramento
5. Amber Midthunder – Novocaine

Best Ensemble & Casting

1. One Battle After Another
2. Sinners
3. The Phoenician Scheme
4. Eephus
5. Weapons

Best Original Screenplay

1. Twinless
2. The Phoenician Scheme
3. Sinners
4. Sacramento
5. Friendship

Best Adapted Screenplay

(oof)

1. One Battle After Another
2. Wake Up Dead Man
3. Blue Moon
4. Superman
5. Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical

Best Editing

1. F1
2. One Battle After Another
3. Twinless
4. Drop
5. The Woman in the Yard

Best Cinematography

1. The Woman in the Yard
2. The Phoenician Scheme
3. One Battle After Another
4. Twinless
5. The Surfer

Best Original Score

1. Sinners
2. The Phoenician Scheme
3. One Battle After Another
4. F1
5. After the Hunt

Best Production Design

1. The Phoenician Scheme
2. Frankenstein
3. Sinners
4. Mickey 17
5. Eternity

Best Costume Design

1. The Phoenician Scheme
2. Frankenstein
3. Sinners
4. Another Simple Favor
5. The Woman in the Yard

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Weapons
4. Blue Moon
5. The Luckiest Man in America

Best Sound Design

1. F1
2. Eephus
3. Sinners
4. Mickey 17
5. One Battle After Another

Best Visual Effects

1. F1
2. Mickey 17
3. One Battle After Another
4. Superman
5. The Monkey

Best Choreography (Dance & Stunt)

1. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires
2. Love Hurts
3. One Battle After Another
4. Sinners
5. Eddington

Best Film Not in the English Language

(Less than 25% English)

1. Misericordia
2. —
3. —
4. —
5. —

Best Documentary

1. Not Just a Goof
2. —
3. —
4. —
5. —

Best Debut Feature

(Achievement in Writing and/or Direction)

1. Carson Lund – Eephus
2. Eva Victor – Sorry, Baby
3. Andrew DeYoung – Friendship
4. Alex Russell – Lurker
5. Lawrence Lamont – One of Them Days

2020

First time watching this animated miniseries upon Brian’s selection for the podcast.

Auntie Whispers will haunt my dreams, as will Jason Funderburker’s frog voice.

Series discussed on The Goods: A Film Podcast.

Podcast Episode Link

2021

I loved it even more this year than last. Its sprawling autumnal tones and early/mid-century influences make every frame a treat; I found lots I didn’t notice the first time. And there’s lots of foreshadowing to plot points that I didn’t pick up the first time through.

Greg’s random silliness stuck out to me less this time around, in part because I was prepared for it and in part because I could better see its thematic purpose in providing tension between him and Wirt. I also felt less disappointed by the inclusion and connection to the “real world,” as I appreciated the way it amplified the deathly/decaying feeling of the woods.

It wraps up in such a satisfying manner that it almost made me want to loop back and start again right away. (Though I still think Greg should have named the frog The Beast.)

The episodes still feel quite short but I’ve come around on the length. I’m not sure many of these premises could sustain much more screen time (though a few certainly could).

My two favorite episodes remain “Into the Unknown” (clarinets and poetry) and “The Ringing of the Bell” (Auntie Whispers!).

Jason Funderburker’s oft-repeated name and frog voice will never not make me laugh.

2022

Better every year.

I decided to write a full length review to capture my thoughts:

Full Review: Over The Garden Wall (2014)

2023

Keeps getting better?

My current chapter ranking:

1. “The Ringing of the Bell” (7)
2. “Into the Unknown” (9)
3. “Songs of the Dark Lantern” (4)
4. “Schooltown Follies” (3)
5. “The Old Grist Mill” (1)
6. “Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee” (2)
7. “The Unknown” (10)
8. “Lullaby in Frogland” (6)
9. “Mad Love” (5)
10. “Babes in the Wood” (8)

SPOILERS:

My top 5 favorite moments, no order:
– Frog sings (6)
– Jason Funderberker voice reveal (9)
– Truth about Lorna revealed (7)
– The Highwayman (4)
– Woodsman’s Redemption (10)

I asked my two daughters why they thought Greg and Wirt transported from the water they fell into to The Unknown, and here’s what they said:

Six year old: “I think they didn’t drown but were close to drowning, and it is magical water so they went into a deep sleep where they dream about fall things because it’s Halloween, and the dreams are The Unknown.”

Three year old: “It’s very magical and silly water! After they fall in, they go to The Unknown in no time!”

2024

Happy 10th anniversary!

I’m increasingly convinced that this is greatest cinematic contemplation of mortality for children of the 21st century (aside from Toy Story 3). I understand why so many think the ending is a bit tacked on — I did the first time I watched — but it really echoes everything that builds up to it.

I was sleeping on Chapter 8 (ha) in my previous watches and. No idea why I ranked it as the worst episode last year. It’s some visionary animation.

Really might be a full masterpiece. Going to noodle on that next year.

Thanks as always to Brian for making me watch this 4 years ago.

2025

Six thoughts in honor of my sixth autumn watching this:

1. It’s kind of a miracle that the very-2010s non-sequitur (i.e. “random”) humor not only holds up as very funny on repeated viewings but actually serves a thematic purpose by contrasting Greg and Wirt as the story progresses. Wirt’s horizon-gazing poetry contrasts Greg’s silly whimsy, but they’re borne from similar souls. And in that contrast comes synthesis; potato colliding with molasses.

2. Wood offers surely the most important and accomplished voice acting here, but we should really give some sort of award to Christopher Lloyd for his defeated woodsman. That aching voice (matched with his tinkling music box motif) slays me in an instant.

3. I feel increasingly incapable of ranking the episodes. They all offer delights and diversions. (Though I always forget to breathe when Auntie Whispers is on screen and often find myself checking my watch during the mansion madness episode, so those are probably the best and worst.)

4. It’s very odd given how much it drives the overarching narrative and how much foreshadowing it gets that we spend all of 30 seconds with Adelaide. Beatrice’s arc is a little compromised as a result. I wonder if the team needed to find a way to cut an episode and so merged the frog ferry ride with Adelaide.

5. It may or may not be the right storytelling choice, but I’m a little annoyed that miniseries opens with what is either its scariest story or its second scariest depending upon your feelings towards Lorna’s transformation. The reason I’m annoyed is because my eight year old spent most of the runtime asking me “is this another scary episode?” I wish we built to that freaky wolf a little bit more.

6. I think the reason I love coming-of-age stories so much is that they’re also death stories, and resurrection stories, and metamorphosis stories: rattles of adult modernity crushing quaint childlike pastoral life. Over the Garden Wall is all of those in very meaningful ways. The ways we use art to process all of those inevitable but traumatic changes of human existence are the loveliest lies of all, indeed.

2026

Watching this year, I really appreciated just how much the sequencing of the episodes mirrors the arc of a human life and its hierarchy of needs: You venture into life in need of shelter (01 “The Old Grist Mill”), food, and community (02 “Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee”). You go to school (03 “Schooltown Follies”), then set out on an adult life as a pilgrim (04 “Song of the Dark Lantern”). You fall in love (05 “Mad Love”). You seek a place to rest and companions you can trust as you journey through adulthood (06 “Lullaby in Frogland”). As you age, you confront disease and strife with younger generations (07 “The Ringing of the Bell”). And as your time winds, down you prepare for the “big sleep” (08 “Babes in the Wood”).

The second-to-last episode (09 “Into the Unknown”) suggests this life and death story is repeated in small ways every day of our lives, and as such, we can embrace either end of the story: the light or the dark, the hope or the despair, the Greg or the Wirt, the potatoes or the molasses. And the finale (10 “The Unknown”) argues that there is no one right answer; to everything there is a season. Sometimes we must fight for life, like the brothers against The Beast, and sometimes we must accept death with grace, like woodsman and his lantern.

Thus, I felt a little bit of an itch when I wrote my review of Rope earlier this year. Even though I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to say about the movie, was I really properly steeped in it? Had I let it sit and develop?

It turns out those instincts were right. Half a year and a Hitchcoctober rewatch later, I’m higher on Rope than I first was. Let’s take a look at what my concerns were the first time through:

• What I thought: Jimmy Stewart is poorly cast and inadequate

I still think his casting is unintuitive, the contrast in his natural demeanor with the edgy written material not so sharply defined as in Vertigo and Rear Window. But I now see this not as a flaw but as something that deepens the character of Rupert and interrogates the way he espouses but doesn’t live out crypto-fascist beliefs and impulses.

• What I thought: The filming is too stagey and proscenium-bound

I see this totally differently now. Although this limitation is built into the structure, Hitchcock completely controls and weaponizes it, directing our gaze and putting us in the perspective of the two killers and their awful secret shame.

• What I thought: The real-time, no-cuts structure prevents Hitchcock from applying his masterful expansion and contraction of space and time via montage-style editing

This defines, to me, Rope‘s ceiling, and Hitchcock himself agreed. In his interview with Francois Truffaut in the essential Truffaut-Hitchcock book, he describes the frustration of not being able to apply his editing techniques, though he still aimed for achieving similar effects with the “pure cinema” of long takes and real-time storytelling. (Although he spent most of the Rope portion of the interview talking a lot about the trickiness of lighting in color for the first time and the annoyance of discarding whole days worth of filming when the sunset lighting didn’t come out right.)

In that Truffaut interview and other later retrospectives, Hitchcock described Rope as an experiment that he doesn’t blame himself for trying but that he felt was ultimately compromised as a final product. I agree a bit, but I ultimately feel Htichcock undersells the film. He created a sinister, spring-loaded trap with rich and disturbing psychology injected into the audience by way of the anti-hero deuteragonists’ philosophical and sexual neuroses.

I stand by most of my initial thoughts on the film, but I’ve rewritten a couple of paragraphs in my review of Rope to be more appreciative of the film’s overall effect, which I do feel is something special.

Previous Rating

Very Good (6/8)

Updated Rating

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

Slamilton (Space Jam vs. Hamilton)

• Link

Super Slam Bros. (Space Jam vs. Super Smash Bros.)

• Link – Super Slam Bros. 4
• Link – Super Slam Bros. Melee

Carry On Wayward Slam (Space Jam vs. Kansas)

• Link

Slamtris (Space Jam vs. Tetris)

• Link

Slammmbop (Space Jam vs. Hanson)

• Link

My Slam Will Jam On (Space Jam vs. Titanic)

• Link

All I Want For Christmas Is a Space Jam (Space Jam vs. Mariah Carey)

• Link

Slammin Jammin Power Dunkers (Space Jam vs. Power Rangers)

• Link

Slam Me Barkley (Space Jam vs. Carly Rae Jepsen)

• Link

Space Space Jam Jam (Space Jam vs. Space Jam)

• Link

A change in eligibility rules this year: I have decided to go by theatrical/streaming release rather than premiere to match the Academy, meaning more films qualified, including some that Letterboxd classifies as 2022 and 2023. You can see the 88 films deemed eligible here.

Normal caveat: I’ve missed a lot of movies that would inevitably place in some of these categories, and I’m sure I’ll change my mind on plenty of selections within 24 hours of hitting “Publish,” if not 24 seconds. Especially after you tell me what I got wrong in the comments.

Previous B.A.D.S.: 2023 | 2022

(Pictured: The 4:30 Movie)

Best Film Title

• Boy Kills World
• Hot Frosty
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Lisa Frankenstein
• Orion and the Dark

I use this category to honor “title that tells me the flavor of the film and also desperately makes me want to watch it” rather than “title is eventually revealed to be clever,” otherwise I’d include His Three Daughters and A Different Man (and maybe even Here) among the nominees.

(Shoutout to Hot Frosty, which wins the 2024 Cocaine Bear Honorary Award for “movie that people only care about because of its title.” Still don’t like either film.)

Winner: I Saw the TV Glow

Best Editing

• Challengers
• Here
• It’s What’s Inside
• The Substance
• Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

I guess you have to call what goes on in Here “editing,” though it’s something much more radical and unusual than your typical schema for continuity. It’s the most ambitious and interesting work of the year by far, though Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s innovative cadence would have a shot here if documentary editing didn’t include “making sure 90 minutes of material isn’t stretched out to 150.”

Winner: Here

Best Debut Director

• Sean Wang – Didi
• Natalie Rae and Angela Patton – Daughters
• Annie Baker – Janet Planet
• Daina Oniunas-Pusić- Tuesday
• Jordan Weiss – Sweethearts

A few of my favorite films of the year were debuts, and I’m sad to leave the “well-observed” Good One by India Donaldson and the very Dan-core I Love Movies by Chandler Levack off this list. If I were going best film overall, this would be a tight contest between Didi and Daughters, but since the title is “director,” I’ll hand it to Wang for his lovely, painful coming-of-age dramedy.

Winner: Sean Wang – Didi

Best Ensemble

• A Complete Unknown
• Conclave
• Dune: Part Two
• Nosferatu
• Saturday Night

I like to reserve this category for casts with a deep bench rather than a top-weighted two or three performances. Dune almost gets it, but every turn in Conclave is terrific and it’s led by one of the year’s best in Fiennes.

Winner: Conclave

Best Song/Musical Number

• “Rock DJ” – Better Man
• “Let Me Entertain You” – Better Man
• “Your Song” finale – Elton John: Never Too Late
• “What Is This Feeling?”– Wicked
• “What Do You Hear?” – Musica

I missed a few musicals, but this is still a weak crop, to the point that I feel like I’m cheating with the Elton doc’s finale and the Musica segment. (I literally can’t remember a Moana 2 song, so that was out.) At least there’s an obvious winner, my favorite musical sequence in years,  the single-shot bonanza “Rock DJ.”

Winner: “Rock DJ” – Better Man

Best Original Score

• Daniel Blumberg – The Brutalist
• Kris Bowers – The Wild Robot
• Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – Challengers
• Isabella Summers – Lisa Frankenstein
• Alex G – I Saw the TV Glow

I’ve spent the last two days listening to 2024 film scores as I prepare this post, and my shortlist was about 9 long. I had to rationalize myself out of Conclave (funny overdramatic use of a single cue is not “Best Original Score” material) and Dune 2 (even Zimmer admits it’s just an extension of Dune 1). Sean Fennessey has effectively propagandized me on The Brutalist score, but it’s fifth place here.

Then I spent last night asking myself “should Isabella Summers’ Lisa Frankenstein score actually win the dang thing, or have I just been listening to ‘Creature’s Love Theme’ on loop for a half hour?” I’m close to defying all consensus and selecting LF, even though I forgot about it until I rediscovered it the past few days. But I’m not quite there.

So now I’m pulling out my hair agonizing between three scores that vastly improve their films and set perfect tones, but I don’t think any do more than Alex P’s otherworldly I Saw the TV Glow score that’s like Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score composed for a Canadian-produced PBS teen TV show. The film’s “creepypasta” vibe is deeply indebted to it.

Winner: Alex G – I Saw the TV Glow

Best Scene

• Goon home invasion – Anora
• Match point and tiebreaker – Challengers
• Secretarybird’s ascent – Flow
• Notes app – Hit Man
• Monstro Elisasue on stage – The Substance

I was tempted to just write “Every scene – The Substance” because the way Coralie Fargeat makes every beat the ultimate version of itself, then pushes it even further, is a key part of the movie’s appeal. But the blood hose finale has to be the peak; it would win if not for Hit Man’s incredible capstone scene where all its ideas and performances crash together.

Winner: Notes app – Hit Man

Best Screenplay

• Between the Temples
• Challengers
• Hit Man
• The Substance
• A Real Pain

This is a category that baffles me more with each passing year. It used to be quite obvious to me as a way to honor my favorite talky movie of the year. But a script is more than just dialogue; it’s story shape and tone; though those are also direction and production, so how do I disentangle it all?

I don’t know. But no script made me laugh harder than Between the Temples this year, and it doubles as a loopy inspection of grief and lost potential and unexpected connections.

Winner: Between the Temples

Best Streaming-Only Feature

• Incoming
• Carry-On
• Rebel Ridge
• Sweethearts
• Turtles All the Way Down

This is a tough category to award, to the point I considered just not doing it this year. Many movies that were marketed as streaming-only (Hit Man, Woman of the Hour) in fact had limited releases to qualify for the Oscars.

I’m tempted to pick the raunchy teen comedy Sweethearts, especially as a contrarian given its mixed reviews, but I’d be surpassing my own capacity for intellectual dishonesty if I did not pick the wonderful Rebel Ridge.

Winner: Rebel Ridge

Best Documentary Feature

• Daughters
• The Greatest Night in Pop
• Music by John Williams
• Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
• Sugarcane

Hey, I’ve actually seen more than two docs this year? Eight, even! And seven of them were no worse than solid (go home, D+ Elton doc; not you, “Your Song,” you can stay). But only one ranks among the most touched and saddened I’ve felt this year.

Winner: Daughters

Best International/Foreign Language Feature

• All We Imagine as Light
• Dahomey
• I’m Still Here
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig

I don’t have rigid rules for this category because I find production nationality completely opaque, so I tend to follow American award body consensus. But Flow’s nomination for the International Feature Oscar seems wrong; despite being a Latvian production, it has no spoken dialogue, and most award bodies, the Academy included, use foreign language dialogue as a bar a film must pass to qualify. It would win this category if I included it, but I want a chance to honor the lovely All We Imagine as Light, so I’m fine excluding Flow.

Winner: All We Imagine as Light

Best Animated Feature

• Flow
• Inside Out 2
• Orion and the Dark
• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
• The Wild Robot

Easy pick for Flow. Wallace & Gromit is great but a hair underwhelming given the franchise pedigree; Wild Robot charmed me in the moment but has rusted the more I’ve thought about it, and nothing else I saw stuck.

Winner: Flow

Best Cinematography

• Jarin Blaschke – Nosferatu
• Greig Fraser – Dune: Part Two
• Benjamin Kračun – The Substance
• Bill and Turner Ross – Gasoline Rainbow
• Eric Yue – I Saw the TV Glow

Is it lazy to always pick whatever Blaschke-Eggers or Yeoman-Anderson project came out this year? Maybe! Still always seems right.

Winner: Jarin Blaschke – Nosferatu

Best Sound

• Between the Temples
• Flow
• Nosferatu
• Tuesday
• The Substance

This has become one of my favorite categories to consider and award each year, and you can make a really strong case for all five of these nominees. Between the Temples has my single favorite sound effect in awhile (the creaky door), but The Substance’s squelchy phantasmagoria has to take it.

Winner: The Substance

Best Visual Effects

• Better Man
• Dune: Part Two
• Here
• The Substance
• Tuesday

In contrast to Sound, this is a category I’ve come to dread, because I tend to skip out on the big-budget shenanigans, and I’m not even always sure what constitutes “visual effects.” Cool use of props in the fights in Jackpot? The weird de-aging and digital manipulation in Here? Special achievement in running by Taron Egerton in Carry-On? This year is especially tough because the line between “makeup” and “visual effects” in The Substance is blurry to me. I dunno, I can’t give that film every award, can I?

Winner: Dune: Part Two

Best Costuming

• The Book of Clarence
• Lisa Frankenstein
• Nosferatu
• The Substance
• Wicked

I completely skipped this in 2022 and 2023, but I had enough costume thoughts in 2024 that I’m going to try awarding this one going forward. There was some good and unconventional costuming this year, but Nosferatu’s evocative and attractive Victorian fits by Linda Muir are off the chain. (That means “good,” right?)

Winner: Nosferatu

Best Production & Setting Design

• Conclave
• Dune: Part Two
• Nosferatu
• A Real Pain
• The Substance

I just love how vivid Dune’s sand planet is in Part 2. It actually feels like a real place; no small feat for a piece of science fantasy. But Nosferatu’s frightening, immersive period production has to take the production award. After seeing Nosferatu, I finally believe bad stuff could happen in Germany.

Winner: Nosferatu

Best Voice Actor

• Maya Hawke – Inside Out 2
• Lupita Nyong’o – The Wild Robot
• Pedro Pascal – The Wild Robot
• Sarah Snook – Memoir of a Snail
• Jacob Tremblay – Orion and the Dark

Memoir of a Snail runs out of ideas before it runs out of runtime, but part of the reason it comes so close to working is because of Snook’s voiceover. This is a category I don’t feel to strongly about this year, and I’m a rewatch away of any animated film from picking a new winner.

Winner: Sarah Snook – Memoir of a Snail

Best Actor in a Leading Role

• Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain
• Ralph Fiennes – Conclave
• Nicholas Hoult – Juror #2
• Aaron Pierre – Rebel Ridge
• Glen Powell – Hit Man

2024 had by far the strongest Lead Actor slate for a given year since I started this site in 2022, and I haven’t agonized this much over a batch of nominees since the similarly stacked 2022 Best Actress lineup. (I could easily double up to ten and feel good about each pick.) You could talk me into literally any of these five being the winner; in my head, I went from Hoult to Fiennes to Culkin back to the candidate I thought might win when I saw his movie last fall. Powell might be the most fun and memorable, at least.

Winner: Glen Powell – Hit Man

Best Actress in a Leading Role

• Mikey Madison – Anora
• Demi Moore – The Substance
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus – Tuesday
• Ariana Grande – Wicked
• Margaret Qualley – The Substance

Am I insane? Why have Qualley and Grande been labeled “supporting” all season? Qualley is on screen almost a full hour, practically as long as Moore. Grande is onscreen actually more than an hour, though in that case she’s at least obviously a smaller component than Cynthia Erivo.

One of the leads in the best movie (Moore or Qualley) would be the safe pick here, but I think Madison’s stripper riff on Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny is so electrically watchable it covers up a lot of flaws in Anora.

Winner: Mikey Madison – Anora

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

• Austin Butler – Dune: Part Two
• Willem Dafoe – Nosferatu
• Gabrielle LaBelle – Snack Shack
• Clarence Maclin – Sing Sing
• Jeremy Strong – The Apprentice

It’s a strong (Strong?) and strange competition for supporting male actors this year — my short list was about 13 nominees long. But I’ve been searching for a performance that gives me the joy of LaBelle’s silly swagger in Snack Shack since I watched it, and I haven’t found it. (Kieran Culkin is pretty obviously a co-lead**, or he’d be the pick here.)

(** One takeaway for me this awards season has been that I need to do some soul searching on how I define lead vs. supporting — i.e. is it mere screentime, or is it story perspective, or is it both? Or do I just defer to consensus? Let the helpful Screen Time Central blog decide? See: Grande/Qualley as Lead dilemmas.)

Winner: Gabrielle LaBelle – Snack Shack

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

• Adria Arjona – Hit Man
• Joan Chen – Didi
• Rebecca Ferguson – Dune: Part Two
• Elle Fanning – A Complete Unknown
• Carol Kane – Between the Temples

I rewatched half of Between the Temples a couple a days ago, and every single line delivery that came out of Carol Kane’s mouth made me feel like I’d just inhaled nitrous oxide.

Winner: Carol Kane – Between the Temples

Best Director

• Robert Eggers – Nosferatu
• Luca Guadagnino – Challengers
• Coralie Fargeat – The Substance
• RaMell Ross – Nickel Boys
• Denis Villeneuve – Dune: Part Two

Fargeat is the real deal, delivering with The Substance a maximalist splatterfest that is beautiful and funny and scary and sad and hallucinatory and horny and all the other adjectives too.

Winner: Coralie Fargeat – The Substance

Best Picture

• The Substance
• Flow
• Here
• Nosferatu
• Between the Temples

The obviousness of The Substance’s satire circles back around into profound. It’s like: “The media, and culture at large, define women by their attractiveness and ability to ‘present’ to the world… let’s take that idea to its logical endpoint in a Jekyll-Hyde riff, and then another 50% beyond that, so you feel it viscerally.” It’s full of fun allusion and wild production, every craft element working in overwhelming harmony. And the ending manages a note of tragedy and catharsis. It’s perhaps too impish and emotionally detached to get all the way to Masterpiece, but it’s damn, damn close.

Winner: The Substance

Thanks as always for being here; my wrap-up of 2024 is on its way, and I can’t wait for another year with you all.

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?

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?

Dune: Part Two

Previously reviewed here.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

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.

Update: I wrote a full-length review here

Is It Good? Exceptionally Good (7/8)

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)

A Complete Unknown

Update: I wrote a full-length review here

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Wicked

Imagine me trying, through sheer force of will like Tim Robinson in I Think You Should Leave, to pull 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)

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)

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

Many of the below films are ones I’d like to write full reviews for, but I’ve come to realize that “I haven’t yet” usually becomes “I won’t,” particularly during the award season rush. Maybe someday on a couple of these.

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?

The Greatest Night in Pop

At some point “the footage is just too good” trumps “toothless puff piece.” This doc isn’t really a great specimen of the form, and it has some pacing issues, but it made me so deliriously happy to watch. It reveals the famous “check your egos at the door” recording session of “We Are the World” to be much stranger and more volatile than you’d guess from watching the music video, with at least fifteen little moments that made me laugh out loud. (None are better than when Stevie Wonder tries to get Swahili added to the chorus, which pisses off Waylon Jennings so much he leaves the studio, only for someone to point out to Stevie that they don’t speak Swahili in Ethiopia. Truly a beautiful series of escalating gags.)

My biggest regret is that they didn’t interview more people who were there and include more B-roll clips. I would watch a three hour cut of this with every interview quote, every weird moment caught on camera, every botched solo recording. Show me Al Jarreau chugging wine and stumbling around. What was Billy Joel thinking this whole time? When the singers spontaneously started signing each others’ lyrics sheets, who did Steve Perry approach? Cut out some of the setup exposition that makes at least a third of the documentary and give us more of the night itself and people’s reactions.

My second biggest regret is that it’s just too nice. A lot of listeners hate the song nowadays and a lot of the musicians there resented each other now and then. So why didn’t more of that bile come out? Do we really need to use kiddie gloves on a #1 hit from 40 years ago just because it raised a lot of money for starving kids back in the day? (The real answer is Lionel Richie is one of the doc’s producer and he probably wouldn’t let this footage out without some understanding “We Are the World” would be treated with reverence, as he considers the song one of his biggest legacies.)

Anyways, it’s still a gloriously fun watch that provides an intimate lens on some of the most influential pop/rock musicians ever (poor awkward Bob Dylan) and emphasizes how something like this couldn’t have happened before or since. 1985 was the right moment for such lovably goofy boondoggle of a song.

Special shoutout to my fellow Meniere’s Disease sufferer Huey Lewis, who comes across as a really likable guy.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

(You can hear me discuss this doc and “We Are the World” in more depth on an episode of The Goods: A Film Podcast.)

Between the Temples

I knew I was going to love this as soon as the first bar scene, when the word “mudslide” is said 15 increasingly hilarious times. But even that didn’t prepare me for how much I laughed during this film’s (slightly overlong) 110 minutes. The climax is a scenario of apocalyptic second-hand embarrassment, but under the film’s cruel surface is a lot of compassion and acute observations about grief and unexpected connections. It’s a great script and rendered with perfect tone by writer-director Nathan Silver.

Most movies of this ilk would settle for a soft focus, observational visual schema and move on. Between the Temples weaponizes this, with blunt-force close-ups that feel like standing in an elevator with someone who is leaning into your personal space. On top of the visceral discomfort the cinematography catalyzes, it also sets up some great jokes in the editing — the space surrounding the camera’s subject is not always clear, so another character’s presence or blocking can be almost a jump scare.

The cherry on top is the sound design, which is ramped up to 11: the horrid squelching of people chewing food makes every meal scene a hysterical nightmare, and there’s a recurring door squeak that’s the funniest bit of foley in years. It sounds like the gates of hell bursting open every time.

Every cast member is wonderful. We’ve known from his Wes Anderson work that Jason Schwartzman can handle deadpan loser grief, as he does with aplomb here. But Carol Kane is even better, touching and loopy without drifting into whimsy wacky land.

I’m itching to get carried away in the rating; but it’s just a little bit too insubstantial and cringe-inducing for me to put it in a pantheon just yet. I try to save “Exceptionally Good” and higher for home runs, pieces of art, and Certified Dan Classics — and I’m definitely tempted here. Maybe I’ll get there when I rewatch it. But, no question, Between the Temples is one of my favorite films of 2024.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

Challengers

The purity of Challengers is appealing to me. It’s almost old-fashioned. It is a screenplay- and character-driven original drama film without a high concept, from a script by Justin Kuritzkes that’s just a little too cute with its nonlinear chronology but otherwise an excellent story. (Though it’s still his second-best piece of cinematic writing.) The theme of tennis rivals as a proxy for sexual rivalry is terrifically realized.

I haven’t gone deep on Luca Guadagnino‘s filmography, but my theory that he rips as a director has held up through three films. Some of the stylistic touches here are outstanding. This is especially true of the finale, which ranks as one of the best scenes of the year, pushing tennis = homoerotic sexual tussle to its limit with some real bravura filmmaking.

I need to see it again (and very much plan to) before I determine if it’s more than the sum of its parts, i.e. an actual great film, or just exactly equal to the sum of its parts. But those parts are considerable, so Challengers is a triumph either way: great score, great editing, solid acting, high energy. A grand slam?

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

Dahomey

Dahomey is much more complicated than its logline would suggest — this is no mere chronicle of repatriated art exhibits, nor even an argument in favor of repatriation, but a meditation upon the very nature of sacred art, told from the perspective of the art itself. Mati Diop’s camera depicts the transfer of the art with sterility bordering on indifference: clips of packing and unpacking boxes; narration of impersonal descriptors of material and quality by museum workers and restorers. But it finds passion and color in the mirrored images of nature and ordinary people: motion and glimmers and gauzy textures. Waves crash and people scuttle.

The point, I guess, is that the core of art is not the product itself, but the spirit and desire in people it represents. To Diop, it is more profound that people care about reclaiming cultural artifacts than the reclamation itself is.

It’s ironic, perhaps — or maybe just fitting? — that a documentary “about” historical art is so artful itself, yet so ambivalent about the pieces of art it investigates.

Even with a provocative idea and a brisk 68 minute runtime, Dahomey is a bit thin on material. It doesn’t wear out its welcome or approach boredom, but it lands its blow with a gentle thump, not a knockout punch. Ultimately, it feels like what it is: a compelling but minor side project of a visionary talent in Mati Diop.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

Daughters

Daughters is the biggest Oscar snub of the year, in my opinion. It’s a wrenching documentary about incarcerated dads. For most of the runtime I thought it was mistitled — “Fathers” would have been better. Then the final fifteen minutes roll around, a flash forward one year, then three years, and the daughters have changed. Some dads have returned home, some are still in prison, unable to do anything but wait. One dad gets a sentence of 30 years, his kids’ childhood destined to complete without him. We start to understand why the older girls had been so reticent and guarded in comparison to the younger ones earlier in the doc. We see it happening in fast-motion to Aubrey, who grows less precocious and enthusiastic with each check-in. “Daughters” was indeed the right title. The dehumanization of the American prison system is undefeated.

I started out ambivalent to the film’s refusal to discuss what crimes each inmate was in for. It keeps the focus on the lovely ceremony of the father-daughter dance. But it does scrub away some of the darkness and complexity of these characters — how do they reckon with being dads in a society that has labeled them unfit for freedom due to their misdeeds? So, too, the movie steers clear of other mistakes the dads might have made: How present and loving were they when they were outside the walls?

By the end I realized it didn’t matter much. This gentle snapshot of a heart-tugging moment between daughters and imprisoned fathers is in fact a misdirection; it’s an investigation of a court and prison system that chews up people. The collateral damage for “justice” is broken families: parents and children who can’t feel each other’s touch or steady support. Rehabilitation is not just discouraged, but its opportunities actively stripped away, leaving only the most industrious and persistent with any chance to repair their damaged souls and frayed family bonds.

The film is also a tribute to the necessity and power of fatherhood — how it matters to those who it’s taken away from, how it impacts the next generation — and that’s what moved me most of all.

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

Megalopolis

This is 2024’s biggest, messiest, loveliest boondoggle. (Well, except Here.) Megalopolis is a walking contradiction. I have a lot of complicated and ambivalent thoughts about what works and what doesn’t, and I’d like to go deep on this film at some point. Maybe I’ll do a Coppola binge someday.

But I do have some initial reactions. The first is that it is delightful to watch a film of actual memorable images. I’ve heard the film called a “silent film with voices,” and I get it: Coppola is pulling from the fluid cinematography and striking composition from the ’20s where blocking, not dialogue, ruled the storytelling.

Second reaction is that the film has a goofy but worthy cast, especially in the lead. It’s hard to imagine a better pilot of a film that so seamlessly bounces between speculative nonsense and over-earnest arch soliloquy than Adam Driver.

My last first-blush reaction to the film is that it is more meta and introspective than I expected. It reads as a farewell to (and defense of) Coppola’s generation of New Hollywood filmmakers. He presents himself and his contemporaries as a virtuous and creative middle ground between the fusty old Bosley Crowther institutionalists and the morally and artistically bankrupt Hollywood coattail riders who came in his wake. This registers in part as a cynical takedown of poptimism and feminism and cancel culture. And yet his closing statement is to love and embrace creativity and break down barriers and pass it all down to the next generation. So, yeah, a walking contradiction.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

Will & Harper

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?

Janet Planet

Debut Director: Annie Baker

If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you know I have a label for these kinds of movies: “well-observed.” It’s a backhanded compliment. These are upper-shelf Sundance-core dramas that are thoughtfully constructed and acutely rendered but don’t really make a case for their own existence. I know saying so is hypocritical, because I typically love hangout comedies and vibey jam sessions, and I certainly don’t mean “well-observed” negatively. But something about a film carrying the tone of thoughtful drama without much actually happening strikes me as odd; like, why generate gravity if there’s no impact with the ground.

Janet Planet is the well-est observed-est movie of the year both in that it’s one of the best made of its annual crop, and it’s the most bafflingly empty of narrative thrust. In three chapters we see Janet (a terrific Julianne Nicholson) navigate single parenthood as a rural Massachusettes hippie. Her daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is a well-sketched blend of normal and strange, of mature and difficult to manage. Janet drifts in and out of relationships with other complicated people. She considers joining a cult-like commune led by Elias Koteas, whose presence is always welcome.

Annie Baker shows some chops (the film’s conclusion includes a provocative bit of magical realism), but something about the vibe kept me at a distance. That must be mostly personal taste, but I was not drawn to this parent-child pairing the way I was, e.g., Aftersun‘s. I suspect a rewatch in the right mood would prove very rewarding, but I’m soft-pedaling my praise for now, though consider it a higher-end version of the below rating.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

Woman of the Hour

Debut Director: Anna Kendrick

Anna Kendrick clearly has sufficient savvy and skill to make a good film, and I do think Woman of the Hour inches into goodness. But there are a few more bad-instinct stumbles here than I’d prefer to see. If she can raise her storytelling to the level of her knack for craft, stuff like scene construction and tension generation and actor direction that she’s already solid at, she might be on to something.

Woman of the Hour is a serial killer story, but Kendrick has gone out of her way to minimize the sense of exploitation towards its women victims. That’s noble and all, but… why make a movie about a serial killer who targeted women then? It scrubs away some of the danger and looming sense of evil, and there’s lot of thematically clunky stuff tacked onto the story to support this perspective that hurts the thriller at a macro level.

The sequencing and timeline of the screenplay is a big problem too. It really emphasizes that the Dating Game incident has no bearing on the rise and fall of Rodney Alcala’s reign of terror. It’s just a curious “isn’t it strange that…” grace note, yet the main subject of the film’s story.

Still, Woman of the Hour is pretty damn tense and watchable. I wouldn’t have guessed Kendrick to be a natural thriller-monger given she does more comedy and light drama as an actor. I’ll be very curious if she directs again what she decides to make.

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

The People’s Joker

Debut Director: Vera Drew

I suspected, correctly, that The People’s Joker is not for me. But it’s good to go out of your comfort zone as a lover of the medium, you know? I don’t quite like The People’s Joker, but I don’t regret watching it.

“Punk” is a very difficult spirit to capture in narrative feature film, so necessarily collaborative and generous is cinema as a medium. And yet “punk” is the phrase that kept running through my mind during The People’s Joker: a middle finger to good taste, restraint, the establishment, IP schlock, cowardly comedy, and militantly heteronormative society. The film is Scotch taped together with crowdfunding and fan-made animation, but not remotely half-assed.

Astonishingly, the film is as heartfelt as it is transgressive — once I realized that this was not a mere flippant, socially-conscious spoof but a work of autobiography, I became a lot more sympathetic towards it. But its big ideas are satiric rather than personal: In a society so corporatized, an entertainment landscape so saturated with vigilante justice wish fulfillment scrubbed free of class consideration, The People’s Joker is both parody of the symptoms and the antidote. Vera Drew is its impish but wounded muse. This could only be made by someone who both loves and hates comic book movies, and both in thoughtful ways. (Honestly, I found the juxtaposition of the safe, over-regulated comedy scene with violent superhero stories more thoughtful than its use of gender and identity, but that is probably my own cishet comedy-loving bias showing.)

…Unfortunately, all that admiration doesn’t mean I enjoyed watching The People’s Joker. I laughed a handful of times, but something like 80% of the film is more cringe-inducing than funny to my eyes and ears. It’s cheap and ugly, of course, but in a noisy, artless way more than an inspired, bootstrapped one — YouTube Poop stretched out to 88 minutes. I engaged with it more as performance art rather than actual storytelling.

The People’s Joker is a nifty project whose existence and distribution I wholeheartedly support. Its spirit is indomitable. It provoked me and made me think. Yes, it is “punk.” But it is a film ultimately destined to be loved by a very narrow audience… one that does not include me.

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

It’s What’s Inside

Debut Director: Greg Jardin

It’s What’s Inside is good enough to convince me that its premise could make for a very fun film: a Freaky Friday body swap movie, but an ensemble thriller rather than a fluffy comedy. A group of friends with interpersonal baggage have their consciousnesses reshuffled with other people in the group in a futuristic parlor game, and everyone tries to figure out who has “become” who. It rapidly flies off the rails. It sounds like a pitch for a fun film, but It’s What’s Inside is not savvy enough to actually be that fun film.

There are two crippling problems with It’s What’s Inside. The first is that the eight (!) main characters are not nearly well-drawn enough for me to know or much care what is going on with each them. The cast list should really be half as long. By the end I still couldn’t remember anything about four of the eight characters, in part because they’d spent most of the runtime in other bodies. (If you have a hard time with names like I do, you practically need a crib sheet to watch this film.)

The second problem is that It’s What’s Inside changes its mind every ten minutes about what kind of movie it wants to be. It turns out “erotic thriller” would have been the best answer — those are by far the most compelling stretches of the film, moreso than “slasher” or “whodunit” or “big tech satire” or “stoner comedy” or any of the other hats it tries on for a few minutes at a time. The movie never really digs into most of its ideas, so it all feels like a bunch of wheel-spinning.

The hook carries the film far enough, and it’s modestly satisfying as a sleepover popcorn film aimed at sixteen year olds — I can easily imagine teens daydreaming and arguing about what they’d do if they were put into each others’ bodies — but a disappointment given the potential. It’s weirdly mean-spirited, too.

Biggest strength: The editing is clever in the way it shows the identities transitioning between bodies, toggling between their outer appearance and their “inner” personhood.

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

Thelma

Debut Director: Josh Margolin

Ever wake up and think to yourself “I want to watch a film that’s just fine today?” If so, queue up Thelma. It’s not so soulless as streaming content dump films; nor is it even a little bit challenging. It so effortlessly straddles the line between clicking as a well-executed little comedy-thriller about a grandma and her grandson, and drifting into forgettable nothingness that I genuinely can’t decide if I like it or not.

What puts it just over the edge into the positive column for me is the title performance by 95-year-old June Squibb, which is not just “fine for a near-centarian” but, like, actually good and touching and funny. Squibb is a crowd-pleaser, and she carries the movie to the finish line. I can’t imagine hating Thelma, nor can I imagine calling it one of the year’s best. (Though friend-of-The Goods Brennan Klein disagrees.)

Is It Good? Good (5/8)