KD^3C^3 - 20241229 I took a walk, I got tired

It is the end of the year newsletter! I watched 383 movies this year (as of this writing) and even though I was tempted to rank them all, I decided to just do a top ten new to me films of the year. Plus some honorable mentions that either would have just been off the list or were worthy of inclusion for other reasons. 

Top 10 movies of the year (that I saw for the first time in 2024)

Honorable mentions:

The Fly

This David Cronenberg horror movie is actually a tragic romance between Gena Davis and Jeff Goldblum. It just happens that alongside that romance, Goldblum is turning into a human/housefly hybrid. This movie is absolutely carried by its two lead performances, but it probably is best known for its jaw-dropping special effects. Cronenberg had been on the scene for a bit, but I think this was his breakout success. A treasure trove of gross practical effects that make turning into a giant fly man feel both viscerally real and horrifying. I avoided this for a long time, because I’m squeamish about body horror, but the body horror actually becomes lessened to me as the transformation progresses. He is clearly not human after long and so I could revel in the grossness instead of being sickened. 

The Marvels and Spider-Man Across the Spider-verse

Two super hero movies that were focused on being fun that anything else. I’ve pretty much written off the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’S output for the last few years. There were only two shows I could fully endorse and those two shows happened to be recommended viewing before The Marvels: Wandavision and Ms. Marvel. I don’t think either show was perfect (and both suffered in their latter halves,) but they at least tried to do something new. The Marvels, is technically a sequel to both of those series as well as the film Captain Marvel stating Brie Larson. I said in my initial review that watching The Marvels felt like picking up three issues from the middle of a run of a comic you’ve only heard about, but even then it’s a lot of fun and knows not to take itself too seriously.

The second Spider-Verse movie took the initial premise of “there’s a bunch of spider-people” and followed it to the only logical conclusion. To say more than that would veer into spoilers, but like The Marvels, this movie knows how to balance serious storytelling with the understanding that superheroes are a deeply silly proposition. It’s technically only the first half of a two part story, but it’s closer to Empire Strikes Back than Catching Fire Part One.

Dick Johnson is Dead

This documentary  the director of my number one movie last year (Cameraperson) didn’t quite blow me away as much as that one did, but it was still a fascinating proposition. To help her deal with the inevitable death of her father, documentarian Kristen Johnson works with him to film a number of different ways he could die, via movie magic. Like Cameraperson this is a deeply personal effort, and like Cameraperson, the movie is mostly about the director even as we don’t see much of her on screen. Mostly we see the world through her eyes and her lens and have to put together who the person we are inhabiting is. It is ostensibly a portrait of her father, but I think it doesn’t succeed there as much as being about Kristen’s own fears. Also it’s equal parts heart wrenching and funny. 

Throne of Blood/High and Low

The fact that Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth didn’t make the top ten says a lot more about how many great films I watched this year, rather than the quality of this one. This might be one of my favorite Macbeth adaptations, despite having one of Shakespeare’s original dialog. Toshiro Mifune does wonderful work, as usual, and Kurosawa has a clear understanding of the story. 

High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s contemporary-set films, rather than being set in feudal Japan. There are no swords or samurai here, but I found it just as compelling. Centered on a kidnapping for ransom and the aftermath I Found this compelling to watch. The first half spools out like a play, confined to the penthouse apartment of the target as he struggles with the demands of the ransomer, and the second half spreads out into the world as authorities try to capture the criminal behind everything. It is a film of congrats and Kurosawa uses both the structure and form of the film itself to really highlight those dualities. 

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

This is a short documentary about Werner Herzog eating his shoe, and the particular series of events that lead to that outcome. It’s also a meditation on creativity a motivation and some other deeper ideas than you would expect from a movie about a guy eating his shoe. 

Now, onto the main list!

10. Highlander 2: The Quickening

This movie, I green considered one of the worst sequels of all time, is absolutely bonkers. The immortals from the first Highlander movie are either aliens or time travelers (depending on which cut of the film you watch) and I don’t know which one is sillier. Sean Connery, who was killed in the first one comes back through the magic of “don’t think about it too hard” and the Highlander himself is now an old man, who helped create the giant sphere that now encloses the earth to protect it from the sun. Except maybe enclosing the planet in a giant sphere was a a bad idea and now the Highlander regrets it, so he teams up with an ecoterrorist to make the sphere go away. Meanwhile another alien/time traveler has come to the future to kill the Highlander because… reasons. This movie is gloriously bonkers and I’ve only scratched the surface with this description. Is the movie good? Not really, but it does manage to be one of my favorites of the year despite that. 

9. I Saw the TV Glow

I watched both of director Jane Schoenbrun’s movies this year, and the first (We’re All Going to The Worlds Fair) left me cold. This, however stabbed a knife into my brain, in the best way possible. It’s set in the 90s and is about two teens who bond over watching an obscure kids show about paranormal investigations. Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Eerie Indiana. They grow close watching the show and sharing vhs tapes of episodes, then grow apart because that’s what happens to teenagers. Except maybe there was something else going on the whole time. The movie has trappings of a horror movie, or maybe something else, and isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. It felt laser guided to appeal to me, someone who discovered weird sci-fi shows as a teen.

8. The Last of Sheila

In a year without a new Benoit Blanc movie this fit the bill. Except Rian Johnson clearly took inspiration from this movie to make both Knives Out and Glass Onion. The parallels to Glass Onion are more obvious, as this movie takes place mostly on a boat, full of Hollywood elites who have gathered together to play a game put on by their host. But things don’t go as planned and someone gets murdered for real, so it all becomes about that instead. A very clever mystery and saying more about it than that risks spoilers, but if you’re looking to scratch that itch before Wake Up Dead Man releases sometime in 2025 this is worth checking out. 

7. Chris Grace: As Scarlet Johansson 

Chris Grace is a fat gay asian man, Scarlet Johansson is not. But also Johansson has played an Asian woman in a major blockbuster, so Grace decides to see what it would be like for him to play Scarlet Johansson on stage in this one-man show filmed for Dropout Presents. This is a show about identity, and who gets to tell what stories, and while it doesn’t quite have any answers, I also think it’s one of the best constructed stage shows I’ve seen in a very long time. Deeply personal, very funny, and starts conversations in a way that makes that cliche actually seem new and like a good idea. 

6. The Last Picture Show/Texasville

I think The Last Picture Show is a pretty well known movie. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich it stars a number of young actors who would grow up to be famous. People like Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd. It adapts an Elmore Leonard novel about a bunch of teenagers In a small Texas town in the 1950s. It’s all about being a teenager at the start of adulthood and trying to figure out who you are and where you fit into the world. It’s a pretty well regarded movie, and with good reason. Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for her supporting role, picked up 5 other nominations including for best picture (but lost to the French Connection.) somewhat unusually for a movie from 1971 it was filmed in black and white, which was a big part of what made it feel so lived in as a place. In 1990 Bogdanovich decided to revisit the characters 30 someodd years later, and adapted Leonard’s sequel novel Texasville. Like the first movie, it was about many of the same characters in that small Texas town, only now they are all adults and wondering how they ended up where they are. It was shot in color and most of the marketing seemed to focus on the stars of Shepherd and Bridges, even though it is much more of an ensemble picture. It was not commercially successful, and ran under the radar for a long time. Bogdanovich eventually re-cut the movie to add back in about half an hour of additional footage, and even more importantly re-graded the whole thing in black and white to match the look of Last Picture Show. This is the version I watched, and while I can’t speak to the original’s quality, I think it works incredibly well this way. It becomes a story in conversation with the first, but not in a way of trying to repeat the beats of the original. The movie wonderfully captures the way life just sort of happens and then you look back and aren’t quite sure how you got here, even if you’re glad you did. 

5. Playtime

Possibly Jacques Tati’s magnum opus, Playtime is a movie very difficult to describe. I could tell you what happens: a man arrives at an airport, has a meeting, sees a technology showcase, has dinner at a new restaurant and spends some time in traffic, but none of that captures how any of it feels. And it’s barely about the man at the center of all that anyway. It’s a movie about humanity as if watched by aliens. I don’t mean there’s any science fictional element, but rather it showcases the absurdities of humanity in a way that shows how even the mundane aspects are strange and humorous. It’s a film very light on dialogue, but full of characters and gorgeous screen pictures. It’s the sort of movie that changes the way you look at the world and those are rare indeed. 

4. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History

A documentary on the invasive cane toad species that was brought to Australia and absolutely took over the continent. The film is structured around interviews of people discussing their experiences with the species and features a few re-enactments as well. The interview subjects are some of the most unusual people ever put to film. It feels at times like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, except all these people actually exist and live in the world. I had no idea a movie about toads in Australia could be this funny. 

3. Sorcerer

Ok now we’re splitting hairs. These top three movies could be in almost any order, but this is the order I settled on today. Sorcerer is based on the novel Wages of Fear, and directed by William Firedkin (possibly most famous for The Exorcist). It follows a group of four down on their luck expats who find themselves in a small South American village who are hired to transport cases of dynamite 200 miles through the jungle in a pair of large trucks. But the dynamite is old and has been sweating nitroglycerin which means any sudden disturbance could cause the whole case to explode. This is possible the tensest movie I have ever watched. This is an incredibly dangerous job and we get to learn more about the kind of people who would take on such a risk, even as we aren’t sure all of them will make it. The movie handles tension and release in a way I’ve never felt from a horror movie, which is impressive because this isn’t a horror movie at all. Unless the horror is people, but that’s a read that undersells the stakes of this very specific terror. There is another movie that adapts Wages of Fear from the 1950 and a remake of that film coming out soon, and I plan to watch both, just because of how good this was. 

2. Citizen Kane

I’m almost mad at how good this movie is. So often it gets held up as one of the greatest movies of all time, because of the groundbreaking filmmaking techniques that Orson Welles pioneered in this movie. But I’ve seen enough highly regarded movies to know that sometimes they don’t stand up to the hype. Maybe they were great once, but they have been copied so much and were so influential that the broken ground just feels normal. But I can say that Kane lives up to its reputation. It’s so dang good. It’s a beautifully shot picture where scenes of people just talking to each other look better than they have any need to, but not in a flashy way, rather in a way that serves the story. And the story is good too! It’s told in an out of sequence way, where as we learn more about Kane we come to understand him better, even as nobody in the film manages to find the answers they are looking for. Dang, this is a good movie. Maybe you should check it out. 

1. No Bears

Jafar Panahi is an Iranians filmmaker who in 2010 was banned by the government of Iran from making films or leaving the country. He documented his earliest days in house arrest in the 2011 documentary This is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of the country on a thumb drive inside a cake. But despite the ban Panahi has continued to make movies illegally. This is his latest film. It stars Panahi as a fictionalized version of himself as he stays in a small town near the border of Iran and Turkey to remotely direct a film over zoom. He also walks through the village taking pictures of the locals. At one point he may have photographed a couple of teenagers holding hands, and some of the villagers demand the photograph as evidence because the young woman was promised to marry another man from birth. Panahi denies having taken the photograph, but the villagers are insistent and continue to pester him as they escalate towards conflict. This is a movie about a lot of things, and it’s impossible to remove from the context in which it was made. It’s hard to not watch the fictional Panahi’s arguments with the locals and not see a reflection of his ongoing punishment from the Iranian government. But the film is not just metaphor, you come to care about what will happen, not just to Panahi, but also the children he mar or have not photographed, and even the actors in the movie he’s filming across the border. Structurally, and formally this is a very straightforward movie, but it is a perfect example of how a well told story can be so much let than itself. 

So that’s a bunch of movies. I loved all of them, and would recommend any of them. Not all of them are perfect (the top 3 are, though) but all of them are worth watching.