I kept track of the movies I saw in 2024, and listed 24 of them in my Notes app. I didn't go out to the theater often, and would watch movies on streaming, and often watch a lot of older movies to write about and be "new" to me. So I will likely see the prestige movies and underseen gems of last year when they hit streaming, but can write about the new movies I saw of 2024 that I really did like a lot, and with honorable mentions.
Between the Temples: This is a really lovely and wonderful little movie, directed by Nathan Silver, where Jason Schwartzman plays a middle-aged cantor at a shul and he can't sing anymore, and through chance he reconnects with his old teacher Mrs. Kessler, aka Carla (Carol Kane), who never got to have her bat mitzvah and wants to have it in her 70s. It's this sweet friendship that blossoms into a tentative romance, more so feeling like Harold and Maude if Harold was in his 40s, and Carol Kane is a gem in this movie, one of her best roles in recent years.
The Substance: Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, this body horror/dark comedy takes its inspiration from weird, batshit horror films like Basket Case, The Fly, Society, as well as influenced by Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and John Frankenheimer's Seconds. Demi Moore gets a major comeback role (not counting her brief role in the FX miniseries Feud: Capote vs. The Swans) as a former star being pushed out of the fitness industry because she's in her fifties, and going to drastic measures to take a black-market mysterious green substance to reproduce a younger, more conventionally attractive version of herself (Margaret Qualley) out of her body, and they have to switch off every seven days, and the film takes their competition in strange and twisted ways.
A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed this road trip/buddy comedy about two cousins David and Benji (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who go on a trip together to Poland to both revisit their recently deceased grandmother's hometown, and to go on a Holocaust tour to honor her as a Holocaust survivor (she had escaped Poland before the Nazi invasion). This movie was both really funny and touching, talking about mental health issues and grief. The cousins contrast with each other a lot, and David does confess to Benji that he wishes he could be more charismatic like him, lighting up a room, but also resents how erratic he is and how he can blow up a room just as easily. Culkin portrays this nervous energy as Benji that is more of a cover for his own anxieties, especially missing his grandmother and how she would snap back at him when she felt he was self-destructing with substance abuse and a lack of direction. The movie is a tight 90 minutes, and it just felt very honest and real to me, and I really liked it a lot.
Strange Darling: This thriller, directed by JT Mollner, seems more like a sleeper hit than anything bigger, but I did like how it unfolded as a story told out of chronological order, and I liked the subverted expectations of the movie, centering on a serial killer and their victim, stemming from a one-night-stand. Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner were the stars, and I got invested in their dynamic, especially when they are talking with each other in the car before going into a motel, trying to size each other up and measure the risk of this hookup. The film is soundtracked by a great synth score, and I really enjoyed getting into this unusual horror thriller, albeit with some plot turns that will likely be seen as controversial because of the killer's way to deceive people.
The Wild Robot: Directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch), this animated film is set in the future where a helper robot (Lupita Nyong'o) lands on an island as a misdelivered package, and immediately wants to be of help to people, but she's on an island full of animals, who find her frightening and attack her as a threat. Roz learns to communicate with the animals and inadvertently becomes a “mother” to an orphaned gosling, befriending a smartass fox (Pedro Pascal) and slowly bonds with the other animals as she gains more intelligence beyond her initial programming. I liked how thoughtful the film felt, how much heart it had, and even if it seemed more formulaic than the Lithuanian animated film Flow, also with animal characters (albeit who do not speak in an anthropomorphic way), I still found it really lovely and interesting, and would highlight it as one of my favorites of last year.
His Three Daughters: Technically this film is from 2023, but it was released last year on Netflix and in theaters in 2024, so I'm counting it. Written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, the film stars Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three estranged sisters who come together because their father, Vincent, is in hospice, soon to die any day, and they gather at his rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Rachel (Lyonne) has been living with their father, and the sisters aren't close, are wildly different from each other, and come at their anticipatory grief with varying ways of coping with it. They try to keep a polite front when the hospice staff members visit, but otherwise fight with each other, with a lot of high tension in the air. This is a really great movie, featuring three outstanding actresses, acting more like they are in a play than a film, and I deeply connected to this film, with the sister stresses and arguments, especially with the strained relationship between Katie and Rachel. I do hope this movie gets remembered during the awards season.
I Saw the TV Glow: Directed by Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going to the World's Fair), about two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigitte Lundy-Paine) who, in 1996, become obsessed with this supernatural teen TV show called The Pink Opaque, that looks like a Nickelodeon preteen show mixed in with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The teens are both very isolated, both on the queer spectrum (Maddy is a lesbian, Owen might be asexual/ace), and get wrapped up in this show to escape their empty, depressing lives. The show effects them both in greatly different ways, using the media consumption of the show as a substitute for actually living their lives, and using the show to identify themselves rather than anything in their real lives, being obsessed with the TV screen and sitting in the dark with the TV glow. And although I think the film's text about equating their experiences to the trans experience may have gone over my head because I'm cis, I still really liked how creative and unique the film felt, very different from anything else I've seen from the past year. And, by chance, Emma Stone produced this and my other choice, A Real Pain, so I'm glad she's choosing interesting projects to produce and elevating voices like Schoenbrun's, who is now on my radar for anything in the future they will create.
Honorable Mentions:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Cuckoo
Handling the Undead
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