Search Results

Whew! Better late than never, right? Here are my 19 picks for movies released in 2024 that are well worth the watch, leading up to my favorite film (and film score) from 2024. Enjoy! The Substance THIS MOVIE RULES! Coralie Fargeat creates a reality where an aging celebrity decides to take a black market drug that can replicate a younger, “better” version of herself. I don’t want to say anything else about the plot. I just want you to sit down and watch it. Demi Moore is taking the plunge. At times, this film is disgusting, sad, and  hilarious. You should watch it with others so you can all squeal and laugh uncomfortably together. Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid are captivating and revolting, each in their own ways, but it’s Moore who truly makes the film.  Good One In Good One , a father takes his daughter, Sam, on a backpacking trip in the Catskill mountains, bringing along his best friend, whose son backs out of the trip at the last minute. While hiking in the woods, both fathers can’t help but compare and compete with each other as parents and husbands. The one thing they both agree on is that Sam, played by Lily Collias, is a “good one.” I won’t say anything more about the film’s plot, only that India Donaldson’s film stayed with me a very long time after I had finished watching it.  Love Lies Bleeding I’ve been a fan of Katy M. O'Brian since her stint on The Mandalorian . Her steely performance was captivating. In Love Lies Bleeding,  O’Brian’s character, Jackie, is just as ambitious, pursuing her dream of becoming a professional bodybuilder. Combine Jackie’s desire with the full-on-grimy-super-G-A-Y-with-a-Capital-G performance by Kristen Stewart as Lou, a gym manager with a shady family, and you’ve got yourself a movie! The thing is, there’s enough to this film focusing on the relationship between Stewart and O’Brian alone, but Rose Glass doesn’t leave it at that. Along with sex and graphic violence, Glass throws in some magical realism into her noir that really packs a punch. Ed Harris also rocks some extremely amazing “bad” hair.  Problemista Julio Torres directs and stars in this hilarious and often deliberately challenging film, along with a career-best performance by Tilda Swinton. Torres plays Alejandro, an immigrant from El Salvador with a life-long desire to become a toy designer in the United States. He comes to New York, but after losing his job, needs someone to sponsor him for his work visa to stay in America. Swinton plays Elizabeth, an art dealer who may be one of the worst (or best) people to work for since Meryl Streep played Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada.  This movie is hilarious but also surprisingly heartfelt. I couldn’t wait to watch it again.  I Saw the TV Glow I was captivated by the trailer for Jane Schoenbrun’s film, I Saw the TV Glow,  months before I finally watched it. The film’s color palette, the cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year‐Old Girl,” and the way the fictional TV Show “The Pink Opaque” looked like a combination of Are You Afraid of the Dark? , Pete & Pete, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all rolled into one had me pumped for watching this film. There’s a clip during the trailer where Justice Smith’s character, Owen, says to Jack Haven’s character, Maddy, “It’s just the suburbs!” that left me reacting with: “Muah! Chef’s Kiss!” Schoenbrun doesn’t neatly wrap up their story with a happy ending, but I didn’t mind; this film is about the journey, not the end. The movie stayed with me long after I finished watching it, making me think about experiences in my life when I felt “other” but did not know why or what that meant. Despite Owen’s journey bringing me to tears, Schoenbrun’s film also gave me immense hope. I’m extremely excited to see what they do next.  Civil War Alex Garland’s film about two journalists and two photographers road-tripping across a war-torn America, documenting the political unrest during a civil war really hit home. Devs  fans get to see Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny reunited, and I loved every minute of it. Spaeny has been killin’ it with her film choices. She is one to watch, but the film hinges on Kirsten Dunst’s performance as veteran war photographer Lee Smith, proving that she still has the juice! This film would not work without her. Ya boi, Wagner Moura also quietly steals the show from time to time with his charisma and heartfelt performance. In my humble opinion, Moura needs to be cast in more movies as the lead. Please, Hollywood. Please.  The Wild Robot Lupita Nyong'o voices Roz the Robot  + foxy comedic Pedro Pascal + Kit Connor as an orphan duckling (I already loved Connor’s voice work in His Dark Materials ) + Peter Brown’s beautiful story creates a truly heartfelt film about family and parenthood that made me cry. This movie has beautiful animation and an even more gorgeous score, and did I mention it made me cry? Chris Sanders did good, my friends. Watch it now.  Flow This beautiful film builds empathy without having anything narrated or overly explained. I loved it. I loved its characters. And with an Oscar win for Best Animated Feature Film, I hope more people will watch it - with or without their own furry friends.  Smile 2 I enjoyed Smile, but Smile 2  is AWESOME. Naomi Scott plays Skye Riley, the fictional popstar I wanted to see in M. Knight Shyamalan’s Trap . Lukas Gage kills it (literally) again in his short but sweet role. My only complaint? Not enough Kyle Gallner.  Nickel Boys Nickel Boys  made me sob. I mean it. Like, really, really sob. I had not read Colson Whitehead’s novel, nor had I even heard the premise of the story before watching the film. I was not prepared. RaMell Ross is a supremely innovative filmmaker, and his unique way of presenting the story works. The film’s central performers - Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ethan Herrisse, & Brandon Wilson are all amazing. The film should have been nominated for Best Cinematography. Watch it and then prove to me otherwise.  Lisa Frankenstein Kathryn Newton, man. Brava. While I also really enjoyed her supporting role in the 2024 film Abigail (“Sammy, those are f*ckin’ onions!), her performance as the titular Lisa Frankenstein truly stands out in this Diablo Cody-penned script directed by Zelda Williams (daughter of the late Robin Williams). This movie is very tongue-in-cheek and it evokes John Hughes-meets- Tales from the Crypt.  Cole Sprouse (best known as Jughead from the CW’s Riverdale ) does an excellent job with very little dialogue. He and Newton have great chemistry and flex their physical comedic chops throughout the film. The movie also features hot Carla Gugino as an evil stepmother. What more could you want? Check it out now. You can read my full spoiler-free review of Lisa Frankenstein   here .   La Chimera While it got a limited release for the awards season at the end of 2023, Alice Rohrwacher’s film is a gem that was not widely released until 2024. Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a smooth-talking, crumpled dirt bag of an Englishman with a gift for finding lost things (of great value) in this story about a group of grave-robbers looking for their next big archaeological find. It features a wonderful supporting performance by Isabella Rossellini as Flora, an aging singer extraordinaire with a soft spot for Arthur; however, it’s Carol Duarte who almost steals the show from O’Connor as Italia, Flora’s voice student. Italia recognizes Arthur as the con man that he is, but she can’t help falling for his charms as he searches for more buried treasures. The two have great chemistry (and might I add that O’Connor speaks Italian for almost the entire film). The film paints a portrait of grief in a way I haven’t seen before, and it haunted me long after I survived its devastating conclusion.  Perfect Days Perfect Days is totally a vibe, and I am here for it. While technically made in 2023, it was not released in the United States until 2024. Wim Wenders' film is about a man, Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), who cleans public toilets in Tokyo for a living, but despite his tedious work, he seems to have figured out how to truly live . He reads, listens to great music, and enjoys nature and photography. But when his estranged niece shows up on his doorstep, it breaks his peaceful routine and makes him reflect upon and examine his life in great detail.  Nosferatu Robert Eggers and his frequent collaborator in cinematography, Jarin Blaschke, have created a visually stunning remake of the classic story of Nosferatu  / Dracula, proving that their attention to detail and authenticity in world-building is breathtaking. The cast is fantastic – but in particular, the film’s triumvirate of Ellen, Thomas, & Count Orlok (played by Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård respectively) are absolutely  killing it  in the film (both literally and figuratively). Willem Dafoe also has a grand ol’ time and provides some moments of much-needed levity. Anora Mikey Madison deserves all the praise she has received for her performance in Anora . Sean Baker’s latest film would not be what it is without her. Baker definitely brings his A-game. Anora  is by far his most polished work with outstanding supporting performances, not only from Oscar-nominated Yura Borisov but also from a long-time Sean Baker regular: Karren Karagulian. Anora received 5 Oscars at the 97th Academy Awards :  Best Film Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress for Mikey Madison, and Best Picture. If that’s not enough of an endorsement to check it out then I don’t know what is.  Longlegs Maika Monroe may be my favorite final girl, but Nic Cage is my favorite wild card. I’m ready for whatever he dishes out, and dish it out he does in Longlegs.  I know some people love this film. Many hated it. I was in the former. I loved Nic Cage doing his best T. Rex impression, creepy dolls, “nuns,” and the film’s grainy seventies color palette. I’m ready for whatever Osgood Perkins does next, even if he decides to resurrect David Kidney from Legally Blonde.  Count me in.  Dune: Part Two MY SWEET DENIS!!! Why has the Academy forsaken thee??? Villeneuve was not given the awards recognition he truly deserved for Dune: Part Two . Dune  is great , but Part Two  goes above and beyond. Zendaya slam dunks with her performance as Chani, and Timmy Timmy Chalamet delivers a MOVIE STAR performance as Paul Atreides, aka LISAN AL GAIBBBBBB, (honestly, there would be no Bob Dylan performance without Denis’ Dune franchise. Part Two  gives the audience pause as they ponder, “What if the main character grows up to be, um, a bad guy ?” I can’t wait to watch Villeneuve’s epic Part Three. Sing Sing COL-MAN! COL-MAN! COL-MAN! In my heart of hearts, I wanted Colman Domingo to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture. Sing Sing is a beautiful film with a career standout performance by Domingo. Domingo, (along with veteran actor Paul Raci), are really the only professional actors amongst a group of real-life formerly incarcerated men who were themselves alumni of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison. Clarence Maclin, aka Clarence “Divine Eye,” almost steals the show from Domingo, which is really  saying something. I hope Sing Sing  opens doors for Maclin to get cast in future leading roles and much success because he truly deserves it.  The Brutalist The Brutalist is a film of epic scale (and not just because of its runtime). When I watched it in theaters I was blown away, not only by Adrien Brody’s performance, but by the stunning look of the film itself. Brody’s been a bit of a rapscallion in Hollywood for years now, but there’s no denying the strength of his performance in this film. The movie would not be the same without him. Brady Corbett, Mona Fastvold, and cinematographer Lol Crawley, along with Daniel Blumberg’s incredible score, have created a stunning film with an equally devastating story. It’s the type of movie we don’t see much anymore, and it should be seen on the biggest screen possible.  My Number 1 Film of 2024: Challengers My favorite movie of 2024 is Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers.  I kept comparing it with every other extremely well-made or moving film that I saw throughout 2024 (e.g. Nickel Boys, The Brutalist, The Substance ), to see if another film pushed it out of my “number one spot,” but I kept returning to Guadagnino’s thriller written by the potions-seller himself , Justin Kuritzkes. It features two of my favorite performances by Zendaya and Josh O’Connor to date. Mike Faist is nothing to shake a stick at either, mind you, and it was often his scenes as Art Donaldson with O’Connor as Patrick Zweig that most delighted me. Zendaya delivers a powerhouse adult performance as Tashi Duncan, a young tennis prodigy who must pivot to coaching once she is injured and her tennis dreams are dashed. Also,...THIS SCORE SHOULD HAVE WON AN OSCAR! Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver the score of a lifetime. IT IS THAT GOOD. I am still angry that they did not even get nominated despite winning the Golden Globe for Best Score. This film is fun and funny, but it’s also extremely tense. The way the physical game of tennis is portrayed grabs you and doesn’t let you go until the film’s amazing climax. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it now. Then throw the soundtrack/score on for good measure. You’re welcome, friends.  Til’ next year… Diana DiMuro Besides watching TV and movies, Diana likes plants, the great outdoors, drawing, reading comics, and spending time with her kitties. She has a BA in English Literature and is an art school dropout. She and her partner Mike Burdge, opened Story Screen Cinema in Hudson, NY in June 2024. You can follow her on Instagram @dldimuro and Twitter @DianaDiMuro

We're back (kinda!), babyyyyyy! Bernadette Gorman-White, Diana DiMuro and Mike Burdge shake off the cobwebs for a fun episode of catching up, making fun of Emilia Perez and chatting about a very weird year of movies that has somehow produced one of the most unexpected Oscar races in recent years. Who did we love? Who did we hate? AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM!? Listen on to find out, friends.....

There’s a line I’ve been thinking about a lot lately from George Carlin’s Hippy Dippy Weatherman routine: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued dark tonight, turning to partly light in the morning.”  That’s about all the summary I have in me for the year behind us and the year ahead. Things are dark. Continued darkness is expected, hopefully turning to partly light at some point in the future. But, to paraphrase the old man in the cave, “It’s dangerous to go alone! So take this list of my favorite films from 2024.” They were each pockets of light for me in the year behind us; May they offer something of the same to you in the days ahead.  Honorable Mention: The 4:30 Movie* For a long while, I had only really thought of Kevin Smith as a podcaster and professional raconteur. I would hear him sometimes on various shows talk about the things he was making or writing, but it wouldn’t ever occur to me to seek those things out. I was happy he was able to pay his bills with Clerks III or Jay and Silent Bob Reboot , but those always felt a lot more like curios for his über fans than anything I would get something out of. I got a lot more interested when he started talking about The 4:30 Movie , though.  A little while back, Smith went in with friends of his to save his childhood movie theater. Part of the theater’s struggles could be tied to it desperately needing to be updated, but what Smith realized was that what he then had on his hands was a movie theater that was basically already dressed for an 80s/90s period film. So, he knocked out a script to take advantage of that. The unexpected result is maybe the sweetest movie of his career, about the semi-autobiographical misadventures of a young boy trying to take a girl he likes on a date to the movies. Something about Smith’s usual mix of crass dialogue, silly set pieces, and heart-on-sleeve sincerity ends up being perfectly calibrated for a story about young teens just coming into their own. What it most reminds me of in terms of tone, was something like the early Savage Steve Holland films, like One Crazy Summer  and Better off Dead. I want to be careful not to oversell this, because it really isn’t trying to do all that much, but I don’t know that I saw anything this year that I was more surprised by how much I ended up liking it.  (You can read Damian's full review of The 4:30 Movie here. ) Ten: The Wild Robot These aren’t two films that are intended to go together, but I can’t think about The Wild Robot  without thinking about Nightbitch. The satisfaction of watching Nightbitch  is how it speaks to that feeling of being consumed by the relentlessness and invisibility of being a parent, so much so that Amy Adams’ character is just credited in the film as ‘Mother’. That film is fluent in the secret and very human ugliness that is sometimes bubbling away inside a lot of parents just trying to make it through one hard day after another. The weird satisfaction of The Wild Robot is that it’s kind of like a version of Nightbitch  that you can watch with your kids.  Adapted from the book by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot , is the story of a robot that finds itself responsible for raising a baby goose. The film explicitly speaks to how hard parenting can be, along with the kinds of unappreciated sacrifices it can typically entail, but clearly packaged in a feel good story with the message that, despite those hardships, parents do still genuinely love their kids anyway. Recommended if you always thought Fly Away Home needed more explosions. Nine: Widow Clicquot I love how this film plays with audience expectations. Initially we meet Barbe-Nicole as a newly widowed mother, overwhelmed by being left in charge of her brilliant husband’s vineyard. Except, it turns out, overwhelmed is just how others see her. She’s profoundly sad by the loss of her husband, but she was also at his side building the vineyard with him, and is more than capable of taking things over. The whole film is structured in these kinds of subtle reveals and reversals that keep reframing the story as it moves along. Perhaps Barbe’s husband isn’t quite what we thought? Perhaps the motives of those who doubt Barbe-Nicole’s ability are actually more conniving than they first seemed? Perhaps Barbe-Nicole actually knows herself to be something much greater than anyone around her suspects? In the end, what seems like the story of a grieving widow trying to make the best of a bad situation, slowly evolves into the story of a shrewd, innovative, and historically important business woman, who changed the course of her industry forever. By rooting this business drama so firmly in the personal drama of Barbe-Nicole’s struggles during those first years after she took over the vineyard, it helps hide that this is another in a string of “origin of a business” films that have been in vogue in recent years (e.g. Blackberry , Tetris , Air, The Beanie Bubble , etc ) ; but where this film thrives is that the story is always far more interested in the widow Clicquot herself than it is in the Veuve Clicquot champagne company. The story of Widow Clicquot isn’t   that Barbe-Nicole was forever defined by the death of her husband, but rather, that remaining a widow was the only legal means she had at that time and place to continue to run this business as her own. Her story isn’t ultimately one of grief, but of stubborn and inventive resiliency in the face of a society that wanted to see her fail. Eight: Orion and the Dark* Charlie Kaufman is no stranger to adaptation. Of his nine screenplays made into films, Orion and the Dark  is the fourth to be adapted from someone else’s book. What all of these adaptations share with Kaufman’s original stories is a generally bleak view of the human condition, typically conveyed through the perspective of some lonely creative who shares many of the same fears and flaws that Kaufman sees in himself. Even when adapting someone else’s work, Kaufman always finds an approach that allows him to fit that story into his own strange voice. In this case, his voice comes through a neurotic 11 year old boy named Orion. Orion and the Dark  is so tonally out of step with the rest of Kaufman’s work, that it feels like a wild departure. In terms of actual content, though, this children’s film overlaps with the rest of his projects more than you might think. Orion shares many of the hallmarks of a typical Kaufman protagonist; he’s smart and terrified of the world, painfully aware of how close at hand the life he wishes he was living would be if he weren’t so incapacitated by his own fears. The key difference in this story, though, is that Orion is still young enough for his life to turn out differently.  Without going into details, the ending of Orion and the Dark  is hopeful, happy, tidy, and family-friendly. Not at all Charlie Kaufman’s usual, but appropriate here because of the kind of story being told. Kaufman is approaching the same issues he normally does - human fears in a foreboding natural world - but from the opposite direction, from the standpoint of the child who still has their life ahead of them. This makes Orion and the Dark  less of a departure for Kaufman, than an entry point for his ideas, tailored for younger viewers. Exactly the kind of film I wish I had when I was a kid.  *(You can read Damian's full review of Orion and the Dark here .) Seven: It’s What’s Inside I had first heard about It’s What’s Inside when Netflix made the largest deal at Sundance that year for its distribution rights. I lost track of it though because of how little promotion Netflix gives most of its properties. It wasn’t until I started seeing it pop up again on people’s Best of the Year lists that I remembered to check it out. Having now seen it, I am deeply bummed that this didn’t get a wide theatrical run and the attention it deserved. The premise of the film is that a group of friends, who used to be much closer, reunite for a bachelor party. One estranged member of their group, with some kind of shadowy job in the tech industry, shows up to the party with the prototype of a machine that allows people to switch bodies.  The party game that follows is: everyone switches bodies, and everyone tries to guess who is in which body. It’s a bit of a feast for the actors as we get to see everyone playing multiple characters, sometimes multiple levels deep as they are sometimes one person, in the body of another person, trying to convince everyone else that they are someone else. With these layers of deception, things deteriorate quickly as people take full advantage of what they can do in somebody else’s shoes that they could never get away with in their own.  Six: Hundreds of Beavers My affection for Hundreds of Beavers  has grown every time I’ve rewatched it. It’s the story of an Applejack salesman whose livelihood was ruined when his distillery and apple orchard were destroyed by the machinations of some local beavers, leading our hero to reinvent himself as the region’s pre-eminent fur trapper, while ultimately getting his revenge on those beavers in the process. Made for $150,000, this film feels like a milestone. This is basically a full length live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. At first blush, it feels overstuffed with gags and ideas, until you realize just how purposeful and meticulously each segment fits into the whole. Every scene manages to be entertaining on its own, while teaching the audience something about how to understand the world of the story, so that the pace and scope of everything in the full tilt finale can land.  Five and a half: Trap My top ten list was already four days late and over 2,500 words long when I saw Trap . I wasn’t about to cut anything I had already written, and I also wasn’t about to leave Trap off my list, so, here we are.  I had been holding off on Trap  because, long before I would have had a chance to see it, I had read and listened to enough reviews of it, that I already knew every story beat. And, this didn’t seem like a film that would survive already knowing all its twists and turns. But, I couldn’t have been more wrong.  I’ve never had the experience before of watching something for the first time, feeling like I was rewatching a classic. Josh Hartnett is undeniable here. I bought him entirely as both a great dad and a serial killer. He’s fearsome, but with a Lecter likability. Throughout, I found myself fervently rooting as much for him to get caught, as I was for him to get away, despite already knowing exactly what was going to happen. A film like that has something to offer you forever. Five: Lisa Frankenstein Before it was even out of theaters, Zelda Williams’ feature film debut, Lisa Frankenstein , was already being inducted into the new cult film canon. It was seen as a financial failure, but the people who loved it were all in immediately, and found one another right away. Williams openly wears her influences here, producing something that feels like John Waters and Tim Burton co-directing Promising Young Woman . Part twee gothic romance and part acid satire of the same, the animated opening credit sequence feels like something that would sincerely work as a segment in Corpse Bride , before transitioning into a story that often feels like a direct caricature of Edward Scissorhands . Equal parts smart, acid, and gross, Lisa Frankenstein  is the story of a teenage girl adjusting to a new school, a new step family, and a new life in the aftermath of witnessing her mother’s murder during a home invasion. That adjustment, however, just so happens to include an undead monster falling for her and murdering the people who do her wrong. Along the way, the film manages to be as much of a love letter to its influences as it is a subversion of them. If it means more films like this, I hope Zelda Williams has a long career ahead of her.   Four: Woman of the Hour Anna Kendrick’s debut film is a staggering accomplishment. Even before getting into how compelling the story is, I was wholly unprepared for how much of a visual stylist she would be right out of the gate. Her use of the numerous outdoor landscapes and exterior settings is incredible throughout.  I ended up leaving Blink Twice off my top ten because I ultimately decided that everything I liked about what that film was saying, was expressed more successfully here. The hook of this film is the true story that a serial killer once appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game , and even got picked for the date. Just that idea is enough to get greenlit as a basic cable thriller, but Kendrick crafts a much richer story about the society that let a guy like this get away with what he was doing for as long as he did.  Three: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is one of the more impressive narrative experiences I’ve ever had watching a documentary. The film is structured so that we are initially told the story of the short life of a young Norwegian man, Mats Steen, who was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy as a child. We meet Mats through a collection of home videos and interviews with his family about the life he seemed to have led as a young man isolated by his limitations, who spent most of his life playing video games in a basement apartment until he passed away at 25. Through the course of going through his things, Mats’ parents discover that their son had been writing a blog about his life and experiences living with his condition. So, they wrote a short update to his blog, so that in case he’d had any readers, they would know what had happened to him. Mats’ parents were shocked to discover just how much they didn’t know about their son’s life when they receive a flood of messages coming in from all the people wanting to expressing their condolences. Messages from a great many people who don’t just know their son, but had deep and meaningful relationships with him as his World of Warcraft character, Ibelin. From there, the documentary almost starts over, but now telling Mats' story through the prism of the character he spent so much time playing. Reconstructed using Warcraft style animation, chat logs, forum posts, and interviews with the people from the Warcraft guild he belonged to, we get a window into a life so much richer than even his family thought possible.  Two: Kneecap I went into Kneecap almost entirely blind. I knew it had something to do with Irish rappers and that it had Michael Fassbender in it. The first time through, I loved it for what it seemed to be: the story of two school-age lads and their teacher, who formed an Irish language rap group as an explicitly political act,  advocating for the rights of Irish speakers in Northern Ireland. In a flashback, Fassbender, as the IRA dad of one of the kids, tells both boys something he’s clearly told them hundred times, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.” At no point during that first watch did I realize that a) this was a true-ish story and b) it was starring the three guys from the real band. Part of the surprise comes from what scumbags the guys in the band are. You wouldn’t expect anyone telling their own story would be willing to paint themselves in such an unflattering light, but this humanizing touch ends up working incredibly well for the emotional heft of the narrative. Even if these are actually more personas than reflecting who the guys in the band really are, and even if the events depicted are heavily embellished, this winds up being one of the most successful musical biopics I’ve ever seen.  One: I Saw the TV Glow I Saw the TV Glow  is one of the more important films released in 2024, thanks to its powerfully evocative approach in trying to depict something visceral and true about the trans experience; That said, sometimes calling a film ’important’ can come off as damning it with faint praise, and sometimes, saying a film speaks to the experiences of a marginalized community can lead people to assume the film is only for that community. I Saw the TV Glow  is more than important, it’s the best film I’ve seen this year ; And, though it is a film with a particular aim, the result is a message that should play for anyone.  It is challenging to relate the plot of this film because it’s a story that only reveals itself very slowly over the full course of its runtime. Like Lynch’s Lost Highway  or Inland Empire , the narrative is built in such a dreamy way that you need to have seen the ending in order to really make sense of the beginning. It does work as an experience as it’s moving along, building with each new sequence, but it only fully comes together in its final haunting moments.  The story opens in the 90s with a young, sheepish boy named Owen, who tags along with his mom when she goes to vote at his school. While he’s waiting for her to finish, he sees a girl a little older than himself named Maddy. She’s sitting by herself, reading the episode guide to a TV show called The Pink Opaque.  Owen has seen commercials for the show, and has been interested in it, but he has never been able to check it out because it comes on after his very strict bedtime.  Maddy is about as awkward as Owen is shy, but they are able to sufficiently bond over the show for them to make a plan for Owen to fake a sleepover at a friend’s house so that he can sneak over to Maddy’s house to watch the show the following weekend. That evening winds up being a turning point in his life.  The show is very deliberately meant to evoke comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer , even using the same font for their credits. Like Buffy , The Pink Opaque is structured as a monster of the week show, where its two main characters, Tara and Isabel, have to defeat a different villain each week, but all of the episodes are part of an overarching storyline about a larger fight against the real big bad, Mr. Melancholy. Aside from the pilot episode of the show, when Tara and Isabel meet at summer camp, the two spend the rest of the series apart, but remain psychically connected to one another as The Pink Opaque. Mirroring the show, thanks to the disfunction of their respective home situations, Owen and Maddy initially only meet up in person this one time to watch the show together. But, they remain connected, however, as Maddy continues to help Owen keep up with the show by leaving VHS tapes of the episodes for him to pick up in the school’s dark room. Such parallels become increasingly important to the story as Maddy eventually comes to believe that she and Owen really are Tara and Isabel, and that they’ve been imprisoned in their current lives by Mr. Melancholy. Owen is especially troubled by this idea because, besides feeling like a paranoid delusion, it also happens to feed into questions he’s not yet ready to start grappling with about his (her?) own identity. Like with their debut film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair , writer/director Jane Schoenbrun has a masterful handle on balancing the tone of a story like this where it’s unclear if a character is crazy or if the world really is something very different than what they had ever thought before. Schoenbrun also has the most incisive sense about that particular feeling of being lost and isolated when you are still trying to figure out who you are and what your place in the world is. The particular novelty of Schoenbrun’s work so far, though, is how they relate those feelings as unapologetic horror stories.  The standard metaphor is the as yet unhatched egg, just waiting to come out of their shell into a brand new life, which can be a fine heartwarming story when it works out. Schoenbrun is more interested in this transformation as a Chapel Perilous, a struggle through a long dark night of the soul where the outcome on the other side is far from certain. Besides making for more interesting stories, such a framing also takes seriously the ways in which becoming who you need to be is fraught with peril. While this message may be most resonant for a particular audience, there is surely something in it for everyone.  The Rest of My Top 20:  20) Abigail, 19) His Three Daughters, 18) Last Stop Yuma County, 18) Late Night with the Devil, 16) Hit Man, 15) My Old Ass, 14) Young Woman and the Sea, 13) Sometimes I Think About Dying, 12) The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Movies!! This is my ninth year writing a year-end listicle for my dear friends at Story Screen, and I am incredibly grateful that they continue to host my rambling opinions and conjectures on the past 12 months of contemporary cinema on their website, as I am grateful to call them my friends. They are an invaluable asset to film culture in the Hudson Valley and are just great people and I wish them nothing but success for their new theater. The American film and television industry has suffered a great deal of turmoil in the last year. Still recovering from two long and arduous strikes, many studios are now opting to greenlight fewer projects, move them overseas, or cut budgets significantly, leaving thousands of veteran film crews all over the country out of work, as well as the Los Angeles fires leaving crews out of their homes. I hope the industry can recover to a better state than it was left in, and that we can continue together to make films as innovative, original, exciting, and as introspective as the films I am about to list below. As is tradition, I would like to shout out honorable mentions of great films I would easily recommend that did not quite make it to my final 10. Consider these 25-11 if i were to make a more expansive list. Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) The Last Stop in Yuma County (Francis Gallupi) Hit Man (Richard Linklater) Smile 2 (Parker Finn) Strange Darling (J.T. Mollner) Late Night with the Devil ( Colin and Cameron Cairnes) In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash) Kill (Nikhil Nagash Bhat) Snack Shack (Adam Carter Rehmeier) Trap (M. Night Shyamalan) Longlegs (Osgood Perkins) A Real Pain (Jessie Eisenberg) Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood) Nosferatu (Robert Eggers) Rap World (Connor O’Malley & Danny Scharar) Here are my final ten! I did not get to see everything I wanted to before I could make this list. As much as it feels like time is standing still when you’re watching a great movie, in reality that is, unfortunately, not the case. This list is spoiler free. 10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)  Nearly ten years after he finished his twenty year long production Mad Max Fury Road , George Miller follows up his masterpiece of metal and mayhem with a film that feels so strongly connected to its world and its characters, both on its own and in conversation with Fury Road , that the two films feel inseparable as one grand story of loss, revenge, and gasoline. While a bit more measuredly paced and introspective, Furiosa still delivers the goods when it counts. I felt like I was levitating out of my seat when those bikers activated their parasails. 9. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg) Like if Charlie Kaufman remade Vertigo , Aaron Schimberg’s tragic meta narrative of identity crisis and the line between truth and myth-making in art tells a wonderfully unique story, full of hilarious and eerie surprises, with the trio of Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, and Adam Pearson weaving together one of my favorite screenplays of the year. 8. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve) Everything Dune: Part One set up is beautifully paid off in Part 2, making this duology one of the finest sci-fi spectacles of the decade. 7. Anora (Sean Baker) Sean Baker is a filmmaker that has the gift of balancing humor and heartbreak in a grounded spontaneity that feels so authentic and natural, and this skill reaches new heights in Anora . So much has been said about how terrific Mikey Madison and Yura Borisnov are, this film also features some of the best goon performances this side of a Scorsese film. I could have watched them stumble around New York City for hours. 6. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier) Jeremy Saulnier’s filmmaking output over the last decade have deftly explored the humanity’s most dark and violent impulses (Hold the Dark, Blue Ruin, and Story Screen’s favorite Green Room) so it was so refreshing to see Saulnier tackle systematic oppression and de-escalation with the same precise tension and character driven set pieces that made his previous films so special. Don Johnson is on fire here and Aaron Pierre is a star in the making. 5. The Substance (Coralie F argeat) The Substance  is every bit as gross, disturbing, and zany as you have heard and I am so glad to see a film as out-there and stylishly confrontational as this get the flowers and attention it deserves. I have been championing Coralie Fargeat since the beginning (read my essay on her previous film Revenge   here ) , and it's so great to see her improve her directorial style to such great heights. If Revenge  was a destruction of the male gaze, The Substance  is an evisceration. 4. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik) The little movie that could of 2024. Hundreds of Beavers  is a triumphant tribute to Buster Keaton and Looney Tunes that made me laugh so hard it may have almost killed me. Bursting with so much more creative energy than many films 100 times its budget, you owe it to yourself to seek this one out. I mustn’t say more. I don’t want to spoil the surprises it has in store. 3. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass) Truly muscular cinema, both in its literal subject matter and its form. Love Lies Bleeding is a perfect little sleazy crime novel come to life with confidence that does not give up one ounce of its personality. 2. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun ) Growing up not too far out of the same generation as its main characters, the way the film explores our relationship to media and how we use it to understand ourselves at a young age felt as though it was reflecting a mirror directly at me. It has been nearly 10 years since we all collectively experienced Twin Peaks: The Return for the first time, and this is the closest film I have seen that matches its tone and vibe. That is one of the highest compliments I could possibly give. Rest in peace David Lynch, I hope this new generation of filmmakers can effectively carry the torch of exploring the surrealness of our lives the way you did, but Jane Schoenbrun gives me confidence in that being true. 1. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino) I did not expect my number one film of the year to be a psychosexual melodrama about tennis, but when it's loaded with this much creative adrenaline, the best soundtrack of the year, and a trio of deliciously toxic performances, you can’t go wrong. A perfect execution, I left the theater exhilarated in a way I haven’t felt in years.  Thanks for reading! Follow me on Letterboxd! Jeremy Kolodziejski Jeremy is a long-time supporter of and contributor to the Story Screen Fam, as well as the entire Hudson Valley Film community, as a writer, filmmaker, film worker, and general film fan. You can find him sifting through the most obscure corners of horror, martial arts, comedy, noir, and crime drama cinema, always on the hunt to discover something new, strange, and exciting.

Set against the aesthetic background of midcentury modernism, The Brutalist  contains multitudes in its thematic and dramatic meanings. This movie, the third from director Brady Corbet, was probably my favorite film of the year. It fuses intimate character work and an epic setting and timeline, taking us on an incredible journey of postwar immigration. The momentum of the story is captured on VistaVision film, which was last used in the 1950s. This fact alone has caused significant chatter about the film, divorced from the film’s content and themes.   The Brutalist VistaVision is when the film is run through the camera horizontally, rather than vertically, resulting in a bigger negative and enhanced “resolution.” I am intrigued by the re-introduction of this format, mainly because no one has seen a new-release VistaVision movie since the sixties. Due to that fact alone, The Brutalist  is automatically in conversation with cinema history. Eye-catching, new cinema formats like VistaVision and Cinemascope were introduced to the American public to rival the rapid rise of television in postwar America. These technological innovations, in conjunction with marketing campaigns, are not unlike the gimmicky popcorn buckets of today. Only now, staying home to watch TV has been replaced with lying in bed to watch TikTok videos. These issues of attention incite active Hollywood PR campaigns to keep audiences in theaters. Timothée Chalamet on Jimmy Kimmel Live! As much as it pains me to say, the process of creating a film in today’s media landscape has become almost as important as the film’s story for some viewers and “media consumers.” The act of shooting on celluloid film alone has become intriguing enough for writers to use it as content for internet articles. At a time when film has become increasingly expensive and out of reach for so many filmmakers, it comes as a marker of artistic integrity to certain projects during awards season. Last year, Oppenheimer  used only practical effects for its subatomic nuclear reaction shots and its large-scale explosions. For a Best Picture Oscar winner, shot in IMAX film, that is quite impressive. The PR fodder from this process was impressive: there were many conversations about the film centered on this fact alone. The process of filmmaking in this way lends itself to an easy topic of conversation. You can ask, “Oh, did you read about how they shot that?” as you walk out of the cinema’s exit doors. This line of conversation begets only more attention towards spectacle and sometimes vacuous chatter. It can suck up all the air in conversations about a movie, negating any need for critical reflection or analysis of the story. Sean Baker filming Tangerine. When I was in film school (about seven years ago), I was surrounded by films that had been “Shot on iPhone,” creating a huge buzz around them at the time. It’s worth noting here that significant attention is being given to the fact that Danny Boyle’s latest film, 28 Years Later  (coming out in 2025), was shot on an iPhone. Sean Baker, who is up for an Oscar this year for Anora , jumped into the mainstream with Tangerine ten years ago. One of the first pieces of information mentioned in articles or conversations about Tangerine  was the fact that it was shot on a cell phone. After countless articles about the film’s production and technical techniques, Baker was put on the map for being an indie filmmaker who pushes the boundaries of filmmaking to create character-centered dramas. Like the seventies filmmakers who used 16mm film and available lighting, Baker was cemented in the industry’s mind as an iconoclast. Even today, much of the press coverage of Anora  mentions that the film had no intimacy coordinator, at a time when on-set safety is increasingly in the mainstream conversation. (Worth noting that the actors in the film stated they were comfortable forgoing the intimacy coordinator, and said Baker created a healthy environment.) Nevertheless, these conversations make Sean Baker increasingly intriguing as a director, as much for his behind-the-scenes gossip as his films’ content. Mark Eidelstein and Mikey Madison in Sean Baker's Anora. I want to mention Marshall McLuhan here, although I am reticent to do so, because of how often he is quoted in any writing of cultural and media criticism. His famous maxim of “the medium is the message,” has just been taken to a new dimension in our current cultural landscape. The meaning of art is increasingly detached from the actual writing or “content” of a piece. No longer is the medium the most meaningful aspect of a piece of art, but the creation story behind that art. We care about how a film generates online buzz, which directly translates to its box office success. As filmmaking decreases its hold on the cultural landscape of Americans, the average American only buys 3 movie tickets a year , it’s no wonder that the marketing of cinematic events is increasingly important. Personally, I am a huge fan of the daring and cumbersome techniques used by directors Corbet, Nolan, and Baker. They are all true artists who utilize cameras to serve their specific stories and characters. But the wave of change in how we talk about films has changed drastically. And the “auteurs” of today increasingly need to advertise the use of their filmmaking techniques in order to remain relevant. Leo Gallagher Leo Gallagher is a New York based cinematographer and filmmaker primarily working in documentaries, commercials, and independent films. You can follow him on Instagram @leo.gallag

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl  (2024) When I heard a new Wallace & Gromit movie was coming out, I’ll admit – I was skeptical.  Growing up, I’ve re-watched A Grand Day Out  (1989) more times than I can count, and have spent hours dressing up Lady Tottington in the DVD bonus features of Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). However, it was hard to get excited about a new W&G entry in an age of cash-grab reboots of childhood classics, and I was sure that the 2017 passing of British actor Peter Sallis (Wallace’s voice actor) cemented that another film would not be made.  But I was not about to let a new Wallace & Gromit movie pass me by, so I gave it a shot… and I am so happy and relieved to say that the magic of this series is still alive! Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl  feels as much of a family classic as its predecessors. Longtime W&G fans will appreciate the long-running jokes, Easter egg nods to other movies, and how much the claymation’s quality has improved since A Grand Day Out  while still retaining the charm and creativity that stop-motion claymation painstakingly and lovingly builds in every minute detail. The new voice actor for Wallace, Ben Whitehead, does an excellent job bringing to life an iconic voice that I thought would be irreplaceable. (And I’m happy to report that the internet rumor that there will never be another Wallace & Gromit film because the studio ran out of clay is false ). Vengeance Most Fowl ‘s high-quality animated storytelling leaves you very impressed and appreciative of the artistry behind it. So, here are three reasons why this feature, along with the rest of the series, is perfect cinema.  The film is spectacular, with its attention to detail, engaging story, and how it captures the essence of the W&G universe. No notes. Give me fourteen more. (While the spoilers ahead are minor, please check out Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl on Netflix! Bonus points if you are prepped with a mug of English tea, a plate of crackers, thick cheese slices, and a re-watch of The Wrong Trousers (1983).) Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) It's movie comfort food, but you never know what to expect. Each film takes place at 62 Wallaby Street, with a few recurring quirky characters, so there’s a comforting nostalgic welcomeness to the W&G universe in Vengeance Most Fowl , no matter how long it’s been since watching the last film. I expect Wallace's absurdly complex wake-up and breakfast routines, high-speed chases involving the red motorcycle and sidecar, a small Yorkshire town shaken by a recent crime mystery, and, of course, Wallace’s unrelenting cravings for cheese. In each film, the duo usually have a new small business powered by Wallace’s inventions (e.g., an intricate bread factory, bungee cord window-cleaning services, or landscaping garden robots) and challenge Wallace and Gromit’s wit against bitter villains. Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave (1995) While these familiar elements are comforting, the film balances them with chaotic, action-packed comedy and fresh side characters (who doesn’t love an evil bagpiping garden gnome?) to keep things unpredictable and entertaining. Pulled together with the palpable emotions of claymation (don’t talk to me during Curse of the Were-Rabbit when the bunnies’ glassy, bead-eyes cry actual water), watching Wallace and Gromit is like being wrapped in a warm, cozy blanket of nostalgia. At the same time, the new mystery’s suspense and fun hectics will make you laugh, gasp, cry, and cheer within an hour. Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out (1989) The hidden puns. To my fiancé’s delight (and my friends’ chagrin), I’m a sucker for puns. Like watching The Simpsons  (1989), Wallace & Gromit  is full of hidden jokes—like Gromit's bedtime reading, 'Men Are From Mars; Dogs Are from Pluto,' or a Virginia Woof novel—making every re-watch a treasure-filled scavenger hunt. The silly newspaper headlines, punny posters, Easter eggs, and other minor references keep you amused, no matter how often you've seen these movies. Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit  (2005) One of the joys of watching these films over decades is finally understanding a joke that went over my head as a kid after returning to it years later. Adults and youngsters alike can enjoy these films. I hope that new, young viewers of Vengeance Most Fowl  will discover new layers of this movie as they grow older, just like past generations of fans have. Wallace & Gromit movies are movies you can watch a million times, at any age, and still be entertained and notice something new that makes you laugh. It puts the bounce in our bungees. Wallace & Gromit films surprise you with how much emotional depth they can pack within a short comedy. Their movies are experiences that leave a lasting impression on your heart and a smile on your face. Even though the situations are fantastical (though I’m not giving up my hopes yet of flying to a moon made of cheese), the films provide relatable, human situations that connect with all audiences. In A Grand Day Out , a misunderstood character fights to fit in and realize his dreams. In A Matter of Loaf and Death,  multiple characters desire to be loved for their talents and flaws. Now, Vengeance Most Fowl  questions our reliance on technology and reminds its audience of the value of maintaining personal connections over artificial interactions. While it’s hard to imagine Wallace doing anything but inventing, as he says to Gromit in Vengeance Most Fowl , he can live without technology but not without his “best pal.” Cracking Contraptions: A Christmas Cardomatic  (2002) Vengeance Most Fowl  is a brilliant movie   that rekindles the magic of two of our favorite animated characters. It reminds us why Wallace & Gromit is still going strong after nearly forty years, and is a testament to the enduring power of Aardman Animations’ timeless storytelling. So grab your cheese and crackers, settle in, and enjoy another epic adventure – because this classic duo is still in style. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) Sophia Acquisto Sophia is an elementary teacher turned PhD student in Troy, NY, and has been a part of the Story Screen family since 2019. When not studying, Sophia loves rewatching with her fiancé episodes of The Great British Baking Show and Malcolm in the Middle .

In an essay on the history of astronomy, Adam Smith drew a distinction between three ideas that often get conflated: wonder, awe, and surprise. His subject was our relationship to the heavens, but he took the distinction he was making to apply to all aspects of human life. Wonder  he took to refer to the feeling we get whenever we encounter something truly new or novel. That feeling of ‘I didn’t know that was possible’. Awe  we feel when we encounter something especially grand or beautiful, even if we’ve experienced something like it before. We may have seen waterfalls, but there is presumably something awe inspiring in seeing Niagara Falls. And Surprise  is reserved for the unexpected. For those situations where we are confident about what is happening, or about to happen, but we are instead met with something we are wholly unprepared for. The way these feelings work, they can occur individually, or in combination. Perhaps the first human to encounter Niagara Falls felt all three at once. But, over time, the surprise would wear off, then perhaps the wonder, and given enough time and exposure, maybe even the awe, though that should be the most resilient feeling of the three. The same was probably true when people first saw The Wizard of Oz or 2001: A Space Odyssey ; feelings of surprise and wonder that might fade over time, but as long as we don’t rewatch these films everyday, we should be able to retain some measure of our awe when we come back to them.  I mention all of this because I wanted to talk about a movie I just saw and unexpectedly loved, but I was having trouble pinning down why exactly. I’m a pretty big fan of Kevin Smith as a person. I listen regularly to a couple of his podcasts, and I’ve greatly enjoyed some of his IP work in comics and TV, but I’m much more hit and miss on his films. The only one of his that I have really ever revisited is 1999’s Dogma  (perhaps more on that in a future article), and I’ve skipped most of his output over the last 15 years. Despite that, I was intrigued when his most recent film, The 4:30 Movie , was first announced. The film is an all-in-one-day story, set in May of 1986, built around a young teen boy trying to take a girl he likes on a first date to the movies, and all the misadventures he and his friends have along the way. It’s a fairly conventional premise, but the initial hook for me had much more to do with how it was going to be made, than what it was about. In a time when there is so much uncertainty around the movie theater business, Kevin Smith and some of his friends took over the theater from his hometown. And, in doing that, Kevin realized that because there had never been money to update the theater in any major way over the years, it was already period perfect to tell a low-budget story about his young experiences as a burgeoning cinephile and eventual filmmaker.  I love the let’s-put-on-a-show spirit of a project like this. “We have a spot we can use for a couple weeks, let’s see who’s around and make something.” This was something of the same spirit of Smith’s breakthrough, Clerks , where he maxed out all the credit cards he could get, to make a film with his friends after hours in the convenience store where he worked. If there was ever going to be a project to recapture the spirit of what initially brought Smith to the attention of the film going public, The 4:30 Movie seemed perfect to be it. And, at least in my case, my goodness did it deliver.  I LOVED this movie. So much so that I’m still kind of grappling with it, because it isn’t something built to wow an audience. It’s a simple story, sweetly told. I’m not really digging too deeply into the plot details here because ‘Young boy tries to see some movies with his friends and a girl he likes, and hijinks ensue’ does basically cover it. This is very much a case where it’s less about the tale here versus how well it’s being told.  Smith’s young cast is incredibly charming and completely believable as high school kids. Other reviewers have mentioned this, but it’s startling how much better Smith’s dialogue works when it’s coming out of the mouths of younger performers. If Smith wanted to spend the whole next act of his career making John Hughes pastiches, I would be here for it. His grown up supporting players are a lot of fun. Ken Jeong is great, chewing scenery as a theater owner who hates kids and movies. Sam Richardson has a delightful turn in a scene as a knock-off of 80’s wrestler Sgt. Slaughter, named Major Murder, who has some important advice for one of the kids. Logic and Diedrich Bader are having a blast in the schlocky film-within-the-film the kids end up watching.  The real selling point of the film for me is how well it balances sweet and funny. The kids tell jokes, but they feel natural, not overly scripted. The kids tease and fight with one another, but never so much so that it strains credulity that they would actually stay friends. Things work out with the boy and girl, but in a way that makes sense for two kids who are still just getting to know each other. Nothing too grand here. This isn’t a big budget production marvel like Oppenheimer  that will fill you with awe at its scope and execution. And this isn’t any kind of form-breaking storytelling like Everything Everywhere All at Once  that will make you wonder at how it all comes together. What it is, though, is surprising. Endlessly so. I didn’t know a film so simple and sweet could hit as hard for me as it did. I didn’t know that this was somehow exactly what I wanted at the moment. And, I didn’t know Kevin Smith had this in him. This is unexpectedly one of my favorite movies of the year, and I hope you check it out. Perhaps you’ll be in for a surprise, too. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Mike Burdge is joined by Scotty Arnold to discuss what we've all been up to for the past few months, as well as diving into the decades spanning franchise of The Blair Witch , including The Curse of the Blair Witch, The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and Blair Witch . Topics include liking movies that some just straight up detest, the Wingard/Barrett onslaught on horror, found footage as a horror sub-genre and the timelessness of certain films that just feel cursed. Listen on....

Two things can be true: (1) Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining,  is an undeniable horror masterwork, and, until recently, (2) it had never really worked for me.   I grew up a Stephen King kid. I picked up a copy of his book, It , from my parents bookshelf in 5th grade, and read almost nobody else until high school. By the time I first watched The Shining , I had read the book about a half dozen times, and was well aware of King’s own criticisms of the film. I may have been too primed by that knowledge to see the film in any other way, but I’ve always come away with the same impression when I watch it: it is truly dazzling to behold, with iconic performances from Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, as Jack and Wendy Torrance, yet I find the film to be hampered by how empty Kubrick’s takes on the characters are, particularly, how little agency Kubrick gives to any of the Torrance family in the story.  King faults Nicholson’s Jack for being crazy from the start, which I believe overstates it a little, but I do think he does start out so wanting as both a husband and father in the film, that there is no real surprise when he becomes violent towards his own family. Short of a joke about cannibalism on the drive to the hotel, you never see a shared moment between Jack and his family to indicate that he still has any real emotional bond with them. Jack Torrance’s character in the book loves his family, despite his numerous screwups; he’s an alcoholic sincerely trying to stay on the straight and narrow for their sake. The Jack Torrance of Kubrick’s film doesn’t seem like he especially needed a haunted hotel to convince him to fall off the wagon and kill his family. Narratively, Jack being like he is in the film does establish a sense of dread and inevitability to the story early on, so that when you hear a naive Wendy describe how a drunken Jack broke young Danny’s arm not all that long ago, you know that the whole idea of anyone spending five isolated months alone with him would be a terrible mistake. But, for King, that also makes it a fundamentally different story than the one he was trying to tell.  For King, he was telling a story about his own recovery from alcoholism and working through his own fears about what his drinking might have done to him if he hadn’t gotten it under control. In the book, Jack is a clear stand-in character for King, and the sympathy we have for him because of that means we mourn what he’s lost when he accepts his first ‘drink’ from the hotel. And also, because the core of the novel is so overtly about addiction and recovery, there always remains some tension about whether there is still something resilient in Jack that can lead him back to the path. Kubrick is telling a different kind of story and evidence indicates that he was right to do so. In 1997, Stephen King got the chance to script his own adaptation of his book for a three episode miniseries that would be directed by Mick Garris. This time, with Garris, King would get to tell his story exactly as he’d always intended, and it was…fine. It was a perfectly acceptable diversion, that faded into obscurity almost as soon as it had finished airing, and all the while, the legacy of Kubrick’s film adaptation grew, further cemented with each passing year. It may not be what I wanted, but Kubrick had an undeniably better handle on how to turn this material into a film.  At least that was my take until I finally saw Mike Flanagan’s underseen 2019 film, Doctor Sleep  - the adaptation of King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining . Written more than 35 years after the original book, Doctor Sleep , recounts what happened to Danny Torrance and his mother after they escaped the explosion of The Overlook Hotel. That detail alone makes it an unlikely candidate for an adaptation, as the filmgoing public, more familiar with Kubrick’s take, might struggle to accept that fate for the hotel. It’s also a fundamentally different kind of story, which I hesitate to talk about too much because of how underseen it is; That said, the theme the sequel borrows most explicitly from the original is that it’s a book about alcoholism, but one that leans much more heavily on the idea of the possibility of recovery. Young Danny struggled mightily with the trauma of what happened to him and his mother and he spent a long time lost. However, he finds his way back to the path, and is presented with the chance to help a young kid in danger, much like he once was.  Mike Flanagan, has become something of the principle adapter of King’s work these days with 2019’s Doctor Sleep, 2017’s Gerald’s Game, the eagerly anticipated, The Life of Chuck,  coming next summer, as well as his announced multi-part adaptation of King’s Dark Tower  series. Flanagan may have been the only person that could have gotten a credible version of this film made, because he may have been the only person who both had the standing with King to sell him on the idea that any successful adaptation would have to find a way to get along with Kubrick’s film, and who also had the writing chops and handle on King’s voice to craft a compromise that King could live with.  Flanagan didn’t just convince King, but his narrative compromise also saved the Kubrick film for me with the addition of one key scene. King’s novel already provides an example of what recovery can look like with Danny’s journey, but Flanagan is able to bring that arc back home to Jack by creating a scene where an adult Danny goes back to the still standing, if abandoned, Overlook Hotel, and has a conversation in the Gold Room bar with the version of his dad that has became a part of the hotel. There isn’t a lot of Jack left, and he mostly tries to deny it whenever Danny refers to him as his father, but for a moment, the old Jack peeks through. Danny tries to confide in the bartender about what it was like when his mom, Jack’s wife, finally did die, but the bartender just nudges a drink towards Danny. “Something warm, to push away such unpleasantries.” But, in trying to encourage Danny to take the offered drink, what also slips through is more interiority into Jack’s character than is contained in the whole of Kubrick’s film. He says:  Medicine. Medicine is what it is. Bonafide cure-all. The mind is a blackboard. And this is the eraser. A man tries. He provides. But he’s surrounded by mouths. And a family. A wife. A kid. Those mouths eat time. They eat your days on Earth. They just gobble them up. It’s enough to make a man sick. And this is the medicine. We only have subtext to read into what affection Danny ever had for his father to make him care about even having this conversation in the first place, but this blunt articulation of Jack Torrance’s addiction and resentments retroactively enlivens his character all the way back to the original film in a way that finally makes him make sense to me. And, while we don’t get the notion of recovery that King originally had in mind as part of Jack’s story, the way this scene bridges Jack’s addiction with Danny’s recovery creates the arc I always wanted, just spread out over two films. Just as Jack has always been at the Overlook, Kubrick’s The Shining  has always been an undeniable classic, but now, thanks to Mike Flanagan, it’s also become something of the story I always wanted it to be. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Hosts Bernadette Gorman-White and Mike Burdge embark upon a brand spanking new filmography series: The Pattinson Stuff , covering the movieing of one Robert Pattinson. Up first, a dive into the actor's first three features: Vanity Fair, Ring of the Nibelungs and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Listen on....

I’ve never seen much virtue in writing a negative review of anything. Making something is hard and missing the mark is the most common outcome for any of our ventures in life; but, that being said, there is some merit in trying to figure out why something doesn’t work. Aaron Sorkin’s most recent directorial effort, Being the Ricardos , is a behind the scenes look at a week in the production of an episode of I Love Lucy . The film boasts a Sorkin screenplay, an all-star cast led by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, as well as an interesting and largely untold story about an iconic figure in the history of tv and film. Despite all that, the film just doesn’t really work, and I’m pretty curious about how that happened. It would be going too far to say that Being the Ricardos is a bad film. I still found it engaging and watchable all the way through. But, of course, I did. I’m basically, for good and ill, the stereotypical embodiment of Sorkin’s exact demographic. Many of the key scenes and sequences hit me the way I believe they were intended to. After decades of breaking stories on stage and screen, Sorkin knows how to carry an audience along. Just the same, I can’t point to any part of the film where I had a clear handle on what the intended tone of the film was supposed to be. In the lead-up to the film’s release, there was significant backlash over the casting of the film. It turns out there was a ravenous, pent-up demand for a film about Lucille Ball, but that prospective audiences revolted at the thought of her being played by Nicole Kidman. People were generally skeptical that Kidman had the comedy chops to play the star of I Love Lucy , and, well, they were right. Kidman was fairly decently cast for the film Aaron Sorkin wrote, but that wasn’t at all the film this audience wanted to see. Sorkin has taken great pains in interviews around this film to make clear that he was telling a dramatic story about Lucille Ball, not a comedy starring her character Lucy Ricardo. Sorkin’s mistake may have been in thinking he could do one without committing fully to also do the other. The story of Being the Ricardos is: during a particular week of production of I Love Lucy , Lucille Ball is contending with three off-stage crises that are all coming to a head simultaneously: an exposé about her husband’s infidelity, a battle with the network, and sponsors of her show about being the first pregnant character on a television show, and the breaking news that she had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about having once registered as a member of the communist party. Sorkin takes some creative license by placing these events all in the same week, but these are all things that happened during the run of I Love Lucy . Sorkin does manage to weave these disparate elements together like they’re the A, B, and C plots of an episode of one of his shows, where each thread is highlighting the tension between Lucy’s career and her lifelong desire for some kind of stable family life. And, structurally, they do all tie together in the end. When Lucille’s real-life husband, Desi, comes through the door of the I Love Lucy set as his character Ricky, calling out, “Lucy, I’m home,” we watch Lucille struggling to respond, and we understand that all of her efforts to hold her show and family together have been for naught. Throughout the film, the growing narrative is that Desi has been coming home less and less, ostensibly staying up late playing cards on his boat with friends to blow off steam, but clearly getting up to more than just that. The irony is that the whole motivation for Lucille agreeing to do I Love Lucy in the first place is so that she and Desi would finally have a way to both have their careers and be able to spend time together. Desi’s infidelity, her pregnancy, and her growing red scare are each conspiring to destabilize the show that ties together the life the two of them have built together. They manage to save the show. They strongarm the network into letting Lucille be pregnant on television. They get the FBI to make a statement publicly clearing Lucille of any suspicion of un-American wrongdoing. But, coming off these historic wins, it feels jarring when the then-what-happened text at the end of the film tells us they would go on to get divorced anyway. The core problem of the film may be that it’s overstuffed. Sorkin ties together threads that don’t really get along well together. There’s surely something to the story of a young Lucille Ball checking the registration box for the communist party to please her grandfather, as a contrast to the story of a young Desi Arnaz fleeing Cuba because of a communist revolution. There is surely something to the contrast between the iconic housewife character of Lucy Ricardo and the trailblazing media mogul that portrayed her. There is surely something interesting to the contrast between the happy friends of the TV show I Love Lucy and behind the scenes squabbling of the actors who portrayed them. There is surely something interesting to how groundbreaking I Love Lucy was just as a technological feat that would go on to transform how tv shows would be made from then on. There is surely something to the story of the serious behind the scenes work it takes to create effortless-seeming comedy on screen. There is surely a worthwhile story to be told about anyone standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and managing to come out on top. There is surely something to the story of the first pregnant mother character that American families saw on TV and how her co-star and real-life husband was cheating on her in real life the entire time. All of these stories are interesting, just not when you try to tell them all at once. A secondary problem for Being the Ricardos is a similar issue that Sorkin had with his show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip . Sorkin is capable of writing comedic situations for his characters or writing enviably naturalistic witty-banter, but he gets utterly hamfisted when he tries to write a character that is trying to be funny. Studio 60 was his much-maligned show, looking at the behind the scenes of a show like Saturday Night Live. Canceled after one season, a lot of it was much better than it got credit for at the time, but the core criticism of the show was as true then as it is now: the central premise of the show demanded adept comedy writing, and Sorkin just doesn’t have that talent in his otherwise ample toolkit. There is a version of Being the Ricardos - both film and screenplay - that may actually lend itself to a stage production, something where the audience is more primed for witty speechifying, and on a platform much further removed from the medium in which the audience is most used to seeing Lucille Ball. For how many stories Sorkin is trying to tell, there may have also been an even better version of this story if it were told as a limited series. Give each story thread its own episode with its own theme, rather than try to force them all together. In its current form, I can go, so far as to say, that Being the Ricardos was a perfectly fine use of my time, but also an unsuccessful mess in that, having seen it twice now, I’m still not at all clear what it’s trying to say about anything. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

I’m not entirely sure if it was something about me, or just something about this past year, but there was a great deal of theater kid energy in the films I most connected with this year. Like with David Byrne’s American Utopia from my list last year, two of my top ten were filmed versions of stage shows. I do consider it a high bar to clear to consider a stage show on par to a traditional film, but the two I have on my list cleared that bar for me. Another is a very filmic reconceptualization of a stage show. Another three are so stagey they could probably be ported over to a theater with little to no changes. Of the remainder of my list, a common theme is that there was little to no grounded realism. With one exception, I wasn’t seeking out or connecting with, anything working with big, visceral, negative emotions. Like many, I’ve had enough cortisol in my life these last few years, so what I’ve needed more than anything was escapism and big, singing, dancing, flights of fancy. Thankfully, this year’s films delivered on that. Honorable Mention - Lapsis Noah Hutton’s Lapsis was one of the more interesting surprises of the year for me. It wasn’t a film I had heard anything about, but I was so struck by its poster that I couldn’t get it out of my head until I finally checked it out. Because of how little attention it’s gotten, I’ll be sparing in my description, but I can say that it’s a soft-touch sci-fi story about exploitation and workers' rights in the gig economy. It feels a little low budget at times, but in ways that actually make the world feel more real. It’s not slick and shiny, but that actually serves the premise by making it feel like the world of this story is not only possible, but could be just months away. #10. Dune Denis Villeneuve’s Dune appears to be the first 50% of a masterpiece. I knew going into the film that it was only going to be the first half of the book, so I didn’t have an issue with the film’s abrupt ending, but I haven’t been able to treat it like it’s a finished work, yet. It doesn’t feel like the first in a series of standalone stories, but one story that’s simply been stopped to pick up again later. If the story is eventually completed, Dune has the potential to be something like my favorite film, but, were something to stop the story from being finished, I might be too disappointed to return to this first film ever again. I was a modest fan of David Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune . It was a mess, but with more than enough in terms of ideas and visuals to be worth watching. I forgave it a lot of its shortcomings on a belief that it actually was an unfilmable story, but Villeneuve, albeit with the benefit of more running time, manages to seamlessly build the worlds and assorted intrigues of Dune without having to lean on clunky exposition, all while delivering generally more impressive visuals and much better performances. It’s master craftsmanship, and I look forward to eventually seeing the finished product. #9. The Green Knight David Lowry’s The Green Knight has a special spot on this list because it was the first film that I got to see in a theater since the start of the pandemic. In this adaptation of a 14th-century Arthurian story, Gawain is a nephew of King Arthur who accepts a challenge from The Green Knight. Gawain can deliver any blow he likes to The Green Knight, but The Green Knight can return that same blow a year hence. The focus of the film is Gawain’s quest to find The Green Knight to receive his agreed-upon blow. Dev Patel is incredible as Gawain, and the world that Lowry creates is incredibly sumptuous, dreamlike, and meditative. Taking place at two successive Christmas times, I expect this to become a holiday staple for me. #8. Psycho Goreman Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman isn’t a film I’m recommending to anyone. It’s a strange little gem that seems to have been made solely for me. Maybe if you share my preference for Army of Darkness over the other Evil Dead movies, this might appeal to you. Or, if like me, you have absolutely no interest in horror movies, but a deep fondness for gory, horror-comedies, this might appeal to you, as well. Even then, I don’t know, I really think it’s just for me and the cast and crew of the film. Consider yourself warned. Psycho Goreman is in some ways the E.T. trope of young kids finding and befriending an alien, only in this case, the kids are kinda sociopaths and the alien is an imprisoned evil menace bent on destroying all life in the universe. It’s a film I was never ahead of the first time I watched it, and, on each rewatch, I’ve continued to be tickled by all of the bizarre choices it makes. #7. Come From Away One of the projects that was lost to the pandemic was a planned film adaptation of the musical Come From Away , telling the story of the 38 planes that were unexpectedly forced to land at the Gander International Airport in Newfoundland on September 11th, 2001, and how the surrounding community came together to take care of their nearly 7,000 surprise guests. Instead, what we have here is a filmed version of the Broadway show, made 14 months after Broadway was shut down by Coronavirus, and 4 months before shows would reopen again to general audiences. In recent years, we’ve gotten high-quality filmed versions of Hamilton and, one of my favorite films of last year, David Byrne’s American Utopia . This filmed version of Come From Away doesn’t have the visual flair of either of those others, but the show itself is such a feat that it more than makes up for it. In some sense, the show has the feel of being one continuous take. There’s no intermission, and everyone in the small cast plays multiple characters without costume changes and rarely even leaving the stage. Each scene feeds quickly into the other, giving the show an incredibly propulsive feel. I can imagine a more traditional filmed version of this story that would be good, but not one that could easily retain these elements of the stage show that make it so unique. I do hope that film is someday made, but I would be very surprised to see it turn out better than what has already been captured in this version. #6. Annette All hail the big swing! I don’t know for sure if I would have connected with Annette if I hadn’t seen The Sparks Brothers documentary first. Having thoroughly met musicians Ron and Russell Mael, and gotten some sense of their unique approach to the world, I started their musical, Annette, as open-minded as can be. I was enthralled with its opening number and was able to adjust when the rest of the songs in the film were serving a far less straightforward role. I was entirely on board when I discovered how the character of Annette was going to be handled and thought the final culmination of that character choice to be just breathtaking. I found it perfect from first frame to last. #5. Mass I’ve long been a fan of Fran Kranz. He’s the only figure in the one movie poster I have on my wall, from when he played Claudio in 2012’s Much Ado About Nothing. I thought he was surprisingly great in both Cabin in the Woods and the TV show, Dollhouse . I was looking forward to Mass as his writing and directorial debut, but I was in no way ready for the film he’s made. It’s possible to see this film and be unaware of its central conceit, so I’ll tread lightly. It’s a devastating film, which is not a feeling I generally seek out, especially not this year, but it’s so empathetic and open-hearted about its subject and characters as to make the devastation worth it. It would work just as well on stage as it does on film because of how stripped down it is, being almost entirely a conversation between four characters in one room, trying to help one another recover from the central catastrophe of their lives. #4. Nine Days Edson Oda’s Nine Days is a very good movie that sneaks up on you as a great one in its final scene. It’s a meditation on what it takes to cut it in the world, against what we wish the people in the world were actually like. Like an inverse of Albert Brooks’s film Defending Your Life , instead of someone defending the life they had led in order to prove themselves worthy of moving on to the next plane of existence, here we see numerous souls interviewing for a chance to be born into life for the first time. As a pitch, it feels like it could be a lower-tier Pixar movie, but in execution, it winds of being something more patient, contemplative, and wonderful than that, before blossoming into something truly electric, that will stick with you for a long time in its final scene. #3. Derek DelGuadio’s In & Of Itself I got to see In & Of Itself during its theatrical run in NYC. It was an experience that stuck with me, and I was looking forward to revisiting it when I heard there was a film being made documenting the final performances of its run. Live theater doesn’t generally translate well to recording, and magic translates particularly poorly, so I didn’t have the highest expectations for how this would turn out, but working with Director Frank Oz, Derek DelGuadio made something truly special. By working in some multimedia elements, the show was expanded beyond what was possible on stage, and by working in audience reactions and participations the way they did, sometimes including a dozen different audience members from different shows in the same set-piece, the show was expanded beyond what it could be in any one performance, creating a unique feeling of immediacy that translates wonderfully to the audience at home. Separate from its execution of documenting a live performance, the show actually does have something very interesting to say in how it interrogates notions of personal identity. Through storytelling and magical set pieces, we see DelGuadio push against the various ways he has seen himself in his own life, push the audience to examine how they see themselves and others, often bringing volunteers up on stage to either bequeath an identity or transform one. #2. & #1. Bo Burnham: Inside & tick, tick…BOOM! I grouped together my top two films because they’ve become inextricably paired in my mind, and, taken together, they almost perfectly capture my feelings about this past year. Both are about a young central protagonist, struggling with their first anxieties about growing older and feelings of failure, but with diametrically opposed messages Based on its absence from most of the year-end best-of lists that I’ve read, it seems like Bo Burnham: Inside has either been somewhat forgotten since this past spring or stopped being considered a film after Netflix submitted it for Emmy consideration. That is a shame because not only is this one of the more impressive films I’ve ever seen, that actually seemed to be the consensus view when it first came out. There are only a handful of people credited on Inside because Burnham wrote and directed it, is the only performer in it, composed and recorded all of the music for it, and handled all of the cinematography and film editing for it himself. For a film looking to capture, among other things, the feeling of being trapped inside with your own thoughts during the pandemic, it helps that no other hands were involved until post-production. That said, and for as great as I think it is, I had been very resistant to having it wind up as my top film for this year. I had started a review of Inside shortly after it came out, but could never motivate myself to finish it because of how acid and hopeless it is as a film. Somewhat like watching late-career George Carlin, you can laugh and be entertained while you're watching it, but the view of people and the world underneath it all is so caustic that it can be depressing to interrogate what is being said too closely. On quite the opposite end of the spectrum is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, tick, tick…BOOM! There is a light, popcorny feel to tick, tick…BOOM! that also made me briefly hesitant to give it the top spot on my list for this year, but if I’m being fully honest with myself, this is already the film from this year I’ve rewatched the most, and the one I expect to return to the most in the years ahead. tick, tick…BOOM! is about the early career struggles of Jonathan Larson, who would go on to write the phenomenally successful musical Rent , but pass away right before its off-Broadway premiere. It’s an adaptation of an autobiographical musical written by Larson, that he performed while he was still alive, and has been staged in different forms since his passing, notably in 2014 with Miranda playing the role of Larson. This version mixes together Larson performing tick, tick…BOOM! with depictions of the events being recounted in the performance. Thematically, tick, tick…BOOM! takes a lot of the opposite, and more hopeful, positions to those taken by Inside. Both films deal with the pressure to make your mark in the world, anchored on the main character turning thirty. But while Burnham jokes(?) about killing himself if he lives to see forty, Larson’s arc is to make peace with simply doing the most he can with whatever time he has left. Where Burnham attacks the value of making content at all, Larson takes the position of creating art as being one of the most important human endeavors. tick, tick…BOOM! is also helped by one of the best lead performances of the year with Andrew Garfield as Jonathan Larson. Garfield trained for a year to handle the singing in this film, and his handling of the songs is better than any other production of the show I can find, even those by Larson, himself. Along with that though, Garfield is just incredibly likable as a leading man. In some sense, that likability captures the biggest difference between Inside and tick, tick…BOOM! for me. Inside is the more impressive artistic statement, but tick, tick…BOOM! is just a more likable and enjoyable film, and this year, that’s what I’ve been seeking out more than anything else. Other films considered for this list: A Glitch in the Matrix; Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar; Benedetta; The Card Counter; Clerk; CODA; The Courier; The Dig; Finch; The French Connection; I’m Your Man; In the Heights; Judas and the Black Messiah; Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time; The Last Duel; Listening to Kenny G; The Map of Tiny Perfect Things; The Matrix Resurrection; Minari; The Mitchell’s vs The Machines; No Sudden Move; Nobody; The Paper Tigers; Pig; Quo Vadis, Aida; Riders of Justice; Small Engine Repair; The Sparks Brothers; Summer of Soul; Val; The Velvet Underground; Werewolves Within, Zola Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.