Living in Cinema: 10 Films You Didn't See Last Year, Part Two
Living in Cinema celebrates the triumphs and failures of contemporary films. This week, let's talk about films you didn't see in 2024 and why you should see them.
Between guild strikes, pinch-fist studios, screenplay punch-ups, recasting, reshoots, streaming wars, and uninspired marketing campaigns, you’ll be forgiven for not seeing every noteworthy movie that came over the transom in 2024. I saw 52 movies last year, one for each week, and there’s still stones left unturned in my garden. I Saw the TV Glow, The People’s Joker, and Sing Sing remain untouched in my queue, which is to say no list of movies is ever truly complete. Last year was no slouch when it came to blockbusters: Dune: Part Two, Civil War, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Nosferatu, The Substance, Alien: Romulus, and Challengers all sold truckloads of tickets and pseudo-sexual popcorn buckets and helped the box office live to fight another day. But what about the rest of the gym-class heroes left unpicked for the kickball team? Let’s talk about ten movies you didn’t see last year and why you should see them. (Read Part One for the first five films on the list).
5. Strange Darling
Call it a struggle meal if you must, but there are days in this life when I’d put a bowl of salsa and a bag of scoops up against any tagliatelle bolognese at the local pasta-house down the street. Likewise with film, there are nights I crave a steaming bowl of style over, ahem, substance. And I’ll be damned if Strange Darling isn’t a twelve-layer taco dip of signature beans and spices. Our chef du jour is director JT Mollner, whose kitchen is stocked with no shortage of title cards, needle drops, lens flares, dissolves, guns, ketamine garnishes, mismatched underwear, blood, and non-linear storytelling aperitifs. The result is a pantry-dinner charcuterie board that’s one part BDSM psycho-thriller, one part riot grrrl rampage, and one part cautionary tale about why you should never, ever become mountain people. The film has the brass balls to begin with a title card that reads: shot entirely on 35mm film. There’s an amuse bouche if I ever saw one. Clocking in at 96 minutes and featuring a breakout performance from Willa Fitzgerald, Strange Darling all but guarantees Mollner will be given another chance to sharpen his knives, and I for one await his next struggle meal with burbling stomach. The breakfast Ed Begley Jr. cooks in this movie, along with the entire stick of butter he dead-drops into his skillet for fried eggs, remains the loudest in-theater gasp I heard all year in 2024.
4. Stand Up Solutions
At last we arrive at the great questions: What is the meaning of life? Where do we go when we die? Are stand-up comedy specials movies? Well, they’re written, performed, filmed, edited, and watched—what do you have to say about that, Pauline Kael? Calling Conner O’Malley a comedian, let alone a stand-up comedian, is kind of like calling a spoon a shovel. Yes the work is the same, but one of them digs graves for a living. O’Malley is more of an agent provocateur, a performance artist whose nightmarish Youtube videos are send-ups of America’s crumbling male psyche. His characters thrash, dither, and gnash their teeth as they throw themselves onto the dying embers of internet fame, fast-cash gambles, and tribal acceptance from QAnon berserkers. In Stand Up Solutions, O’Malley plays haunted start-up entrepreneur Richard Eagleton, a man hell-bent on selling his vision: an AI-generated stand-up robot that steals data from our phones in order to mine comedic gold from the slop of our lives. Framing his audience as would-be investors at a pitch meeting, Eagleton is a mash-up of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and your basement-dwelling friend who always has a new idea for an app. Part of O’Malley’s genius is his willingness to deprave himself, and he uses every inch of his hulking shoulders, crooked teeth, and scratched, manic voice to both terrify and exhilarate his captives. In my favorite comedy moment of 2024, O’Malley slows down for some crowd work, asking his audience if they’ve seen “that Top Gun movie.” Did you, did you, did you, he asks. “How’d they get them planes so fast,” he suddenly screams, and for a second nobody knows where Conner O’Malley ends and Richard Eagleton begins.
3. Nickel Boys
I joked in Part One of this hallowed list that 2024 was a pantheon year for staring in movies, but thankfully one film came along and turned all my wise-cracking bullshit into dust. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, Nickel Boys not only tells the story of Elwood and Turner (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson), two black teenagers navigating their way through Jim Crow-era reform school, it tells their stories through first-person camerawork that captures every detail and shared moment of their lived experiences. It’s impossible to overstate the difficulty of filming a story in which your main character is the camera, and yet Nickel Boys defiantly strides past this challenge at every turn. There’s never a doubt whose eyes are seeing the world. Whether it’s Elwood or Turner, the composition of each character’s perspective is always singular, even when the camera deconstructs moments they experience together. It’s like watching late-period Malick if you tossed poetry and vibes into the river and watched a landscape artist paint the river instead. This is not to say Nickel Boys isn’t lyric. RaMell Ross’s feature debut is unmatched in its portrayal of the cruel, impassive work of history and the weird roads down which it inevitably leads us to companionship and meaning. When people say a film is like poetry, often what they’re stating is a film’s pronouncement of its own beauty. When I say a movie like Nickel Boys is lyric, I’m saying it does the work a poem is supposed to do: it sings us a song without knowing it’s singing.
2. The Brutalist
Yes we all know this movie was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, and yes we all know Adrian Brody gave an all-time insufferable acceptance speech after winning Best Actor, but show of hands: did you see this film? Despite Hungarian-AI debacles, intermissions, and a film-bro marketing campaign that made Strange Darling look like a PBS documentary, The Brutalist was the most moving film I saw in 2024. What do I mean when I say this word “moving”? Across continents, oceans, addictions, overtures, and decades, when the credits roll on Brady Corbet’s immigrant epic about the stakes of artistic vision in a country where the ruling class simply tolerates you, we feel as though we’ve been physically moved across the room and the place where we began is no longer familiar to us. For László Tóth (Adrian Brody), architecture is not merely a profession through which he builds bookshelves, churches, and bowling alleys for his rich, all-consuming benefactors. Rather, architecture is a deconstruction and defiance of the fascist ideals that drove him out of Hungary. Perhaps you remember Albert Speer, the famous architectural scumbag and nazi war criminal? Speer’s most cynical contribution to architectural theory was “ruin value,” the idea that buildings ought to look beautiful even when they’re destroyed. In The Brutalist, Tóth goes to war for posterity: his buildings are monuments to the people that history couldn’t destroy and the cultures that will outlast the ruination around them. There’s nothing more American than outlasting America, even if it means America destroys your sense of self in the process.
1. Evil Does Not Exist
Legend has it that an aspiring filmmaker named Alfred Hitchcock is responsible for coining a term he called the icebox scene: the kind of scene that “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.” Almost a year after its Japanese release, Evil Does Not Exist is the movie that continues to stalk me cold while I’m out for a hike in the woods, simmering broth for a ramen, or staring with trepidation at the group-text invitation for a luxe cabin getaway (don’t worry, nobody invites me to those). Much like writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s previous film, Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist is unhurried and contemplative with its camera, a deliberate, tension-building choice that roots us in the mountain village of Mizubiki, where protagonist Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) live off the land and the fellowship of their goodly, homespun neighbors. The film’s declarative title entangles the events of Evil Does Not Exist in an ethical quandary that’s impossible to unknot: when a corporate glamping start-up shows up at your door and threatens to overtake your land, is that evil? Who decides? And if your community rallies together against the inevitable sprawl of capitalism, who’s to say this isn’t evil in itself? Evil does not exist, the film tells us, which unearths an even more terrifying question: what matters? Is the very question of evil a meaningless one because life is simply a matter of what happens and what doesn’t? These questions barrel with abandon into the movie’s final sequence, which is among the most challenging, convulsive, and unforgettable filmmaking I saw all year, and yes I saw the scene with the CGI sharks in Gladiator 2.
Agitprop
• Find yourself in upstate New York for a luxe cabin getaway? First of all, evil does exist. Second of all, catch a movie at Upstate Films and support theaters, damn it
• Wanna get drunk with your dog under the night sky this summer because you’re living out of your car in upstate New York? Catch a movie at the Overlook Drive-In
Until next time, I’ll see you in hell.