Welcome to my second annual winter review round-up. In the preamble to last year’s round-up, I wrote that I was trying out the format as a way to mitigate not publishing much because the events of 2023 had me in an acute state of agita and melancholy. Spoiler alert: the events of 2024 didn’t exactly help to improve my precarious mental and emotional stability.
While I simply couldn’t get it together enough to publish regularly in the waning months of last year, I nevertheless feasted on the glut of end-of-year titles. I played catch-up as much as I could in preparation for contributing nominations and final votes for awards as a member of two critics organizations.
Presented below are capsule reviews of a slew of titles I saw in my end-of-year scramble to see as much as possible before voting and preparing my top ten titles of the year. (Flying Spaghetti Monster willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll publish that best-of 2024 list next week.) These capsule reviews are arranged in the order in which I saw the movies, over the course of a month or so. Without further ado, let’s get to the round-up:
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
Like it’s mouthful of a title, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Kevin Costner’s passion project –which had a three-decade+ gestation period – is overstuffed. As the first in a planned four-part series, it also feels incomplete and frustratingly introductory. Clocking in at a whopping 181 minutes, what Costner likely hopes to be his career-capping Western opus begins as a set-up to what we’ll see in the forthcoming three chapters. The film never quite breaks through that sense of set-up.
The number of characters that Costner’s picture – which he cowrote with Jon Baird and shares a story credit alongside Baird and Mark Kasdan – introduces us to is overwhelming. I’m all for telling epic, larger-than-life stories on the big screen, but watching Horizon gives one the impression that it would have worked better as a ten- or twelve-part limited series. In that instance, Costner & Co. could have crafted more focused hour-long segments with each assortment of characters, giving them all the room to breathe and the time for us to get to know and care about them.
As it is, this tail of the violent, bloody birth and early years of Horizon, an Arizona frontier town, tries to accomplish too much and leaves us confused about all the people we’re meeting and how they’re connected for most of its three hours. To his credit, Costner doesn’t shy away from the ugly truths hidden behind the lofty-sounding idea of manifest destiny. That’s a term that acted as cover for inexcusable acts of genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples – represented in Horizon by a band of Apache who decide to fight the incoming white oppressors – by European colonialists bent on stealing and exploiting the Western frontier for their own profit. It imparts a sour note to the magnificently beautiful vista shots captured in Horizon.
What Costner and his cinematographer, J. Michael Muro – who worked with Costner on both Dances with Wolves and Open Range – capture in filming the stark beauty of the western landscape is Horizon’s greatest achievement. While watching it, I was struck by the distinct feeling that Costner, in the mold of John Ford, is perhaps one of the last great Western filmmakers.
I appreciated Horizon as the latest – and possibly one of the last – in a grand and epic genre that’s fading, the other three installments of Horizon notwithstanding. (I can unreservedly recommend another Western from 2024; Viggo Mortensen’s splendid The Dead Don’t Hurt.) Costner is making films that, while flawed, I think we’ll miss when they’re gone for good.
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Thelma
Thelma is the kind of movie that leaves a smile on your face long after it’s over. This goofy action/comedy mashup centers on 93-year-old Thelma Post and her attempts to get her money back after falling victim to unscrupulous scammers. Thelma is played with pitch-perfect befuddlement by 95-year-old June Squibb. Much of the comedy comes from Squibb’s defiant indignation flowing from her character’s determination to get her money back.
It's almost impossible to avoid news stories detailing how the elderly are increasingly becoming targets of sophisticated scammers, collectively losing millions each year. That knowledge puts a pit in your stomach the instant Thelma answers her cell phone and someone claiming to be her grandson Danny tells her that he’s been arrested. The panicked voice on the other end of the phone tells Thelma that she needs to send $10,000 to a local address in order to spring her grandson from jail. She does so, but immediately regrets it when she learns that Danny is not, in fact, in the hoosegow, and that she’s handed a large portion of her savings over to thieves.
Thelma enlists some of her friends for help in tracking down the scammers, and writer/director Josh Margolin shoots a hilarious sequence in which Thelma “borrows” a mobility scooter like it’s a prison-break sequence in a Tom Cruise blockbuster. Margolin’s homages to action movie tropes throughout Thelma are inspired and hilarious.
One of the best of these involves Danny and his parents – played to varying degrees of comedic panic by Fred Hechinger, Clark Gregg, and the inimitable Parker Posey – as they desperately search for the missing Thelma. It depicts a mild-mannered family making a slightly dangerous turn from one street to another, but it’s shot, acted, edited, and scored like it belongs in the Fast and Furious franchise.
If you want a lighthearted comedy that, paradoxically, mines most of its laughs from some dark real-world circumstances, Thelma delivers. It also serves up a top-tier Parker Posey freakout and the final performance from screen legend Richard Roundtree.
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Civil War
The entirety of Civil War revolves around this dialog: "Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home - 'Don't do this.' But here we are."
The latest picture from writer/director Alex Garland was one that I initially planned on seeing at SXSW 2024, but I bailed on it when I calculated that I would need to stand in line for four hours in order to have any hope of getting in to see it. Nine months later, I finally caught up with Civil War from the comfort of my couch at home.
That comfort didn’t in any way reduce the fascination, revulsion, and disgust I felt while watching the British director’s take on what it might look like if the United States fell into the carnage and bloodshed of a second civil war. The revulsion and disgust came mostly from my acute awareness that the country I call home feels perpetually on the precipice of exactly this kind of needless death and destruction.
The quote at the top comes from seasoned war photographer Lee, as she and a small band of compatriots move through a war-torn landscape on their way from New York City to Washington, DC, in an attempt to get an interview with the authoritarian President of the United States, who is serving his third term in office.
Despite the President’s assurances to the American public that the war is almost at an end and that his glorious victory is imminent, Lee and her team know what everyone else does. The separatist factions of the Western Forces and the Florida Alliance are closing in on DC, and POTUS’s days are numbered.
Lee and her colleague, Joel, are determined to get into the White House for an interview with the President before his regime falls. Before breaking camp to head to the Western Forces frontline in Charlottesville, VA, Lee and Joel add two more to their party. The first is their mentor, Sammy, who is trying to get to Charlottesville for his own reasons, and Jessie, a green photojournalist who idolizes Lee and is desperate to prove her mettle as a photographer in battle.
In the wake of the film’s release, I heard grumblings that Civil War’s politics were too muddled and undefined to provide a meaningful commentary on our real-world political turmoil. I was surprised to discover that I found Garland’s approach nuanced and complex, if a bit opaque. It’s also slightly beside the point. No matter the reason for the fighting, Garland’s ultimate preoccupation in Civil War is examining the kinds of people who run into deadly situations in order to document what’s happening for those on the outside.
Garland’s film is a celebration of the bravery of war journalists, who risk everything to broadcast the truth from the most dangerous conflict zones on earth. It also acknowledges that at least some of that bravery is fueled by adrenaline addiction. Civil War also delivers outstanding performances from Kirsten Dunst as Lee, Cailee Spaeny as Jessie, Wagner Moura as Joel, and Stephen McKinley Henderson as Sammy.
Jesse Plemons, AKA Mr. Kirsten Dunst, steals the movie for five minutes in an uncredited role as an ultranationalist white supremacist who may or may not be using the conflict as his own personal means of executing fellow citizens who he deems as not being the right kind of American. It’s one of Plemons’s most chilling appearances on screen, and that’s saying something considering his work on Breaking Bad. The character – like the movie more broadly – also serves to remind us that when we allow civil society to crumble, the violence and suffering that’s unleashed as a result is unconscionable.
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Queer
Luca Guadagnino wasn’t content to release one stunning and audacious project in 2024, so he somehow made time for two. After the spring release of Challengers – a title I only later caught up with in the fall – Guadagnino dropped (right in time for awards season) the trippy, hyper-stylized passion project that’s been gestating inside of him since he read the source material 35 years ago at the age of seventeen.
Set in 1950, Queer is based on the novella of the same name by William S. Burroughs, and revolves around William Lee, a semi-fictionalized version of Burroughs. Lee, a tortured soul struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, is living in Mexico City, sustaining himself through a mix of odd jobs and his GI Bill benefits. While bar hopping and passing the time with various sexual trysts, Lee meets a fellow American expatriate named Eugene Allerton. The two strike up a friendship and sexual relationship that proves to change both men in ways neither could predict.
Lee becomes obsessed with Allerton in the way that only someone who is deeply uncomfortable with themselves can; Lee looks to Allerton not as a way to fix himself, but as a way to forget himself while in the thrall of another. Desperate to be understood completely by someone else, Lee convinces Allerton to travel to South America with him in pursuit of a drug that will facilitate telepathy.
The drug that Lee finds is ayahuasca, and Guadagnino stages one of the most memorable and viscerally potent drug-trip sequences in recent cinematic history. The entirety of Queer is a formal wonder, with surrealist touches bordering on Lynchian, and the same languid sensuality found in Guadagnino’s exquisite Call Me by Your Name.
A friend whom I follow on Letterboxd commented in his reaction to Queer that maybe he has to admit that he just doesn’t like Burroughs. As someone who struggles with thoughts of inadequacy, self-consciousness, and an acute inferiority complex, I felt particularly seen by Guadagnino’s film. Like Lee, I, too, feel like I struggle to make myself understood to the outside world.
Our life circumstances couldn’t be more different, but I connected deeply to Lee and our shared psychology. Meanwhile, Guadagnino’s sui generis aesthetics swept me off my feet; I was enthralled with the way he told his story. Daniel Craig, in the role of Lee, delivers a tortured performance that turns his James Bond persona on its head. Jason Schwartzman also turns in an idiosyncratic and droll performance as one of Lee’s expatriate acquaintances.
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Coreys
Coreys contains some of the most bonkers twelve minutes you could ever spend in front of a screen. I had never heard of this short film by director Dan Streit and writer Conner O’Malley – who also plays the titular Coreys – until Rae and I sat down to wade through Letterboxd’s 2024 Year in Review.
The film was listed in the YIR as the highest rated live-action short based on Letterboxd users’ rankings. The comically cryptic one-sentence summary of the story, “Corey goes to Las Vegas to meet the other Corey,” intrigued Rae and I enough that we switched over to YouTube, where Coreys is currently available to stream, to check it out. What we saw melted our faces.
Fair warning: the psychedelic mind meld that the two Coreys at the center of the short undergo – which, for me, was the highlight of the experience – was put together with the use of the hated and feared AI monster. (In my defense, I didn’t know that was the case until I did some poking around on Letterboxd after watching the movie.)
If you don’t have moral objections to watching something created in part with a tool that is determined to kill creative jobs and further ruin our already collapsing environment – you’ll get zero judgement from me if you do harbor those objections! – then get in a dark room, fire up YouTube, and prepare yourself for the freak out. “COREY!!!!!”
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Memoir of a Snail
The works of Roald Dahl swirled in my head as I watched Memoir of a Snail, stop-motion animator Adam Elliot’s second feature film after 2009’s Mary and Max. Elliot channels Dahl’s penchant for feeding kids miserabilism from the likes of hostile care takers (James and the Giant Peach) or crushing poverty (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as obstacles for his heroes to overcome. While it might be animated and appear kid-friendly, Memoir of a Snail is most decidedly for grown-ups.
Elliot’s movie, which is semi-autobiographical, follows the life of Aussie Grace Pudel, whom we meet as a girl in 1970s Melbourne. She lives with her twin brother, Gilbert, and their French father, Percy, who gave up on his career as a juggler and turned to alcohol when Grace and Gilbert’s mother died in childbirth. Percy dies in his sleep when the twins are still very young, and the state separates them to be raised on either end of the Australian continent by foster families.
So far, so Dahl. Things take a decidedly more adult turn when Grace tells us in her small, quiet voiceover about who is raising her and her brother. Grace’s foster parents are swingers who lightly neglect their new charge in order to get their freak on. This dynamic is played for laughs, and we understand that Grace isn’t in any real danger, and likely prefers to be left to her own devices anyway.
The more disturbing situation is the one in which Gilbert finds himself. His foster parents are religious fanatics, doling out harsh punishment and cruelty to their biological children and Gilbert for not being devout enough or, more importantly, for not working hard enough during their shifts for the family business. Elliot’s portrayal of ecstatic speaking-in-tongues was a highlight of the movie for me.
To cope with losing her father and brother, Grace turns to collecting anything snail-related that she can find. Already accustomed to abuse from others because of her cleft lip, Grace all but disappears into an imaginary snail shell as a form of self-protection. The dazzling detail of Elliot’s stop-motion animation, from each and every snail shell to every other item in the frame, is a wonder.
As miserable and depressing as Memoir of a Snail can get – as Grace grows into a woman, she falls in love with and marries a man who she discovers has an ulterior motive to his affection for her; she confronts the devastating realities of Alzheimer's disease in a friend; and Gilbert, meanwhile, navigates his adoptive family’s bigotry when he explores his queer identity – Elliot manages to make all the suffering secondary to the wonders of being alive.
As bad as things get for Grace and Gilbert, misery rarely lasts forever, and Memoir of a Snail finds a quiet strength in perseverance and dignity in the face of suffering. While it’s too intense of a journey for kids, Elliot’s movie provides a way for adults to take comfort in friendship and love when all else seems hopeless.
