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:
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I’ll start my review of Dune: Part One by using one epic fantasy tale to comment on another. In The Waste Lands, the third book of Stephen King’s sprawling Dark Tower series, Roland, the hero from another world, asks to hear stories from the Wizard of Oz books. His response when asked why is, “The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.” Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s serpentine 1965 novel Dune dreams of a pitiless, insatiable greed for power and riches, colonialist subjugation of marginalized societies, and a savior who promises to right all. Fifty-five years after the publication of the source material, Villeneuve’s stunning translation of Dune for the screen shows that whether it be 2021, 1965, or 1065, humanity’s preoccupations haven’t changed much.
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When adapting a play for the screen, there’s always the risk that the result will feel stage bound. Movies are uniquely visual, whereas plays, more often than not, rely heavily on words to convey ideas. In his adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning August Wilson play Fences, director and star Denzel Washington probably felt the pressure to bring a cinematic style to a stage production that takes place entirely in the yard of a house. Washington moved several of the scenes inside the house, and a few of the 140-minutes of run time take place in other spaces: a bar, the walk home from a hard day’s work. Aside from the real shooting locations, the outcome is reminiscent of a filmed play. But when the words being spoken are as brutal and honest as August Wilson’s, and the performances are as emotionally pulverizing as they are in Fences, the fact that the movie feels stagy is much less important.
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