Category: Movie Reviews

This year’s ranking of the 2024 Best Picture field is here—see the list below with links to full reviews for each film. Afterward, see my writeup for general commentary on the nominees.

 

10. Maestro (full review)

9. Barbie (full review)

8. Past Lives (full review)

7. Poor Things (full review)

6. American Fiction (full review)

5. The Holdovers (full review)

4. Killers of the Flower Moon (full review)

3. Anatomy of a Fall (full review)

2. Oppenheimer (full review)

1. The Zone of Interest (full review)

Commentary

In the half-decade that I’ve been compiling these rankings, this is the most impressive Best Picture slate that I’ve reviewed. Four of these ten are excellent movies, and at least one of the four is a masterpiece. Add Asteroid City from Wes Anderson, whose mounting pile of snubs will one day haunt the Academy, and you have five valuable additions to twenty-first century cinema.

Among some of these, I detect a common thread: humanity’s paralysis in the face of violent horrors. How timely. Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest all contribute important nuance to what amounts to a masterly cinematic discussion. Perhaps the order in which I’ve ranked them reflects the degree to which their protagonists confront the evil of their inaction: Ernest from Killers remains totally unwilling to do so, while Rudolph from Zone looks straight into the abyss and sees… well, I won’t spoil it for you.

Some may feel that I’ve shortchanged Barbie, the year’s top grossing movie. But to them and those who feel that Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were snubbed: I entreat you to watch the other films. Barbie operates on a meta level, calling for change in media and institutions. The other films, though, are way ahead of it: they answer that call. Anatomy of a Fall sympathetically portrays an imperfect woman. The Holdovers chronicles and validates a vulnerable masculinity. No grand speeches or recited thinkpieces are necessary for these superior films because they, like all good art, serve as counterpoints to mainstream narratives. They prove their dislike of commercial ideas by leaving them behind. Barbie, meanwhile, produced as it is by the multibillion dollar Mattel corporation, is chained to those ideas, so, to satisfy feminist discoursers, it spends its runtime merely telling us what it dislikes. But lodging complaints is superficial; only charting a new path is authentic. Today’s admirers of the movie may yet come to recognize it as just another guise of the ultimate chameleon, who’s always changing outfits—but always the same underneath.

Outside of the Oscar field, this year was notable for the decline of Disney as a dominant box office force. Marvel films are getting more boring by the week (even from, in my view, an impressively boring foundation), Star Wars may never recover from its last installment, and the animated studio outputs are regressing to 70s/80s-level blandness. Maybe that’s why this was such a good year for big studio films like Oppenheimer: the end of a monopoly is always good for the customer. Let’s see if the empire strikes back in 2024.

 

–Jim Andersen

Poor Things is a celebration of sexual adventurousness, empathy for the poor, traveling the world, higher education, and belief in the scientific method—in other words, of being a Democrat. I’m one myself, so I don’t mind the pat on the back. But after two-and-a half-hours, one’s back gets a little worn out.

A comedy that flatters isn’t likely to be very original in concept, and indeed, although director Yorgos Lanthimos’ audiovisual effort at quirkiness is formidable, the substance of Poor Things is of a conventional mold. Emma Stone manifests various shades of a cliched character: the clueless outsider wreaking havoc on social norms. Tarzan. Borat. Big. Coneheads. You’ve seen them; you know what kind of jokes this movie has in store. Fifteen years after Borat, Stone deadpans: “Shall we touch each other’s genital pieces?” Twenty-five years after “Spongebob Squarepants,” Mark Ruffalo hams it up as a chauvinist Squidward.

The movie’s premise, too, for all its sci-fi gloss, is decades too late to be interesting. In 1989, a naïve mermaid wondered at a kitchen fork and dreamt of exploring the world. Poor Things, released thirty-five years later, uses the same concept (employing, even, quasi-animated backgrounds), modified only by the fact that—of no little emphasis throughout—Bella Baxter has a vagina. This will strike you as an innovation only if you’ve managed to miss, for example, every HBO show ever made.

British humor. It seemingly always comes back to sex, to the uproarious lifting of naughty taboos. But who, nowadays, is imposing these taboos? Poor Things, like Lanthimos’ previous feature, The Favourite, takes place in older times, the better to supply a parade of stunned prudes to gape at women talking about their clitorises. That Lanthimos must reach backward to enable these situations says something about how stale they are. Today, even the leader of the Republican Party discusses pussies in casual conversation. So, again, who among us are these frowning, stuffy villains?

Or are we all heroes? If we are, then my feature-length pat on the back, in addition to being tiresome, has no meaning. Because, to quote Syndrome: when everyone’s super, no one will be.

 

-Jim Andersen

An ingenious subversion of the courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall dives into modern society’s fractured, confused ethical landscape with the goal of salvaging something useful, and it succeeds.

Samuel Meleski (Samuel Theis) has fallen to his death under strange circumstances. His wife, Sandra (Sandra Huller) is suspected of murdering him, but complexities abound. After the review of painstaking forensic analysis; changing stories from Sandra and her blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner); and a recording of a ferocious argument between Sandra and her husband; Sandra remains, in the court’s view, the likely culprit, but her guilt hasn’t been proven with certainty. Plus, a competing narrative emerges that Samuel was depressed and may have killed himself (although Sandra herself initially disbelieves this).

Thus, our favorite sources of knowledge fail to yield conclusive results. Scientific evidence, eyewitness accounts, professional expertise, and even taped dialogue leave us in doubt. Is Sandra guilty? Is she merely the victim of sexism? Of poor representation by her defense lawyer (Swann Arlaud), who lacks the fiery eloquence of his prosecutorial counterpart (Antoine Reinartz)? Of the murkiness of marriage, which defies the kind of easy answers that the jury seeks? Or, finally, is she simply a victim of the very notion of truth, which, despite its pretenses, is never ironclad—vulnerable, especially, to the convergence of unfortunate coincidences?

In summary, Triet has shuttled us into the epistemological crisis that, arguably, has characterized much of the 21st century. Truth is a lie, the thinking goes, and cases like Sandra’s prove it. Why even try to parse facts, when so many of them are suspect? (After all, they were gathered by humans, who are prone to error.) Why attempt to form conclusions, when our interpretations rely on inference and, sometimes, prejudice?

But one witness has yet to come forward. Daniel may not have been able to see the tragedy, but his experiences have lent him a perspective on the case. Torn whether to share it, he shrieks for help, realizing that there’s no perfect solution: if he provides testimony beneficial to his mother, he may well aid in freeing his father’s murderer. His cries, however, are in vain: there’s no help on the way. He, on the verge of adulthood, must for the first time reckon with the ambiguity of life, making a decision with mighty consequences while possessing only incomplete information. Such is life. We’re all blind, metaphorically, yet we forge a way forward.

So, again: is Sandra guilty? No, she isn’t. Do I know this for sure? That’s the mischievous question. I suppose I don’t, but shall we dismantle society on the basis of our limitations, rather than hoisting it on the basis of our strengths? Triet, with this virtuosic picture, says that we shall not. Because for us humans, nothing is ever certain—unlike for Snoop, the family dog, who, upon Sandra’s return, snuggles up to her, never having doubted: acquainted, maybe, with some means of unshakable, irrefutable knowledge, forever elusive to us.

 

–Jim Andersen

 

There’s always one.

Every year, I watch all ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar, which means that every year, I have to spend a whole evening watching somebody impersonate a musician. Maestro, this year, was my dutiful sacrifice to the Academy.

As with Bohemian Rhapsody and Elvis, I can only spend my review questioning why this movie was made. Musicians, after all, hardly need films: their work speaks so loudly for itself, and we can access it any time we want. Of what importance, really, are their private lives? This is an especially pressing quandary for this picture, since Leonard Bernstein wasn’t a wild man like Freddy Mercury or Elvis, both of whom, as characters, at least promise a spectacle (even in their faded, Oscar-tailored iterations). Rather, he was a focused composer who mixed in high society and partook in affairs. The movie, therefore, has nothing to depict. Its runtime consists of light, uninteresting banter—as if, instead of aiming to portray older times, it means to copy older cinematic aesthetics: in particular the penchant for sniggering, martini-sipping remarks, which don’t pack a tremendous punch these days.

Bradley Cooper wears a prosthetic nose for this role. He has to, because he doesn’t look a lot like Leonard Bernstein. Truth be told, he doesn’t sound a lot like him, either. It was a stroke of good fortune for his casting prospects, however, that the director, co-writer, and co-producer of this movie were all… Bradley Cooper.

(Said dryly between martini sips): The audition must have been a breeze.

 

–Jim Andersen

 

The Zone of Interest is the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon achievement that makes very good films seem paltry and pointless by comparison. In a year of troubled pictures that reckon with twentieth century evils—searching, clearly, for the secret to averting their twenty-first century recurrences—Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama stands apart for its supreme daring, originality, and, most importantly, wisdom.

Allow me to explain my reverence for The Zone of Interest.

The film follows a Nazi family presiding over unspeakable suffering. Directly over the wall of their property lies Auschwitz, where father Rudolph Hoss has made a name for himself as an efficient and levelheaded manager of Jewish extermination. He isn’t a crazed maniac, though—at least not outwardly—unlike the cinematic villains of Schindler’s List and Inglourious Basterds. In fact, he wife, Hedwig, are, from what we can see, quite dull. They dodder around the house and act out a boring family drama: Rudolph has to leave town for a new post while Hedwig stays behind and cares for the kids.

An unremarkable tale. The film’s titular “interest,” though, lies in the way that the characters go through their daily motions without acknowledging the gunshots and cries of torture that pour steadily into their yard from the camp. These noises are easily audible to us, which means that the Hosses can hear them, as well. How, then, do they go about their day? How do they live with themselves?

Because of the remarkable dissonance on display, The Zone of Interest has been repeatedly linked to Hannah Arendt’s notorious formulation of “the banality of evil.” But I think the comparison is misguided. In Arendt’s argument, Nazis were guilty of substituting official commands—the “law”—for the truer law of Kant’s categorical imperative. Glazer’s Nazis, however, don’t appear morally confused in this manner. Unlike the mindless rank and file of Arendt’s imagination, these characters know what they’re doing, and they know that it’s wrong. They simply don’t want to know (because they stand to benefit from it), and they succeed in hiding their knowledge from their own consciences.

Several developments demonstrate that the Hosses, in contradiction to the notion of the “banality of evil,” know perfectly well the evil of Nazism. When Hedwig’s visiting mother, for example, tells a pithy story about a Jewish servant, Hedwig becomes visibly uncomfortable. Apparently, for Hedwig and Rudolph, even anti-Semitism isn’t good enough: what they require is total omission of Jews from discussion. Lies, after all, are leaky, since their fallacies risk being recognized. Constant, effortful ignorance, by contrast, is airtight. If Jews are never mentioned, the morals of their elimination never require consideration, let alone justification. (Indeed, Hedwig’s mother later leaves the house in discomfort: although bigoted, she alone, having spoken the victims into existence, finds herself haunted by the crematorium.)

The question, then, isn’t how the Hosses fail to realize their culpability—they do. The question is how they distract themselves from it. And this is what the bulk of The Zone of Interest illustrates.

Floors are swept. Hedges are trimmed. New clothes are tried. Board meetings are held. Parties are thrown. Gossip is exchanged. Work calls are made. Marital squabbles are had. These are the events shown in The Zone of Interest, because they comprise the all-important bubble in which the Hosses have ensconced themselves to guard against their own moral compasses. Not even the sounds of mass death can penetrate this bubble: dreariness, it seems, is a formidable shield. Only when evidence of such horror arrives unmistakably under their noses—such as Hedwig’s mother’s departing letter, or the appearance of human remains in the nearby river—is the bubble invaded, but even then, Rudolph and Hedwig quickly discard the relevant evidence, quickly rebuilding their mental fortress of domestic duty.

Mundane matters, it appears, can consume a life. They’re the blinders that, if we prefer, can shield us from real reflections. Such as: What is my responsibility to the world? Am I making society better or worse? What is happening outside of my immediate circle, and is it good or bad? The Hosses find it possible to participate in genocide because they know how to drive their ugly thoughts away: by keeping busy with trivialities.

But for a brief, perhaps inevitable moment, the mental fortress does falter. At the movie’s conclusion, Rudolph begins dry-heaving after a Nazi social event, suggesting, for the first time, discomfort. He’s so uncomfortable, in fact, that he experiences, apparently, a premonition of the future: the opening of the Auschwitz museum, where the horrors he helped implement are on display for the world to see.

There’s something wrong, though. The impact of this vision isn’t what it should be. The employees preparing the exhibits don’t seem to notice what they’re looking at: unthinkingly, they scrub the windows, vacuum the floors, sweep the cells. Just as in the Hoss household, it seems, there’s work to be done. And, just as at home, the little tasks at hand—not the explosion of suffering all around—command all the attention.

Rudolph sees this. He sees that, in the future, our eyes will glaze over. That we’ll be too busy, too distracted to shudder or recoil. That the same banality that shields him and his family so safely from having to consider their actions will, just as surely, shield us, far in the future, from having to do so, as well. After all, under the shroud of dreary goings-on, he’s escaped his own conscience. Why not ours, too?

Reassured, he stops dry-heaving. Composed once again, he slips down the stairs, into the darkness, unseen, unnoticed, his crimes forever in shadow, his villainy vanished from the world, which has more pressing things to do than think about it. Thinking, of course, is the scourge of atrocity, and people are endlessly good—and getting better and better—at finding ways to avoid it.

So: the banality of evil? Jonathan Glazer, our newest deserver of the title of cinematic master, has given us a new, terrible take: the evil of the banal.

 

—Jim Andersen

 

American Fiction has two objectives. First, to parody the exploitation of Black artists by White people hungry for garish, insulting stereotypes. Second, to provide an alternative to these stereotypes by telling the nuanced story of a Black intellectual grappling with family troubles. Combined, that’s a lot for one movie, so it ultimately has to choose which objective is the priority. It chooses the latter.

Wrong choice. Unfortunately, the life of author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) isn’t all that compelling on its own, although it’s well written and acted. It’s only compelling when juxtaposed with Monk’s newest output: an intentionally exaggerated, phony novel of Black hardship and violence. But as American Fiction progresses, the farcical half of the plot—the key to the other half’s significance—fades into the background. Therefore, the movie becomes increasingly ho-hum and forgettable.

The result of the failed balancing act is a very good movie in parts, but not as a whole. There are scenes of first-rate satire, such as a White interviewer fawning over a popular Black author whose dumbed-down new novel (“We’s Lives In Da Ghetto”—hilarious) features two characters arguing in heavy vernacular about a trip to the pharmacy. On the other hand, there are scenes of laudable realism, such as Monk’s arguments with his wayward brother, Cliff. These two aesthetics are awkward bedfellows. Imagine if “South Park” had attempted to reshape itself into an Oscar contender.

Perhaps the film’s tonal inconsistency is why its narrative eventually disintegrates, unable to reach a conclusion. Caught between satire and realism, between sharp-edged humor and subtle drama, it can only peter out, shielding its own exit with tired postmodern games. This final indecision may be a meta-commentary on the impossibility of writing (and existing) as Monk Ellison. But even so, the smell of a cop-out is unmistakable, and this ending reeks. Given American Fiction‘s jumbled concept(s), one last disappointment may have been inevitable.

 

-Jim Andersen