Stylish Substance: PRESENCE and BLACK BAG

The usual haunted house movie is all about how scary it would be to live with a ghost. Here’s one that goes a step further: it’d also be scary to be a ghost. The formal conceit of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence puts us in the ghost’s skittish perspective. The camera is the specter’s point of view. It lurks. It glides. It peers around corners. It eavesdrops on the family drama of the home’s new inhabitants. The mother (Lucy Liu) has looming legal trouble related to her job, the son (Eddy Maday) is a grumpy high school swimmer who is clearly a bit of a bully, the daughter (Callina Liang) is mourning the recent death of a friend, and the father (Chris Sullivan) is just tired of all this stress. Even without a ghost in the house, they’d be a troubled bunch. David Koepp’s screenplay tensely suggests these dilemmas as glimpsed from the haunted perspective. Joining the melodrama to an elliptical telling gives the story an extra eerie frisson. These are convincing, concisely drawn characterizations with a casualness that’s powerfully expressive in the performances. And the style lends all of that extra power as the camera floats and darts and stares and hides. It compounds the tension in interesting ways. It makes the audience lean in to fill in the gaps. And then there’s the additional electricity in seeing a typical ghost story scene in which a sleeping character awakens with a start and stares into a room’s dark corner, clearly sensing the supernatural presence, and seeing the character’s fearful eyes looking directly at us. Have we been spotted? The short movie (not quite 90 minutes) never outstays its welcome as it draws to a fine genre close—a kind of percolating teen drama slowly descending into horror—and takes a few gut-twisting swerves. The final shots pay off both the style and the story simultaneously with a shivering gasp. This is a fine example of playful style matching sturdy function.

Soderbergh is a rare modern Hollywood craftsman whose prolific and consistent sense of play with style only adds to the fine-tuned pleasures of his films. He clearly loves moviemaking, and it enlivens the genres to which he brings his touch. Whether a cheap experiment like Presence or his bigger studio productions, his movies reliably have slick surfaces and crisp editing, an intelligent precision to where he looks and what he sees, expertly calibrated with forward momentum and clever thoughtfulness. They are sensational entertainments serious about class and process and the ways our relationships get tangled up in ambitions and betrayals and systems. So of course Black Bag proves the spy movie works well for his style. He does it with an approach reminiscent of his Ocean’s trilogy. This is similarly a story that’s a nesting doll of intricate, intersecting secret plots done with warm colorful cinematography, a jazzy David Holmes score, clever multi-layered dialogue, and sexy stars outwitting one another. The movie, another scripted by Koepp, has a familiar cat-and-mouse game—a digital-age Le Carré mole hunt—enlivened by a cool, clinical, procedural logic. Husband and wife spies (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) that’s a cover for rooting out a suspicious character. Turns out each of them could be a suspect, too. Much sneaking and spying and setting traps ensues. Their boss (Pierce Brosnan) swoops in for a handful of scenes that keep the plates spinning, too. It has that pleasing confusion of the best spy stories, and the psychological gamesmanship you’d expect from wrapping it around a marriage. Soderbergh keeps this one short and sweet, too, playing out the setup to a crisp conclusion with a propulsive editing and clinical eye that suitably straightens out the complications with a satisfying snap.

Wild Child: NE ZHA 2

The bright and bouncy animated adventure sequel Ne Zha 2 is far and away the biggest movie of the year so far at the worldwide box office. It’s gotten nearly $2 billion to date, and shows little sign of slowing down. It’s a global crowd-pleaser, with a likable lead character and epic cartoony action that nonetheless knows how to pause to bring down the hammer of emotion. By the time you get to an emotional peak of the climax and find the title character, a little demon boy with a heart of gold, embracing his mother tightly, both of them weeping as they face certain doom in the fiery pit of the villain’s evil plot, it’d be tough to be unmoved. Yet you probably wouldn’t know much about this movie if you relied on the usual American mass media. Aside from some nods from showbiz reporters tallying up the grosses, this hit has gone largely unreviewed. Metacritic logs just two reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes has only aggregated six. That the movie’s nonetheless accumulated nearly $20 million thus far from American multiplexes is a sign that the word is getting out. And yet that it has done so to near silence from the usual sources of English-language criticism is an astonishing example of the provincial timidity of our media as it consolidates its coverage, contracts its scope, and nervously narrows its aims. It’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum was complaining about thirty years ago, the synergistic, parasitic demands of thoroughly corporate studios, media, and exhibitors artificially putting limits on the audience’s interests.

So here’s Ne Zha 2, a delight from beginning to end despite its 144-minute run time. It continues the story of the first picture, which introduced audiences to little Ne Zha, a scamp who looks like the British Dennis the Menace and acts like an anime hero filtered through Moana’s rounded sentimentality and Dreamworks' spiky silliness. He’s fighting his fate, trying desperately to battle the bad and uplift the good. It’s a story settled firmly in a loosely retold cinematic universe of Chinese mythology, and to a typical Western audience it’ll be occasionally baffling. (Try imagining getting dropped into a dense Hercules riff with no prior knowledge of Greek myth.) But writer-director Yang Yu has crafted a movie that moves like Hollywood blockbuster, even as it is so deeply informed by its cultural perspective. There are wars between immortal gods and trickster figures, jade palaces in the clouds, villages endangered by supernatural forces, gurus training students, martial arts, dragons, comic relief, and massive armies preparing for showdowns. It has the peaks and valleys, and twists and catharsis, a movie on this scale should deliver to its popcorn matinee audiences.

It’s satisfying, and easy to want more from its mythology unfurling as a backdrop to a lovable character just trying his best to be his best. The world is imagined well, with colorful complications and elaborate staging. The characters are vividly drawn and immediately appealing—from little Ne Zha to his roly-poly master, his noble parents, his ice-blue dragon-brother, and a big babyfaced deity. The writing is heart-felt and well-crafted to a sturdy family adventure formula, from escalating tension to kiddie humor asides. The action is well-choreographed, and takes advantage of the careening velocity and precision in framing that only a computer-animated sequence can pull off. Watching it, I got the feeling of being a foreigner looking in on something huge on which I’m almost missing out. This must be what international audiences feel watching blockbusters from us. It’s no more a work of Chinese propaganda than Hollywood blockbusters are visions of American hegemony. If you can believe only New York’s superheroes can stop international supervillains, or only a United States-led coalition can stop an alien invasion, you can hang with some Eastern mythology as it's rendered in vivid colors, appealing characters, and agreeable spectacle.

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Nickel Boys

2. Challengers

3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

4. The Beast

5. Hard Truths

6. Evil Does Not Exist

7. The Brutalist

8. A Real Pain

9. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

10. Wicked Part 1

 

Honorable Mentions: Anora; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; Between the Temples; The Book of Clarence; Carry-On; Civil War; Close Your Eyes; Coma; A Complete Unknown; Conclave; Dahomey; Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World; Dune Part Two; The Fall Guy; The First Omen; Ghostlight; God Save Texas: Hometown Prison; His Three Daughters; How to Have Sex; Hundreds of Beavers; I Saw the TV Glow; Janet Planet; Juror #2; Kinds of Kindness; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes; Kneecap; Last Summer; My Old Ass; No Other Land; The Order; Problemista; Red Rooms; Sing Sing; Smile 2; Soundtrack to a Coup d'État; The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel; The Substance; Thelma; Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl; The Wild Robot; Young Woman and the Sea

 

Other 2024 Bests

Other Bests of 2024

Best Cinematography (Film):

Anora

The Brutalist

The Bikeriders

Kinds of Kindness

Maria

 

Best Cinematography (Digital):

Challengers

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Hundreds of Beavers

Nickel Boys 

Best Sound:

The Beast

Challengers

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Smile 2

Best Original Score:

The Brutalist

Challengers

Dune Part Two

Saturday Night

The Wild Robot

 

Best Original Song:

"Kiss the Sky" - The Wild Robot

"My Stranger" - Your Monster

"New Brain" - Smile 2

"Release" - Trap

"Starburned and Unkissed" - I Saw the TV Glow 

 

Best Stunts:

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Dune Part Two

The Fall Guy

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Rebel Ridge

 

Best Costumes:

Challengers

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Smile 2

The Substance

Wicked Part 1

 

Best Hair and Makeup:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The Substance

Wicked Part 1

 

Best Set/Art Direction:

The Beast

The Brutalist

Challengers

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

Janet Planet

 

Best Effects:

Alien: Romulus

Dune Part Two

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Hundreds of Beavers

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

Best Editing:

The Beast

The Brutalist

Challengers

Nickel Boys

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

 

Best Adapted Screenplay:

The Beast

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Last Summer

Nickel Boys

Wicked Part 1

 

Best Original Screenplay:

The Brutalist

Challengers

Evil Does Not Exist

Hard Truths

A Real Pain

 

Best Non-English Language Film:

Close Your Eyes

Coma

Evil Does Not Exist

Last Summer

Red Rooms

 

Best Documentary:

Dahomey

God Save Texas: Hometown Prison

No Other Land

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

 

Best Animated Film:

Inside Out 2

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Orion and the Dark

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The Wild Robot

 

Best Supporting Actor:

Yura Borisov - Anora

Kieran Culkin - A Real Pain

Chris Hemsworth - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Samuel Kircher - Last Summer

George MacKay - The Beast

 

Best Supporting Actress:

Adria Arjona - Hit Man

Michele Austin - Hard Truths

Ariana Grande - Wicked Part 1

Carol Kane - Between the Temples

Zendaya - Dune Part Two

 

Best Actor:

Adrien Brody - The Brutalist

Colman Domingo - Sing Sing

Mike Faist - Challengers

Ralph Fiennes - Conclave

Josh O'Connor - Challengers

 

Best Actress:

Marianne Jean-Baptiste - Hard Truths

Kirsten Dunst - Civil War

Cynthia Erivo - Wicked Part 1

Lea Seydoux - The Beast

Zendaya - Challengers

 

Best Director:

Bertrand Bonello - The Beast

Luca Guadagnino - Challengers

Mike Leigh - Hard Truths

George Miller - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

RaMell Ross - Nickel Boys

 

Toying with Death: THE MONKEY

The Monkey is a funny, nasty little thing: a cockeyed horror movie with explosive gore served up as punchlines. Those are real gags in both senses of the word. Its horror is both archly told and earnestly felt. The blend of random violence and cornball sentimentality signals it as authentically Stephen King. It’s based on one of his short stories, after all. But it also makes it a satisfying, wild-eyed B-side to its writer-director Osgood Perkins’ previous feature, Longlegs. That surprise hit of last summer was a droning, portentous demonic serial killer movie. This one is about twin boys who discover a cursed wind-up monkey. Both pictures are about a legacy of family trauma, the capriciousness of fragile life and random death, and a possibly quixotic attempt by children to atone for the sins of their parents. Longlegs did so with a sly sense of silliness percolating under its grim straight-faced sense of doom that feels a little empty by the end. I liked The Monkey’s approach more, for its oddball turns and jabs, and its sense of accumulating absurdity. The twins don’t know the toy monkey’s deadly curse—but we know immediately it’s up to no good since the movie starts with their father (Adam Scott) trying to sell it in a pawn shop, an effort thwarted by a sudden accident taking the shopkeeper’s life. He’s abandoned his boys years ago, though, and their mother (Tatiana Maslany) isn’t talking about him. Snooping for information, the boys find the cursed thing in the back of a closet. Let the random deaths begin. 

The movie wastes no time quickly and impactfully killing off a few characters, then jumps ahead 25 years to find the meeker of the boys (grown in Theo James) having deliberately isolated himself from others to avoid the pain of losing them. Too bad, then, that the monkey will make a comeback and leave a bloody trail in its mechanically-drumming wake. In true King fashion, the grown-up kids feel they're the only ones who can stop It. By rooting the movie in a very real sense of dawning childhood awareness of death, it makes even the most outrageous moments—an explosive electrocution, a bowling ball smushing a face, a trampled sleeping bag that might as well be filled with cherry pie filling—a sense of absurd dread. (It's like Sam Raimi doing Creepshow.) Here’s a pitch black horror comedy—laced with a sense of ironic impending doom—about existential grief that stems from fluke accidental death, and how deranged we can get in our denials, and our attempts to explain it away. How fragile the human body. How fragile our efforts to forget that. After one early, poignantly shattering death, one of the boys tells us the chances of such an event were one in 44 million. Cold comfort, since he says it means to him that it has to happen to somebody. The movie sits in that cold pessimism, and the preposterously frightening ways it comes to pass.

Marvel Less: CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD

Marvel is still in its flop era, I fear. I’d love to like these again. When they were fresh and fun, telling reasonably coherent, colorful sci-fi action stories, they were breezy popcorn satisfaction. Even if rarely stylistically adventurous or thematically engaging, that initial couple dozen movies had a low ceiling for quality, but a pretty high floor for fun. Alas, they don’t make ‘em like they used to. Captain America: Brave New World is another widget marking time between projects. Used to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe would tell a story while teasing the next one. At worst it was an okay movie promising a better time next time. Now it’s all tease. This movie’s ostensibly a feature about Anthony Mackie taking over for Chris Evans as Captain America. Evans passed the shield to him at the end of Avengers Endgame, and the Disney+ mini-series The Falcon and the Winter Solider found Mackie tussling with the government about whether or not he could take on the official role. Brave New World could follow up on those threads, but instead decides to tie off some loose ends from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk set in the geopolitical backdrop of the aftermath from 2021’s Eternals. When the MCU was firing on all cylinders, there was a kind of enjoyment to be had from the unexpected call-back. But when a new movie is based entirely around gesturing vaguely in the direction of characters and plot lines that, in some cases, have gone unmentioned in nearly 20 years, at the expense of its own potentially interesting lead characters, I found it to be unusually empty stage setting. Even the post-credits teaser is atypically cryptic, in which a villain mumbles, almost verbatim: hey, um, maybe next time something big will happen.

Though under the direction of The Cloverfield Paradox’s Julius Onah the action is workmanlike and the personalities appealing, the whole endeavor is warped by its reversion to the blandest, least compelling way through a scene or sequence. The movie idles its engines, never finding a story or conflict to kick it into higher gear. Even the Big Climactic Action Sequence is a pretty small, predictable shrug. The way there involves Captain America investigating an assassination attempt while the President of the United States (Harrison Ford) tries to salvage a treaty as he edges closer to the line for proper POTUS conduct. What little energy the movie has comes to life when Ford—drifting off of his Clear and Present Danger and Air Force One throwback gravitas—and Mackie—bringing the charming MCU credibility—talk to each other. The performers generally are just likable enough to make the movie feel pleasant and frictionless—not exactly the goal in a conflict-oriented genre. Add to that, the plot's problem arises from the sequence of events around them having been so clearly pro forma slotted in and retooled—by five credited writers and rounds of reshoots—to be the least they could be. (Every scene could be a deleted scene to almost no change to the overall arcs.) The movie has the moves of a conspiracy thriller, but is too simple to be convoluted, and too obvious to be mysterious. It also desperately avoids politics of any sort. (Not even a Red Scare reference when there's a Red Hulk hiding in the government.) It must be pretty difficult to make an action movie set in the White House completely apolitical, but here we have it: a movie that goes nowhere and says nothing. Mission accomplished. In this movie about a president testing the limits of his authority, the fantasy isn’t who’s secretly a Hulk, but the fact that he can be stopped within minutes and no one much cares.

My Bloody Valentine: HEART EYES and LOVE HURTS

I don’t know why we got two cheap, violent Valentine’s Day genre pictures this year, but here they are. They also both feature a straw stabbed into a face. Will wonders never cease? We’re a culture starving for sincerity, drowning in junk. So why not turn a romantic holiday into an occasion for death and mayhem? It can get pretty wearying having to look at movies brightly and noisy going nowhere if all they have is that kind of hook. Luckily the horror-comedy lark that is Heart Eyes has a couple neat tricks up its sleeve. It runs straight into its artificiality and genre play. Director Josh Ruben, whose Scare Me and Werewolves Within reflect a sensibility more in love with comic horror movies than fully inhabiting anything convincing on a character level, finds the best use of his interests here. The screenplay co-written by Christopher Landon (the Happy Death Days, Freaky, and some Paranormal Activity sequels, for better or worse) takes the beats of a slasher picture and places them over the structure of a romantic comedy. That’s not an easy mix to reconcile, and somehow, by serving both sides of that equation something like equally, it finds a way to work despite its wan digital look. We get the first kills and a Meet Cute, a fashion montage and a crime scene, a misunderstanding and a red herring, a needle drop and an impalement, a reconciliation and a decapitation. The arcs overlap pretty neatly. The story finds a business meeting turned first date between work rivals (Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding) interrupted by a masked serial killer whose gimmick is killing couples every February 14th. Because Holt and Gooding have some genuine sparks in their flirty banter, they give the movie the right push it needs to actually work on both levels. We’re rooting for their survival, and their relationship, in that order. Though there’s nothing novel in the over-the-top violence or sly punchlines, it’s the tension between the two that pleases enough. It’s about nothing but goofing on genre tropes, but that makes for a matinee diversion.

Way worse is Love Hurts. There’s nothing recognizably human within, and no playfulness of form or content to make up for its total phoniness. It’s as cliched as action movies get these days. The only reason any character makes any decision is because that’s what happens in movies like this. But at least the action is pretty good, if overfamiliar. It comes to us from 87North, the production company started by the John Wick guys to give stunt professionals a chance to direct and show off their chops. Their form of highly choreographed, faux-improvisatory fisticuffs and gunplay are now routine, but still dazzling from a logistical standpoint, even if this features combat so tight and airless it’s without tension. The feature stars Ke Huy Quan, and it’s nice to see him in a lead role to follow up his return to acting in Everything Everywhere All at Once. If only there was a good movie built around him. Instead it is functionally identical to Bob Odenkirk’s starring role in Nobody, another middling action movie about a retired killer whose comfortable suburban life is interrupted by deadly interlopers who must be beaten back. The plot progression is side-scroller predictable, and floats along superficially, with motivations papered over with voice over, and the whole thing barely limping past 80 minutes before giving up. The supporting cast is full of one-note eccentric characters—a killer who likes poetry, a killer who likes boba tea, and so on. Worst is the instigator character, a mob lawyer who comes out of hiding on Valentine's Day for selfish story machinations we’re eventually supposed to read as a love story, but is 100% false the entire time. She’s played by Ariana DeBose, in yet another calamitous career move. (Add one more to the unbroken string of bad movies with which she’s followed up her Oscar-winning turn in Spielberg's West Side Story.) The whole movie is a missed opportunity for everyone involved capable of more.