Another month of movie-watching, another month documenting what I’ve watched. There’s not as much “straight-up masterpiece”-worthy material here this time, but this month’s slate is nonetheless quite impressive.
To set a few guidelines for what films qualify for this post: (1) they must’ve been viewed between September 1st and September 30th; (2) Films reviewed or soon-to-be reviewed by me in outside publications, such asThe Statesman, will not be included here. Consequently, all the films I saw at the 62nd New York Film Festivalare on the chopping block, which is a shame, considering I’m having second thoughts about some of the movies I’ve watched in those first two weeks of October. But they’ll have their dedicated post, so stay tuned for that. (3) All these reviews are ripped straight from my Letterboxd account. Alright, here’s the rundown.
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Joker (2019, Todd Phillips)
[Oct. 4th, 2024; 58/100:] Joker is one of those movies that, weirdly enough, came at the perfect time. Whether that’s the shifting sentiment that clowns were “scary,” if you were old enough to remember those clown sightings; our growing resentment of Western class division, spurring dozens of acclaimed contemporary adult dramas critiquing class and capitalism; and the driving force to the film becoming a cultural phenomenon, there was a burgeoning desire to find the “incel” movie to define the decade. That latter part might sound stupid, and it is, but hear me out. There have been plenty of films from the last decade that “incels” have attached themselves to, but none of them really exude the same energy as their canon of films from the decades prior. This one, however, does. So it’s a shame that I feel pretty indifferent to Todd Phillips’ attempt at becoming a “serious auteur” five years after its release. And it’s also not as remotely dangerous nor an “empowerment anthem for incels” as many critics chastised the movie for, which stoked the fire and madeJokerinto something it isn’t. What it is, however, is pretty simple: A pastiche mashup of Scorsese’sTaxi Driver(1976) andThe King of Comedy (1982). To the film’s defense, there’s a sincerity to it—it’s coming from a place of authentic frustration about the current state of affairs—but it’s too sanitized and vague, visually and narratively, to recapture Scorsese’s grittymagic.
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, Todd Phillips)
[Oct. 5th, 2024; 46/100:] An interesting, admittedly admirable attempt at moral course-correction, only it’s an inherently reductive attempt at course-correction that smashes you with a sledgehammer of its “true messaging.” I can envision an alternate world where a jukebox-musical-themed Joker(2019)sequel actually works, framing music to communicate Authur’s mental delusions, but the concept only half-works in execution; Joaquin Phoenix’s non-singer singer voice holds some magnetism at first, but after half-an-hour or so of the occasional singing, every musical set piece becomes oppressively grading to the ears and eyes. Right before my 4:30 p.m. screening, I read rater’sFolie à Deuxreviewand Francis Ford Coppola’spostabout the parallels between Phillips’ anti-hero follow-up and its “spiritual predecessor”One From The Heart (1982). While I haven’t seen the Coppola passion project that drove him to near-bankruptcy, it is, frankly, a comparative swing of intentional inaccessibility. It intentionally burns down the legacy of its predecessor to create something new—note how Phillips not-so-subtly injects his film into this world of Gotham, treating it as a “television movie,” and how said “television movie” wasn’t so great—only, I don’t find it much tooadditive.
Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)
[Oct. 6th, 2024; 88/100:] It’s easy to dismiss Inceptionas a piece of over-mechanical construction—while feeling the need to nauseously overexplain itself to the point where Nolan is scared of letting go of the audience’s hand—but it exudes “cool” in a way that very few could possibly dream of. Additionally, Nolan’s approach to the narrative’s dream-making and anti-approach to dream logic is deeply intentional because these characters treat dreams as something deeply mechanical; they’re architects at heart, and so is Nolan. It results in infectiously effective action-heist cinema—some of the century’s best action set pieces are found in this movie—with throbbing tension-building that puts you on the edge of your seat. And to the dissenters who say the film has no “heart,” I find the narrative’s father-son dynamic, specifically the manipulation of memory to create a cathartic “lie,” quite possibly the most emotionally potent moment in Christopher Nolan’s filmography. None of that would be possible without Cillian Murphy, who steals the show whenever he enters the screen; his execution of the movie’s big emotional crescendo is enough to merit an Oscar nomination. (Granted, Leonardo DiCaprio pretty convincingly hits all of his character’s emotional beats, but Cobbs’ story of a widower’s grief and quest for freedom doesn’t register as potently as some well-conceived daddy issues. Maybe that says something about me?) The “Nolan movies are cold and have no heart” narrative is genuinely absurd, as I give Nolan’s filmography a rerun. Frankly, that title should’ve been given to DenisVilleneuve.
Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)
[Oct. 8th, 2024; 75/100:] Sure, there’s an eye-catching quality to its gruesome nature, even if it partway dilutes the thematic complexity of its source material, but there’s one interesting element that separatesBattle Royalefrom its countless, shameless rip-offs: it’s fundamentally a teen movie with interconnected high-school melodrama galore. The film’s character motivations, arcs, youthfulness, and dialogue are fundamental tropes to any teen movie—thinkMean Girls (2004), but framed from a twisted lens of children mercilessly killing each other for the sake of anti-authoritarianism social commentary—and that’s what injects this narrative with the palpable empathy and emotional gravitas that most early-‘10s young-adult dystopia movies sorely lack. Granted, that exaggerated emotion enables the film to be undoubtedly contrived, like how the psychopathic Kazou Kiriyama’s Uzi practically has infinite ammo, but if that means we get characters as emotionally gripping as Shogo Kawada, that’s a tradeoff I’d gladly take. It also helps that, unlike other assertively transgressive pieces of anti-fascist cinema, the movie is wicked fun—the grading perversity of Pier Paolo Pasolini’sSalò(1975) immediately comes to mind—while never letting the audience forget the horrors of itshellscape.
Affliction (1997, Paul Schrader)
[Oct. 9th, 2024; 77/100:] A man traumatized by a lifetime’s worth of domestic abuse and emotional belittlement attempts to reclaim his masculinity and sense of power through his profession, only to fail while doing so. Like father, like son, but Wade is also almost perennially a “son,” belittled by everyone—including his semi-estranged daughter, thoughAfflictionmakes this most clear through Wade’s encounters with Mel Gordon or his pull-over face-off with Jack; his threats are all talk, no bite—and he’s completely powerless, even if his façade as a noble working-class man desperately insists otherwise. He’s not a good person, but it’s complicated, and Wade’s lingering state of small-town discontentment and stagnation packs a walloping punch. Then again, I can imagine Paul Schrader getting more out of this unmistakably strong material if he embraced more narrative opaqueness, à laFirst Reformed’s (2017) ending, and rejected some of his primal instincts to insert as much voice-over narration as humanly possible. Concluding the movie with Wade turning into Travis Bickle 2.0, going on a murderous spree, and finally having a sense of morally dubious agency feels like Schrader falling back on what he knows best. That’s no deal-breaker, of course, but even if it deviates from Russell Banks’ novel, I’d much rather the film end with Wade leaving town and never lookingback.
We Live in Time (2024, John Crowley)
[Oct. 12th, 2024; 72/100:] Yes, it’s your run-of-the-mill, “unremarkable British weepy,” but it admittedly came very close to making me weepy on multiple occasions. And surprisingly, the moments when I felt my eyes getting watery were purely driven by the magnetism of Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh’s performances; whenever the clunky, manipulative score interjects itself into the film, the scenes lose much of their emotionalpunch.
The Apprentice (2024, Ali Abbasi)
[Oct. 13th, 2024; 49/100:] I’m glad that this isn’t exclusively commenting on Donald Trump’s detestable nature, which would’ve made the movie genuinely unbearable, but it’s also commenting on the system that enables these people to exist and thrive, in the first place. If there’s anything to take away fromThe Apprentice, it disagrees with Trump on one specific thing: You’re not born with the “killer instinct.” You’re bred with it. That’s not a particularly revelatory statement—how many movies these days fulfill that dreaded mantra of “we live in a society?”—but it’s the way Sebastian Stan so cogently transfigures his character into something bigger-than-life evil that makes the whole experience feel, just for a brief moment, refreshing amidst the hundreds of poorly-executed Trump impressions we’ve seen on Saturday Night Live. Stan’s performance also happens to be one of those rare moments where you think the actor is playing their role pretty poorly, only for the bigger picture to set in, and you realize its “brilliance.” (And your tolerance for a wannabe-Adam McKay’s smug, clunky style of filmmaking will make or break your experience with the film.) However, Ali Abbasi couldn’t help but fall for the bait, as the back half of this otherwise competently made biopic partly relishes in the horrors of Trump’s final form, which makes for excruciatingly dullstorytelling.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004, Alfonso Cuarón)
[Oct. 15th, 2024; 90/100:] Going fromthe Chamber of Secrets(2002) to this is the cinematic equivalent of being shocked by a defibrillator over and over again for 141 minutes. I’ve grown more sensitive to directorial style, and almost immediately going from the somewhat rudimentary filmmaking of Chris Columbus to the sweeping nature of Alfonso Cuarón felt like a genuine sensory overload; it was impossible to contain my genuine exhilaration for the opening 30 minutes, which is not only a coming-of-age Hollywood spectacle with an actual stylistic identity but aHarry Pottermovie that, for once, explores and embraces its darker and more mature setting. There are several moments, especially the “Professor Snape vs. Lupin and Black”scene, where Cuarón skillfully composes the camera to enable this top-tier ensemble to do some capital-A acting. As much as I’ve raved about Alan Rickman’s performance in this franchise, it’s impossible to overstate how incredible he was inthe Prisoner of Azkaban, bouncing off David Thewlis and Gary Oldman. (Speaking of Thewlis—who delivers an exceptional performance as one of the most likable characters in the franchise—I can’t help but read Professor Lupin’s character as a representation of queerness. There’s the thinly veiled headcanon between Lupin and Black, but it’s easy to read the werewolf as a metaphor for homosexuality. At the end of the film, he does describe it as “a condition,” after all.) Also, this is where the child actors, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, in particular, hold their own as actors; they consistently hit all the right emotional beats, something that only came in spurts in the previous twofilms.
Anora (2024, Sean Baker)
[Oct. 19th, 2024; 90/100:] As of now, this is the closest I’ve gotten to calling a Sean Baker film “an undeniable masterpiece,” but I need a rewatch to confirm that. Part of that skepticism comes from its ending, which fizzles out an otherwise bombastic, utterly chaotic piece of storytelling. Admittedly, that felt jarring after spending much of the film’s runtime at the edge of my seat—when the credits rolled, I thought, “Huh, that’s an interesting way to end things…”—but it really clicked with me after some marinating. The tragedy of this quasi-Cinderella story registers most effectively in those moments when there’s no music throbbing in the theater’s speakers and characters aren’t yelling at each other at the top of their lungs, and a lot of the ending is, rightfully, dead silent; you’re witnessing Ani’s perception of the world shatter in real-time. It’s maybe the most outright cynical Baker has gotten, though, akin to the rest of his filmography, a tiny glimmer of hope shines just bright enough to give the ending a sense of ambiguity. (The comparisons to the Safdie Brothers are apt, butAnorafeels far less formally calculative and reminded me far more of Baker’s micro-budget breakthrough,Tangerine (2015), as its disarray is driven more by comedy than pure-genre thriller.) There’s some criticism floating around that this film betrays much of Baker’s signature “American Neorealism” aesthetic—The Florida Project (2017)is one of those films whose portrayal of lower-class Florida is so tactile and so well explored that you wind up being as familiar with the setting as the characters—but Baker is working from a very different framework here. This is a fucked up Cinderella story, with Ani immersing herself in a lifestyle of big mansions and getting drunk in Las Vegas; there’s a vapidness to all of this, which juxtaposes the film’s fleeting explorations ofBrooklyn.
Conclave (2024, Edward Berger)
[Oct. 25th, 2024; 59/100:] I was wrestling with this for a while, but I think it’s mostly “fine,” with the exception of a few scenes. There’s no denying thatConclaveis conceptually and thematically timely—the movie speaks its contemporary importance to existence on multiple occasions—but it’s a fascinating choice for the movie to disavow the belief of choosing between the “lesser of two evils” when we are capable of doing better. (Granted, that’s not the most applicable allegory to American politics, but it is semi-applicable nonetheless. There’s something resonant about sitting through a movie where the leading candidates are horrible, like with this year’s election, even if the ending’s liberal-fantasy escapism arguably erodes some of the thematic agency.) Political subtext aside, however, Ralph Fiennes’ Thomas Lawrence is the biggest draw here; he undergoes a very low-key religious battle of sorts, grappling not with his belief in God but with the institution that’s supposed to uphold the beliefs of God. It’s pretty sparingly examined in the context of the conclave, but those moments areConclaveat its most invigorating. Still, it’s hard to sincerely give this its flowers when it’s all so technically unremarkable in its extraordinariness. And like the movie itself, I also find Edward Berger extraordinarily unremarkable as a director. He has a fine eye for composition—some of those establishing shots are breathtaking—but his feel for narrative flow is lacking, clearly established by how much of a slug-fest the opening hour is. It doesn’t help that all this is layered with arguably my least favorite score of the year; sonically obtuse bombast that distractingly panders to your run-of-the-mill Oscarvoter.
