Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Honestly, I don't understand why Aaron Taylor-Johnson's abs aren't on the poster. They're definitely the most important feature of J.C. Chandor's Kraven the Hunter. 

While we're talking about it, this is the strangest J.C. Chandor movie. It has a cast like a normal J.C. Chandor movie—ATJ, Alessandro Nivola, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Christopher Abbott—and they're all pretty great. But then this is a superhero action movie extravaganza slash family drama and not serious at all. In fact, the chief problems with Kraven the Hunter are with the script. The dialogue is terrible, and some of the acting does not make it any better.

But, the action is great and the visual effects are pretty excellent. When Kraven the Hunter is doing action, it's doing a good job. This movie is rated R, and so the fights are bloody and very violent. But this is also very silly even though it wishes to be taken quite seriously at times.

Listen, the thing is, it's just not that bad. I think the critiques of this are unfair. It's a fine Marvel movie. It has a couple good monsters, and it has a fun lead. And other Marvel movies are just as dumb. 

Moana 2 – with 3 on the Way (2024)

I'm sorry to report, but Moana 2 is not good. The plot is deeply confused and it borders on utterly nonsensical. The animation keeps changing, too, which is weird. Whenever the characters are wet they look like they’ve been animated completely differently (maybe this is a technology thing; maybe it is a skill thing; but what it looks like is that Disney just didn't invest quite enough money into Moana 2). 

There also just some truly insane sequences involving typical gross-out humor with nasty fluids (kids love these kinds of jokes for some reason), weird theatrical animated sequences that I didn’t understand at all (there’s a strangely surreal musical number in which Maui cheers Moana up, and they are in a completely different world for some reason), and there are animate coconuts who seem evil but are good and know a great deal about poisons? I have no idea. At one point I leaned over to my companion and asked What is happening? 

This thing moves along with the logic of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants or maybe I mean a Minions sequel. Much worse: the songs are forgettable. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Lin-Manuel Miranda. Does this mean I'm going to actually enjoy Mufasa: the Lion King? 

Wicked: Part I (2024)

Wicked: Part I is successful on all fronts. The first time Cynthia Erivo sang in this I let out a little cheer.

It’s so nice to hear a Hollywood musical sung well (Michelle Yeoh excepted—who gave her this part?)! This is something I complain about nearly every time I see a Hollywood musical (The Prom is one of the most egregious recent outings in this vein). But Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sing very well, and it's just so good to hear a song in a movie well sung. In fact, I also liked that this movie never pretends not to be a musical like some Rob Marshall piece of junk or the truly absurd Color Purple from last year. This movie starts us off with a musical number and never lets up. It knows what it is and it sets us up to get it quickly

Wicked: Part I also looks great, it’s choreographed well, Paul Tazewell’s costumes are gorgeous, and it’s quite funny. The whole thing just works. To be honest, I didn’t even really notice that this movie is as long as it is (I only got slightly bored when we were being welcomed to Oz by Emerald City street theatre and the cameos from Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth kept going); this movie really moves very well, and it's almost always visually interesting.

But also... this is Wicked. For me, this means that there's really a rather hard ceiling on how good it could actually be. It's a series of winking in-jokes that were cutesy in Gregory Maguire's original novel and which I've always found really trite in the Stephen Schwartz musical. I'm also just, like, not a teenage girl. And I recognize that this film isn't really aimed at me. It is to John Chu's credit that his film doesn't try to be more than that. It leans into its material and does that to its absolute best. This is precisely what he should have done. And that more or less means it's only ever going to be middlebrow. (I might as well tell you that last year I ranked Wonka very similarly to how I rank Wicked this year.)

PS. Stacy Wolf was right about Wicked, and it’s very easy to see why it’s so available for lesbian and other queer identifications.

Gladiator II (2024)

Gladiator II doesn’t quite work in all the ways it wants to, but it works in a lot of those ways. This is a big, soulless spectacle in the vein of Ridley Scott’s most recent outing, Napoleon, but to be generous, Gladiator II is much much better than last year’s Ridley Scott film. Still, this thing is big and nonsensical and soulless, and one even has trouble figuring out who to root for. 

Gladiator II's ostensible protagonist, Hanno, tells us very little about what he wants, and so although we admire him, he is hard to love. There's also Pedro Pascal's general something-or-other, but he's not a character who makes much sense, actually. He strains credibility in that he's a ruthlessly bloody general working in the service of Rome who seems to have no ambition except to do the right thing. The film’s most compelling character is Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, and even when he’s behaving very badly, it’s difficult to turn on someone so charismatic. Perhaps this makes me more of an ancient Roman than a morally upstanding US American in 2024, but I would vote with Macrinus. He knows what he’s doing and he played the game well. 

There is more to say about Macrinus (who was a real emperor of Rome after he murdered emperor Caracalla). Denzel ate. He chewed. He feasted on this part. He’s a pleasure to watch. My companion thought Paul Mescal lacked charisma, but I don’t know. I thought he was fine. I blame Ridley Scott. The whole thing feels sort of bland and generic (and, frankly, if I remember correctly from 24 years ago, I think that was mostly true of Gladiator itself). Gladiator II is epic, though, and I enjoyed most of it. I like it when people quote Virgil and Cicero and Seneca. And it's fun to watch muscled dudes play with swords and fight wild animals. For me this was better than the critics said it was. I was not bored.

I have more to say. I’ll believe lots of things: gladiators riding rhinoceroses wearing bespoke saddles, fine; gladiators fighting starving baboons, fine. But sharks? Sharks??? In a naumachia? How? You’re telling me they caught a half dozen sharks from the ocean without injuring them and transported them from the sea (in what vessel?) and then let them loose in the Roman Coliseum after flooding it? I do not believe it.

Anora (2024)

Anora is easily Sean Baker’s best film. This is very funny; the editing is great. the performances are excellent, and the physical comedy is top-notch. Best of all, Baker sticks the landing. He’s terrible with endings, but this one works very well. Anora ends with empathy and care. 

Still, I kind of can't believe this won the Palme d'Or. This is a filmmaker who almost uniformly shows contempt for his characters, despite coaxing brilliant performances out of his actors. And yet, I was stunned by this film’s last few moments. They don’t make the movie into something great or anything like that—it's a rather silly farce with a stellar ending—but I was still stunned; I didn’t know Baker had it in him. 

It's worth saying, too, that the supporting performance by Mark Eydelshteyn is wonderful.

Bird (2024)

My good friend Dayne once said to me that an Andrea Arnold movie looks the way it feels—it’s one of the hallmarks of her brilliant filmmaking, and this statement characterizes Bird through and through. 

This movie is about feeling alone even when you’re not physically alone; it’s about trying to fit in, trying to make a way in the world. And Bird is also about the world, by which I mean the greater-than-human world of birds, dogs, horses, snakes, toads, and the way our human lives intertwine with theirs. And this is a film about magic and love and needing other people. 

Goddammit this is a great movie.

Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (1975)

Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! is a filmed evening at the theatre (it's TheatroVision), watching James Whitmore in his celebrated role as Harry S. Truman in Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! and there’s nothing cinematic about it. It’s clearly filmed for television, in fact, with blackouts timed helpfully for commercial breaks. Whitmore is great, of course, and the play is filled with the kind of generic liberal political ideas that most people agree with across the board. The whole idea is a kind of no-nonsense politics that at least feels reasonable. The audience in the theatre loves the show and applauds throughout at various clever stories in Samuel Gallu’s play. It’s a one-man show, though, and that can make for tiring viewing. Once I realized the gist of the thing about 20 minutes in, I got rather bored. It’s a clever note, but there’s only one note.

I don't think you can watch this film anywhere...? I watched it on a bootleg DVD, and I'm sort of surprised to find it's not streaming and there is no DVD.

Twisters (2024)

Twisters is a fun time. The script is absurd, but I had a good time. Glen Powell is a star. And Maura Tierney is really great. (This film does suffer from a severe and bewildering lack of Helen Hunt.)

My lord the script is stupid though. For some reason we are supposed to believe that these YouTubers aren’t really YouTubers but are actually like humanitarians in disguise? They don’t even chase the last tornado; they drive into the town it’s about to hit and try to save people’s lives? And people listen to them? Makes no sense. But I dunno. It’s hard to be mad at this. It’s loud and suspenseful and has a good soundtrack.

Kneecap (2024)

Kneecap is hilarious, wild, and supremely satisfying. I had a great time. And I fully feckin’ cried more than once.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)

Nu Aștepta Prea Mult de la Sfârșitul Lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) is the bleakest of dark comedies. This is a funny satire from Radu Jude, delivered in his insouciant, constantly innovative and unexpected style. This is a very challenging film, and it offers its laughs and its critiques in an uncompromising and bold way. This is hardcore, even brave. 

Honestly I just fucking love Radu Jude. This is so hard to watch at times, but fucking hell it’s smart… so smart. There are so many amazing, bananas sequences. And just so much heartbreaking, cutting absurdity.

The Settlers (2023)

Felipe Gálvez's Los Colonos (The Settlers) is very intense. We begin with these gorgeous views of Tierra del Fuego. A Scottish mercenary working for a Spanish settler–colonizer maps a path to the sea and kills native people. The film analyzes colonialism in no uncertain terms – it is about extracting land and people, destroying life in order to transform both land and people into property. "Nation" appears in this film as a nonsensical concept in the first part of the movie (the same colonizer owns the land on either side of the national border between Chile and Argentina) and then in the movie’s third act, nation has become something insisted on by the colonizers, forming a new nation with “justice” and “truth” and “equality” for everyone. The concept is just as absurd in the third act as it is in the first. 

This film gets even better the more I think about it.

Boys on Bikes

In preparation for The Bikeriders, I wanted to watch a kind of legendary old British biker movie I had heard about called The Leather Boys from 1965 that has a homosexual twist (or a homophobic one, depending on how you're looking at things).

Well The Leather Boys is not nearly as gay as I wanted it to be. It’s actually a very typical angry young man/woman drama from the 1960s. Lots of married young people yelling at one another and living in tiny rooms when they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. From the perspective of The Leather Boys, hanging out with the boys while riding around on bikes looks a lot better than going home to tea and baked beans from a can. But I’m not sure the movie really says anything about queerness or queer bike riders or any of that. This seems like a sort of strange addition to the angry young man genre. But it's clear that some of the men in the biker gangs just really don't do well with society—with going to college and getting a job and, like, raising a family and stuff—and then some of the men in the biker gang are there to wear leather and get their rocks off with other leather boys. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Anyway, that is how I prepared for The Bikeriders. And, well, it was fine. 

The Bikeriders is shot in a cool way—it reproduces a series of documentary photos taken by the (completely undeveloped) Mike Faist character—but I don't really understand what Jeff Nichols has to say about this gang of bikers. The character development for all of the men is pretty much nonexistent. We don't really know Austin Butler or Tom Hardy at all. Who are these guys? Why do they hang out together? What are they doing? They actually almost never talk about bikes, so it's probably not really that. But, then, they don't really talk about anything. They’re violent and awful and drink too much and fight for no real reason, but I guess we’re supposed to find that charming. But, like, why?? 

What’s strange is that The Bikeriders just doesn’t have much of a point of view about them. I think I know why, too. The film almost completely avoids politics—there’s one part where a guy gets beaten up because he says he wants to become a cop and another where a guy says he hates “pinkos” who go to college—but the film doesn’t agree with any of this stuff. It’s just sort of presented for us. The same guy who hates pinkos tells us that he really really wanted to go to be in the Vietnam War, except that he didn't really because he got super drunk the night before and then slept through his alarm the day he was supposed to sign up. These biker guys are counterculture dudes, right? They hate cops and the government and having a job and the man. This is what I understand. They're violent, and they think cops and firemen are schmucks, which is why they flout the law and start fights and stuff. It’s the only real reason I can think of for their antiestablishment antics. And it must also be what ties the men together. But none of them ever talks about any of that. And the film doesn’t ask them to. 

Consider, for example, the gang going to Brucey's funeral. Why does the family send their flowers back? And why does the old woman spit in Johnny's face? There's literally no reason for these old folks to hate this group so much—as far as we know. Have they done something horrible that we don't understand? The screenplay, in other words, leaves a very large lacuna in the center of the film. The Bikeriders just seems sort of there, like a documentary that never presses its subjects on anything they say.

As for my homo-preparation for this movie, I was glad I prepped with The Leather Boys. There's this crazy erotic sequence in The Bikeriders when Tom Hardy asks Austin Butler to run the club after he quits (although he's not quitting, so the scene's purpose is actually just for Tom to tell Austin he's his favorite person). But the whole scene is firelit, and they are just so close together that it feels like they should be kissing. They didn't. And I'm not actually sure why they didn't.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Miss Joy did not learn her lesson in the first film. So we need another movie to teach us all the same things. 

Inside Out 2 has three or four good jokes and a really funny reference to that famous 1984 Apple commercial, but this movie is really stupid. I was bored for most of it. 

Why must Pixar movies all be about forcing the child to explain herself, with making sense of the darkness within all children? In fact, Pixar now makes movies where they intensely project their feelings onto the kids in their films. I imagine these Pixar folks as really, really anxious parents, intensely worried about what’s going on inside their kids’ heads. They made a film about a teenager having anxiety, but of course teenagers didn’t make Inside Out 2. This is actually a film about parents’ anxiety about what their kids aren’t telling them. 

The clue to this is that we're supposed to identify with a rainbow of characters who are trying to take care of the teenager at the center of the film rather than the teenager herself, whose actions we consistently judge. And then the big lesson that Anxiety and Joy and the other emotions need to learn is that they have no control over who the teenager will grow up to be. At whom might such a lesson be directed? Right: parents.

The filmmakers show their hand at the end of the movie when we find that "This film is dedicated to our kids. We love you just the way you are."

If my impatience with all of this is exasperatingly obvious, it's because one of the arguments I make in my book Love Is Love Is Love is that animated films seem these days to be overwhelmingly about adults' frustrations with their children's inscrutability. I put it this way in my book:

Frozen and its sequels, in this sense, take part in a larger (adult) discourse within contemporary animated films – about children whose choices cannot be explained, who "act out," whose behavior is antisocial or mysterious or queer. Films such as Song of the Sea (2014), When Marnie Was There (2014), Inside Out (2015), My Life as a Courgette (2016), Your Name (2016), The Boss Baby (2017), Bao (2018), Over the Moon (2020), Soul (2020), Wolfwalkers (2020), Belle (2021), Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021), Luca (2021), Encanto (2021), and The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) represent the child as frustratingly obtuse and distant, its desires inscrutable, its thought processes impossible (for the adult) to access. These are, in other words, all films about the queer child, the child who resists growing up according to the approved path laid out by adults or, as [Kathryn Bond] Stockton puts it, the child who grows sideways. Unlike many of these films, Frozen appears to celebrate the idea of Elsa leaning into this sideways growth, even if the film’s narrative still insists that she illuminate – "show herself" – so that her darkness no longer remains a mystery. 

And if this makes you think that I'm calling Riley, the teenager in Inside Out 2, a proto-lesbian that is because of course I am. But, unlike the parents who made this movie, I see no reason to be so anxious about it.

Furiosa (2024)

George Miller made the very intelligent decision to give Anya Taylor-Joy around 20 total lines of dialogue in this film. Instead, the script allows the brilliant Chris Hemsworth to do the screenplay’s heavy lifting. This means that the film’s emotional center is almost non-existent and that the most interesting character is Furiosa’s nihilistic villain. In other words, there are both drawbacks and benefits to this. Taylor-Joy can’t actually carry a movie, and Miller needed Hemsworth to do this, but it makes for a very jaded, emotionless film. 

Anyway Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga is visually relatively boring – there is nothing visually new about this film compared to Mad Max: Fury Road; it’s visually identical to its predecessor. And one wonders, after all, what the point of all this is? (I wondered this with MM:FR – a film I didn’t like – as well, honestly.null) Revenge, blood, bullets, gore, oil, depravity. OK. But why? Obviously this universe is terrible and bloodthirsty and hateful. And obviously Miller believes our own universe is headed in this direction, but, like, what does the movie have to do with that?

Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

I liked Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない) so much better than Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy! This is a mysterious, slow-building eco-thriller that had me thinking about it hours and hours after I watched it. The film is still bogged down by Hamaguchi’s penchant for long sequences of boring conversations in cars and other static locations, but weirdly those worked for me better in Evil Does Not Exist. And because the movie begins much more slowly and contemplatively, I forgave the long conversations in the car and at the community center. The ending is great!!