There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have reviewed less than half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the overall selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including one of our own Top 10 Films of 2024. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but from what we’ve seen this year’s list is a decent sample of what 2024 cinema had to offer.
Listed below are the 14 Oscar-Nominated films from 2024 that we covered for the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.
The Substance, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Coralie Fargeat), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Demi Moore), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Makeup & Hairstyling
“Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.”
“A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. I really like what Adam Elliot’s doing. He’s got a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to his work matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt … thankfully this time borrowing a little Jean-Pierre Juenet whimsy to help cut the tension.”
Dune: Part Two, nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects
““This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it.”
“Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction. Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible. It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.”
Anora, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Sean Baker), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Mikey Madison), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Yura Borisov), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing
“This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.”
Nosferatu, nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, and Best Production Design
“Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale. As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.”
“Pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise.”
Wicked Part 1, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Cynthia Erivo), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Ariana Grande), Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects
“It would have been nice to have the film try to replicate the Technicolor-sais quoi of the MGM classic, but there’s still a lot to love here in the designs and the details. The costuming is fantastic, and at no point did I think that Oz looked boring or colorless, except in moments in which there’s an intentionality to the blandness that I find appropriate. Overall, it left me feeling elevated and effervescent, and I loved that, even if what we’re watching is the real time character assassination of our protagonist at the hands of an evil government.”
“A frantic essay film about the CIA’s attempts to rebrand the Cold War as a ‘Cool War’ by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government in 1960. It’s a little overwhelming as the anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums play over news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes, but it’s an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania nonetheless. It’s like a version of The Movie Orgy for lefty academics.”
“Just as cute & funny as expected, but also surprisingly smart about its skepticism of easy-fix tech solutions like AI, in that it’s most critical of using that tech to eliminate life’s pleasurable tasks: gardening, making tea, petting the dog, etc.”
Conclave, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Ralph Fiennes), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Isabella Rossellini), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score
“I’m a lapsed Catholic in most ways except that I still have a huge soft spot for all the costumes & ritual, so this was an oddly cozy watch for something that’s supposed to be a kind of paranoid political thriller. It plays more like an HBO miniseries than an Important Movie for the most part, but those series are handsome & amusing enough that the distinction doesn’t matter much.”
A Real Pain, nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Kieran Culkin) and Best Original Screenplay
“Darkly, uncomfortably funny as a story about two men who love each other but have incompatible mental illnesses. I, of course, have whatever form of anxiety Eisenberg’s character suffers, which Culkin aptly describes as ‘an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late’.”
Nickel Boys, nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay
“If you end up watching this at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention will be paid to the 1st-person POV of its imagery, but the sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive. I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement can’t be dismissed.”
The Apprentice, nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sebastian Stan) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jeremy Strong)
“A dirtbag sitcom featuring two talented actors playing two despicable ghouls. It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it’s impressive as an acting showcase, which means it must be Awards Season again.”
1. I Saw the TV Glow – A pastel kaleidoscope of teen angst, gender dysphoria, Buffy the Vampire Slayer nostalgia, and general melancholy. It’s impossible not to read Jane Schoenbrun’s VHS-warped horror of persona as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche media obsession instead.
2. The Substance – Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.
3. Love Lies Bleeding – Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller is not one for those with queasy stomachs. It’s a hot, sweaty, ferociously vicious work that’ll have you swooning over its synths, sex, and biceps until you’re feeling just as ripped, roided, and noided as its doomed but determined lovers.
4. She is Conann – Bertrand Mandico once again transports us to a violent lesbian fantasy realm, this time reshaping the Conan the Barbarian myth into a grotesque fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. A cosmic swirl of glitter, swords, gore, fetishistic fashion, and deconstructed gender, nothing about it is logical, but it all makes perfect sense.
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Radu Jude made a three-hour, fussily literary art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga– Large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen, George Miller’s latest manic blockbuster is a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that’s easily the equal of Fury Road. It’s truly epic, a mutant-infested Ben-Hur that trades in chariots for chrome.
7. The Taste of Things – A sweetly sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals. It’s absurdly cozy & warm, likely the best movie about food since Pig. Also, Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s easy fall in love with a movie when Juliette Binoche is in it.
8. Mars Express – This is a great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. A noir thriller about an alcoholic detective pursuing the assassin of a “jailbreaking” hacker who liberates robots from synthetic lives of servitude, it’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood isn’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Blade Runner or Minority Report anymore, but it also distinguishes itself from those obvious reference points through futuristic speculation and sheer dazzlement.
9. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” Deborah Stratman’s apocalyptic hybrid doc finds infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations. It recounts the story of our planet’s geology through an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life, aggressively anthropomorphizing ordinary rocks until an obscured origin myth emerges. It looks to the future as well, crafting a Chris Marker-esque sci-fi narrative about rocks taking over the Earth after humans end our current, destructive reign. Good riddance.
10. The People’s Joker – An impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture, Vera Drew’s fair-use warping of copyrighted comic book lore to illustrate her own gender identity journey is pure brilliance and pure punk. Direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the secret batcaves of its director’s brain, it’s a marvel . . . except that it’s DC.
It’s tempting to think that since online movie discussions have migrated from IMDb message boards to Letterboxd rankings and Film Twitter squabbles, communal tastes have skewed a lot less macho. We’ve supposedly been working towards a more inclusive online movie nerd community, leaving behind the white-boy Film Bro days of the late 90s & early 2000s, when the taste-defining IMDb Top 100 was wallpapered with dorm-room-poster titles like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento. You can still hear bellowing echoes from the Film Bro days of previous decades, though. It’s just now wrapped in a protective layer of self-aware irony, with prominent Film Twitter Personalities exalting the “vulgar auteurs” of “Dudes Rock” cinema, clearing space for meatheads like Zach Snyder & Michael Bay in rankings among the modern greats. It’s a mostly empty, flippant exercise, but a few genuinely great filmmakers do get swept up in the momentum of it – most notably Michael Mann. Clearly, Michael Mann’s most creative, vibrant work was his initial run of high-style genre films in the 1980s: Thief, Manhunter, The Keep, etc.. However, those are not the Mann classics that vulgar-auteur apologists cite in daily conversation. In true retro IMDb message board fashion, Mann’s name most often recurs during conversations about The Greatest Films of All Time in the context of two sprawling, macho crime pictures about dudes who rock: Heat & Miami Vice. To get a clear snapshot of how Film Bro culture is still alive & well in a post-Letterboxd world, you have to venture into The Mannosphere and spend some time with that hairy-knuckled pair.
To truly return to the macho Film Bro 2000s, you obviously have to start with 2006’s Miami Vice. Consciously updating the titular television show’s extremely 80s style of crime-thriller filmmaking that he himself helped create, Mann leans into the flat, digital aesthetic of the early aughts in this undercover cop procedural, again attempting to define the visual style of a new decade. As soon as Maxim babes go-go dance to Linkin Park in the opening minute, it’s clear that you have to harbor nostalgia for the bro-down flip-phone cheapness of the 2000s to appreciate Mann’s Miami Vice, or else you will continue to suffer for the following two hours. Colin Farrell & Jamie Foxx play undercover cops who work to manufacture a grand mid-deal bust, aggressively grumbling through a series of anticlimactic phone calls & meetings but occasionally taking breaks to order mojitos and ride on “go-fast boats” to a butt-rock soundtrack provided by Audioslave. Before the climactic drug deal inevitably goes wrong and concludes in a shootout, it plays like a DTV action movie without any action scenes, as if Mann had blown all of his squib & explosion budget on movie-star casting & SD cards. Miami Vice is a lifeless, hideous film about men who greatly respect each other and work tirelessly to protect the women they’re currently sleeping with. Mann’s embrace of the era’s jarring shift from celluloid textures to digital imagery was daring but unfulfilling; there’s no reason why a $150mil production should resemble an overlong episode of Cheaters. He did pave a path for more successful actioners to indulge in the uncanniness of modernity, though, getting way ahead of titles like Tenet, Ambulance, and Gemini Man. He’s undeniably a visionary, even when his vision is an ugly one.
1995’s Heat is a much more pleasant journey into The Mannosphere, one that will remind you that the major titles of the Film Bro canon aren’t individually “bad” by default; they’re just collectively limited by an overbearingly macho perspective. Nearly three hours long and supported by a cast so stacked it has room to include Bud Cort, Henry Rollins, and Tone Loc, Heat feels like the final word on a very specific category of macho 90s thriller (in which I suppose Point Break was the first word). Its cat & mouse game between a criminal mastermind (Robert DeNiro) and the harried detective on his tail (Al Pacino) is familiar in tone but epic in scale and sharp in detail, starting with an impeccably well orchestrated armored-truck heist and then spending the next couple hours provoking & profiling its many players (including actors as varied as Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, William Fichtner, Dennis Haysbert, Hank Azaria, Tom Noonan, Danny Trejo, Wes Studi, Jeremy Piven, and even a few people who aren’t men). Unlike in Miami Vice, there are multiple action sequences in Heat, with plenty standoffs & shootouts keeping the adrenaline up between scenes of gruff cops & criminals venturing home to protect & bed their respective women. Devoted fans of Mann’s Miami Vice will notice plenty of overlap with this earlier draft’s visual techniques, especially in its uneasy handheld closeups and in an awkwardly green-screened conversation held against the artificial backdrop of Los Angeles city lights. Heat has all of the Dudes Rock virtues of Miami Vice without looking like a syndicated daytime TV series that couldn’t afford to shoot all of its scripted gunfights. It’s even got Val Kilmer as a pretty-boy co-lead with awful hair, telegraphing Farrell’s role in the later, inferior film.
None of this reportage is helpful to the Mannsplainers of the world who are already deeply entrenched in The Mannosphere. I’m only speaking from a place of curiosity about why these two particular titles continually come up in the current film discourse, despite feeling out of step with the general mood of post-Film Bro movie culture. As a pair they’re instructive in how that culture has changed in the past couple decades, even though they land with opposing effects. To get a sense of how much better the current cinematic landscape is now in comparison with the artless, bro-infested aughts, check out Miami Vice. To get a sense of what might have been lost as we left that Mannscape in the rearview, check out Heat, which is an even more engrossing, entertaining thriller now that we’re not living in a world where every acclaimed movie appeals to the same audience.
I love this queer, 80s bodybuilder crime thriller. It’s got such a subtle horror and fantastical style to it that just builds and builds until you get a truly magical ending. Both of the main characters are terrible people who you know are super toxic for each other, but you want them to have a happy ending anyway. Kristen Stewart plays another lurking weirdo of a character, Lou, who becomes a Renfield for Katy O’Bryan’s manipulative, aspiring bodybuilder, Jackie. It’s a hot, sweaty, violent mess of a movie. I’m glad we have a movie about terrible gay women getting away with murder.
Also, there’s a cat named “Happy Meal.” Enough Said.
I love a good geology documentary, okay? Then you add in a Chris Marker-esque narrative about rock beings taking over the Earth after humans have had their destructive reign. There are so many beautiful images of rocks, so many interesting experts talking about geological evolution (absolutely fascinating!!), and so much hypnotizing French narration.
Rocks were here before us, and they will be here long after we’re gone. Yes, we’ve gradually changed each other but, ultimately, they’re winning the “How bad can everything get while still surviving?” game.
This movie is a kaleidoscope of nostalgia, gender dysphoria, teen angst, and general bad vibes. For some reason, in my head, I want to call it pastel angst-core, which is a cringy phrase that I hope never catches on. Two misfit teens, Owen and Maddy, bond over a show called The Pink Opaque (yeah, it’s a good Cocteau Twins reference), a supernatural teen horror featuring a protagonist named Mr. Melancholy. As Maddy and Owen’s friendship progresses, the line between the show and real life blurs. Maddy, having completely taken the show as true, abandons her life and runs away. Owen stays. He lives a boring “real” life: dead end job, boredom, depression. The Pink Opaque is not what he remembers, or has Mr. Melancholy trapped him?
Okay, I think when making this movie Bertrand Mandico entered my brain and just picked out the cool parts where I think about swords, glitter, gross gore, and amazing clothes. It truly is the movie that most encompasses my style goals. (Although, there’s a glitter ban in my house per my partner’s request. *sigh*) Conan the Barbarian is reimagined through the ages as a woman. She fights through other Barabarians to claim her place at the top, becoming a stunt woman with no regard for safety, a war criminal, and finally a rich billionaire patron of the arts with investments in mines, oil, and everything evil. Having a female main character strips the Barbarism concept of masculinity and boils it down to its roots: unimaginable cruelty by human hands, which has no gender. Also, there’s a paparazzo dog demon named Rainer who wears really cool jackets, and pants after Conann through it all. It’s a fever dream of blood, once again glitter, and really cool fashion.
Jean Kayak makes Apple Jack. In a beaver related accident his entire apple orchard burns down, and his distillery explodes. He is left to fend for himself during a brutal midwestern winter, eventually becoming a fur trapper, who falls in love with a shop keeper’s daughter. Then, he hunts down and gains a grudge against, yes you guessed it, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. All of this is done in the style of early silent slapstick comedies, while also mixing in some more modern jokes and videogame references. Oh yeah, no animals were harmed in the making of this movie, because literally every animal is played by people in mascot costumes. Basically, this is a movie full of silly madness and Looney Tunes style visual gags. It goes so many places and not a single one is somber or serious. Truly a movie that exists to just be a silly adventure, and I appreciate it for that.
15. Last Summer– This was such an uneasy experience, yet I couldn’t look away. I found myself completely absorbed by the drama, the stunning scenery, and the overall French vibe of it all. Catherine Breillat doesn’t hold anything back, nor does she depict anything taboo with judgement, which I always appreciate.
14. Mothers’ Instinct – This isn’t your typical 1960s housewife drama. It’s wild and totally twisted in the best way imaginable — the psychological melodrama that I’ve been waiting for. Douglas Sirk would be so proud.
13. Immaculate – 2024’s standout pregnancy horror film. An exciting watch that had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Truly terrifying — the sense of being trapped by your surroundings and body was so intense.
12. Babes – I know its unexpected-pregnancy concept isn’t anything new, but wow, this was one of the funniest and most endearing movies to come out this year. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau are absolutely hilarious.
11. Nightbitch – Although I was hoping it would go even further and get even weirder, this ended up being a surprisingly great film as-is. Marriage and children are two of my biggest fears and, in a way, this made me feel validated. Also, it’s hands-down Amy Adams’s best performance. Fight me.
10. The People’s Joker – Vera Drew is a true legend in the making. Using Batman comic lore to represent a gender identity journey is pure brilliance and very punk. It’s both deeply moving and ridiculously funny. This is art.
9. The Front Room – The filthiest film of 2024. It’s batshit crazy, unsettling, and absolutely hilarious. I had so much fun with it. Hagsploitation at its finest.
8. Love Lies Bleeding – This is a gripping, intense lesbian erotic thriller. I gasped and screamed so much — it was absolutely fierce! Kristen Stewart was great of course, but my god, Katy O’Brian was the standout star for me.
7. MaXXXine – The much-anticipated third installment of Ti West’s X series took an unexpected giallo turn that some folks didn’t like, but I absolutely loved it. The handful of gruesome scenes had me covering my face in the theater while chuckling from how surprising they are. Also, the soundtrack is killer.
6. Anora – This kicks off as a fun, high-energy party movie, but deep down, you know it’s all too good to be true. When the second act rolls around, the energy and humor still carry through, but the story takes a turn towards sadness and frustration. I just want Ani to have it all. Spoiled mama’s boys suck.
5. Wicked Little Letters – The witty script and charming storyline had me hooked from start to finish. It’s Serial Mom meets Downton Abbey. I just adore foul-mouthed women, especially when they’re Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley.
4. Monkey Man – I was completely captivated by Dev Patel’s directorial debut. The raw, gritty storytelling and powerful, action-packed performances stuck with me all year. I’m so glad that Jordan Peele recognized its brilliance and pushed for it to get the theatrical release it deserved.
3. She Is Conann – Bertrand Mandico once again transports us to a captivating fantasy realm full of lesbians, but this time, we’re joined by a dope-ass dog demon in a leather jacket. The re-telling of Conan the Barbarian through six reincarnations was brilliant. Nothing is logical, but it all makes sense; it’s one of those experiences that defies explanation and simply has to be witnessed.
2. The Taste of Things – I absolutely adored this movie. Its sensual, intimate exploration of food and desire was both visually stunning and emotionally profound. It beautifully captures the complexities of human connection through the art of cooking. And Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s impossible to not fall in love with any Juliette Binoche film.
1. The Substance – Demi Moore is back and finally getting the recognition she deserves. This is undoubtedly the best film of 2024. The striking visuals, the perfect performances, the body horror, the psycho-biddy moments . . . It’s perfection.
Nosferatu: I’m still digesting this one. A technical achievement, to be certain. Dreamlike in a hypnotic way, such that it almost lulls one to sleep in the same way that Suspiriadoes—yes. Marvelously composed and photographed, without a doubt. But did I like it? It’s been nearly a week since I saw it and I’m still not certain. I’m digesting it, but I think I may not have enjoyed it at all. I’ll have more thoughts, I think, by the time that we record our first Lagniappe podcast episode of the new year. In the meantime, read Brandon’s review here.
She is Conann: An irreverent reimagining of the mythology of Conan (the Barbarian, the Destroyer, the Cimmerian, and more) as a series of reincarnated women, this one is going to end up on several of this year’s lists (and undoubtedly at the top of Brandon’s). It’s worth seeking out. Read Brandon’s review here.
Madame Web: Look, I love this movie. I love every strange little moment of it. I love how awkward Dakota Johnson is with children, I love her bizarre relationship with canned soda, and I love her whispering “I hope the spiders were worth it, mom.” I shaved my face for the first time in over five years just so that I could portray this character for Halloween. I loved it so much on my first screening of it that I wrotea 5-star review, and then I also forced Alli and Brandon to watch it so that we could discuss it on the podcast(they were … less interested). This movie changed my brain chemistry, but I know what would happen to me in the street if I put this where I really wanted to on this countdown (hint: it would be number one).
20.Civil War
For a long time, I viewed people who enjoyed clowning on Alex Garland as goofy weirdos lacking media literacy. With the release of information about his next picture, Warfare, which at this time appears to be yet another apologia for America’s practice of undermining the sovereignty of other nations, I may have to reevaluate. Alternatively, that film may end up being another subversion of what it appears to be, just as Civil War is. I did wait to see it until it would reap zero financial benefit from me due to the studio’s choice to use AI in generating posters for the film (I’m not going to give any ground on this front), and although I feared it would be too engrossed in “both sides” discourse about a potential future for the nation, I was pleased that it was nothing of the sort. In a movie for which politics is so solidly a part of its foundation, it isn’t about its onscreen politics as much as it is about the politics of observation. To paraphrase Brandon from one of our podcast episodes, this is a movie about the psychological complexity of those who document humanity in its moments of most extreme inhumanity. Decades ago, Frantz Fanon wrote “Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor,” which is something that feels more relevant now than it ever has before, especially in light of our ongoing rightward shift and the contemporary legacy media treatment of the brave souls putting their lives on the line for the liberation of Palestine. What Civil War does is explore that concept through the lens of photojournalism, following a group of people whose lives are spent in the pursuit of unearthing and exposing the worst things that human beings do to one another, while never taking direct action to prevent those atrocities. None of the characters here are cowardly, as they throw themselves into the worst situations imaginable in order to ensure that the horrors thereof are not occluded behind the fog of war, so we must ask if they are traitors, and if so, against what? Read Brandon’s review here.
19. Gasoline Rainbow
An unexpected gem that I managed to catch at SXSW, there’s nothing “new” about Gasoline Rainbow. In conversation with a much less meaningful and thoughtful picaresque that came out this year, this is almost the platonic ideal of a coming of age indie, but that lack of novelty doesn’t detract from the overall quality. This is a road picture about teenagers and starring teenagers, all unknowns, whose real lives seem to form and inform the characters that they’re playing. Their dreams are realistically small: to escape from their isolated home town for a part of the last summer that they have together before they enter the crushing adult life that they see around them. There are misadventures and setbacks, but not much in the way of tension; there’s never a moment where you fear for their safety on the road, there’s never a cut back to a concerned parent panicking about their child or trying to find them, and the question of whether they’ll get to the coast as they are trying to do is largely irrelevant. Even if there’s no one here who reminds you of who you were as a teenager, you’ll still recognize a time that you’ve left behind, and find both melancholy and triumph in watching a group of kids prepare to move on from it as well. Read my review here.
18. It’s What’s Inside
This remains a film that is difficult to talk about without giving away too much of its premise, so in order to preserve the early-in-the-film narrative train-jump, I’ll try to explain its vibe. This is a film about how regret and envy so frequently lead to self-damnation, but also about how some amount of acceptance of those failures as part of human nature can allow us to vault over our failings into something different. It’s also frequently quite inventive, as one of the film’s recurring stylistic choices is to have multiple characters try to recount events from the past and have the visualization of the various remembrances, corrections, and fuzzy details be edited in real time to match the dialogue. It’s Rashomon for the generation of short attention spans, it’s Alice Sheldon’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” for those who are currently living through the dystopian reality of self-actualization via social media’s psychologically predatory algorithms, and it’s Bodies Bodies Bodies for those who want that same “trapped at a party you can’t leave” feeling but with an unexpected science fiction bent. Read my review here.
17. Wicked Little Letters
In interbellum England, the friendship between staid, repressed, religious busybody Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman) and her neighbor, the recently-arrived Irish migrant Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), has fallen apart. Although the younger woman’s brusque, vulgar manner initially brought a refreshing air that loosened Swan’s uptight rigidity, a misunderstanding and underhanded action on Swan’s father’s part has soured their relationship to the point of bitterness. And it’s based on a true story! You might be wondering why a film with a plot summary that reads like thirty percent of the content of BBC’s iPlayer app is on this list; it’s because this movie is filthily hilarious. In this little community, someone is posting “poison pen” letters to various upstanding (and not so upstanding) citizens that are riddled with the most inventive invectives that would make even the late Jerry Springer blush. In his review, Brandon nominated the film as a kind of John Waters movie for the Downton Abbey crowd, and I had a very similar thought during my screening, as I couldn’t help but think about the title character’s obscene phone calls in Serial Mom. Of course, Edith is the recipient of a large portion of these letters and Rose is blamed and set up to take the fall, while the film also follows Anjana Vasan as the officer attempting to solve the mystery despite an obstinately patriarchal justice system, the incompetence of which is an impediment at every step. Definitely worth the watch.
16. Strange Darling
This one has gotten a pretty mixed reception, and I can see the validity in the complaints. Told in an anachronic order, Strange Darling is, on the one hand, a film predicated on “subverting expectations,” as its various twists rely upon the viewer entering the narrative with certain preconceived notions about who commits violence against whom. The problem is that those “preconceived notions” are simply an observation about violence against women in our society, and which are thus not biases so much as they are statistics. It could be argued that this is entirely the wrong time and social climate for a movie that trivializes violence against women; it would be uncharitable but arguably accurate to call it incel-adjacent. What I’m trying to say here is that no one who is calling this movie sexist is inherently wrong, even if my reading is different. On the other hand, Strange Darling as a film is something that I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of. Former actor JT Mollner has a keen eye for what works that was no doubt honed by his years on the other side of the camera (along with fellow actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi), and every bit of this is a technical achievement, from sound design to the decisions of where to cut each nonlinear chapter to ensure maximum engagement and interest to the casting. Willa Fitzgerald’s performance as “The Lady” is stunning here, and all of the potential that viewers saw in her in The Fall of the House of Usher is on full display as she alternatively plays cunning, confused, abused, and malicious, often all on top of one another. (Confession: I did watch some of the Scream MTV program that she was apparently the star of, because of my long-documented love of Scream, but if you put a gun to my head and demanded that I remember a single detail from it other than that it featured Tracy Middendorf, I’d just have to say “shoot me.”) Kyle Gallner is also quite fun here, as he’s demanded to play malice at points and vulnerability at others, and manages it with aplomb, even if he is outshone by his co-star. It’s funny, scary, and sexy. For an alternative opinion, check out Brandon’s review here.
15. I Saw the TV Glow
I came to be a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan through a fairly roundabout way. For my 2002 birthday, I got an Xbox, which came with a yearlong subscription to the official Xbox magazine, which in turn contained a demo disc with every issue. Sometime that summer, I got the disc with the demo of the upcoming Buffy video game on it, and I enjoyed it enough that I saved up to buy the game itself when it came out. I was completely out of the loop on Buffy, the characters, and the associated lore, but I loved the game so much that when I discovered that the show was in late night syndication on our local Fox affiliate, I started recording it every weekend. Growing up in an incredibly strict Christian household, my ability to watch it depended upon my ability to keep this newfound love a secret from my father, who had already had a conniption about the BtVS video game’s Game Over screen simply using the word “Resurrecting” as it reloaded to your last savepoint. This is one of the few instances in which my love for something “feminine” wasn’t contentious because of that femininity, but there were plenty of other examples of my being punished for having insufficiently masculine interests which I could detail but we’ve already come this far without talking about the actual film on the list, so I’ll try to move a little faster. In the winter of 2007, my bandmate, neighbor, and friend Alicia and I were living in the same fourplex, and we would often convince ourselves to get out and get some exercise by “going on patrol” like Buffy did, complete with stakes that we hid up our sleeves; when we didn’t have gas that winter because of our slumlord, we would pool our money together so she (who was of age) could get us a bottle of Southern Comfort, which we would drink until we weren’t cold anymore and fall asleep watching my Buffy DVDs, including the same box set that TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun posted a photo of on their Twitter. The show meant a lot to me, and I dearly wish that I had the opportunity to craft the kind of love letter for it that Schoenbrun has with I Saw the TV Glow, especially since, if I tried to do it now, it would only read as a ripoff of their film. I see so much of myself in Justice Smith’s Owen: my secrecy, the constancy of self-denial while living in the shadow of an ignorant and rage-fueled father, the discovery of an escapist fantasy through associated material rather than the text itself, and the escape to within the fantasy of not being alone in the world and how sharing that fantasy world with another person mitigates that loneliness, even over great distance and after great time. I understand that this blurb isn’t really about the movie as much as it is my relationship with the metatext, but here we are. I saw I Saw the TV Glow, and in so doing, I saw both myself and the me that might have been. Read Brandon’s review here.
14. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
I don’t have a lot to add to my thoughts on this one, as we talked about it so recently on a Lagniappe episode of the podcast. Check out our conversation about it here.
13. The People’s Joker
At Thanksgiving with friends this year, one of my closest companions was venting about how much he hated this one. Earlier in the year, I reconnected with an old lover (whose opinions I greatly respect) over coffee who asked me “Did you really like The People’s Joker?” with great incredulity. And look—I get it. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of images from this film that, taken out of context, would look like a feverish nightmare or a badly rendered student film. But film is more than images, and I’ve rarely seen Roger Ebert’s adage that films “are like a machine that generates empathy” come true so clearly in a director’s work. If there’s anyone in this world who’s earned the right to be sick to fucking death of Batman and Batman-associated products and projects, it would be me, a man who spent this entire year watching so, so, so many DC animated films. And yet, after getting so sick of typing the word “Batman” that I was convinced I would have an aneurysm if I ever had to do it again, I’m here, doing just that. Writer/director/star Vera Drew has made something truly transformative here, taking pieces of the narrative surrounding one of the most well-known characters in Western fiction and thus one of the most widely shared common cultural touchstones and using those building blocks to craft one of the most personal, confessional, and intimate portraits of the self ever committed to film. It’s a marvel. Read my review here.
12. Dune: Part Two
From my review: “This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it. There’s a sequence in the movie in which the Fremen enact a guerilla attack on one of the Harkonnen spice-harvesting machines, which is dozens of stories high and takes up the same amount of space as a quarter of a city block. They come from multiple fronts—bursting forth from under the sand, storming out from behind caves, and sharpshooting one of those dragonfly helicopters. It’s so perfectly captured and rendered on screen that I could almost feel the desert sun on my skin, the heat coming off of the sand. The tremendous, hideous machine has these pillar-like feet/ground hammerers that move every few minutes, and Paul and Chani take cover behind one while working out how to take down the copterfly. There’s an almost ineffable, indescribable reality of the starkness of the shadow, the perfect sound mix, the pacing of the cuts, all of them in perfect harmony that is just pure movie magic, and I was there[….] Everything that you’ve heard about this movie’s mastery of every facet of the art of filmcraft is true, and more.”
11. Last Things
From my review: “Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet).”
10. Monkey Man
From my review: “Taken at nothing more than face value, this is a fun action movie, where the choreography of the fighting is absolutely stellar. The film references its most overt influence, John Wick, on its sleeve by mentioning the film by name, but Patel has cited Korean action flicks Ajeossi (aka The Man from Nowhere) and I Saw the Devil as well[….] The action here is stunning, with long sequences that remain exciting through a combination of dynamic camera work, novel shot choices, exciting locations, and the kind of frenetic energy that feels like speeding. There’s a bathroom brawl that’s the equal of, if not better than, the one in M.I.: Fallout, and the sequence there is a franchise highlight. A flight from police on foot and then via electric rickshaw (complete with a Fast & Furious style NOS-injector) is a ton of fun, and the final assault on Kings owes a lot to The Raid—that certainly wasn’t the first film to have our protagonist(s) take out a building floor by floor as they approached their boss battle, but it arguably perfected it. This comes off not as a compilation or recitation of hits, but as something exciting and worthwhile in and of itself, and even if that’s all that one takes from it, this is still a great action movie.”
9. Love Lies Bleeding
From my review: “Where this film picks up the torch from [director Rose] Glass’s earlier work is in the way that we are once again made privy to the internal life of an emotionally and mentally unwell person. Jackie is a fascinating character. When we first meet her, she’s using her body to get what she needs, and is at peace with that. She has history, but no origin; the earliest part of her life that she mentions is being adopted at age thirteen (by parents that no longer speak to her and who call her a “monster”), and she tells Lou that she turned to bodybuilding as a way to change her body due to fatphobic bullying. Like Maud [from Glass’s earlier film St. Maud], she’s running from something, but unlike her, she also has a goal in mind and is relying on herself to get there, self-actualizing where Maud turned to a hollow, false spirituality. […] There should be no mistaking that this is still a brutal movie. It’s not one for those with queasy stomachs, and I’m not just talking about all of the disgusting mullets (of which there are … many), […] but just in case you’re somehow floating around out there with the idea that this is more romance than grit, I want to make it clear that this is a ferocious, vicious piece of work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
It’s a genuine puzzle to me why this movie isn’t more fondly remembered. Was it simply that all the love that people had for Fury Road had died down in the near-decade interlude between that film and this one? Do people have Anya Taylor-Joy fatigue? (Couldn’t be me.) Is it that, as we get closer and closer to a potential future that’s as apocalyptically brutal as this one, the appeal of this kind of film is sputtering out like an engine that’s nearing an empty tank? This movie was a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that was easily the equal of Fury Road. I love this Furiosa bildungsroman, the way that she had as close to a luxurious experience as possible after her childhood capture, the way that she narrowly avoided becoming one of Immortan Joe’s sex slaves and instead found herself among the rabble and forged her way up through talent and ingenuity. It’s truly epic, a Ben-Hur filled with mutants that trades in chariots for chrome. Read my review here.
7. La Bête
I’ve been recommending this to everyone that I know with the description that it’s “like a mean-spirited Cloud Atlas.” That film (and David Mitchell’s novel of the same name from which it is adapted), spans six stories across an array of different time periods: near-future Seoul, an ocean voyage during the era of American chattel slavery, 1930s Belgium, a future post-society Hawai’i, etc. In each one of these times and places, the same group of actors portray different characters, an indication to the audience that these scenarios are occupied by the same souls which are destined to reunite in some way in every reincarnation. It’s a beautiful thing there, this eternal recurrence. In La Bête (aka The Beast), this constancy and continuity of being tethered to the same “soulmate” throughout all of time is instead a source of horror, a kind of damnation in which one could find themselves trapped in an eternal, recurring loop of being forced to deal with the same shitty man for every foreseeable lifetime. Léa Seydoux does phenomenal work as a woman who, feeling stuck in a rut, finds herself digging into an even more existential hole when she undergoes a procedure to “cleanse” her DNA, which only serves to expose her to her past lives and the choices thereof. A intriguing recurring concept of “dolls” appears throughout; her husband in the 1910 timeframe is a dollmaker, the 2014 version of herself housesits at a place with a strange animatronic doll toy, and the future version of herself is given a companion in the form of a fully adult human woman who acts as her “doll.” This is a dense text, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Read Brandon’s review here.
6. Problemista
Not a week goes by that I don’t think about this movie. Julio Torres is a delight, both behind and in front of the camera, and his main character here is just awkward enough to be lovable and delightful, meek in a way that generates empathy rather than frustration at his inability to stand up for himself. As his mentor/nemesis, Tilda Swinton is an utterly terrifying MegaKaren, the likes of whom would send shivers down the spine of any person who’s ever worked in retail or food service; her completely scattered attention and deep lack of self- or situational awareness coupled with a hair-trigger temper and an infallible sense of being correct make her one of the best realized human beings I have ever seen in a film. A truly wonderful debut feature. Read my review here.
5. The Substance
People seem to have really turned on The Substance in record time, but you won’t find me among their number. A fun little fable about self-hatred, the fear of aging, the intersection of ageism and sexism in the dominant culture, and obsession with the past, this is a perfect mixture of many elements that synthesize together into something new and fresh (and monstrous). We have no term other than “body horror” to describe something like this, and while that’s not an incorrect way to describe this gem, it’s more about how being alive and made of meat is disgusting, and the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and the things that our self-hatred can drive us to do to ourselves are stomach-churning. My estimation of this one has only gone up since I saw it, and I think that its penetration of the cultural zeitgeist will make it the 2024 film most likely to be revisited in the years to come. Read my review here.
4. Kinds of Kindness
The Swampflix crew at large went gaga over Poor Things last year (I, unfortunately, was not able to catch a screening until after the start of 2024), and I’ve seen comparatively little love for Kinds of Kindness out and about in the world. Perhaps it came too closely on the heels of Yorgos Lanthimos’s most recent triumph, but this little triptych of oddities was right up my alley. These three stories all appealed to one of my favorite things. “The Death of R.M.F.” feels like Lanthimos’s take on Richard Kelly’s The Box, wherein we see people’s lives manipulated by forces that they could resist but which their loneliness and insecurities lead them to subject themselves to. “R.M.F. is Flying” reads like an Outer Limits episode written by Oliver Sachs, in which a man is convinced a rescued woman is not his missing wife, to tragic ends. Finally, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” is all about a cult running all over Southern Louisiana trying to find the messiah, which is so up my alley it feels like it came out of one of my dreams. Read my review here.
3. Longlegs
I’ve been meeting a lot of Longlegs haters in my real life. In November, I visited New Orleans and reunited with an old grad school buddy who was virulent in his hatred of it, and at a recent Christmas party, everyone was fairly shocked that I had such fond feelings for this one. The truth is, I don’t care that this one lifts so much from Silence of the Lambs. I don’t care that there were people laughing at Cage’s performance. I don’t care that the totemic dolls and their associated powers were left as an element of narrative ambiguity. I love horror movies, and there are so few that manage to shake me so much that, when I was home alone later, I had to turn the lights on. I couldn’t have enjoyed it more. Read my review here.
2. Hundreds of Beavers
From my review: “Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie.”
1. Mars Express
There was a moment during the early part of my screening of Mars Express where my viewing companion mentioned how much the film reminded him of Westworld, and I mentioned that the plot (to that point) was more reminiscent of Blade Runner, only to learn that he had never heard of the 1982 classic. Luckily, our local arthouse was screening Ridley Scott’s take on android independence the following month, and it was a delight to see that film again with my friend and through his fresh eyes. Not everyone is lucky enough to have this opportunity, but if you want a similar experience, I can’t recommend Mars Express more highly. The film, which is animated and French, opens as a noir thriller about a recovering alcoholic detective and, for all intents and purposes, a cybernetic ghost of her late partner; the two of them are in pursuit of the killer of a “jailbreaking” hacker—that is, a person who uses their computer skills to liberate robots (both androids and less humanoid mechanical beings) from the servitude for which they were designed. From there, it dives into a world in which man and machine “live” side by side, in which the mechanisms that outlive (and serve as host for the minds of) their creators are just as fallible as flesh. To cease being made of meat and replace synapses with silicon doesn’t fix the mistakes of the past, and true change may require the rejection of the material world altogether. This was absolutely my favorite movie of the year. Read Brandon’s review here.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is a monstrosity. Like the antimatter wave that threatens the (multi)cosmos in its narrative, it sprawls – cancerous, devouring everything. It’s not badly made; if anything, it’s above average, but it’s working very hard to try and duplicate the successful interfilm structural scaffolding that characterized the MCU when it was at its most culturally relevant, and coming up short. Hell, it’s falling short of the (mixed) glories of the CW’s “Arrowverse” Crisis event, even when it attempts to duplicate elements of it that can’t be explained away as simply being from the original comic. Although it’s possible that the creative (for a certain value of creativity) concept behind this was to wrap up this franchise given that there’s yet another new DC refresh on the horizon, attempting to pull off the equivalent of a direct-to-video/streaming Endgame after a mere seven films (if we’re being generous and treating The Long Halloween as two separate entities, which I don’t). That’s not even getting into the fact that one of them was set in a different dimension, another was set in outer space, another was set in the future, and Warworld was, well, whatever the hell it was.
The narrative is broken up into three 90ish minute segments. In the first, it mostly revolves around the Flash (Matt Bomer) as he “time trips” through various points in his life: the night he met his wife, Iris; the formation of the Justice League; an excursion to a morally inverted parallel Earth ruled by evil versions of the standard DC hero roster; his and Iris’s wedding day an the interruption thereof by “Harbinger,” a messenger warning of an impending threat to all of existence; and finally, the lead-up to the plan to defeat this looming doom and the failure to complete it in time. It’s at this point that we learn that the reason Barry is skipping around in time is because he has accelerated himself (and Iris) so greatly that they are able to complete the building of a giant vibrational tuning fork that should allow the wave of destruction to pass through the planet harmlessly, living an entire lifetime in the minutes that remained before it arrived.
As we learn in the second segment, which splits its focus between Supergirl and a villain known as “Psycho Pirate,” this success is short-lived. There is not merely one wave of antimatter, but many more that follow, and the network of giant tuning towers requires maintenance, spreading our heroes thin. We also learn that Supergirl actually encountered the Monitor, the heretofore non-interventionist being that’s older than our galaxy and who has finally been stirred into action by the impending destruction of existence, prior to her landing on Earth, and that although they developed a familial bond, she resents him for his inaction regarding the destruction of Krypton. Psycho Pirate is able to manipulate this grievance into causing Supergirl to kill the Monitor, which exacerbates the already perilous situation (it also doesn’t help that the future in which her friends and lover reside has been erased). It is also revealed that the unhoused doomsayer who was rescued by Jon Stewart way back in Beware My Power is none other than our old friend John Constantine, who, following his exit from the end of House of Mystery, taking on the Crisis comics role of Pariah. Further, (in Part 3) we learn that it was an action that he took at the end of Apokolips War, namely sending the DCAMU Flash back to when Darkseid was a baby with the intent to kill the still-innocent child and infecting Barry with a spell that would still kill li’l Darkseid when Barry inevitably found himself morally unable to super-shake an infant to death. Apparently, Darkseid is so vital to the universe itself that his death fractured reality and created the multiverse that our characters inhabit, which set this whole bad situation into motion. Nice work as always, Constantine.
The third segment of this sprawl sees our heroes having used the release of energy from the Monitor’s death to somehow transport all of the remaining endangered Earths into The Bleed, an extradimensional “nowhere” that was featured in the Authority comics I mentioned back in Superman vs. The Elite. There’s a bunch of rigamarole involving an alternate Lex Luthor, but the (very) long and short of it is that each Earth in their brought with it their sun (sure) and that if a Superman absorbed the energy of all of the suns, it could be redirected to destroy the entity behind the (ahem) crisis, the Anti-Monitor, and everyone could go home. Wracked by guilt from having been manipulated into killing the Monitor, Supergirl chooses to sacrifice herself to this plan instead. This is all for naught, however, as it turns out that the Anti-Monitor is an “antibody” response from the larger whole of reality, as the aforementioned Darkseid infanticide fracture isn’t resolved simply by killing off one part of its immune response. The miracle machine that resolved the conflict of Legion of Superheroes is acquired, and it’s decided to merge all the different parallel realities back into one “monoverse” as the only possible solution, and everyone says their supposedly heartfelt goodbyes and jumps into the new universe, where all the alternate versions of each character merging into one single person on the new Earth. To its credit, this does manage to make that seem more hopeful than the CW adaptation did. Constantine, assuming he’s off for more of that eternal damnation that he’s always on about, also gets a new start, which—alongside the sweetness of Barry and Iris’s relationship and some of the scenes in that comment on the sadness and somberness of Wonder Woman’s immortality—is one of the few emotional touchpoints that actually work here.
If you look back at that third paragraph, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of “we learn” and “it’s revealed” going on. This is a text that is 50% “it’s revealed,” as it weaves together the apparently disparate threads of a pre-planned narrative from movies it’s been rapidly spitting out for the prior three years, rushing headlong into this project with no reason to make it other than, well, if you’re making DC stuff, you’ve just gotta do Crisis on Infinite Earths, right? You’ve just gotta. But the truth is that this is a terrible idea done for completely the wrong reason. The original comic came out in 1986 and was created specifically to simplify what had become a too-sprawling number of parallel Earths that DC’s continuity editors were supposed to keep consistent despite DC just buying out other comic book companies and sticking them in wherever. There was the “main Earth,” of course, and then there was “Earth-2,” where DC editorial had arbitrarily said all stories from the “Golden Age” had occurred. Then there was the Earth where all the Shazam (née Captain Marvel) characters lived, and the Earth where the Justice League was instead the dictatorial Crime Syndicate, Westworld Earths, Elseworld Earths, and so on and so forth. So 1986’s COIE was going to simplify everything, while DC Animated editorial decided to create and destroy a multiverse in about 15 hours. Making COIE purely for the sake of makingCOIE is a bonkers decision. There were, collectively, twenty-three seasons of television across six different television series before the CW committed to doing this as a concept, whereas this exists to tie different continuities together that didn’t need that at all, and it does it through exhaustive exposition.
The other 50% of this movie is nostalgia bait, but to be honest, it wouldn’t be Crisis without it. The original comic was published before I was born, and I learned about it when I started getting into comics in my adolescence; I got a copy of it from the library, and, despite having a mind that was a sponge for all of what I was reading, it was a dense and incomprehensible text to me as a nascent fan. Who the hell were all these people that I didn’t know from Justice League? Why were there two Supermen? Things like an alternate reality of evil Leaguers I could figure out from context, but what the hell was an Atomic Knight? But those appearances of characters that I would come to know better (and many I would not)—Blue Beetle, Negative Woman, Nightshade, truly too many to mention—weren’t for me, who wasn’t even a glimmer in my mother’s eye when it was published. It was for all the fans at the time, people who knew who Bartholomew Lash and Hourman when they were reading the thing forty years ago and got a little thrill out of seeing to-them familiar characters all in the pages of a single comic. I understand the thrill of that, but that’s most of all the media that is being produced lately, whether it’s Free Guy or Ready Player One or any of the hundreds of less-obvious pastiches of endless nostalgia-driven regurgitation. For most of the people who are going to watch this and enjoy it, that’s going to be the reason that they do—not because of the animation or the design or the character work, but because Terry McGinnis Batman is here. Some stilted, cliche interactions between “our” Batman and his adult daughter from an Earth that’s running a few decades ahead, including lots of “Well, my father” and “I’m not your father” repeated ad infinitum isn’t going to convince me that this needs to exist. You’re also not winning me over by erasing the parallel world where Batman: The Animated Series and its associated works takes place, then dedicating the movie to Kevin Conroy. I guess some people find this touching because it was the last thing Conroy recorded before he died, but it feels ghoulish to me.
There were moments when I never thought we would reach the end of this, but here we are. Please don’t expect more of these. This little comic newsstand, like most newsstands outside of metropolitan airports, is closing for business. I didn’t have a good time, and I have no one but myself to blame, but I will take pride in managing to get through all of these in a year with most of my sanity intact. I’d say “until next time,” but there’s not going to be a next time. Excelsior!
This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve. That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories. It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US. While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set. It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize. So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.
The Uninvited (1944)
1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing. More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted. One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff. The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost. While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that. It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.
Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions. Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering. It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game. They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them. Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks. Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave. The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus. They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.
Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways. From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss. Dying is just not that big of a deal. Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood. Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor. He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12. Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.
Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day. Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment. All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since. As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list. It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat. Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs. Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit. A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob. That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body. While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.
It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers. During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom. The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips. It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice. As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story. There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.
1. She is Conann – My favorite working director reshaped the Conan the Barbarian myth into a lesbian fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. No one else alive has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way Bertrand Mandico has. He’s perfectly attuned to the medium’s ability to evoke powerful ideas & feelings out of pure, hand-crafted imagery. There are allusions to luminary provocateurs herethat indicate Mandico thinks of himself as the modern equivalent of a Kenneth Anger or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he’s actually our modern Méliès: an illusionist who’s pushing a still-young artform to its most fantastic extremes.
2. I Saw the TV Glow – The melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon. It’s impossible not to read this VHS-warped dysphoria horror as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche, obsessive media consumption instead. It made me so sad that I felt physically ill, and then I immediately retreated into another movie screening so I wouldn’t think about it for too long.
3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – A three-hour Romanian art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.
4. Mars Express – A great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. It’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood studios aren’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Minority Report & Terminator 2 anymore, but then its third act shoots for the stars in a way that distinguishes it from its obvious reference points through sheer dazzlement.
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – George Miller’s action blockbuster sequel gives me the RRRtingles more often than it gives me the Fury Road tingles, which is honestly just as good. It’s large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen.
6. The People’s Joker– This fair-use Joker parody is the kind of direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the inner sanctums of its director’s brain. It’s not Vera Drew’s fault that the secret batcaves of her particular brain are wallpapered with copyrighted corporate media. We’ve all been mentally poisoned by pop culture iconography in that way, but most artists are too timid to engage with it in their work with this level of fearless vulnerability. It’s an impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture.
7. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” the most exciting thing about this apocalyptic hybrid-doc is finally getting to experience what it’s like to be Björk for an hour: finding infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations.
8. Memoir of a Snail– A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. There’s a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to Adam Elliot’s work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt, except Elliot thankfully borrows a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet whimsy to help cut the tension.
9. Cuckoo– Tilman Singer’s teen-angst freakout escalates the verbally conveyed psychedelia of his debut Luzto something more traditionally thrilling. He genre-hops from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintains the same screenwriting ambition of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools. It’s also a major triumph for audiences who’ve been waiting around for Dan Stevens & Hunter Schaeffer to be handed meatier material; our time is now.
10. Love Lies Bleeding – I went into this muscular erotic thriller expecting to swoon for its synths, sex, and biceps. I’m surprised to say that I was also emotionally invested in its central romance beyond those surface aesthetics, which was not as much of a given. Rose Glass amplifies everything that was exciting about her debut Saint Maud to grander effect, once again getting away with one of my least favorite genre filmmaking tropes (contextualizing all supernatural fantasy elements as dreams & delusions instead of them “really” happening), somehow making it feel like audacity rather than cowardice. It’s ripped, roided, and noided.
11. The Substance – There was a movie called Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo at Cannes a few years ago that got unanimously rotten reviews complaining that it’s just four relentless hours of young people’s gyrating butts. It never got US distribution, but Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is exactly what I imagined it looked like, except now with positive reviews and surrealistic gore effects from Screaming Mad George.
12. Aishiteru! (Safe Word) – A semi-pink mockumentary about a pro-wrestling pop idol who gets recruited as a dominatrix because she can’t stop playing heel. Whatever dramatic authenticity is lost in its sub-professional production values is made up for in its intense fixations on sexual power dynamics & subcultural detail. If you have any entry-level interest in wrestling, pop, or kink, this is a thrilling, endearing journey through their backrooms & dungeons.
13. Kinds of Kindness – The sinister absurdism of this New Orleans-set anthology drama convinced me that Yorgos Lanthimos would be just as effective as a playwright as he is as a filmmaker, which I can’t believe never occurred to me before. More urgently, a lot of it was shot in the immediate area where I work & live, which was uncomfortable because I don’t want any of the creeps he’s dreamed up anywhere near me.
14. A Different Man – Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction. Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible. It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.
15. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed – Joanna Arnow delivers the driest humor you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about an autofictional BDSM romcom where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.
16. Anora– This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.
17. The Beast – A sci-fi fantasy horror about falling for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of your past & future lives, and all that changes is the temporal context in which he sucks. It’s one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure if you’re supposed to take entirely seriously, until director Bertrand Bonello tips his hand a little by making you watch pop-up ad clips from Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.
18. Nosferatu – Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale. As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.
19. Longlegs – This supernatural serial killer thriller feels convincingly Evil and gives Nicolas Cage free rein to be erratically Intense. Call me a simple man, but that’s more than enough for me. The Oz Perkins directorial project continues an upward trend.
20. In a Violent Nature – A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. It’s very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
I completely forgot that Justice League: Warworld existed, despite the fact that, according to my viewing history on the app formerly known as HBO, I sat through it at some point in the year since its release (or, more likely, I put it on while I was doing housework and then took a nap). Don’t let that fool you, though, as it’s not my resentment about realizing that there was still yet another one of these movies before the coming “crisis” that led to the low score for this one; it’s one of the most forgettable, despite being one of the more original of these flicks.
We open in the Old West, where a lady gunslinger arrives in a town that has barricaded its funds inside the town bank, to protect it from an outlaw Jonah Hex and his crew, who claim that they are owed their “protection interest” by the miners who reside within. The woman is more trusting of the townsfolks’ representative, Bartholomew “Bat” Lash. She ends up defending the town from the bandits, including derailing a train that was sent barreling toward the town’s fortifications. When Hex kills Lash, she almost beats the former to death, before riding off into the dawn, her name still unknown. From there, we find ourselves on the world of Skartaris, a very Edgar Rice Burroughs sword-and-sorcery jungle planet, where a man named Warlord captures a mercenary sent by his enemy, the dark wizard Deimos. The mercenary offers to reveal Deimos’s hideout to Warlord, but the latter man insists that the mercenary accompany them, and once Deimos is dead, he will reward the mercenary with his freedom and his weight in gold. Warlord’s little Masters of the Universe-style team gets picked off one by one until only he and the mercenary are the only ones to arrive in Deimos’s loot cave, where they also find a familiar woman chained to his throne. They ultimately manage to kill Deimos, and the mercenary and the now-freed warrior woman share a look of recognition as a portal opens, and they enter it. From here, we find ourselves in what is, for all intents and purposes, a pastiche of the Twilight Zone classic “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, where an “Agent Kent” meets his new partner, King Faraday, at a diner where a group of bus travelers have gathered after seeing a supposed UFO crash. They’re assisted by highway patrolman Bruce Wayne, and among the diner patrons is a woman who identifies herself as “Ms. Prince.” Of course, nothing is what it seems.
Warworld really suffers from being viewed so closely after I marathoned all of the DC Showcase Shorts. Although they weren’t all perfect, most of them were very effective as exactly the kind of vignettes that this film is seeking to achieve (albeit while making them fictional “mindscapes” in which our heroes are trapped), and failing. The western segment fails to achieve the atmosphere of the Jonah Hex short, and is a fairly rote “protect the townspeople” narrative that offers no genuine excitement. The “savage land” section is a pale imitation of the Kamandi short, and there’s nothing all that interesting about “What if Batman was a mercenary on a strange world?,” since it’s just another retread of tropes you’ve seen done before, and better. The black & white alien paranoia bit is the most intriguing experiment that the film does, and it turns into a pretty rote retreading of all the tropes associated with that genre before speeding right past it into the realization on the part of Clark, Bruce, and Diana that they’ve been forced to play out scenarios by an alien known as Mongul, who has harnessed the psychic powers of Martian Manhunter to do so. The three manage to escape from their psychic prisons, get out into the large “war world” planet-killing ship, and blow it up, before being saved by an unknown woman who tells them that they will be needed “for the coming crisis,” and then it’s credits time.
I spent most of the movie assuming that the Wonder Woman whom we were following was a version of the character that we had not yet seen, since the only Wonder Woman appearance prior to this in this new “Tomorrowverse” sub-franchise was the one from the alternate dimension in the Justice Society movie; as a result, I kept asking why I was supposed to care about this character when we had never seen her before. As it turns out, this is that Wonder Woman, which is revealed when she recognizes Superman as Clark, but as a younger version of him than the man she knows. It’s needlessly complicated, and the narrative decisions on display only make sense when looking at this not as a film unto itself, but as a placeholder and teaser for the upcoming Crisis film. It’s not interesting, it’s not exciting, it’s not fun, and exists solely for the least interesting reason for any piece of art to exist: filler sequel bait.
Swampflix 