1. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.
2. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.
3. The Phoenician Scheme — Its violence is Looney Tunes, its business negotiations are Three Stooges, its religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of The Phoenician Scheme for any other director’s work. It’s another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.
4. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both. The film takes its title from a type of curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if time is standing still. The game it stages also plays out over an impossibly long time, an eephus hovering in the air while everyone hopes it will never end.
5. One Battle After Another — 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.
6. The Ugly Stepsister— A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous “villain” who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).
7. The Plague — A coming-of-age nightmare drama about hazing rituals at a children’s water polo summer camp. It might not fully qualify as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon among titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about boyhood bullying we’ve ever seen.
8. No Other Choice — Park Chan-Wook returns with another spectacular revenge thriller, except this time the antihero lead can’t actually fight the thing that’s wronged him. You can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure layoffs into a torture dungeon, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. So, he convinces himself that he has no other choice but to kill his fellow workers while competing for jobs, losing sight of the real enemy. Our relentlessly mundane & degrading corporate hellscape knows no borders nor mercy. Someone ought to do something about it … just preferably someone smarter & nobler than this guy.
9. Boys Go to Jupiter— Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, illustrating the listless ennui of unoccupied time between childhood school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Overflowing with killer music, adorable animation, and quietly hilarious characters, its Floridian otherworld is politically grim, but hanging out there feels like getting a foot massage while digesting an edible.
10. Rats! — A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but it’s doubtful any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.
-The Swampflix Crew
Swampflix 