A24 movies, the American independent entertainment company that specializes in film and television production, have been hit or miss for me. The distribution studio has my utmost respect, as I admire its effort and ability to bring to life smaller, independent projects that might otherwise have a chance for creation. Founded in 2012, the company has ventured out of obscurity and into the mainstream within the last half dozen years, with its films many Academy Award nominations, including wins for Best Actress (Brie Larson – Room, 2015), Best Documentary Feature (Amy – 2015), and Best Visual Effects (Ex Machina – 2016), and Best Supporting Actress (Yuh-jung Youn – Minari, 2020). As of this post, A24’s most recognizable and arguably successful film was Moonlight, which was the Best Picture of 2016 while earning Mahershala Ali a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. However, 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once will likely earn multiple Academy Award nominations and could win in multiple categories, including Best Picture.
Category Archives: Art House and Independent
Another Round (2020)
Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, The Command) turned heads when he received his first Best Director Academy Award nomination for the little-known but well-received Another Round, the 2020 Best International Feature Film winner. There were some excellent candidates for Best Director in 2015, but Vinterberg wasn’t necessarily in that discussion.
I had this movie at the top of my queue to watch for more than six months before I finally watched it on a recent plane ride. It’s a Denmark movie, and I haven’t been doing great in recent years with subtitled films, especially when watching at home. A long plane ride was the perfect opportunity to focus on my laptop with some headphones on. The movie earned 92% critics and 90% audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Those scores were both pretty high. Another Round, while original, was nothing special. It wasn’t so much that it was uninteresting. It just wasn’t memorable at all. It also had numerous things that could have been improved, including plenty of continuity questions. I don’t doubt that there were many international films from 2020 and that this one received much of its acclaim and fanfare because of its director and lead actor.
Ammonite (2020)
Ammonite, Francis Lee’s (God’s Own Country) tells the familiar of something uniting us all: the internal need to find human connection, even when we externally live a life that suggests otherwise. We often seek out other humans to fulfill some of our needs inside of us, though we often have different capacities. As I write this review during the Coronavirus pandemic, this innate truth could not be more evident. The main difference between now and the past is that we can connect with others through face-to-face video technology, phone calls, text messages, email, social media, and other platforms. But in 1840 Europe (the time and setting of Ammonite), the person had to be physically near you, outside of the occasional letter that might or may not arrive in the mail. There certainly is real-time interaction if you and the other person are in the exact location. Our connections also aren’t authentic, and we live a fabricated existence because it beats being alone. So when we can connect with someone (on whatever mutually agreed upon level), it quickly becomes something we don’t want to let go of. And that is essentially the story of Ammonite.
Beast (2017)
The best thing I can say about Michael Pearce’s Beast (in a movie that is rife with good things) is that I can’t think of a movie where an unknown director directing his first feature-length film (Pearce), an unknown lead actress, starring in her first film (Jessie Buckley) and an unknown lead actor, starring in, really his first film (Johnny Flynn – Love Is Thicker Than Water) have excelled more. The direction is purposeful, stylistic, and detailed. At the same time, the performances between the leads are combustible. The story is rich enough to carry you from the starting line to the checkered flag in a movie that ultimately failed to live up to its initial promise primarily due to errors in editing and an overall storyline that might have been a tad ambitious for this novice in their craft. It’s a difficult movie to recommend if you’re not a hardcore independent movie film buff. But, if, like me, you try to watch anything that comes close to looking like an intense, original, emotional drama, this movie will fill that need. And even if you leave feeling a little unsatisfied, you’ll leave knowing that the director and both leads left everything they had on the floor. If nothing else, it’ll encourage you to look for future films with which any of these three people might be involved.
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
As the release of 2017 movies slowly (and mercifully) comes to an end, each review provides an opportunity to reflect deeper and deeper on the year that was. I’ve mentioned a few times in recent reviews that 2017 has, by far, been the worst year for movies since the inception of this blog back in 2010. Some movies may finish at the end of my year Top 5, but they wouldn’t even come close to finishing in my Top 10 in any other year. Unfortunately, for this review, Luca Guadagnino’s (A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) Call Me By Your Name did not benefit from a weak 2017. This movie has done very well with the critics and likely will earn multiple Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Actor (Timothée Chalamet – Lady Bird, Interstellar), Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as potential nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Armie Hammer – Nocturnal Animals, The Birth of a Nation) and Michael Stuhlbarg (The Shape of Water, Arrival), Best Original Song, and others, it still didn’t captivate me in the way I expected it to. For those expecting this to be the most excellent movie about gay love since Brokeback Mountain, you may be disappointed. Brokeback Mountain is an A+ movie. Guadagnino’s (A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) Call Me By Your Name is a B at best.