Hamnet was the one film of the year that you expected to feel the most heartbreaking emotions from. It had all the elements, including glowing reviews from film festivals held months before its release. Though still relatively new to the director’s chair, Chloé Zhao has a penchant for directing a couple of super affecting movies in The Rider and Nomadland, for which she won her first Oscar. Add, perhaps, Hollywood’s next leading man in the already accomplished Paul Mescal (Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, Gladiator II) as William Shakespeare, and equally young and accomplished Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter, Beast, Chernobyl) as his wife, Agnes along with the tragic play Hamlet, and this had the formula for a film that would leave an entire audience sobbing by the ending credits. Unfortunately, Zhao never took us there in her tender, though underwhelming Hamnet, the true story of William and Agnes’s son, who inspired Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most recognized and revered play behind Romeo and Juliet.
Category Archives: Romance
Babygirl (2024)
One of the most divisive films of 2024 was Halina Reijn’s (Instinct) Babygirl. Much of this may be due to the film being Reijn’s follow-up to the highly successful Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, while of this may be due to the film’s taboo topic of a workplace affair between a superior and subordinate, revolving around domineering and submissive sex. Some filmgoers likely lined up on opening night to see this much-talked-about movie since its 2024 Venice International Film Festival screening. For many others, this would be a film they could never watch. While I am willing to give most films a fair chance (10-15 minutes at least), Babygirl is not one that I would have felt comfortable watching with someone else. It’s a film that takes a far too taboo subject for most social settings and groups to converse about and gives it a home. However, as well as the film felt genuine and honest, Babygirl did not venture into lanes we may have wished for. Presumably, what we thought would occur did exactly that. While it did those things well, many may be disappointed it didn’t try to go for something more profound. I lay somewhere in between.
Far and Away (1992)
There have only been a handful of movies I’ve been able to call my favorite of all time. From 2015 to the present (February 2024), it has been The Revenant. The Town had a few years run before that. Before that, the honor belonged to The Shawshank Redemption, holding it for many years after wrestling it away from Braveheart, which had an equally long run. It dates back to the 1980s, The Goonies and a surfing movie called North Shore until Young Guns took the title in 1987. The ’90s was when my favorite film changed hands the most, full of some of the first Rated R movies I saw in the theater, including Flatliners, True Romance, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, and Ron Howard’s (In The Heart of the Sea, Rush) sweeping romantic adventure Far and Away.
It Ends With Us (2024)
It Ends With Us, the 2024 film from director Justin Baldoni (Clouds, Five Feet Apart), is another example of a film movie that had the potential to be great but ultimately tried to either do too much or incorporate too many elements that weren’t otherwise needed in an attempt to want to be more than the movie was capable of delivering. While there is quite a discrepancy between critics and audiences (55% vs. 89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), it’s tough to dispute that this touches on issues significant in today’s society, including a conclusion that feels murky and haunting, but also honest and authentic, and one that I haven’t seen before in movies or shows about the subject matter. It Ends With Us does have trigger warnings. Proceed cautiously as you decide to watch or read my review.
Anora (2024)
Blue Valentine, An Education, Silver Linings Playbook, Pretty Woman, The Worst Person in the World, Before Midnight, and Like Crazy. These were the seven movies in the first article I pulled up after an online search of “movies like Anora” returned. As a fan of all seven films, I needed nothing more to decide that Sean Baker’s (Red Rocket, The Florida Project) Anora was one I needed to see. I did not need to see a preview. I did not need to read a synopsis. Instead, I had to find out how quickly I could watch the film. My viewing happened soon after. It was a mixed bag and one that mostly failed. While Silver Linings Playbook and Pretty Woman have good-natured moments of good-naturedness and humor, I wouldn’t label any of these as comedies or unbelievable. While I could see vague similarities, Anora was much more comedy-first, absurd second, and attempts to portray emotional bleakness third. I would not have listed it with the movies the article I read compared it to.