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.
Category Archives: Year of Release
The Brutalist (2024)
Brutal. That was how I had already decided how I was going to describe Brady Corbet’s (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux) The Brutalist, regardless of what I thought about it. With a runtime of three hours and forty-five minutes (plus a 15-minute intermission), I asked myself before my theater viewing, “Why am I seeing this?” The answer is not because I had any interest in seeing it but because it had been nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actor (Adrien Brody – The Pianist, The Jacket), Best Supporting Actress Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything, On the Basis of Sex), and Best Supporting Actor Guy Pierce (Memento, The King’s Speech). I saw it in the theater because I was told by content creators I follow that the viewing experience had to be in the theater as Corbet shot the film using VistaVision. This process involves shooting the film horizontally on 35mm film stock to achieve a higher-resolution image for large screens. I wouldn’t have noticed a difference if I had not learned this beforehand.
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.
Burnt (2015)
Good things happen to bad people. That was my impression of Adam, the lead character of John Wells’s (August: Osage County, The Company Men) imperfect but underappreciated Burnt. The Bradley Cooper (Maestro, A Star Is Born) 2015 release came when its lead actor was on a cold streak with poorly received big-budget releases such as Aloha, Joy, and Serena. This was abysmal timing as Cooper, who, the year before, had just become the 10th male actor ever to earn three consecutive acting Oscar nominations (Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper, American Hustle).
Emilia Pérez (2024)
Emilia Pérez, the not-so-quiet musical, has quickly become this year’s Oscar darling over awards season, racking up 13 Academy Award nominations, three more than any other film. It is one of the more divisive Best Picture nominations in recent memory. Critics like it but don’t love it, as evidenced by its 75% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and 71 on Metacritic. Those scores alone suggest it’s one of the year’s better movies, but it is far from a consensus. Worse are the audience scores, with a meager 27% fresh Rotten Tomatoes audience score and 6.2 on IMDB. Some are comparing its surge to Crash (2004) and Green Book (2018), two great films that may have earned their Best Picture Academy Award wins, based more on where we were in American society during those periods than on the timeless quality of the movie itself. While that is not something I would say, I would agree that neither film was the best of those years. I have Crash as my sixth favorite and Green Book as my third favorite movie of the year. Similarly, Emilia Pérez is not the best movie of 2024, but it will finish in my top ten. Like those above, it’s not perfect, and its timely, topical relevance is a factor of its generated steam.