FLOW CHART

The Oscar nominations came out earlier this week; Your Humble Narrator graciously waited until afterwards to present my Top Ten List for 2024, so as not to make the Academy's announcement an anticlimax. Here, roughly in order of preference, are the ten films that I think I liked best this year:

1. Flow--No movie last year meant quite as much to me as this wordless, visually exquisite animated feline adventure from Latvia.  

2. Conclave--This Vatican melodrama has the sweep of a great silent, but also humane and lovable performances, especially that of Ralph Fiennes.

3. The Bikeriders--Compelling, beautifully shot wheeler held together by the funny, sensible performance of Jodie Comer.

4. Heretic--Comparative religion debate in horror movie form; it goes a bit too gruesome in the homestretch, perhaps, and it's defamatory toward blueberry pie, but Hugh Grant's performance is a tour de force.

5. A Complete Unknown--Dylan's early years make for a conventional but enjoyable and musically rich biopic.

6. Nickel Boys--The horrors of a Florida reform school for boys, and the triumph of friendship, both seen from the point of view of two of the boys. Heartbreaking but thrilling.

7. A Real Pain--Two Jewish cousins from New York go to Poland together to explore their grandmother's Holocaust experience. Kieran Culkin is marvelous as the loud, nervy inappropriate one; writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's performance as the quiet one would be easy to overlook, but he's also terrific.

8. Kneecap--West Belfast lads stir up trouble performing hip hop in Irish, as in the Irish language; hard to resist.

9. Sing Sing--Colman Domingo is a powerhouse at the center of this drama about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at the title correctional facility; many of his superb costars are actual veterans of the program.

10. Anora--Brooklyn sex worker marries Russian oligarch's playboy son and imagines it's forever. The movie goes on too long and has a few complications too many, but it's ruefully funny, and Mikey Madison is great in the title role.

A few other titles that I found worth watching in 2024: The Fire Inside, Love Lies Bleeding, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Queer, My Old Ass, Between the Temples, Saturday Night, Thelma, Challengers, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the long-belated Pitch People and Francis Ford Coppola's infuriating yet inspiring Megalopolis. It's also important to note that there are many other major flicks, notably The Brutalist, The Substance, Wicked, Hard Truths, The Last Showgirl and September 5, that I haven't caught up with yet.

You can check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, on this year's Chandler International Film Festival, running today through February 2.

Finally, for the kind few who might possibly care, here's the embarrassingly short list of books I read in 2024 (excluidng, as always, short stories, articles, poems, comics, fridge magnets, instruction manuals, road signs and stuff I'm re-reading):

The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer

Prequel: An  American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama

Eneas Africanus by Harry Stillwell Edwards

Billy Summers by Stephen King

Playback by Raymond Chandler

Bound to Rise by Horatio Alger, Jr.

My Childhood by Maxim Gorky

She'll Never Get Off the Ground by Robert J. Serling

JOINT SESSION

Opening this weekend:

Kneecap--The title refers to a west Belfast rap trio whose members perform in Irish, as in the Irish language. The members play themselves in the film--two youths, who go by the stage names "Mo Chara" and "Móglai Bap," and an older music teacher, JJ aka "DJ Próvai," who performs in a balaclava to hide his identity both from his employers and from his wife.

The group's bristling, furious, insolently funny music gets them in trouble, not only with the police and  politicians but with scuzzy local gangsters, the Orange Order and their own families. Even the pro-Irish language activists react with distate; they don't want the mother tongue associated with this sort of profanity, obscenity, drug use and anti-Brit sentiment. But the music also, of course, finds an enthusiastic audience.

The trailer calls the film, set in 2019 and directed by Rich Peppiatt from a script he wrote with the stars, a "mostly true story." To what extent the adverb in that phrase is strained, I can't say, though the publicity seems to suggest that this is a tall-tale version of the truth.

What I can say is that the movie is irresistible. The three stars are extremely endearing, and hold their own onscreen alongside veterans like Michael Fassbender as Móglai Bap's father and Josie Walker as a forbidding detective. Peppiatt's direction is fast and graphically playful but never merely slick; there's always warmth in the wit. And it's all driven forward by that marvelous music.

I realize that I come to Kneecap as a total outsider; most of the cultural references were opaque to me, and if there's another, darker angle from which this story can be seen, I'm certainly not in a position to recognize it. Things get a bit melodramatic toward the end, but again, the movie never really tries to claim that it's a documentary. Taken on its own terms, it's a delight.

There's also an irony built into the movie's language: the beautifully-spoken Irish is subtitled; the English dialogue is not, and was thus much harder for my Yank ear to follow. Maybe they should have subtitled both languages for the U.S. market, one in orange lettering, the other in green.