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

PRO AND CONCLAVE

This week Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I am a proud founding member--the last remaining founding member, I think!--announced our 2024 awards.

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist took Best Picture, but numerically the big winner was Conclave, with five awards. As usual, some of the honorees reflect my voting, some don't, but there are a lot of worthwhile movies on the list.

My own Top Ten list is still in progress, and is slated to post after the New Year.

SWEET SISTINE

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Conclave--Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who has the unenviable job of presiding over a contentious election to replace a recently deceased Pope. With liberal, conservative and shifty middle-of-the-road candidates and their factions jockeying, the sequestered old fellows can't arrive at the needed two-thirds majority.

Stanley Tucci is a liberal who insists, demurely and unconvincingly, that he doesn't want the gig, but is willing to take it and will embrace a broad spectrum of progressive reforms if elected. Sergio Castellitto is a cheerfully reactionary, Italo-centric Cardinal who still resents Vatican II. John Lithgow, playing the middle, is all wounded innocence when told that there's a bad report about his last meeting with the late Pontiff. Then there's the mysterious Cardinal (Carlos Diehz) of Kabul, who shows up out of nowhere, having only recently been appointed by the deceased Pope unbeknownst to the College.

This tale of an improbable papal ascendancy almost challenges Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian VII  for far-fetched wishful thinking. How possible, let alone plausible, any of it is I can't say. Nor do I much care. High ecclesiastical dramas are fun. Movies ranging from the naïvely pious Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) to the campy Monsignor (1982) to the wild and woolly Angels & Demons (2009) have all taken advantage of the splendor and grand theatrical ceremony of the Vatican, and the intrigues of its sumptuously outfitted habitués.

So too does Edward Berger, the German director of Conclave, adapted by Peter Straughan from the 2016 novel by the Brit Robert Harris. The movie starts a little slow, but very soon, abetted by the cinematography of Stéphane Fontaine and the fevered strings of Viktor Bertelmann's score, it becomes an exciting spectacle, swept along by Berger in a manner reminiscent at times of the great silents; he gives us carefully composed tableaux of clerics skulking about shadowy stairwells, or Eisenstein-ish masses of nuns under umbrellas, surging like tides into high-angle shots.

But Berger's eye on the settings also cuts through the superficial lushness and opulence to find an oppressive cheerlessness. The marble-paneled hallway into which Fiennes and his fellow Cardinals emerge from their austere dorm rooms during the conclave's lockdown has an institutional dreariness.  The figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement glower down in reproach upon the Cardinals as they vote. Somehow the most hopeful presence in the film is a rather intrepid turtle.

Berger's skill is impressive, but it's the acting that makes Conclave lively and juicy, and ultimately even moving. Fiennes, always good at suffering, has rarely been so woebegone, or so wryly likable. Tucci and Lithgow could do roles like these in their sleep, and they're both crisply on point. Lucian Msamati and Brian F. O'Bryne are strong as a Nigerian Cardinal and as the Dean's sheepish aide, respectively. And as a large-and-in-charge, baleful-looking nun, Isabella Rossellini's role is almost wordless early on, but then she brings off her one big moment so flawlessly that her punctuating gesture wins applause.