"No matter what others try to sell you - it is the destination, not the journey."
Watching the epilogue of The Brutalist, I thought of all the lifetime achievement awards shows I’ve seen over the years, and what horrors must get glossed over in the pomp and circumstance of celebrating an artist's life. Over the course of three and a half hours, we witness the harrowing journey of Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), and there is something truly powerful about intimately experiencing the warts and all portrait of this man's life, and then jumping ahead to a gaudy, chic Italian event that eschews the ugliness that came before.
The First Venice Biennale, 1980 (as the film's epilogue is titled) shows us a gala in which it feels as if Tóth's masterworks of architecture were just inevitably going to happen, without much reflection on the torturous, decades-long process of making them. It's this dissonance between the painstaking process of becoming and the jubilant celebration of having made it that lends so much power to the ending of Brady Corbet's monumental film. And that final line of dialogue, which seems to have mystified some critics, is the key to what it's all about.
I saw The Brutalist on a beautiful 35mm print at the Austin Film Festival last year, and I knew immediately it was a film that demanded to be seen more than once, ideally with an architect by one's side (luckily, I married one last October, and it was a treat to see the film again with her when it opened). In terms of scope and style, it's tempting to compare The Brutalist to one of Paul Thomas Anderson's twin American epics, The Master (2012) or There Will Be Blood (2007), but ultimately this thing is its own, strange beast. Corbet has enormous confidence in his vision - the movie is characterized by long, unhurried scenes and an unrelenting conviction that the audience will stay with this decades-spanning, often grueling story until the very end. And they do.
The Brutalist is also, in part, a film about who gets credit or acknowledgment for what. The climactic point of the film is Tóth's wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) defending her husband’s honor - and then we jump ahead twenty years to an event honoring him with only a passing mention of her. I find it interesting that a husband and wife team (both of them filmmakers) wrote this movie together; in fact, in the film's opening titles, the credit reads "By Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold," essentially giving authorship to both of them.
A testament to the power of artistry, both in its portrait of the fictional László Tóth and in its very miraculous existence, The Brutalist gives me hope that great American movies are still possible, against all odds.
Given that the best Bob Dylan biopic already exists (Todd Haynes's I’m Not There) and this genre was blown to shreds by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), I was fairly skeptical of A Complete Unknown in the months leading up to its release. But I’ll be damned if James Mangold didn’t knock this one out of the park, sidestepping many of the musical biopic conventions he immortalized with Walk the Line (2005) nearly twenty years ago.
The first thing A Complete Unknown does right is refuse to explain away Dylan’s behavior and persona through some simplified backstory. Instead, the movie adopts the ethos of Dylan himself (brilliantly portrayed by Timothée Chalamet): “Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself, creating things.”
While the film (correctly) doesn’t try to force a traditional character arc onto our protagonist, Dylan does undergo an evolution over the course of the movie. Mangold’s strongest choice is bookending the film with Dylan’s visits to Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in the hospital. Yes, our boy goes electric by the film’s end, and no, he won’t apologize for it - but he hasn’t abandoned his roots. He hasn’t forgotten the person who drew him to this profession in the first place. And the fact that the mostly nonverbal Guthrie is the only person not projecting anything onto Dylan makes theirs the purest relationship in the movie.
I was also delighted to find that this is a true ensemble piece. Yes, Dylan is front and center, but including Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) as a central character is critical to the audience understanding the divide between folk and electric. I felt great empathy for both sides of this debate - I want Dylan the artist to feel free to express himself and not be boxed in by the demands of his audience, and I also understand Seeger’s desire to preserve the integrity of his folk festival, which exists to champion a musical tradition in danger of disappearing.
More than anything, A Complete Unknown respects the music. Dylan has written many of the greatest songs of all time, and this movie allows us to hear them. The vinyl of this film's soundtrack has been playing on repeat in my apartment the last few weeks, and I suspect the eventual Blu-Ray release will do the same.
It's a thrill to see one of my closest friends, Mike Cheslik, deliver the most original and acclaimed independent film of the year. Mike has been pushing the limits of narrative comedy for years, and all of his prior work comes to a head in his one-of-a-kind masterpiece Hundreds of Beavers.
Human cartoon Ryland Brickson Cole Tews plays Jean Kayak, a 19th century applejack salesman and fur trapper mired in a never-ending battle against beavers (played by human actors in animal mascot costumes). Beavers is a black-and-white, dialogue-free film (though hardly silent, with its stupendous sound design by Bobb Barito) - an absolutely unhinged fusion of slapstick comedy, Saturday morning cartoons, and video games, topped with a splash of Guy Maddin and The Simpsons (at one point, Jean Kayak has the misfortune of getting the Lionel Hutz of beaver lawyers).
Mike has said that micro-budget filmmakers can't compete with studio movies, so his films have to look and feel like something else entirely - in other words, the work has to be noticeably indie. Hundreds of Beavers has become a sensation precisely because there's absolutely nothing else that looks, sounds, or feels like it in the cinema climate today.
In my view, Juror #2 is a film about the transference of guilt. The win-at-all-costs, morally compromised character at the film's beginning (Toni Collette's Faith) gains the backbone initially possessed by our protagonist (Nicholas Hoult's Justin), while the reverse is true of Justin. The film feels and looks like a top tier John Grisham courtroom drama from the 1990s (I mean that as a high compliment), but as we get closer to the end, we realize Eastwood's after something bigger than the film's subgenre would suggest.
Guillermo Del Toro described Juror #2 as Clint Eastwood's take on Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and that feels apt. The final haunting shot of this film is something that will live in my brain for a long time. If this were the closing chapter to Eastwood's unparalleled career, it would be a stunning finale. Thank God the tireless 94-year-old workhorse is already preparing his next movie.
Richard Linklater's latest film is a huge argument in favor of seeing a movie with a big audience. At Austin Film Society Cinema, the film played like gangbusters, the audience riding high on its comedic wavelength at every turn. It's too bad, then, that most people watched Hit Man in their living rooms after the film received one of Netflix's token week-long theatrical releases in a handful of theaters.
Listening to Linklater talk about Hit Man in a post-screening Q&A, it was astonishing to me that studios didn't see the inherent commerciality of this movie, particularly with Glen Powell in the lead. It's a frustrating and dispiriting cinematic landscape where Hit Man isn't considered a surefire wide release hit.
After driving to the outskirts of Austin to see the lone cinema showing Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 (don't get me started on how Warner Bros. has treated him this past year), I took another drive outside the Austin city limits to see another compelling adult drama starring Nicholas Hoult that was been banished from most theaters due to it not being a candy-colored piece of disposable IP.
In Justin Kurzel's The Order, Jude Law gives us a lead character straight from the Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners (2013) school of law enforcement protagonists. We don’t need this guy's entire backstory - the character is fascinating enough as he is that we’re hooked from the get-go, nosebleeds and all.
The most disturbing thing about The Order is how relatively normal the white supremacists are. When Law and Hoult come face to face mid-movie, Law doesn’t even peg the handsome young man as a potential suspect. These aren’t the bucktooth rednecks we’ve come to expect in these types of films - they’re organized, fully functional individuals who split their time between hosting backyard family barbecues and robbing armored cars to bankroll their fanatical cult.
For his 50th film as writer and director, Woody Allen decided to shoot an entire movie in the French language - and it's a damn good one. Although there are echoes of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point (2005) here, Coup de Chance is a little lighter on its feet than those films. It's been a treat to see Allen's visual style evolve over the course of his working relationship with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, which now spans five films. This is their strongest collaboration together since Wonder Wheel (2017), and, like other movies on this list, it's a shame the visual splendor wasn't widely available on the big screen.
The Apprentice wasn't a movie many people wanted to see before last year's U.S. presidential election, and I'm not certain if many people want to see it now, either. But I have a feeling the film will age very well. Utterly horrifying without ever succumbing to moralization, The Apprentice is also remarkable for the shreds of humanity it manages to find in its lead characters. Both Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are outstanding as Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. I left with an icky feeling that’s going to be hard to shake.
It was interesting to see how afraid people were of this movie. Nobody wanted to release it. One of the best things to happen this award season was Stan and Strong both receiving much-deserved Oscar nominations for their performances. Someone needed to make this movie, and in our current cinema climate - where to take a risk means alienating a shareholder - Ali Abbasi went out and made the movie everyone else was too scared to make.
A film so compelling, I watched it twice in one day! Conclave is a spirited debate on the future of the Catholic Church, with phenomenal performances by Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, and John Lithgow.
For a movie that alternates frequently between English and Latin, why would Prime Video not offer an option for English subtitles only when characters speak Latin (IE, the subtitles that are actually burned into every Conclave DCP that played in the U.S.)? There are a multitude of frustrations to be had with streaming (the inability to watch a film's end credits without being greeted by recommended titles, the dipping in and out of resolution no matter how strong an internet connection, the burial of older films), but weird subtitle inconsistencies is one that often gets overlooked.
Five stars for the sheer audacity of this thing alone. There is simply never going to be anything this batshit crazy allowed in IMAX cinemas again, but boy am I glad it confounded unsuspecting audiences everywhere. Look, at this point, I’m hungry for any movie that doesn’t feel like it was vetted by a corporate board, for better or worse. And the only possible person who could’ve vetted this movie is the madman genius Francis Ford Coppola, and it feels like he got to make exactly the movie he wanted to make.
As for the content of Megalopolis, I was struck by the film’s earnestness and good faith attempts to start a conversation about the future of humanity, both between its characters and its audience. I think the movie could have benefitted from a more robust exploration of the characters’ competing visions for the future - I mean, I understand what they represent individually (Adam Driver = utopian dreamer, Giancarlo Esposito = status quo, Shia LaBeouf = populist fearmonger), but the movie doesn’t explore how and why they think their visions will provide a better future for generations to come.
But, ultimately, I was so damned entertained by Megalopolis that I didn’t mind. This is an insane anomaly of a movie, and I’m here to celebrate its existence.
Special Jury Prize #1
Rusty Lightnin' Kick Starts (Jack Kyser)
All right, I made this movie, and it's seven minutes long, and it's not really a movie at all - it's a proof-of-concept for my forthcoming feature film Rusty Lightnin'. But I've screened it quite a bit this past year, and as such it's my most viewed film of 2024. That has to count for something, right?
Special Jury Prize #2
In order to explain what the dreamlike, kaleidoscopic De Niro, New York installation/ six-screen immersive short film is, exactly, I have to offer a mini-diary of my day at De Niro Con at last year's Tribeca Festival (which is exactly what it sounds like - Comic-Con for fans of Robert De Niro). I won’t bury the lede here. I had the opportunity to ask De Niro a question during his Q&A with artist JR, which I was not expecting (they don’t often open these things up to audience questions). But the talk became something of a group therapy session (it was billed as a discussion of “art, family and film” - but it went really hard on the “family” part, with De Niro speaking candidly about his relationship with his father and the legacy he’ll leave behind for his children).
My question for De Niro was about whether, in digging through his father’s archives and working on this new autobiographical project, he had been able to fill in any of the gaps in his understanding of his dad. I shared that I had held close to little things of my father’s - letters, home movies, mementos - to help me put together a more complete picture of a man I will never fully know.
Okay, De Niro, New York. Outstanding work by Little Cinema (shoutout to Harvey’s Last Night on the Avenue breakout Max Pava for his work on this massive project). De Niro’s extraordinary body of work is in conversation with itself here. I watched the piece three times (for one viewing, I just picked the center of the six screens and only watched it). I really loved how Pava and his team used a lot of material from underseen recent-ish films (Everybody’s Fine, Being Flynn, The Wizard of Lies, etc.) and some of De Niro’s early Brian De Palma movies, too. Perhaps the most striking moment is of Travis Bickle staring in his rear view mirror on the center screen. You do a quick 180 degree turn, and on the opposite screen is steely-eyed Frank Sheeran sitting in a passenger seat, staring right back at Travis. Two De Niros, 43 years apart, engaging across space and time with one another.
The Rest of the Best:
11. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
12. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (David Hinton)
13. The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols)
14. Saturday Night (Jason Reitman)
15. The Secret Art of Human Flight (H.P. Mendoza)
16. Asphalt City (Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire)
17. The Last Stop in Yuma County (Francis Galluppi)
18. Anora (Sean Baker)
19. Daddio (Christy Hall)
20. September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum)
21. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)
22. Knox Goes Away (Michael Keaton)
23. Horizon: An America Saga - Part One (Kevin Costner)
24. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)
25. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
