Rebel Ridge – Director: Jeremy Saulnier (Netflix)
If Carl Franklin’s 1991 noir-thriller One False Move was rewritten by an investigative journalist who had been mainlining action films and police reports, you could see the result coming out something like Rebel Ridge. Dropped with little fanfare on Netflix this year, as too many things are, Jeremy Saulnier’s taut Southern noir drops ex-Marine Terry (Aaron Pierre, hypnotically controlled) into a small town where the cops strip him of the cash he needs to bail out his cousin who is likely to be murdered if imprisoned.
Jeremy Saulnier uses Terry’s fight to retrieve his money as a neat pretext for visualizing the hard-to-believe reality of civil asset forfeiture in America (the legal police prerogative allowing them to seize property just on suspicion of a criminal connection). That visualization takes the form of deftly choreographed set pieces where Terry has to mentally outflank the corrupt sheriff (Don Johnson, rarely better) or jiu-jitsu through squads of heavily armed police without killing any of them. Rebel Ridge is action cinema as public service journalism. – Chris Barsanti
Robot Dreams – Director: Pablo Berger (Curzon)
The popular narrative is that Alan Crosland’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, the first talking feature, was the beginning of the end of cinema’s silent era. By the early 1930s, sound synchronization had ushered in talking pictures and, along with it, silent cinema’s end. Nearly a century later, Spanish director Pablo Berger’s animation debut, an adaptation of Sara Varon’s 2007 wordless graphic novel, is a modern-day tour de force of silent film.
Robot Dreams is blessed with emotional intelligence that acknowledges the difference between what someone wants and needs. Indeed, a conflict gradually emerges between what the audience wants and what the characters need, even spiralling into a situation where the characters want something different to the audience. It risks creating a feeling of disappointment and heartbreak.
Berger pitches an effective curveball by thematically embracing how relationships, including friendships, aren’t always for life. It’s about appreciating relationships and connections in the moment or for however long they last. Robot Dreams asks its audience to let go of the fear we project onto the characters and understand the story we’ve been watching. – Paul Risker
The Room Next Door – Director: Pedro Almodovar (Sony Pictures Classic)
The legendary Spaniard Pedro Almodóvar has done it again, miraculously, making his tropes and fixations seem fresh. Famous for his hugely diverse narratives, often mistaken for uniformity just because his films feature women or marginalized groups, the elder icon of world cinema has again repositioned the angle from which he explores the themes of life and how we weave stories to explain our time and purpose on Earth.
There is much to unpack about The Room Next Door, which blinds one with big ponderings, Almodóvar’s flamboyant, burning polychrome (this time through the prism of Edu Grau, working with the director for the first time), and narratives of love and nurture. The Room Next Door had to be made in English, and not just because it’s based on the novel What You’re Going Through by the American author Sigrid Nunez, but its leads are two affluent, accomplished, unbelievably blasé New Yorkers – three if you count Cunningham, who thrives on giving lectures titled “How bad can it get? Navigating urban life with integrity” or pontificating about why people should not keep procreating. (“People should be aware of the state of the fucking planet they’re living on.”)
Its honest and potent examination of what remains of life in death invites us to consider who gets to shape the discourse on death, especially who gets the enormous privilege of being the masters of their own lives until the end. Certainly, no working-class Spanish heroine of Almodóvar’s could dissect death and approach it in the same playful way that wealthy Martha and her NYC socialite friends can. A dignified death is a human right, and The Room Next Door opens another welcome debate on the potential benefits of euthanasia (under certain circumstances, at least). It also shows us that most of the dying are light years behind how Martha and her idle, morbidly curious friend may gracefully handle the transition. – Ana Yorke
Santosh – Director: Sandhya Suri (MUBI)
Sandhya Suri’s directorial feature debut seethes with corruption, where the law is a more tokenistic presence than anything else. In the northern Indian badlands, the caste system oppresses those lower-born who are suspicious of police. It’s an unpleasant and hostile setting into which Suri thrusts her titular protagonist, Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami).
Like the oppressive Los Angeles heat in Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown, the spatial settings in Santosh are as much their own character. Set outside America and Europe, Santosh imbues the neo-noir with fresh energy. It loses none the cynicism that has been bred into the genre. In fact, the inequality and injustice, the angry cynicism that is viscerally expressed by Polanski and Chinatown‘s screenwriter Robert Towne, is as forceful in Suri’s Indian set neo noir.
There are no unnecessary scenes or shots. The story is told with precision, and while narratively formulaic, it’s as a character piece that Santosh is an engrossing crime drama. Suri’s approach to exploring the vulnerability of Saini’s innocence leans into Jungian ideas about the shadow complex, which creates a character that intrigues. Santosh is a film predicated not on the destination but the journey, and so when it ends, we are forced to reckon with the moral layers of the drama and what it means for the future. – Paul Risker
Scala!!! – Directors: Ali Catterall and Jane Giles (BFI)
Alternative film theater and music venue Scala’s contribution to British culture was urgent and necessary to counter the government’s regressive social policies. As a bit of cinema history, Scala!!! is fun to watch. The testimonies are often moving and very funny. The various subjects speak about their time at Scala with love despite the building’s creakiness, the terrible sound system, and the perpetual rumbling of the Underground beneath the building.
Scala!!! is also a thoughtful and pointed critique of London’s gentrification (descriptions of King’s Cross’ grittiness are an interesting contrast to the current King’s Cross’ scrubbed blandness). Scala’s end coincided with the end of Thatcher’s authority. It’s an interesting parallel, as it’s doubtful that Scala would survive in Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia when weirdness and transgression were summarily melted away. – Peter Piatkowski
Small Things Like These – Director: Tim Mielants (Lionsgate)
Not often does one come across a mostly silent, quasi-arthouse film metaphysically examining historical crimes through the eyes of a single man. Even more rarely will such a film be signed with names like Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon as producers or stars. Then again, most film and the novels they draw from do not bare the secrets of Irish history, a topic of considerable interest to decidedly political Murphy. Nor are the ideas for these morally complex works lost on Damon, himself a Hollywood powerhouse and co-founder of the production company Artists Equity.
Small Things Like These – based on Claire Keegan’s tale of a small-town coal merchant facing an impossible decision and directed by Murphy’s Peaky Blinders collaborator Tim Mielants – follows the beat of the book in every respect, staying true to the quietly devastating source material. Over a terse 97 minutes and a handful of simple scenes with bare-bones dialogue, the story of Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is shown, not told.
There is a good reason why, Murphy says, Small Things Like These‘s “story of women has a man (and not the female victims) in its center”. For more than 30,000 women whose lives were diminished and shattered by the Magdalene Laundries, retroactive heroism or fictional poetic justice would simply be Keegan’s method of self-serving hypocrisy had she chosen that route. Instead, the piercing silence and horrifying stillness that permeate every page and frame of Small Things Like These are political statements in themselves. Which is the greater horror, Small Things Like These asks: the women who suffered under Ireland’s abusive Magdalene Laundries or the citizens’ complicity? – Ana Yorke
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat – Director: Johan Grimonprez (Kino Lorber)
Like so much in history, the Cold War is often boiled down to a few oft-repeated hinge moments: the Cuban missile crisis, Nixon’s trip to China, and Reagan’s demand that the Berlin Wall be torn down. However, the period’s world-spanning conflict of propaganda and subterfuge had more wrinkles than is usually remembered. One of the more fascinating, complex, and consequential is covered by Johan Grimonprez’s rippingly entertaining documentary about how US-Soviet rivalries, post-colonial dreams, espionage, assassinations, and cool jazz came together in the chaos of the newly independent Congo.
In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Grimonprez sketches the scene in the central African colony, which Belgium had ruled with bloody brutality since the 1880s but agreed to independence following protests led in part by Patrice Lumumba, an autodidact beer salesman with a gift of oratory. Tragic ironies abound: Fears of Communist influence lead the US to plot against Lumumba just as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is showing interest in rapprochement; the UN gears up a peacekeeping force ostensibly to stop a Congolese civil war but in practice reinforcing the West’s grip on the country’s natural resources; and the CIA sponsors touring jazz bands like Louis Armstrong to project the image of a free and cool America even as forces align to assassinate Lumumba. The pocket post-colonial history is fascinating enough by itself, but Grimonprez sets it to a syncopated soundtrack of Nina Simone, Max Roach, and Dizzy Gillespie, which serves as a singular cultural time capsule. – Chris Barsanti
The Sparrow in the Chimney – Director: Ramon Zürcher (MUBI)
Dysfunction makes for good family-oriented cinema. Consider the royal squabbles in Anthony Harvey’s 1968 drama, The Lion In Winter, climaxing in a father’s desire to execute his children, or Wes Anderson’s 2001 comedy, The Royal Tenenbaums, a unit that comes together to bid farewell to a charlatan and a parent. Ramon Zürcher’s clan in The Sparrow in the Chimney is a different breed: haunted by the presence of a hostile mother, Karen’s daily interactions are influenced by the torrent of cormorants screeching outside. She pretends that everything is normal while her lodger sleeps with her husband, and her son tortures animals. The arrival of her free-spirited sister threatens to upend this normality despite the obvious red flags.
What makes Ramon Zürcher’s film stand out from the realm of indie family drama is the way it is shot and edited. The director uses long takes, kaleidoscopic colour palettes, and Balz Bachmann‘s pensive score to flesh out this abstract world. Paula Schindler’s Christina is the closest thing to a “normal” person in The Sparrow in the Chimney, acting as the eyes and voice of the viewers submerged in a house full of unfulfilled sexual fantasies, perished childhood dreams, and generational trauma. Maren Eggert is excellent as Karen, the silent, stern matriarch who resolves to rid herself of her demons, and how! – Eoghan Lyng
Sujo – Directors: Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez (Damned)
Sujo immediately captures its audience with a strikingly beautiful image that is a metaphor for the story that will follow. Directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez not only observe with their cameras but burrow down into what these characters are feeling—the wind on their faces, the ground beneath their feet, the adrenaline rush, and the fear. It’s a visceral depiction of a world with love and compassion parallel to the Cartels’ violence.
An unexpected parallel Sujo shares is with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1976). They are two very different films, but the roots of Sujo and the young Vito Corleone’s journey to America lay in the shared idea of the “inheritance of violence”. A more intimate affair than Coppola’s sweeping epic, Rondero and Valadez construct Sujo‘s story in chapter form, which allows them to be deliberately specific. It seems that Sujo is trying to find the middle ground between narrative and documentary.
Rondero and Valadez don’t dismiss the dramatic or narrative arcs but are attentive to finding something more authentic. Sujo uses narrative to explore a culture of violence, forming it from a tension between cinematic and authentic narrative aesthetics. At its heart, Rondero and Valadez’s drama is best summed up as the fragments of a life. – Paul Risker
We Live in Time – Director: John Crowley (A24)
Romantic dramas like We Live in Time are often shrouded in a guilty appreciation, if not pleasure. Like the movie melodrama, they are prone to being looked down upon as lacking substance outside the sentimental and overly saccharine pulling on the heartstrings. There’s no doubt director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne are pulling on their audiences, but Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s genuine onscreen chemistry and the script’s finely judged expressions of crisis find the most sincerity the genre can ever hope for.
Not everyone will agree, and some will see this film as an extension of other emotionally exploitative romantic comedy dramas. However, in We Live in Time, we are swept up in Almut (Pugh) and Tobias’ (Garfield) story, helped by the non-linear structure that isn’t gimmicked by Crowley or Payne. Instead, it reminds us that two opposing realities can be simultaneously true in that we live our lives non-linearly through our memories. – Paul Risker
The Wild Robot – Director: Chris Sanders (Universal)
The most humane, vital story about family (and especially how it rewires the circuitry of a mother) and the power of communal solidarity this year comes from… an animated feature about a robot and a runt duckling. Don’t let this deter you – Chris Sanders’ latest is his best, most viscerally human feature yet. It is also hands down a delight to make your heart burst with emotion and overflow your eyes with tears.
Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot stars a fantastically endearing Lupita Nyong’o as ROZZUM unit 7134 (“Roz”), a service robot stranded on a remote island after a massive storm. Activated accidentally by the animals, Roz struggles to adapt to the new environment, learning the animals’ language but unable to find anyone to “serve”. However, one day she saves an egg from a hungry fox named Fink (a stupendous Pedro Pascal), and finds herself in the utterly uncomfortable position of becoming the adoptive mother to Brightbill (Kit Connor), a runt Canada Goose who loses his family in a tragic accident. As Roz and Brightbill do their utmost to become a family, the many challenges of nature, nurture, and distinctly man-made greed will make things very difficult.
Breathtakingly animated, mischievously smart, and surprisingly hard-hitting, The Wild Robot is a profoundly, at times almost unbearably emotional film. Sure, there is sentimentality to its tropes, but the honesty and intensity of its emotion, and especially the candor behind its unusually dark humor (a rare sign of respect for the youngest audiences) leave a lasting impression. A story of resilience, community, and motherhood, with all the unimaginable sacrifices the role entails, The Wild Robot is, against all odds, 2024’s most heartfelt, touching release. – Ana Yorke