We are at the halfway point of 2024, which means it is time to look back at the best movies of 2024 so far. I have seen 64 new release movies so far in 2024 (92 total including film festival movies and movies that will be released later this year. Overall, 2024 has been an interesting year for movies. Due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes last fall, a lot of movies in production were…
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Director Ti West’s MaXXXine is the third and seemingly final installment of his X Trilogy (though he has hinted in being interested in a fourth film) and the film is entertaining, twisted, and violent, something we have come to expect from this series of movies. But it suffers from something a lot of third films suffer from in that it has an over-stuffed and rushed plot that takes away from what made the previous…
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Barry Jenkins’ epic mini-series The Underground Railroad has been added to the Criterion Collection. A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced…
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Tuesday is a strange bird of a movie, literally and figuratively. I’ve seen several movies in my years about death and people learning to cope with it, but never one quite like this. Though it takes a bit to get going, Tuesday is a unique and emotionally harrowing film about a mother coming to terms with her daughter’s death. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Zora, whose daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is terminally ill. Zora can’t…
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The Dead Don’t Hurt is Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen’s second directorial effort following 2020’s Falling and while it is an improvement from Falling, I still find myself struggling with Mortensen as a director. Though shot well with some good performances, The Dead Don’t Hurt never fully clicked for me and ended up being a film I found mostly boring despite some moments of greatness. The Dead Don’t Hurt is a western and love story…
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I saw What You Wish For at the Chicago Critics and to be honest, it was not one of my most anticipated movies of the festival. The film was barely on my radar as a movie coming out this year. The only reason I went to see it was because following the film was a screening of Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead on 35 mm (which was amazing) so I thought I’d give…
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Last Stop in Yuma County finds several strangers stranded at a diner in the middle of Arizona waiting for a gas truck to come to the neighboring gas station. The strangers include a knife salesman (Jim Cummings), a pair of thieves who just robbed a bank (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan), the diner’s lone waitress (Jocelin Donahue), a couple looking for trouble (Ryan Masson and Sierra McCormick), and an older couple (Gene Jones and…
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The Watchers marks the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of director M. Night Shyamalan. Since breaking out in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan has been one of the most polarizing directors over the last almost thirty years, so following in his footsteps is quite a task. But Ishana shows that she is a real-deal filmmaker with this well-made, eerie, flawed folk horror movie. The Watchers finds Mina (Dakota…
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Karyn Kusama’s directorial debut Girlfight is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection. Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she learns to channel her strength, discovers a sense of community, and falls for a rival fighter. In Karyn Kusama’s raw, understated feature debut, Rodriguez commands the screen with both tightly coiled intensity…
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is one of the greatest prequels ever made because it does everything a great prequel should do and does it well. It takes us back in time to give us a more in-depth look at a character we loved in a previous film. It expands the cinematic world in which the previous films took place while also showing us characters and places we’ve already met. It feels unique in its…
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