Expanding on my Letterboxd list, the new releases I saw this year and what they meant to me. Titles link to whatever gibberish I wrote at the time.
18. The Flash
In a year where I mostly didn’t bother seeing anything that I didn’t think would be good, The Flash has the indignity of being something that I went out of my way for despite expecting it to be a flavourless slurry. The production of this one is surely the nadir of Warner’s attempts to make a Marvel-like universe of DC films seaworthy, and ahead of release it seemed like it could only logically be an abomination in form and content. So it was with malice in my heart that I sat down to watch it in the cinema. But it surprised me — not offensively terrible except in certain specific ways and a tremendous sense of fun, some of the time. But the final third is a slog that just keeps getting worse and worse, and there’s nothing on this list that I can favourably compare it to.
17. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
It’s a tightly-sprung little diorama of 40 or so minutes, Wes Anderson’s adapation of a slightly obscure Roald Dahl tale that I must have read at some point as a child. I was a furious reader and Dahl is (or was) one of the archetypical British children’s writers. All of his tales have an enchantingly sinister edge to them that often crops up again in film adaptations, from the gothic trimmings of James and the Giant Peach through to the animalistic protagonists of Wes Anderson’s (there he is again) utterly inspired Fantastic Mr Fox.
Anderson is deep in a particular style he’s been cultivating even as a subset of his well-known aesthetic, and it’s as on-show here as it will be in (spoiler alert) the Wes Anderson entry that is going to make an appearance higher up this list. I suspect the coherence and ambition of that entry makes this one pale unfairly by comparison, but it’s a wonderfully crafted little ditty that moves at a breakneck pace even though there’s not much of anything happening. No quarter whatsoever is given for the viewer to catch their breath while listening, which can be a frustrating experience if you’re half paying attention on a phone, but is a marvel to attend to.
16. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Tom Cruise! You were the chosen one! You were supposed to be a fixed beacon of care and deliberation in blockbuster movie making, not propping up one end of a flimsy tent that’s blowing about in the wind… or something. End metaphor. I set myself up with this one really, having done a marathon over several weeks of the preceding six (six!) entries in the Mission: Impossible saga. Fallout remains the high watermark, with this being a real let-down that’s way less than the sum of its parts, despite the usual set-pieces and ensemble cast. It’s the shabby treatment of Rebecca Ferguson’s character that rankles most, and we can only hope that the (now consciously uncoupled) sequel remedies that.
15. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
I knew this was well-regarded but I hadn’t actually planned to watch it; I’m not a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan, despite spending most of my childhood in front of Baldur’s Gate 2 on the family PC — at one time I could have identified any one of the several hundred items in that game from the icon alone. I’m also not a fan of mainstream American comedy, which to my refined British palate doesn’t feature nearly enough bon mots and/or upper class men putting regional accents on for fun.
Having been sat in a room while this was on though, there’s plenty to appreciate — it is genuinely funny, and affectionate for the setting in a way that brings specificity to the comedy. Michelle Rodriguez solidifies her position as the safest pair of hands for your ‘competent number 2’ role and Hugh Grant, who seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance, is a scene-stealer even if he’s definitely only giving it 60%.
14. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
In the gap between the release of this and now (only a few weeks), Swift has started to enjoy a little bit of a backlash, with critics pointing out that her feel-good, be-yourself non-specific feminism could be seen to be a little self-serving, and her silence on the genocide occurring in Palestine might suggest that selling records is a more prioritised leveraging of her pop culture cachet than doing good in the world.
Of which, well, pop stars were never going to save us. Movies were never going to save us. It’s all worth saying — and saying so loud it becomes a problem for the great, crushing press engine that drives these stars forwards — but it struggles to become a moral imperative against enjoyment.
As for the movie? Well, it’s nothing to write home about in terms of cinematography — a mostly prosaic camera is enough to show off the maximum-budget staging and on-stage choreography. On occasion there’s a shot that tells the big story here — Swift a giant astride the stadium — but no throughline. It’s all assuming that the staging and the Swift songs will be enough to sweep you along — and for me, they were. Taylor Swift dares you to suggest that her imperial days are behind her.
13. John Wick: Chapter 4
The audience in the cinema with me for this audibly groaned when he rolls back down those stairs. A positive groan, to be clear, an expression of solidarity with poor Mr Wick who has just so painstakingly climbed them. But still a groan — at four long entries, Wick’s unceasing tear of film revenge hasn’t lost anything in the stunt choreography column — and the addition of both Donnie Yen’s blind assassin and Rina Sawayama’s hotelier ninja provide plenty of opportunity for fresh ways of showing off there. But this series can only subsist on ramping up the action for so long before the always-overwrought plot collapses into tedium, and that’s feeling like it might come soon now.
12. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
It’s such a hard one to love. It’s got all the warmth, all the creativity and feels exactly as fresh as the first one, but out of all the “part 1 of 2s” that somehow came into confluence this year it’s the one where it just didn’t work for me. Not helped by seeing it in the cinema, where it certainly seemed like there was some kind of audio issues over the first twenty minutes (a bit of hyper-focus on the centre channel for dialogue?). And two people sat to the right of us who interacted with their various foodstuffs to such an extent that we fled like cowards to the other end of the row.
But yeah, the film has just set up its major conflict… and then it ends. And unlike Rebel Moon, the first film is right there as a complete, cogent unit that told one story end-to-end. This feels like a regression — that’s terribly unfair to all the artistry and beauty, but making this list I found it a difficult notion to shake.
11. A Haunting in Venice
It’s just for me, the guy who loved both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile! Branagh’s Poirot is such an odd project, taking on a role so recently lived in with tremendous aplomb for so many years by David Suchet. But he’s persisted with it, and for me as the person who is happy to see really any classic detective tale at all, I’m glad.
Orient Express suffered from an identity crisis, with Branagh’s idiosyncratic take on the character and setting emerging out of step with the film — intense action sequences clashing with posed frame composition. Nile was a cinematic victim of Covid, ending up more than a little stiled. But Haunting delivers on the promise of Branagh’s Poirot at last — moody and atmospheric, it’s the best of the three.
10. Master Gardener
I saw this in a cinema in Valencia, of all places, away on a work trip. There was a great big cardboard display out for it in the lobby, which is a delightful thing to find promoting a new Paul Schrader film. I bought popcorn and soda and settled in to ignore the Spanish/Valencian subtitles, then afterwards walked back through the raucous streets of the old town to my hotel room.
Schrader is retreading familiar ground in this story of a former Neo-Nazi turned flower-tender who falls in love with Quintessa Swindell’s millennial dilettante, but it’s done with such an eye for beauty and the hopeless pain and loneliness at the heart of every person that you won’t care. It’s tight, it’s thrilling, it’s unique — but my god, that ending.
9. How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Always fun to see a dramatic adaptation of a non-fiction book, and Daniel Goldhaber turns Andreas Malm’s book (which I sadly haven’t read) into a tense, small-scale thriller which approaches ‘Sorceror’ levels of tension. A group of activists each with their own reason to feel particularly passionately about the environment come together to do something about it: blow up a pipeline. Anyone with any kind of knowledge of activist groups can imagine from there the sorts of things that go wrong, but the true radical optimism of the film is in what it imagines could go right. Very few films have politics nowadays, so it was nice to go see one that did.
8. The Pigeon Tunnel
John Le Carre (fake name) tells tall tales about his disreputable father and time in the security services. It rivals F for Fake in the genre of documentary films that are actively messing with their you, but where in that film Orson Welles was actively setting out to disrupt the audience’s expectations of a documentary film, here veteran filmmaker Errol Morris (no stranger to deception and persuasion, mind) is desperately clinging to the rudder trying to keep this ship on course. At one point, prying ever so gently at his interviewee’s closely guarded secrets, he says “they think I should press you harder on this betrayal thing”, which provokes Le Carre into an absurd diversionary rant about his own sex life — but which reveals nothing. As enigmatic as one of Le Carre’s books.
7. BlackBerry
The Thick of It mixed with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia mixed with Masters of Dune mixed with Bad Blood. The funniest film this year and probably the funniest film since The Death of Stalin. The rise and fall of Blackberry mobile phones, which were the undisputed top dog of business phones (‘Crackberry’, how quickly we forget) until the iPhone utterly obliterated it and left only a hard kernel of keyboard-phone devotees behind. Glenn Howerton manages to make a case for himself as a serious dramatic actor in a role which has him scream “I’m from Waterloo! Where the vampires hang out!” at a board of nonplussed executives.
6. Rebel Moon
This is generous, Zack! This ranking is generosity! Snyder’s reputation precedes him with all the internet’s worst critics and naturally this dreamy sci-fi action thriller has been received with the ceremony of a letterbomb, the audacity of doing Star Wars without involving the brand owner just too much for many. I’ve been a fully signed up Snyder sicko for many years now so this was high up on the anticipation list for me, and I got to see it in beautiful soapy 70mm at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. Snyder does what he does well on screen for two hours, though this may not be the one to convert to unfaithful.
It’s the big Christmas Netflix release for this year, and Snyder’s take on the space opera has promise and promise and promise to spare — and of course, lots of utterly gratuitous slow-motion. But it’s part one of two, and (bafflingly) cut one of two, and cumulatively it’s hard not to feel some of the disappointment this year’s Spider-verse suffered from — but part two should hopefully only be a few months off.
5. The Killer
Has Fincher been away? Since 2014’s Gone Girl there’s only been the 2020 cult hit Mank, about the writing of Citizen Kane, and well-regarded Netflix series Mindhunter. This then is something of a return to cinematic fiction, and he’s not missed a beat. Michael Fassbender’s titular trained killer muses existentially about the nature of his job, as a single missed shot unravels the whole thing. More than any other film on this list, the controlled, thoughtful nature of this is the foil to Dead Reckoning’s sprawling mess of plot sinew. There’s not a second out of place as Fassbender goes through the boring, everyday motions of hiring cars and unlocking storage lockers and memorably at one point signing up for a trial at a gym. A small slice of genius.
4. Napoleon
What if Napoleon were just a grotty little guy? Ridley Scott swerves the historic epic expectations and delivers the year’s second-funniest film in this unflattering portrait of old history-on-horseback himself. Critics slated it for bias, for mendacity, for simplifying the intricate historical events that make the Napoleonic era so attractive to lay historians. But it captures something so essential about self-assurance, self-doubt, self-pity in the dual protagonists of Napoleon and Josephine — both of who do as they will and let the whole world come round to agreeing with it.
Much like the man himself, Scott’s great sprawling epic doesn’t give a damn if you like it or not. It’s stupid, it’s grandiose, it’s slapstick, it’s everything. Like Rebel Moon, it has a full-fat version coming in the new year. Unlike Rebel Moon, it doesn’t need it.
3. Oppenheimer
I saw this on the biggest screen, the one at the BFI IMAX in London which I don’t think I’ve been to since seeing Watchmen there back in 2009. It’s an intoxicating experience, even if the three hours of film had me flagging slightly by the end. We had to get a taxi back it was so late.
If Tenet felt like the peak of a certain cumulative thought in Nolan’s work, Oppenheimer feels like a whole new mountain. He keeps all the interpersonal tension, the motions of science and technology reflecting the behaviours of the people who enact them, but all the fiction is torn away, all the artifice. These were real people (and Nolan takes particular pleasure in showing as many of them to us as possible) but they may as well be in the plot of Interstellar with the scope of the world-historic change they provoked. Also it looked gorgeous in 4:3.
It’s Nolan’s masterpiece, and I can’t see how he will top it. On that basis, it should be at number 1 in this list. But in a pairwise comparison of my own personal honest choice, I couldn’t place it above either of these next two films.
2. Asteroid City
Wes Anderson, as noted above, has started to make being Wes Anderson look effortless. Asteroid City is breezy, unassuming, utterly crushing, smart, unashamedly intellectual, silly, funny, lurid. If I watch it again I will cry. I might have cried the first time. Going back to The Royal Tenenbaums and presumably before, Anderson can tug the heartstrings when required with an expert finesse. But this is something more. It makes you feel for being human. I don’t know. Perhaps this is a film that will only be describable in the rear view mirror.
1. The Creator
Much like how Oppenheimer doesn’t deserve to not be number one, The Creator doesn’t deserve to be number one. It’s broken! It’s flawed! It doesn’t work at all! The film flies at a breakneck pace from scene to scene, setting to setting, allowing no time at all for establishment or inattention. Then, in the third act, it goes even faster. It doesn’t allow time for coherence, or explanation, or logic. Things just happen, images splashing across the screen. It’s left for the viewer to put them together into a compelling ending.
If you’re not on board, it won’t work. But for me, seeing this on a last-minute trip to the cinema the day before it stopped showing, the imagery was enthralling. I can home talking about how incoherent it was and how it was in many ways a weaker retread of Avatar 2: The Way of Water. But it wasn’t weaker. It was stronger. And since seeing it that affection for it has only grown, to the point where when I did the pairwise comparison with the other movies on this list, it beat every one. The imagery is more direct, more vibrant than Oppenheimer. The story is more thrilling, more imaginative than Asteroid City. The subject matter is less tired than Napoleon. Every time, it wins. Unlike all the other flawed gems on this list, there’s no sign of an extended cut of The Creator. But perhaps that’s for the best; perhaps with a more complete version the spell would be broken.
Didn’t see but will:
- Barbie — I don’t watch films for children. But more seriously, the marketing campaign for this one was just a little bit too self-aware to click for me, and when the opportunity didn’t present itself I didn’t seek it out.
- Blue Beetle — The latter DC cinematic universe is dead and gone and now’s the perfect time to start critically reappraising it.
- Killers of the Flower Moon — I’m a philistine and a fraud and I should resign my stewardship of longmovie.club. There just wasn’t time to fit it in in a winter season full of films.
- Maestro — I still haven’t gotten over Tár.
- The Marvels — The latter Marvel cinematic universe limps on and I have no desire to start critically reappraising it.
- May December — Might sneak this one in before the end of the year and silently edit it into this list.
