The year in film: That’s (not) all, folks
Cinemas struggled in 2024 as audiences shrank, fewer films came through, sure-fire ‘blockbusters’ bombed and production companies pulled back – but there were treasures in between the sequels and remakes.
Each year, cinema is meant to die and never does. But there were dark clouds this past 12 months, with audiences down and production companies pulling back so tightly that Clint Eastwood’s likely final film, Juror No.2, went unceremoniously to streaming.
One of the problems in 2024 was lack of product. The long tail of last year’s five-month Hollywood writers’ strike fed through and there were weeks when reviewers wrote about television because there nothing new to say.
There were also some early disappointments, such as the adaptation of Jane Harper’s novel, Force of Nature: The Dry 2, starring Eric Bana as agent Aaron Falk. It was illogical and unfocused, which made it hard to care about the outcome.
And director Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla felt compromised. The visually eye-popping film was a startling reflection on the power of Elvis Presley, who fell in love with a schoolgirl and moved her into Graceland. It starred Australia’s towering Jacob Elordi as a thinly sketched Presley, but suffered from the dead hand of Priscilla, who wanted her version told and her reputation intact.
Creativity never dies, however, and there were landmark moments.
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest was astonishing and not just for the juxtaposed horror of the family of Nazi commandant Rudoph Höss growing flowers and celebrating birthdays in the shadow of the smoke stacks of Auschwitz. The remarkable Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), as Hoss’s wife, was silently complicit, and in one unforgettable scene preens in front of a mirror trying on a dead Jewish woman’s mink coat. The use of sound transported it to another realm with a soundtrack of mechanical noises and shrieking anguish that felt like voices from beyond.
Ultra-violent and madly enjoyable was Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, a revenge tale with overtones of Hindu deities shot with a moody neon palette. It was the first film in which Patel both starred and directed, and left you wanting more – of Patel as an action man and a director on his way.
Off-beat and exquisite was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, which opened with a meditative contemplation of a man chopping and stacking wood. In a village in Japan, the old ways are under threat and in something of a fable, the threat of change makes nature rise up.
The Bikeriders, based on a 1960s memoir about the Chicago Vandals and an origin story for the rise of motorcycle gangs, saw Austin Butler return to normal life after Elvis, in a strong portrayal as a pretty-boy biker but in a film that was oddly inert, given the material.
Also much awaited was Kinds of Kindness, the latest from absurdist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, who delivered a series of bizarre vignettes that were darker in tone than Poor Things (2023) and more of a mystery.
Two other small but notable films were Alex Garland’s Civil War, a brutal look at a divided America, and the fabulous tale of a gang of Italian grave-robbers, La Chimera, starring Josh O’Connor and directed by Alice Rohrwacher.
Two big box-office failures – Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie a Deux – came as a surprise.
Australian director George Miller’s Mad Max Saga was the precursor story of Furiosa starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the young woman who Charlize Theron becomes in Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s over-the-top and sensationally so, displaying Miller’s trademark steam-punk aesthetic with weapons made from what’s left of a plundered world. It features breathtakingly choreographed aerial attacks on a desert rig, and the gritty mayhem felt like Miller at his best.
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Maybe the fault with Furiosa lay in the weird, mugging performance from Chris Hemsworth as the brutal warlord Dementus; given a part that required more than putting on a costume, Hemsworth turned the dial up too high.
The other mysterious failure was Joker: Folie à Deux, in which Lady Gaga was suitably unhinged as an early Harlequin who meets the Joker while he is incarcerated for mass murder. Audiences turned their backs within a week, perhaps because of the songs or because it lacked the arc of triumphant insanity that founded the Joker myth.
By the time the Adelaide Film Festival arrived in October, hot on the tail of the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, a new slate of films was coming through. The two standouts, both of which will be in cinemas soon, were Sean Baker’s Anora and Jacques Audiard’s wildly original Emilia Pérez. Baker is an alternative storyteller who makes moving, non-judgmental films that spin off from the sex industry: an unruly mother in The Florida Project, a porn star in Red Rocket, and Emilia Pérez a lap-dancer, Ani (Mikey Madison), who dares to dream of a better life when the feckless son of a Russian oligarch gets a crush and marries her. So much sex, so little love.
Emilia Perez follows the melodramatic flow of a Mexican telenovela in a story, with songs, about a Mexican cartel boss who undergoes a sex change, re-emerges as Emilia and lives with his unknowing family disguised as a long-lost cousin. Selena Gomez, as the grieving cartel wife, and Zoe Saldana as the lawyer who enables Emilia’s transition are standouts, and along with Madison from Anora are likely Oscar nominees.
The biggest end of year letdown was Steve McQueen’s Blitz which, despite a riveting opening in which firefighters wrestle with an out-of-control fire hose, was a tame offering. It looked wonderful but the story about runaway George and his adventures was too hokey; an exceptional disappointment from someone of McQueen’s artistic reach. To remind yourself how good McQueen can be, catch Small Axe wherever it streams.
Doing a roaring trade at the box office but a mixed bag for me was Gladiator II, an outlandish spectacle that slides into silliness. It has a convoluted Game of Thrones storyline, great white sharks in the Colosseum, a magnificent Pedro Pascal as Marcus Acacius, Denzel Washington in camp overdrive as the gladiator wrangler Macrinus, and Paul Mescal doing his Irish best but really reminding everyone what a man Russell Crowe was in the original.
As always, there is much to look forward to and the summer holidays are alive with promise, starting with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, a remake of the gothic horror myth about a vampire in love with a young girl, starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe.
Conclave, a political thriller about the appointment of a new pope starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, looks like consummate drama; Black Dog is a low-key offering from China about a released prisoner who bonds with a stray dog; and in February Pamela Anderson continues her reinvention as a real person by starring in The Last Showgirl, about a seasoned showgirl cast adrift when her long-running show is abruptly cancelled. I hope for her sake it’s a hit.