A Banana Republic catalogue with musical numbers. Caps off a banner year for a genre becoming tragically bereft of formal risk.
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Gladiator II 2024
A movie that features rhinoceros impalement, baboon attacks, sharks in the Colosseum and decapitation galore yet Ridley’s direction drains all of those things from a greater visceral thrill. The script is bad but could have been good hammy melodrama had Mescal not been so seemingly checked-out. Now add in poor coverage, lighting and blocking — which stunts both action and drama in the most awkward fashion — and 150 minutes becomes a real drag. Goofy Gonzo antics here and there…
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Gladiator 2000
For such a prolific filmmaker, Ridley Scott only has a few good movies under his belt and his single best picture winner is not one of them. A solemn, lumbering, exhaustive epic that falls into the tradition of DeMille’s clumsiest sword-and-sandal features. That being said, I always loved Oliver Reed’s delivery of “you sold me queer giraffes.”
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Wicked 2024
Ultra-earnest, ultra-theatrical, ultra-glossy, ultra-ULTRA. It’s pure maximalist spectacle and (despite a couple hundred thousand flaws…most of them attributed to the lighting design) it’s irresistibly entertaining. For the first time in years, an event film actually feels like an event!!
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Juror #2 2024
A real testament to a great ensemble of actors, specifically in regard to how well you can act in an echoing courtroom while a 93-year-old bearded geezer munches on cheez-its behind the camera.
It’s no The Mule (obviously!!) but it’s certainly engrossing even if it’s achingly square. Late Eastwood is as good as the scripts he gets, if that, and this one is the tightest thing that’s fallen into his lap in years! ……At least i would assume so? Unfortunately…
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Here 2024
No one made me aware that this film features such subplots as Ben Franklin’s illegitimate child, Spanish Flu, the invention of Lazyboy, early onset Alzheimer’s, police brutality and Covid. Zemeckis wants us to feel all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings about family and the passage of time, but instead creates a domestic purgatory. He’s too sweet and saccharine to grasp the existential terror of that. In other words, just what you would imagine if you thought “what if the director of The Polar Express remade Michael Snow’s Wavelength?”
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The Brutalist 2024
Corbet has a great amount of clout with the “auteur crowd,” and with that he has adopted the most bombastic mannerisms of other directors’ work. He makes a big talk but the gimmicks are obvious, and once the polish wears off there really isn’t much to see. Without the lush 70mm film grain we are left with a rather by-the-book historical epic that is convinced it is so much more important than it really is. Perhaps most disappointingly, to me,…