Rambling Thoughts on My 'Balatro' Problem

Balatro is not a game about gambling, despite what the Pan-European Game Information guys might have once claimed. It does start as Poker but quickly evolves into something much more, until its weird mutations have it resemble Poker as closely as Final Fantasy Tactics resembles Chess, insomuch as both take place on grids. Yeah, Balatro is a card game about building hands, but it's also an absurd math problem built around stacking bonuses to numbers beyond human comprehension.

Now, however, as much as Balatro is Not Gambling, it is still a dangerous, terrible addiction. Please check on your loved ones if they start playing Balatro, especially if they have the phone app downloaded. The app is not a casino but works on similar psychological manipulations such as hiding your phone's clock, denying you any sense of time or place, leaving nothing but flashing lights and numbers. Their lives are on a downward spiral and they will need care and support. They might not listen to anything you're saying since odds are they'll be looking down at their phones, playing Balatro. Please give them understanding because they are no longer in control of themselves. Balatro is a disease. Abstain from moral judgments towards the sufferers.

I spent $10 to get Balatro on my phone back in January and that was the entirety of the sum I risked for my entertainment. After all, it is Not Gambling. However, if we consider that at the moment my time is worth something like $30 an hour and that I have spent somewhere in the region of hundreds of hours playing Balatro in the first quarter of 2025, really I'm down thousands of dollars lost from potentially productive time. To complicate this I have definitely played whole games of Balatro while on the clock at a job. (Mr. or Mrs. Eric's Boss, you are not allowed to read this - you may leave the room now.) That time however could have been spent on more production neoliberal activities such as actually gambling on sports or crypto-currencies. Just think of all the economic progress I could be achieving playing real Poker instead of fake electronic nonsense Poker! 

Clearly I am an antisocial terrorist with my deviant behavior of not maximizing my grindset every second of my life. I instead am playing a game with no real point or aim. That I am willfully a wasteful and not maximally productive member of society is not really the problem for me. The problem is that I can't stop. Balatro has devoured my gaming life. I am searching for an escape and cannot find one.

'In the Lost Lands' Somehow Exists and I Appreciate That

In the Lost Lands is probably terrible, probably unworthy of my interest, and yet I am mildly obsessed with this thing. There is a kind of perverse nostalgia compelling me towards it. I saw the trailer for In the Lost Lands and said out loud to nobody "that looks like total shit, I need to see this".

The movie has the over-produced color correction of a 2000s movie, think of Zack Snyder's 300 or Robert Rodriguez's Sin City - plus the overblown lens flair on every lighting source from JJ Abrams' Star Trek. The plot is a generic post-apocalypse western SciFi fantasy... thing which would have sounded very cool back in the 90s if it were an anime OVA, not one of a dozen similar genre mashup ideas. This movie is apparently based on a George RR Martin story, one purchased by the producers back when Game of Thrones was red hot. Instead the idea sat on a development shelf for a near-decade, gathering dust and losing relevancy. If In the Lost Lands were a trailer during a Sony State of Play, it would fit right in next to say, Forspoken. During coming attractions next to proper movies with more than two colors in their pallet like Novocain or Black Bag, In the Lost Lands looks like a bizarre mistake. Maybe somebody had thrown together a fake trailer and AMC Theaters had put it up as a joke.

What In the Lost Lands reminds me of more than anything is bad movie called Priest. Do you remember that? You don't do you? It came out in 2011? Starred Paul Bettany? Was basically lame Judge Dread but with vampires and priests that knew kung-fu but also vaguely a western? In the Lost Lands is that kind of movie. Thing is, Priest made 76 million dollars fifteen years ago. It was based on a Korean comic book that nobody in the West knew about, so had no existing fanbase, yet drew crowds. Priest did not review well, had no fanbase then or now. Paul Bettany would rather you never mention it in presence, I imagine. However, Priest was profitable!

In the Lost Lands is a disaster that has made none of its budget back. It is too small a movie to even get clowned on by industry types who love to laugh when say, Mickey17 is not a hit. There's something to note here: a D+ genre movie fifteen years ago could make money. Whereas these days, oh no. If you have 55 million dollars, you would save more of it by setting it on fire than doing this: flying Dave Bautista and Milla Jovovich out to Poland to pose dramatically in front of green screens with guns and sickle knives.

This massive flop will probably be the final nail in coffin for the long decline of the career of Paul W.S. Anderson, who not coincidentally is married to Milla Jovovich. In the Lost Lands could very well be the last time either name gets inside a cineplex. Anderson and Jovovich have been a great power couple in the realm of mediocre genre flicks, having piloted the original Resident Evil film series through six or seven installments (neither you or I care to actually count). Their last production together was a 2020 adaptation of the game series Monster Hunter - and we share the same stunned reaction of "wait a second, there was a Monster Hunter movie?!" And yeah, that happened, it existed. Anderson has never been a great director, but who can deny the appeal of things like Event Horizon or Mortal Kombat or even Resident Evil 1? Alien vs Predator sucks but he understood the pop-corn-ball assignment in a way. He's never made a truly great movie, and has made many movies few will remember (Pompeii, The Three Musketeers, In the Lost Lands). As hacky and frankly, unambitious as Anderson is, I cannot find the rhythm to dance at his grave. 

I feels the environment is not going in a healthy direction if we cannot have a space for garbage like In the Lost Lands and garbagemen like Paul W.S. Anderson. If they are extinct, the entire food chain is in trouble.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff

Wildly late as usual on my plans. This post concludes the Top Movies of 2024 series. 

I'm still considering exactly what I'll do for a Top 10 List of Video Games in 2024, whether or not even such a list even makes sense anymore. I'll have something out eventually on that front, I hope. Still gotta finish Metaphor ReFantazio and that game is loooong.

But for now, let's talk about all the Good Movies of 2024 That Didn't Make the List - there's a lot. Also a Bad Movie. And a few movies in between.

And yes, I am requesting that you watch every single one of these movies (except the last one). If you start now you can probably be done by about oh... Sunday. I'll talk to your boss for you, they'll understand. This list is in no particular order, by the way.

Hundreds of Beavers, dir. Mike Cheslik

One of the few movies whose title could easily be its own porn parody. Hundreds of Beavers was really close to making the Top 15, until I ultimately decided I did not have much to say about it that was not just 'describing the object'. It's a really cool movie to describe, sure, however, my opinion does not bring much to this movie. I like this exists, I cannot I learned much about life or myself watching it - besides learning that I really need that hat.  

Hundreds of Beavers is a live-action cartoon comedy. The entire thing operates on a mixture of Looney Tunes physics and video game economics. Our trapper hero (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) completes several "runs" to collect loot and objects across an old-timey theme park vision of 17th century fur trading in the Great Lakes region. And maybe he'll win the heart of a local cute Furrier girl (Olivia Graves). This movie is all black and white, with almost no spoken dialog. And everybody is wearing big goofy mascot costumes. It is a little over-long. Personally, I'd have cut down the first act by a lot, but Hundreds of Beavers has a vast wealth of jokes, and lots of visual gags. It is maybe the most creative movie of 2024. Everything you can imagine, and several things you could never imagine, happens in this grand battle between fluffy animals and our goofy bearded protagonist.

Be a Hater in These Super Bowl Times

 

I hate this fucking Super Bowl.

Now: am I really angry about football? Maybe not. Maybe this is all about the personal life stuff I've gone through these past two months, where I've watched most of the NFL playoffs in various hospital rooms. (I'm fine, by the way, I'm always a visitor in these rooms, not a patient.) The reason is I feel just a crushing overwhelming feeling of hopelessness lately, that we passed the point that anything can be done to stop this unending era of horror and depravity. That the authorities that should have stopped this have all been bought, the champions we should have had were insufficient and came up weak, that the media can only given token complaints, that many in the punditry class actually are all too happy to prove how smart they are and be contrarians about this. "No, it isn't that bad, relax, in fact, what you think is bad is good, because I see the nuisance of this situation, because I'm that much more wise and brilliant", says the opinion editors.

And yeah, maybe that is all a metaphor for something. I can't really say for sure. Nor will I be particular vague about it, what am I, Jonathan Swift? All I do know is that there is no part of me that wants to watch this unfold. I have no doubt about the outcome. Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs will three-peat, and it will be miserable.

Here's what I don't want to hear: "relax, be positive, enjoy yourself." Instead, let's appreciate the power of Hating. I am full of Hate. This is a full-on, big league, major levels of Hate now in 2025. I think this is healthy, to really really deeply despise something. The power of positive thinking only gets you so far. No, you need to recognize when you're fucking pissed and you need to relish that emotion. Really stew in the broiling hatred. Braise yourself in your contempt. Be really fucking mad and don't give yourself a reason. Do you need a reason to enjoy something? No. The power of sports is to create completely arbitrary emotions. It is emotional gambling, and also real gambling, parasitic to a reckless degree. What happens with a random ball bouncing two thousand miles away means nothing to me. It has as much affect on my life as the shape stars million and billions of miles apart appear to have if viewed from Earth's arbitrary position in the universe. If the Broncos shocking us all and winning ten games in a season can bring me joy, than the Chiefs being this damn unending of a nuisance should also bring me to a rolling boil.

I have motto these days: A.B.H.

A. - Always

B. - Be

H. - Hatin' 

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 1 - I Saw the TV Glow

1. I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenbrun

There is a particular reaction I get from certain movies. David Lynch has pulled this off a few times. I could not keep a conversation with a friend just minutes after I finished Lost Highway. Inland Empire left me disturbed and half-zombied, unable to really function. These movies make me feel stoned, and I'm not somebody who much likes getting high. The basic movements of conducting life are suddenly are made utterly bizarre. I left the AMC theater after I Saw the TV Glow, walked over to a yogurt shop, and found completing the transaction with the guy behind the counter difficult. My brain was just in a fog of feeling and over-stimulation. I had completely disassociated from my body and my mind. I was not fully there, I was instead off writing a narration about what I was doing. Eric Fuchs ate his snack, feeling dizzy, while I wondered if I Saw the TV Glow was going to be the best movie of 2024.

Also, they had Spice Melange flavor yogurt in honor of Dune 2. Turns out it tastes like coconut lemon saffron. It did not open my brain any further to the greater magic of the cosmos, unfortunately. If there was transcendence to be found it was in the movie, not in the Spice.

I Saw the TV Glow is about a queer identity, it is about a very 90s-kid nostalgia for Teen Nick meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it is about losing your sense of reality when fandom is your only identity. But whether you have any personal experience with trans awakening or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, this movie has a universal message of terror. This creeping question of whether you have lived any life worth living at all. Whether the self you've created is utterly insufficient. That you denied yourself the opportunity to evolve, to become, to love and be loved. You locked yourself into an ideology or a lifestyle that is a false narrative, and are stuck like this. To use Duke Leto's phrasing, "the sleeper did not awaken". The Matrix was similarly powerful in its ability to create a techno-gnosticism - which also was at its core a trans metaphor. But you did not need to be trans to feel its energy. If anything The Matrix is over-universal considering its application in the worst kinds of people's worldviews, see that whole Red Pill fucking nightmare. That story is about escaping false realities to be a truer, romantic, perfected self.  

I Saw the TV Glow asks "what happens when you take the other pill?" When you strand yourself, maybe forever, in a false, insufficient life. It is the kind of thing I get to worry about now. I'm thirty-four, I work a service job that is not a career, writing has never paid a single bill, and these are all my own failings. Mortality has been on my mind a lot lately as my family members get older, frailer, and they might pass away before I feel like I've ever achieved anything. My anxiety about getting old has been creeping through this Top 15 with such things as Look Back and The Substance, these fantasies about restarting your life, maybe to do it all again, maybe to do it right this time. You never need to get old, it's never too late. I Saw the TV Glow is that full brutality of "you fucked it up". But even in this grim reality, like I said two weeks ago: reality is insufficient. There is still hope.

The color pallet of I Saw the TV Glow has a heavy use of blues and neon pinks. "Bisexual lighting" was a meme back in 2018, and here we have it again. Even a shared memory of many 90s Kids: the big gym parachute, is blue, pink, and purple. There are more "naturalistic" scenes with reds and greens. The starker the color correction gets, the closer we are to the surreal and fantastic. Our main characters watch their favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque, this young adult horror-themed program, and are awash in an impossible pink light. This is our lead, Owen (Justice Smith)'s first friendship with the older Maddy (Jack Haven, congrats on the new name, btw). It also becomes Owen's brush with sexuality, first moment to dare be independent from his parents, and we experience most of this through the hazy warped fog that is long-distant memory and nostalgia. Owen and Maddy stare into the TV and are transfixed by the glow, seeing something that might be meaningful only to themselves. It is liberation a half hour at a time, between commercial breaks.

Creepypasta as an art movement seems to have largely died down, but I Saw the TV Glow shows it at least lives in inspiration. Schoenbrun's first movie, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was about an online community playing a shared horror fiction game. The Pink Opaque is based a lot on the short story, Candle Cove, where a forum reminisces about a short-lived program that seems to be too horrifying and strange to have ever existed. What our leads see on the television has the structure of a YA program, two girls with magic powers battling suburban monsters. But the effects are terrifying, more extreme than a broadcast program should have been. The show ends with both of its leads captured by a nightmare Moon Monster, with perhaps Owen and Maddy as their reborn selves, prisons bodies with assigned genders at birth. Or maybe it was all just a TV show. The point is that Shoenbrun takes a concept that was designed to be fearful and disturbing, and instead conjures it as a vessel to something greater, a different plane of existence. That Pink Glow is memorizing because of its fear. Maybe we enjoy fear because there's something in horror that we admire, that we yearn for in ways we cannot express openly.

I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie full of jump scares and great gore gags. There is a decent spooky part in that Ice Cream Monster though. More terrifying might be Owen's father (played by Fred fucking Durst!), this stern faceless creature of masculinity, who can devastate a scene with a single line: "isn't that a show for girls?"

Really I Saw the TV Glow works as a masterful work of vibes and discomfort. Owen is so awkward and so out of place in the world, or any world. The vague haze of the past actually feels more "real" than the future we are shown. Things get much more disturbing in I Saw the TV Glow's final act, when Owen begins telling us a narrative that is certainly not true. We see a new version of The Pink Opaque that is painfully aged and cheesy and whose plot is missing the two main characters. An older Owen announces to us that he has a family now, "I love them more than anything", said in a flatter tone than Justice Smith usually gives. This family is never seen. Owen either is making them up, or this character's life is so artificial and so going-through-the-motions of heteronormativity that in truth, they might as well not exist. Owen feels no love for them, no connection to this life they were "supposed" to have. We see Owen working a miserable job at a children's birthday arcade, another 90s-kid memory of places like Chuck E. Cheese or Discovery Zone. This is a menial task that would never allow them to provide for a family anyway. Owen is briefly so overwhelmed by anxiety they have a panic attack that glitches the entire reality of what we're seeing. The whole world pauses while Owen struggles to breath.

There is still a final surreal image of hope. That even at this late state, even in terrible old-age make-up, Owen can still be, whatever Owen was supposed to be. We see them tear open their flesh, revealing a very yonic slit in their chest, within which is the glow of a television set. It is in these moments, in secret, that Owen can still live a life of fantasy and possibility. Where the crushing boot of authority and complacency and naked hatred towards whole swaths of the country can be silenced and ignored. This is Videodrome, again rebuilt to not be body horror, but whatever that term I could not come up with in my Queer review was, a Body Romance, a Body Comedy? I Saw the TV Glow says 'Long Live the New Flesh' with pride and defiance.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 2 - The Brutalist (CENSORED)

So I've never run into this problem before with Blogger but the automated system - ironically for a review that starts with two paragraphs complaining about automated technology - decided to flag the first version as too explicit or against very unclear Community Guidelines. So I'm just trying to test what I did wrong, this version is missing a few words and a sentence I think flagged it, so that people can actually read the thing.

Also, this blog may no longer continue on Google if this how the future is going to be. I am not writing porn, I am not advocating violence, I am just trying to discuss a movie that covers adult subjects. The previous is under review, I don't even know if human beings work in that department and will ever actually read it. So let's see what happens when I post this version:

2. The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet

AI, huh?

[Scare Quotes] "Artificial [Scare Quotes] "Intelligence"" has been a knife hanging over the entertainment industry for over a year now. For all the grifters selling AI into everything, if not yet the kitchen sink than at least your fridge, the story is different here. AI actually, to my dismay, has a use in filmmaking. The tiny steps towards AI in films have been met almost universally with backlashes. Civil War's biggest story was not the war, but the generative AI posters with laughable giant swans. Late Night with the Devil almost became a sleeper hit this fall until a few seconds of AI footage turned the conversation against it. The Brutalist is the latest story, which has generated a unique sense of betrayal.

"AI" is such a nebulous term, at this point so buzz word-y and confused as to be halfway useless. This is not a discussion about a particular technology, since dozens of technologies have been wrapped together. This is a kind of battle between tech ideology and all of us increasingly uncomfortable and unconvinced by the future the tech billionaires insist we must have. That future is all the less convincing when they each bend the knee to the new administration, or if you're Elon Musk, are all but a shadow president - when one Trump is already far too many. This is a labor battle, an ecological battle, an artistic battle, and above all else, a battle whether we need any of this or whether it works. You can use these tools to fix a character's accent or make somebody sing like Freddie Mercury, I don't need these tools for Google to hallucinate nonsense lies when I want to know how long shrimp stays good frozen. Maybe I should just toss The Brutalist out with the rest of the poisoned AI bathwater.

I don't think I can though, because this movie is really really good.

The Brutalist AI hurts so sorely because this is a movie that sells itself on its physicality, on its reality, on its non-digital-ness. Director Brady Corbet have a vision for a very old-school kind of filmmaking. Maybe the monumental piece of architecture at the center of the story does not exist, but everything else from the Philadelphia streets to the film grain of the 70mm feels like somebody actually went out to a place and shot stuff. That used to be what filmmaking was: you find something, or you make something, and you shoot it. The Brutalist gathers an amazing cast of actors, has them put on posh mid-20th century accents, and puts on a grand show of melodrama. Even that melodrama is retro because the villainous family talks like Charles Foster Kane with a touch of Cary Grant. This is an "epic film" in the pre-blockbuster definition, the kind of roadshow experience that Hollywood would sell in the Fifties and Sixties. It is shot in VistaVision, a form of high-resolution cinema that had not been used to shoot a complete movie in over fifty years. At three and a half hours, The Brutalist is the longest movie of 2024. It has an Overture and a fifteen minute intermission. Nobody has done that since Tarantino's Hateful Eight, also released in 70mm. So if there are cutting edge high-tech shortcuts being made, that does not fit.

Beyond just nostalgia for pre-Star Wars cinema, The Brutalist has a nostalgia for mid-century America in all its grandeur and promise. However, it also has this fetish for the old economy. The first half is interspersed with these film reels of Pennsylvania steel and rail and coal, the tireless industrial muscle that could build mechanized armies from scratch during WWII. "We used to make shit in this country" said The Wire, and The Brutalist nods in agreement. All this power meant endless opportunity for those barely surviving the 20th century, such as the Jewish family at the center of this story. However, the a vision American capitalism when it most closely could back up its promises eventually becomes a criticism of its endless desire to devour in The Brutalist. All of this was poisoned: the industrial economy rusted away for service jobs, and the photography of making movies transformed into the grind of CG artists producing digitized slop for Marvel movies, soon to be AI slop.

That first shot of The Brutalist sets up everything here. This will be an iconic scene, that is my called-shot. It shows László Tóth (Adrien Brody) climbing out of the darkness, unclear if this is a concentration camp or a Communist prison, only to pull himself out into the light, and we realize it was the bowels of a ship. Above us we see the Statue of Liberty while the classical score blares. Only Lady Liberty is shot from far below, at a strange angle, appearing upsidedown at first, like a flag raised in distress. Tóth will find most of the parts of the American Dream: a place for himself and his family to live, a place where his architecture talents are appreciated by ultra-rich patrons, a place where he pursue his vision and passions to create. Except, all of it, from his Judaism to his belief in the power of structures to endure, will be taken advantage of. There are two scenes of sexual violence in The Brutalist, one explicit, one heavily implied. Tóth battles against the limits of his boss's patience, the price tag, philistine architects making compromises. He has been driven to near-impotence both artistically and sexually by his life experience, and finally finds a hunger to build again. Only that building just drives him more in debt to evil men, and more certain he will forever be a stranger in his new home.

We have in the first act of The Brutalist a sort of a dry run for László's despair. Tóth arrives in Philadelphia (where I'll note, my own Holocaust-survivor grandparents immigrated to around this same time) to work under his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who is now going under the name "Miller". Attila has fully shed his Hungarian-Jewish identity, having lost most of his accent, converted to Catholicism, and married a shiksa, Audrey (Emma Laird). At first, this is a hopeful reunion, with László in tears upon seeing his cousin outside a bus. He goes to work under his cousin in his Miller & Sons furniture store - where Tóth notes there is no real Miller and no Sons - and thrives, building a magnificent modernist library for the wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Yet it all goes horrendously wrong, when the Van Buren family changes their mind just as Attila pushes the sexual boundaries, with Audrey getting very uncomfortable. In one day László goes from being toasted as a genius to back onto the street.

Harrison Lee Van Buren becomes the main patron and a repeat in grander scale of László's experience with Attila. They not just building some shelving, they're building a massive concrete community center. Tóth is not living in a closet, he's living in a guest house on the property. His half-paralyzed wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) is rescued from the communist government of Hungary, along with his traumatized silent niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) thanks to Van Buren's connections. But here again, the identity as a Jew, as an artist, as a man is chipped at, questioned, and aimed to be consumed. Van Buren flirts openly with Erzsébet. His awful son (Joe Alwyn) indulges himself off-camera with Zsófia. It is not enough that these immigrants find a life in America and even prosper, every part of them must be taken, consumed, and violated by their new home. The younger generations of this family finds themselves believing Israel might be a better home, free from America's tendrils, and history shows that will not be the case at all.

I've heard comments that The Brutalist's first half is stronger than its second. I cannot find myself to agree with this. The second half is where the movie becomes more difficult, more complicated. I would never, ever sacrifice Felicity Jones in this picture who only appears post-Intermission but fits so well you would believe she was there from the first reel. She is such a force of energy and propulsion right from the jump. Erzsébet is also a moral and emotional center for László, who I think might have been perfectly happy with her as an ideal, something to dream of but never have. When she finally appears, with her own cravings and wants, the movie becomes an awkward negotiation, a dream reunion facing realities.

The ending to this epic is very odd, but I love an odd ending. The conclusion of the villain's arc feel too "neat". They literally disappear, and with them goes all the problems and miseries of this Community Center that Tóth struggles for years to build. We then cut to the 1980s, in Venice, where a much-aged László in a wheelchair, being led around by Raffey Cassidy, now playing a great-niece, Zsófia's daughter. She is his caregiver during a lifetime achievement awards. Our protagonist does not speak. The announcer tells us how everything we've seen, from the Community Center to Tóth's other projects were, in fact, a representation of his experiences during the Holocaust, with some measurements matching his cell in Auschwitz.

At no point in The Brutalist were we told that anything László was doing was in response to his experiences under the Germans. Perhaps it was a subconscious desire. Or a secret he kept from his employer and even us, the audience. I do not believe this is the case. Tóth struggled throughout his life to build his art his way, according to his vision, and sacrificed immensely to do so. However, in the end, he is broken down not by Nazis or capitalists, but by the inevitability of age. With no ability to speak, his work can finally be taken from him, made to represent whatever means the most to his audience and descendants. They want the story about a Holocaust survivor, building monuments to a particularly Zionist vision of Judaism, so they got what they wanted. A building outlives its creator, it can last for centuries, making the architect, somewhat immortal. But that immortality is flexible, it can be used, misused, or exploited, and the artist, a ghost in his own decrepit body, has to lose their ownership of their pieces in silence.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 2 - The Brutalist

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Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 3 - Anora

3. Anora, dir. Sean Baker

Sean Baker loves whores. Sex work, be it stripping, pornography, or straight-up prostitution (and the blurry lines between these jobs), has been a feature of his last five movies. The awkward thing is that Baker is a straight guy, seemingly happily married, obsessed with young women in the sex trades. He's found quite a few young stars such as Suzanna Son in Red Rocket, or Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, the two trans star of Tangerine. Red Rocket, notably. was all about a despicable loser, a "suitcase pimp", grooming a young woman to be his next meal ticket. Sean Baker is not just directing these movies, he's also the writer, producer, editor, and sometimes cinematographer. These are his movies, through and through, auteur theory all the way, and this is a guy who loves the trashiest elements of society. His characters are not rich, they make bad choices with what few options they have, they are not well-educated, and what they do is, for sure fetishisized, but not glamorous. We're right on the border of exploitation. The director says the right things, he supports sex work as a profession, he is an LGBTQ "ally", as toothless as that term is in 2025. But can we honestly say that Baker is not titillated by this stuff?

If suddenly some dark accusation comes about Sean Baker from one of young women he's worked with, I will not be terribly surprised.

Now I write this as somebody who equally loves trash. Yesterday I was gushing about The Substance largely for being a glossy 21st century take on Brian Yuzna movies. What Sean Baker does is perhaps more difficult since he so heavily steeps himself in "reality". The Florida Project is fictional, but it does show a real situation of people living on welfare in motels and how the system sets them up to fail. Anora is Baker at his least grounded, but it still needs physical reality. We're still focused on details like the protagonist not buying milk for their roommate. 

There are parts of Anora that are made out of random guys the film crew ran into while shooting in Brooklyn or Vegas. Total civilians on the street end up joining in the celebration for the wedding. You have Mikey Madison as the titular character, a Brooklynite stripper, who in the opening montage is dancing and entertaining random men, some of whom might have been actual patrons to this gentleman's club. It is a bit weird to have your star play a stripper but also, thanks to how you shoot your movie, you're making her be one in real life, you know? There's a Coney Island candy shop that the production smashed, with its real owner (Billy O'Brien) in frame. He has the kind of weathered eighty-four-year-old face that would never be in a movie except for neorealism verisimilitude. Baker depicts the strip club with all his loud, charged, headache-inducing thrills as a patron would see it: a sex fantasy. But also it is a service job, basically having to baby sit lonely strangers, while you argue with your boss about benefits. We are having our cake and eating it too, here, and I'm not going to be the bad guy and say that's not allowed.

What's interesting is that Baker's filmography is only getting funnier. The Florida Project is miserable. Meanwhile, Red Rocket is practically screwball in comparison. Anora's central premise could be - and often is - a melodrama about broken dreams. The central character, her name Anglicized to "Ani", gets a magical opportunity when a young immature oligarch's son, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), basically buys her out as his girlfriend, then wife. She only got chosen because she can speak a bit of broken Russian in a thick Brooklyn accent. The consequences are coming, Ani has supplied fantasies for so long she's actually come to believe one. However, ultimately she is just another toy that a spoiled brat will not take responsibility for. In the mean time, before the harsh reality sets in, half of Anora is a weird single night comedy. Ani finds herself helping Vanya's handlers, a group of incompetent thugs to wander Coney Island and Brighton Beach for hours, looking for Vanya, who has run off instead of facing up to any of this.

In this section of the movie, the thugs triple park their car which nearly gets impounded. One of them has a concussion and pukes all over the dash. They're running around trying to threaten random people in a diner who have no idea what is going on and are in no way frightened. This night seems to never end, just an increasingly absurd sight of three goons and a young woman going practically door to door, asking anybody "have you seen this deadbeat bridegroom?"

I often talk about how the thing that separates a good movie or story from a truly great one is the ending. I should be left with a difficult question. The final scene of Anora is one of those tough, confusing things. I don't fully know what you should take away here. Ani has lived up to the objectified fantasy of herself, pretending to be a wife but really serving as a prostitute for a boy whose only interests are partying and having no idea how to hold an Xbox controller. Vanya's got all the love-making skills of a leg-humping bulldog until Ani dares ask him to slow down so she can at least get something out of this. What I'm saying is: even the Cinderella dream is all transactional. There's one thug Igor (Yura Borisov) who dares show her anything like kindness or respect for her feelings, even recognizes her as "Anora", not "Ani". Their final moment is nearly a romance, or perhaps one last transaction she feels she owes him. And when whatever is happening here veers towards tenderness, when a very uncomfortable Igor tries to kiss her, it just breaks down into sobbing. The moment this is not a quid pro quo, not exploitation but rather an equal human connection, she cannot handle it.

That is not really the kind of movie Sean Baker makes, after all.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 4 - The Substance

4. The Substance, dir. Coralie Fargeat

Nominate this for Best Picture, you cowards!

...oh wait, they actually did? ...Really?

Okay, have this win Best Picture, you cowards! I want to see that acceptance speech.Coralie Fargeat should walk up to the podium with a bucket of blood and then see which front row A-listers get to be in the splash zone.

We are ten years into this "elevated horror" movement, if that even is a thing. (I'm not sure it is all that terribly well-defined.) As much as I enjoy watching horror movies get all this critical interest and praise... something felt off in 2024. I came away not exactly disappointed with but very underwhelmed by a lot of what was out there. I did not disliked Longlegs or Cuckoo, they both get soft recommendations from me. They look great, they have an aesthetic, they have good leads, there's one character actor hamming it up wildly as the villain, and yet... I just did not feel like they went far enough. They just did not have an edge. They never felt dangerous. They never took their ideas to beyond all good taste. Maybe there were just a lot of 3/5 horror movies in 2024 like The Heretic that had pretensions of greater questions, yet offered nothing of... substance.

I walked out of The Substance feeling like perhaps the promise/curse of AI had come true according to all of the wildest investor fantasies. Here was a move machine learning had crafted for my precise perversions. I'll admit, I'm something of a cheap date when it comes to cinema: you show me a ton of pornographic nudity and pornographic gore, I'll cheer. The Substance has a core point about how Hollywood and entertainment treats its aging beauties, and turns it into a Cronenbergian (both David and Brandon!) concept of splitting flesh and identity. Then it just keeps going. And going. It keeps evolving and progressing its disgusting concept to the point that an entire audience is covered in fluids. And I just want to swim in all of it.

This a solid SciFi concept about an aging actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), choosing to undergo a process called "The Substance", in which she will be reborn as Sue (Margaret Qualley), a younger more perfect version of herself. The rules are arbitrary in a fairy tale manner: you must spend one week as your older self, then one week as your younger self. There's a slow devolution of this character into two figures, as Elisabeth breaks down and becomes increasingly unable to function as herself. The Substance has the carefree recklessness of youth face its aging consequences immediately. But also, it's a person tearing themselves in half. Elisabeth is undergoing a process to transform, yet in truth, is trying to reject change. She is just repeating the life that left her such a lonely, empty person with nothing except her fame. She does undergo a different transformation, not into youth, but to the grotesque.

The Substance is only Coralie Fargeat's second movie, which is stunning to consider. This is so polished, with such a strong voice already. Her previous work, Revenge, also had an ending that amazed with its unusually large amount of blood. And it had a highly erotic gaze towards its female star. The Substance is horny with a capital-H. It is drooling at Margaret Qualley's body, fetishized from every angle, often nude. There's a lot of vibrant colors that pop, no color popping more than the pink on that swimsuit. This is all in contrast to Demi Moore, an actress who thirty years ago was the hottest sex symbol on the planet. Her filmography includes sweaty trash like Striptease and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, yet even her big swing for dramatic bona fides in 1995's The Scarlet Letter had to sell itself on a sex scene. Maybe it is fitting therefore that Demi Moore finally got her Best Actress nomination for The Substance, a movie about her own aging and declining star power, and willingness to degrade herself ever further. Fargeat is playing up the contrast of impossibly glowing white flesh on Qualley while uglying-up Moore.

There is a message here in The Substance, not a complicated one, nor does it need to be: we've known film stardom objectifies women  for over a century now, and that story goes not get any more "trite" even if you've heard it before. (People still cannot handle a woman's body in the public eye, Sydney Sweeney's chest became one of the weirdest stories of 2024's media cycle.) I do not think The Substance becomes any less interesting because its satire is obvious. And I'm not entirely sure if the exploitation is in service to the satire, or if Fargeat is making a satire in service to her exploitation instincts.

Fargeat has visual references to The Shining, the ending is pure Screaming Mad George mixed with De Palma, plus there is a lot of The Fly. But I'll say, The Substance is not just a great movie because it reminds me of several of my favorite horror movies. It is its own kind of unique nasty. Early on in The Substance, we see Dennis Quaid as this producer figure, probably not named "Harvey" by accident, eating a bowl of shrimp in a nasty close-up to his teeth. That's exactly the movie this director wants to make. She wants to film the consumption of bodies, not even swallowing them, just the chewing. She wants to show the most gorgeous vision of objectified femininity juxtaposed with the most horrible, the most unimaginably disgusting, first from the ravages of age, then even a twisted body made out of even more depraved nightmare. These are in-your-face extremes, daring you to keep watching. There are several points where The Substance reaches a logical conclusion, where Sue and Elisabeth's rivalry breaks them both down into ruins of themselves. And no, it is not settling for a logical conclusion. The ending must be entirely illogical, hitting another gear of gross for no necessary reason.

I was sad The Substance ever ended. It was the best time I had at the movies in all of 2024. Cannot believe there are three movies I think are better than this.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 5 - The Taste of Things

5. The Taste of Things, dir. Tran Anh Hung

I did not see this on many Best of 2024 lists. The Taste of Things may have gotten lost in the shuffle of releases since it came out in February, or many critics considered it a 2023 movie. It is on Variety's 2023 list for example. The Taste of Things screened at Cannes two years ago, released in France in fall '23, and was the French entry at the 96th Academy Awards. As always my rule is I count only the American releases, which is when the movie is available for me to see it, and presumably most available for my Anglosphere audience. It would have ranked very highly on the 2023 lists if I had put it there. And The Taste of Things is definitely deserving of discussion one year after release, or two years after release, I'll be bothering people about The Taste of Things for decades.

The Taste of Things is a movie about food, and everything about it. It is about cooking, about eating, about chewing, about tasting, about feeding, about caring, and about the satisfied sigh of relief after a good meal. The only thing it is missing is the burping and farting. The first half hour is a single sequence across a day in a busy 19th century kitchen preparing a great abundance of food. Tran Anh Hung shoots his actors actually preparing real food on camera, which is rare in cinema. They actually were in an old kitchen and used old antique such as ice boxes. We see the entire process of making the meal from pulling vegetables out of the dirt to gutting the fish to clarifying the butter. 

I was enraptured by the choreography and performance on display. It was just magnificent. I know people are excited by violence on film or sex on film, but you can be just as excited by a passionate production, be it cooking or anything else. It is food porn mixed with competence porn. The opening of The Taste of Things was the single most exciting cinematic adventure of 2024. There was this wonderful suspense as a team of men and women worked tirelessly to prepare some mystery dish, which turns out to be a five course meal for their local gentry friends. Who are all smiles and warmth as they enjoy what has been created.

The meals are so important to The Taste of Things that I must discuss what that first meal was. We start with a beautiful clear consommé soup, then second course is a seafood pot pie, then a turbot in a creamy hollandaise sauce, next a gorgeous rack of veal for the entree, and finally, just to fully stunt on anybody not blown away, Baked Alaska. This is all physical craftsmanship, the eroticism of eating and cooking, of getting pleasure from your guest's pleasure. The Taste of Things is also really horny in a very French way. There is a shot of a boiled dessert pear that is match cut to a naked woman's behind in repose. Food leads to ass in more than one way.

Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) is the genius chef who prepares this meal for her guests, who beg her to sit down and join them. Her employer is Dodin (Benoît Magimel), an independently wealthy gourmet whose large home is dedicated entirely to cooking. Eugénie and Dodin are both in the autumn years of their life, they've lived and worked together for a decade, sometimes as employer and employee, sometimes as more. Dodin might get to visit his chef's bedroom at night, or maybe the door is closed to him. He eventually convinces Eugénie to marry him, just as an illness is beginning to overcome her. This is a romance of the final years of life, with food again, being the great vessel of their passion: it can be both flirtation and caregiving.

Dodin's signature dish is Pot-au-feu, which was actually The Taste of Things' original title back at Cannes. This is a signature French dish. It is also probably the most intimidating item made in The Taste of Things. Dodin is a master of this stew, which involves slow cooked beef, potatoes, and vegetables in a broth. The broth is then served separately with you eating the meat and veg on a plate with some pickles and sauces. Personally, I find any beef stew worrisome, because cuts of steak so easily dry out if you prepare it poorly. Worse, you're serving all the parts naked. It is a such a simple dish that you cannot hide a cheap stock or little mistakes under spices or salt or fats. Our gourmet's recipe is so involved and fussy that several chefs take one look at his instructions and just walk out the door. Frankly I do not think I'll ever made this: Beef Bourguignon is almost certainly easier thanks to the bacon and rich sauce. However, Dodin is an artist of Pot-au-feu, this dish is his life's work. He got to share that passion with Eugénie, and will continue to share it with the world.

Who cannot be inspired by that? It is a dream life.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 6 - Look Back

6. Look Back, dir.  Kiyotaka Oshiyama

Look Back is the shortest movie on the list. At only about fifty-eight minutes, Look Back is barely feature-length, and that depends whether you go with the Academy's definition or SAG's. For most of history, a major motion picture has always been at least eighty minutes long, and in my lifetime, they've only been getting longer. And here's a question is: why eight minutes? Why ninety? Why two hours? On what is any of this based? Look Back is an adaptation of a Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot manga, itself only 144 pages long. I've clocked this, the manga takes about forty minutes to read at a leisurely pace. So this adaptation, which is very close to manga, basically animating every panel, should match that. Efficiency is something nobody seems to care about to anymore - most streaming TV shows now are just overlong movies and would have been better at two hours. (And I'm a writer who has always failed at getting anything done with concision - look at this bloated paragraph!) If Look Back can achieve everything it wants to achieve in roughly a lunch break, that should be celebrated. That's courageous.

I already talked about Past Lives once in this series when I retroactively made it my Favorite Movie of 2023... as reconsidered in 2025. One of the powerful things about that movie is this question of choices and the infinite deaths you suffer across your life. As possibilities shrink, and potential yous dry up you're left with only the You That You Are. Look Back is not about a mid-life crisis, rather it is two young girls, who dedicate their youth to the pursuit of their art, this being manga. Early on, Fujino (Yuumi Kawai) is satisfied with the praise her talent for silly drawings achieve. However, she is horrified when confronted with real seasoned craft in the form of a rival, Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida)'s background drawings, which are near professional-quality. Fujino right here makes a key life decision: she can double-down and hone her skills, sacrificing all else socially to master the art of comics, or she can live a more normal life. The mangaka lifestyle is especially grueling. Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece, claimed to have worked twenty-one hour days, seven days a week, which I have to believe is an exaggeration but still points to a disturbing workaholic lifestyle. Look Back is not glorifying this by any means, it recognizes the toll this takes on a person, even one so long and passionate. 

Still there gives us two universes, one where Fujino grows to be a major success with a beloved manga series, and another where she didn't. Fujino does not even begin to reflect on the course of her until a terrible tragedy puts everything into a new focus.

There's a contraction at play in making art. Doing this has to be a social activity. I write these things then run around with my little scribbles outstretched, hoping somebody reads it. But also, it is isolating. Even doing these reviews requires many hours of sitting alone in front of a computer, considering a sentence, considering a joke, doubting oneself as to whether or not any of this is even worth doing at all. One does not reach out into the ether of the higher levels of the universe to build a thing, you just actually do it, typing one word at a time. Or drawing one line at a time. Fujino and Kyomoto have each other as a great partnership. Look Back is one of the best romances of 2024 while also being entirely asexual. Fujino and Kyomoto were not born good at this craft, it took hundreds of hours and stacks upon stacks of sketchbooks to get to a masterful level. But eventually they go their separate paths, and we're left with Fujino alone in her studio, working in total quiet. There is a huge window of the world outside, which she is not experiencing. Millions might love what she does, she might connect with them through the manga, but they're not here with her. We end this movie on a long shot of Fujino sitting there, back to the camera, working.

I wanted to draw manga at one point in my life. I have middle school and high school and college notebooks full of sketches and ideas, which will probably never be realized. It is something I just did not pursue. Cell phones and social media ate up the little moments in the day I found for doodling. Writing came more easily, and even there I  have a million disappointments in projects I never finished in this medium as well. There are times I imagine High School Me and whether he'd even recognize Current Me. I wonder if he'd like any of this writing or if this would just bore him because I didn't put in enough curse words.

Tatsuki Fujimoto clearly has a lot of himself wrapped into Look Back. There's an extended reference to the Kyoto Animation arson attack, one of the worst tragedies in modern Japanese history. I can imagine both young women in this manga and film represent sides of himself, maybe parts of the process he's felt he's lost along the way. They're the hot young passion that gets burnt away when sticking to deadlines and grinding out volume after volume of Chainsaw Man. It's a kind of journey to rediscover what really drove him to do this. We might see that moment here. There's a scene set in the rain where Fujino, having just lied to Kyomoto about a new project, is so overpowered by the desire to create she cannot contain herself, she has to dance along the path, finally overcome, she takes off running home, where he can start drawing her next work. Actually doing the thing is work, dull work. But the moment of inspiration, that's magical. You need to cherish that to keep going.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 7 - Civil War

7. Civil War, dir. Alex Garland

Remember when 2024 happened and we were all terrified what would happen during the election? Did we get off lucky since the bad guys won the popular vote, thus eliminating the need for a violent bloodbath? At least, we deferred that violence until those people are in office. It can all seem nice and normal this way.

Alex Garland's Civil War does not have politics, not on that level. It does not fall into any explicit "pro or anti Trump" binary. Civil War is not offering some bill that a party must sign. The very concept of this film makes no sense according to our politics: California and Texas are somehow unified? This is a movie more about vibes, a sense of increasing hatred. There is a villainous character asking our heroes "what kind of American are you?" There is a right and a wrong answer here. The immigrants in the party suffer the most, but that is about it in terms of any messaging.

Civil War is not about any particular alt-history or science fiction concept of a particular Civil War. It is a kind of ur-Civil War, the pure elements of this process and its complete destruction and terror. Garland is taking the imagery of modern global conflict and bringing it "home" - well, to my home. I'm American, he's an Englishman. The concept of this movie is that horrors you see on the news in Ukraine or Syria or Palestine or Sudan, will now happen in in the suburbs, by chain hotels, in mall parking lots, and finally on the White House lawn. This is society torn apart to its most chaotic, awful impulses, so that gas station attendants happily pose by the strung-up corpses of their neighbors for press photos. The colors on the map move with the various victories or defeats. But Civil War takes place mostly on the peripheries where, nobody is in control.

Another interesting aspect is the focus on battlefield reporters of all things. Civil War feels odd to frame itself here considering the rapid decline of the modern media ecosystem. Even the Washington Post is trying a desperate right-wing rebrand before its billionaire master gets bored and shuts it down. However, there must be somebody out there to tell the story. Somebody must take the pictures. So we find ourselves following an odd party of veteran battlefield corespondents (Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson), photographers (Kirsten Dunst) and an innocent young wanna-be along for the ride (Cailee Spaeny). They're having road trip cross-country to race against the collapse of the federal government to get one final blurb from President Nick Offerman. The journey is about increasing dissociation. A typical war film will teach its green soldier how to kill, Civil War teaches its young reporter to shoot her camera as the bullets fly. She gets more and more reckless with her life, more willing to get that final perfect shot to capture... something.

Our protagonist march through exciting set piece after set piece, through greasy landscapes of neon hair dyes and colorful graffiti (it's a Gamer aesthetic apocalypse, perfect for 2024). Garland makes one of the great blockbusters of 2024, in terms of raw excitement. He is as masterful here in building tension and the sense of increasing darkness and un-reality as he was in Annihilation. You can feel the inevitable switch towards a darker tone during a fun ride out in the woods, even while everybody is having fun, your heart is pounding, because you know this is un-safe. Something bad is hiding out where you cannot see it. The final sequence is an FPS assault on the final boss, with bullets flying in every direction. 

And yet, we leave with a sense that maybe none of this was worth it. The blurb from President Offerman is one word. The shots of his corpse are disturbing. Yet what truth really was uncovered? All this journalism was as a death-seeking profession as any other on the front lines. Our protagonists never kill anybody, but they come off as voyeurs or parasites.

There was talk this year that Alex Garland was ready to quit filmmaking. That seems less likely since he has an Iraq War movie ready to release in 2025, and after that he's making a sequel to 28 Years Later in 2026. I've loved many of Garland's movies, especially Annihilation, so I would miss him. I am glad he changed his mind. However, you can see Garland's ambivalence at the entire process in Civil War. His photographer heroes, are tirelessly risking everything for their craft, and we end with this emptiness. Filmmaking and photography are the same artform in many ways. So what are we left with after all the tight staging of gun fights and months of choreography? There's this big sense of nothing. We get no final great message from President Offerman, our reporters do nothing to save America, the film gives us nothing to stop its vision of an apocalypse. We just have more imagery to digest.

The Civil War's over, kids, time to go home.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 8 - Queer

8. Queer, dir. Luca Guadagnino

Double Guadagnino in 2024. This makes him, the first director ever that I've listened twice on a Top 15 list. Challengers is the more commercial movie. It is the "straighter" movie. Audiences are more ready to see a film about attractive young people be horny than they are to watch this, a movie about a sad homosexual drug-addicted writer (Daniel Craig) stewing in his own loneliness in Mexico City. One is people living the most exciting moments of their lives, the other is a man desperate for connection. Challengers has a thrilling sports sequence edited to maximum intensity, while Queer has a single long-take its hero injecting heroin into his veins while all alone in a dark, silent apartment. Nobody today does longing as well as Luca Guadagnino, and he has not made a movie as achingly lonely as Queer before.

Queer is the second film I have seen about the works of famed beatnik author William S. Burroughs. This follow David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch starring Peter Weller and a series of horrible alien flesh typewriters. Both films use Burroughs' pseudonym "William Lee". And both versions of the story must deal with the notorious death of Burroughs' wife, Joan Vollmer. It is a sin that hangs over them, in guilt and shame. In real life, Burroughs was playing a "William Tell" game with Joan, with whom he was having severe sexual and drug problems. We must use passive voice to describe what happened since the details are otherwise so unclear: she was shot in the head. Burroughs was actually convicted in absentia of murder by the Mexican government. Naked Lunch makes this event the fulcrum of the entire story, seemingly Burroughs/Lee's attempt to find and redeem himself for this act, only to repeat it at the very end, choosing a found identity of an artist over salvation. Queer keeps this event very quiet, there is only one mention of a wife at all, and an off-hand one at that. The "William Tell"  act appears in the final sequence, with a different figure entirely. You could easily have no idea what this was in reference to. Instead, Queer is much more explicit with the titular subject matter of sexuality, which Naked Lunch is ambivalent about. This 21st century Burroughs/Lee is a gay man in the back half of his life, on a spiritual journey for love that can never be.

This history really hits when you hear that very first song used in Queer, Sinéad O'Connor's cover of 'All Apologies'. With such lyrics as, "everyone is gay", "what else I should write", "I'm married" all standing out knowing Burroughs' history. The camera gives us a close-up of various items in Lee's hotel room, including a collection of firearms. Later Kurt Cobain himself will appear on the soundtrack in 'Come As You Are', which has the disturbing line "I don't have a gun" (tragically resonant for both the singer and the writer).

Queer is set in 1950. All this Nirvana is as out of place here as it was in that Peter Pan prequel movie. Equally impossible is Lee's age. Burroughs would have been in his thirties in 1950, Daniel Craig is 56. Craig is a handsome man in great shape, but Guadagnino and his DP, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (hello again), shoot the former Bond so every wrinkle and gray hair stands out. This movie star has never looked more like a man in the back half of his fifties than he does in Queer, his good looks are straining against the lush of too much booze and the rust of age. 

The first half of this film is a lucid drama of Lee pissing his way across bars, flirting with the young expatriate boys in post-war Mexico. Craig fills the awkward silences with frantic conversation, a desperate charm. He's found yet another wonderful accent to match his Benoit Blanc or Joe Bang. The story does not get truly weird until the second half. Guadagnino and Mukdeeprom leave you a few hints we are going somewhere other than a mere period piece: there's a lot of miniature shots, a lot of rear projection. We're always on the same block in Mexico City, in the same few sets. It only gets stranger  once we jump on a doomed road trip.

The longing and disaster comes together as Lee falls in love with a handsome younger man, a GI named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), this thin quiet boy. The type to leave plenty of room in the conversation for the older mans' dry witticisms. Eugene is friendly, and open enough to sleep with Lee, which is an immense release for our protagonist. Few films present the act of giving a blowjob with as much religious ecstasy as Queers gives it. But Eugene states he's not "queer", the term Lee uses for himself. Whatever Allerton is - it is never given a label - he's not an emotional partner. Their relationship goes from friendly to sexual to even akin to prostitution, but ultimately they are not bonded. We in the audience never understand this character, nor does Lee.

The third act of Queer takes Lee and Allerton on an odyssey across the Americas, into deep jungle, to transcendent forms of existence. And for one magical evening, their minds are expanded into something more. There is a scene in Queer that I could describe as "body horror", but that is the incorrect term. It is flesh transforming, but not in a negative or terrible way, quite the opposite. Maybe a "body romance", where the confines of the humanoid form are transgressed. What decades of straight filmmaking has decided is terror, Queer decides is a transgression that can be celebrated and envied. The tragedy is not that it breaks a boundary, but that the boundary cannot stay broken, that normal life resumes the morning after.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 9 - Kinds of Kindness

9. Kinds of Kindness, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

At the end of my screening of Kinds of Kindness, a gentleman stood up and yelled "WHAT???". This is the kind of reaction I want out of an audience. If a movie does not disgust and confound, why even make it?  I do not know what this guy expected to see before the end credits considering the long 166 minutes of movie that had come before. Perhaps he believed there would be some sort of explanation, some clear message and point to it all.

He must not have been paying attention.

To be honest, I'm not sure what Kinds of Kindness is about either. I'm less lost than that poor fellow, but I'm still pretty lost. The difference is that I was laughing glee, and that guy had his night ruined. Kinds of Kindness is not a movie about "kindness", as in any form of altruism. It is not about "kinds" either, if you consider the title as meaning similar types or sets of things. The title seems to be random. It was the third name Yorogs Lanthimos considered for this project, probably chosen because it had the best SEO. This movie is a three-part anthology film with all three stories named after a character with named 'R.M.F.' That character is played by Yorgos Stefanakos, who is not an actor, does not get a speaking role, and in real life is simply the director's friend. Those letters "R.M.F." do not stand for anything according to Lanthimos. In two of the tales, R.M.F. is killed. In the third, he is brought back to life. None of the stories connect with each other besides the fact they star the same core cast of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley. Why any of this? Why not?

The one thing these stories have in common, what makes them a "kind" if you will, is that they're really weird. There's a recurring dynamic of control. That is control to the point of absurdity, and the pleasure gained in existing under extreme masochism, extreme surrender. Our first tale is about an employee, Robert (Plemmons) who lives his entire life and entire existence according to the orders of his boss, Raymond (Dafoe). This is down to his food, his sexual habits, his dress, even his weight. His life unravels when he fails to kill R.M.F. in a planned car crash - this murder being planned for no particular reason -forcing Robert to try to either find his own independent life, or to win back Raymond's favor. The second story is about a wife (Stone) who is so subservient and incomplete that she cooks herself to feed her husband (Plemmons). The final act is about a sex cult of hydrophobics in Florida searching for the Chosen One, living under the leadership of a horny guru named Omi (Dafoe). They must keep their fluids safe and unpolluted from the outside world, be that fluid water or semen.

Lanthimos is as Lanthimos-y as he's ever been with this trilogy of Kinds. There are blunt matter-of-fact requests for a sex orgy. People have dreams about dogs being the dominant species feeding their human pets chocolate. Margaret Qualley plays very bad piano while singing from her heart as two men embrace on the couch. A normal world exists out in the corners beyond this stage, but what we see is surreal, but completely unabashed in its weirdness. These characters are fully liberated from the normal, be that chopping off fingers or kidnapping young women or murdering a stranger. You simply follow the rules of whatever micro-social structure and you find liberation, there is true love, there is even the hope of salvation.

Or maybe not. This all just be pure comedy. Kinds of Kindness three set pieces that all building brilliantly to a punchline. Every story ends on the most hilarious possible musical note. To nail a short story so perfectly that's craft, and Lanthimos and his team do it three times. Lanthimos carries us through these ideas, these characters and their world and its rules, then fires a shotgun blast of complete absurdity right at the end. You're not quite sure what has happened, why it happened, and you have more questions than answers. But something incredible has occurred. One story leaves us with Emma Stone throwing it back to a song called "Brand New Bitch" while a comatose woman is slumped over in a wheelchair. 

Is that a good ending? A bad ending? I don't know. I do know that it is damn good cinema, baby.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 10 - Challengers

10. Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino

"I don't want to be a homewrecker" says Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) during the first pivotal moment between herself and her two boys. Challengers is a love triangle in structure, but let that line be a clue as to which relationship truly drives the plot. This movie about is about singles tennis - a game that can accommodate only two people on the court. Three people can fit on a bed, not in a tennis match, not in a marriage. Tashi is the prize fought between the mousy Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and the rat-faced Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor). This battle occurs during the course of their teens, twenties, and early thirties, or the beginning, middle, and end of their sports careers. Challengers describes tennis as a "relationship". In the end, it is only Art and Patrick on the court together. You might be doing this for the love of a girl, but the affair you must have is with your opponent.

The marketing of Challengers promised a lot more of a ménage à trois than the film actually delivers. There is only one scene of all three young people together in a crappy motel room, set during the steamy outro to the song "Uncle Ace" by Blood Orange. Tashi is controlling the lust of both young men, going from one set of lips to another until she finally pulls off her great magic trick: Patrick and Art making out, a tennis duo pushed over the line to a couple. We cut to Tashi with a Cheshire grin on her face, lying back and loving the sexual fantasy she conjured.

The whole movie is really a repeat of this trick. Tashi starts a family and brand with Art, while sleeping around mid-Nor'easter with Patrick. Art lives out every dream of a sports legend, Patrick is living out of a car and begging a small-stakes tournament assistant for half of her Dunkin' Donuts breakfast. One of them gets a huge poster outside, one of them is whoring himself out on dating websites for a place to sleep. It makes for a great evolving dynamic, shown non-linearly by Challengers. More and more moments of these relationships are shown to us, as Patrick goes from child prodigy to has-been, Art from sidekick to miserable champion. Tashi based between them, a living medium of exchange. And yet, even now, with both careers concluding in far less glory than either hoped, who is sitting in the middle? Who gets front seat tickets to the show?

We never see who wins the last match of Challengers. Art gets the final spike but also hit the net with his knee, so it depends on the ref's call here. (I've seen enough Mahomes' games to know how celebrity gets treated.) The stakes are made ludicrous by the plot: Tashi is basically put for wager, hard to imagine that will ever actually work out since she has a daughter and an entire business to run based on Art. Patrick believes rekindling things with his tennis genius ex-girlfriend will give him the edge he always lacked. It is equally hard to believe he'll bounce back considering his age and condition, no matter how half-cocked his smile is. We do not see a winner because the winning is irrelevant. Challengers is a sports movie that really is all about the game. This final sports climax brings something new out of these two men, something they have lacked since they were boys, a love of the competition and each other. Tashi is not cheering for either Art or Patrick, but for them both, who are too busy hugging to realize one of them won and one of them lost.

The final match brings something new out of Challengers. This is one of the best-shot sequences of the entire year. Director of Photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom stages this match with every trick you could image: tennis ball POVs, digital camera moves to look down at the court, impossible shots from underneath the players, slow-motion. There's a lot of sweat dripping, and a lot of grunting. This is will not be the last time I mention Mukdeeprom this year. Also the edit is set to Trent Rezor and Atticus Ross's pounding techno score. (Do we have more great music from Reznor and Ross via soundtracks now than we do from Nine Inch Nails albums?) You're lifted up with the athletes to whatever magical moment they're having, as the past and future does not matter, just the beat of the ball bouncing, and the tension of the racket getting tighter and tighter.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No 11 - Rebel Ridge

11. Rebel Ridge, dir. Jeremy Saulnier

To talk about Rebel Ridge, one must first talk about Aaron Pierre. This is only his fourth film role, with the fifth being a voicing credit on Mufasa: The Lion King. (Fun fact: That was the first and the last time I ever talk about Mufasa: The Lion King.) Pierre stands out as deeply impressive presence. He has the physicality, he's got the muscle, he's got perfect cheek bones, and more importantly he's got those deep blue soulful eyes. Aaron Pierre is preposterously beautiful, and is blessed with the intensity to match it. I wanted to see more of him after his short role in The Underground Railroad, and I'm glad he has a full starring role in Rebel Ridge. He is a glacier of ice, a sublime beauty. Admire it from a far, but do not mess with it. When the glacier moves, it crushes all in its path.

Rebel Ridge is a big return to form for director Jeremy Saulnier. His previous works were also gritty stories set in the back corners of America, Blue Ruin and Green Room. The unique thing about his thrillers is how neither side, the hero or the villain, are ever fully in control of the situation. These are nightmare scenarios spiraling out of control, with every bad decision leading towards more violence. I disliked Saulnier's first film with Netflix, Hold the Dark, which led to a tough fallow period for this director. Something went terribly wrong with True Detective Season 3, where he ended up exiting as showrunner after just two episodes. Then we had five years of no Saulnier.

Something also went wrong with Rebel Ridge's production as well, where John Boyega was going to play the lead, then quit. That caused production to pause for an entire year. Aaron Pierre was the second choice to be our hero, Terry Richmond. You'd never know that this role was written for anybody else though. Nobody else could be this contained, this calm presense against such reckless stupidity and corruption.

Rebel Ridge is a modern answer to First Blood, the original Rambo movie. That was one about PTSD and local police bullying. Terry Richmond is an ex-marine CQC expert, but he's never used these tools he's mastered to hurt anybody. He's just a tutor who shows up in Youtube videos. Richmond has not seen war. The only war Terry runs into is our at home War on Drugs. Welcome to the 21st century, where civil forfeiture and qualified immunity are naked and obvious corruptions of the justice system. Meaning a local sheriff (Don Johnson) can strut around like a gangster and lead his whole sleepy little precinct to destruction by messing with the wrong guy. Presume invincibility leads to pointless provocation and finally, a lot of people getting hurt. Like many of Saulnier's great films, all of this could have been avoided if a stranger on his bicycle had just been allowed to ride to a courthouse with $10,000 in his pocket and get his cousin's bail.

The action in Rebel Ridge is a flashy fantasy. The way the real world works is that a corrupt sheriff like this will become the next governor of Louisiana or even president. Who is still pretending in justice anymore? But let's pretend for a second those things exist because this is a movie. 

Terry Richmond's action is the opposite of fancy, the choreography is built around an economy of movement. He will disarm you in just two twists of your arm to maintain absolute control. He will not hit you unless you need to be hit. He will not shout unless he needs to be heard. Every gun needs to be unloaded before he makes his next move, his finger is never on the trigger unless he means to shoot. The gun is pointed downward, he holds the weapon in two hands close to his body so that nobody gets any ideas. This is efficient "less" lethal violence. Unlike First Blood, Richmond never kills anybody, not even the proud bastard of a sheriff who honestly, deserves worse. Even in spiraling chaos, where nobody is control, Terry can at least control his own limbs, and what violence he gives out.