Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 10 December

Special Edition! 2024 Year in Review

I wrote this piece for RNZ only to dis­cov­er that I mis­un­der­stood the brief and this isn’t what they wanted, so you get to read it instead. Apologies to non- Aotearoa based read­ers as this is very much a loc­al summary.

By my cal­cu­la­tion, I’ve seen over 180 new films this cal­en­dar year – 140 in cinemas and 40 on stream­ers – and even with that sort of volume there are plenty of films I’ve missed. It’s not pos­sible to see everything in a fest­iv­al, of course, but I’m find­ing that loc­al main­stream release pat­terns are now unpre­dict­able enough that new releases require mil­it­ary levels of plan­ning to get to. Outside of the biggest block­busters, release dates are now guidelines rather than rules, with some films get­ting ‘sneak’ pre­views for weeks before offi­cial launch dates. Session times for smal­ler films are also often lim­ited – one a day in some cases – and in the last couple of months I’ve noticed some films are not being released in Wellington at all.

If it’s hard work find­ing the film you want, it is usu­ally reward­ing work. I haven’t seen too many out­right clunkers in cinemas this year. In fact, I’ve enjoyed myself much more often than not.

The big trend this year has been the amount of sup­port that audi­ences have shown for hor­ror. It feels as if there was a new one released every week in 2024, many arriv­ing on the back of canny release strategies that built up audi­ence expect­a­tion and then pro­ceeded to cash in. I’ll be hon­est, it’s not my favour­ite genre but I was impressed by the fem­in­ist fury of Immaculate, the goofy gore of Abigail and the geni­us cast­ing of Hugh Grant in Heretic.

And has any film this year become part of the zeit­geist quite like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, win­ner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in May and prompt­ing much fevered dis­cus­sion ever since.

Last year many of the best films were made by octa­gen­eri­ans – Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Loach’s The Old Oak and Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron – and the trend of age­ing mas­ters con­tin­ued into 2024. 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea but after­wards you knew you’d seen some­thing that no one else would dare to make. The box office dis­ap­point­ment of 79-year-old George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga still hurts as it was the best and smartest block­buster of the year. And the cine­mat­ic crime of the year could well be Warner Bros. decid­ing that – des­pite mak­ing 40 films and nearly four bil­lion dol­lars for them over 50 years as a dir­ect­or let alone a movie star – 94-year-old Clint Eastwood’s latest film Juror #2 didn’t deserve to be released in New Zealand cinemas. Scandalous.

But my favour­ite film of 2024 was by the almost-80 Wim Wenders. Perfect Days was about a med­it­at­ive middle-aged clean­er of Tokyo pub­lic toi­lets and was a pro­found les­son in con­tent­ment. Almost the per­fect film, you might say.

If Furiosa was the best and smartest block­buster of the year, then Jason Statham vehicle The Beekeeper was the best and dumbest. In terms of action flicks, I also had a lot of time for Dev Patel’s Monkey Man which took a stand­ard viol­ent revenge plot and fuelled it with anger at the state of India’s Hindu nation­al­ist polit­ic­al leadership.

2024 was also the year that Disney dis­covered that they didn’t have to drop their anim­ated sequels dir­ectly to stream­ing and that they could bank a bil­lion dol­lars each from cinema releases of Inside Out 2 (which I loved) and Moana 2 (which I only liked) and still have them drive sub­scriber num­bers later. It’s taken a while for them to real­ise how much money they were leav­ing on the table, but nor­mal ser­vice has been resumed now. Meanwhile, Netflix con­tin­ues to see cinemas as com­pet­i­tion and will only put a film in theatres if it has Oscar ambi­tions, and then only for the least pos­sible time.

Due to scale, though, Netflix still man­ages to come up with the occa­sion­al high qual­ity fea­ture film (almost in spite of itself). Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge was the best of them – a ter­rif­ic action film with some grunty social con­text and a star-making per­form­ance from Aaron Pierre – and J.C. Bayona’s Society of the Snow used incred­ible phys­ic­al effects to recre­ate the crash of a plane full of Uruguyan rugby play­ers in the remote Andes moun­tains. Both of those would not have looked out of place in cinemas which is more than can be said of Richard Linklater’s over­rated Hit Man (with its over­rated star Glen Powell).

Our smal­ler film fest­ivals went from strength to strength this year – the Italians, French, British & Irish and Terror-Fi all intro­duced con­sist­ently good films to loy­al audi­ences. The New Zealand International Film Festival had some wobbly moments at the begin­ning of the year as it some­how con­trived to lose most of its pro­gram­ming staff, but the even­tu­al slimmed down selec­tion of titles was high qual­ity even if the event is still strug­gling to loc­ate its iden­tity com­pared with those that have a clear­er man­date. I didn’t see as many of their selec­tions as I should have but my favour­ite from the fest­iv­al this year – now avail­able as a digit­al rent­al – was the vis­cer­al yet tran­scend­ent Sasquatch Sunset in which a fam­ily of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) make their lonely way around the North American wilderness.

2024 was also the year that I was forced to retire the word “new­comer” from my rep­er­toire as I dis­covered that more and more of the act­ors that were new to me were, in fact, already huge stars on some Netflix series or oth­er that I’d nev­er seen.

Two New Zealand pro­duc­tions that found their moment – and should be required view­ing for politi­cians starved of an under­stand­ing of Aotearoa’s his­tory – were Lee Tamahori’s The Convert and Michael Johnathan’s Ka Whaiwhai Tonu – Struggle Without End. As the nation is dragged, some­what unwill­ingly, into a debate about our found­ing doc­u­ment, these two films provide import­ant context.

Apart from those two, my favour­ite loc­al film of the year was Bookworm. Great fam­ily movies have a bit of weird­ness about them as well as a good heart and Ant Timpson’s film about an odd-couple fath­er and daugh­ter hunt­ing for a myth­ic­al beast in the Canterbury back coun­try has plenty of both.

Also, a big shout out must go to loc­al doc­u­ment­ary Maurice and I that was launched at the Architecture & Design fest­iv­al and went on to a tri­umphant self-distributed run across New Zealand. That’s now avail­able on DocPlay if you missed it.

Of all the films that made over a mil­lion bucks at the New Zealand box office my favour­ites were the afore­men­tioned Inside Out 2, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Dune: Part Two. Special men­tion should go to Kon Krasinski’s IF which is the biggest film of 2024 that wasn’t a sequel, part of a fran­chise, or based on any pre-existing IP. It was the 27^th highest gross­ing film of the year.

At the art­house, if we still call it that, I need to cel­eb­rate Todd Haynes’ con­found­ing May December, heart­break­ing All of Us Strangers, whim­sic­al Robot Dreams and the titan­ic achieve­ment of The Zone of Interest.

I’ve tried to give myself as much time as pos­sible to pro­duce this list of what I’ve liked but there’s still a bunch of (poten­tially) great films due to arrive for the Christmas hol­i­days. I have seen Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or win­ner Anora which is a vul­gar hoot with a big heart and a per­form­ance from Mikey Madison which blows every oth­er per­form­ance I’ve seen this year off the screen.

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In prep­ping this, I took a look at a few inter­na­tion­al sum­mar­ies of the year and was dis­mayed – as I always am – at how few of the world’s best made it into our cinemas this year, and how few are on the sched­ule to arrive in 2025. If I have time before tomor­row, I’ll pro­duce a list of films that were released over­seas this year that are miss­ing in action for Aotearoa.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to and write up an actu­al 2024 top ten list for RNZ.