Jan 27 - Feb 2 2025
Memoir of a Snail, The Girl with the Needle, Inside Out 2, The Brutalist, The Apprentice, The Eternal Daughter, Threads, Sugarcane, Blink, Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story, Donnie Darko: Director's Cut
- Memoir of a Snail [2024] - 60
Nominated for “Best Animated Film”, Adam Elliot’s bleak follow-up to Mary and Max is likely to hit home for some viewers, and be a little too snailish for others. Memoir of a Snail is undoubtedly impressive in terms of design and stop-motion fidelity, but ultimately feels like a story designed for a short film that got streeetttchhheeed out over a 95-minute runtime. There’s certainly some interesting and meaningful moments during that stretch, but this is a piece that, for me, needed to commit a little more to one lane or another. It sports an “R” rating, but I think the forthright nudity and language that cause it would have been better served with some Austin Powers-style lampshading instead. Its story is meaningful by the end, but a single perspective take on the telling would have made it punchier. Its runtime is reasonable at just over an hour-and-a-half, but the space between its words makes it feel closer to two. All said, the animated category isn’t terribly compelling this year anyway [besides Flow], but this is a particularly uncompelling part itself.
- The Girl with the Needle [2024] - 88
Switching gears not only from “Best Animated Film” to “Best International Film”, but to “things that deserve recognition”, The Girl with the Needle is an excellent achievement in unique storytelling within a framework most will find fairly familiar. Sporting a scene viewers won’t be able to forget for a long time, The Girl with the Needle marks an impressive achievement for director, Magnus von Horn, and writer, Line Langebek Knudsen, as well as another stunning entry from Denmark into the category. Featuring impressive black-and-white cinematography, a well-told story with a shocking twist, and touching on social commentary around modern issues, The Girl with the Needle isn’t one I’d recommend to everyone due to its subject matter, but it is a film most excellent and deserving of your time and attention… if you don’t mind a little tragedy.
- Inside Out 2 [2024] - 73
Annnnd coming back to the animated world… 2024’s follow-up to the 2015 smash-hit Inside Out, Inside Out 2, is more focused, more thoughtful, and [unfortunately] more limited than its predecessor. I felt that the first entry into the series provided something of a shallow ocean; allowing viewers to wet their toes in a series of meaningful topics, but never following any particular thread far enough to give any real insight, and ultimately felt a little cheap when obvious punches were pulled. The sequel [which I’m sure will steal the Oscar], has similar-but-opposite issues. Inside Out 2 is so myopic in its subject matter and wastes so much time being witty instead of profound that its climactic moments offer a microcosm solution to a profoundly complex experience centered around self-identity, positive/ negative self-talk, and growing up in general. While I do think this is a better story and vessel of growth than the first film, it still left me just feeling “ok” when compared to insightful powerhouses like Turning Red or Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
- The Brutalist [2024] - 73
Another “just ok” film that’s garnering a monumental amount of praise, The Brutalist is long, large, and good-not-great. Nominated for 10 Oscars, this intermission-sporting high-rise of an architectural drama certainly deserves recognition in some areas, but isn’t a film I think people will remember long after the long credits roll. Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce are both nominated for their roles here and, while they’re both good at what they’ve been assigned to do, I don’t think they’ve pulled the win over other players in the game. They’ve certainly done the most acting of any nominee, but I don’t think they’ve done the best. Felicity Jones has a real shot, score has a real shot, directing has a real shot… but I think that this particular construction is either going to win everything its nominated for in a The Lord of the Rings-style sweep, or realize that it forgot to get its permits approved and simply be remembered as a series of girders and AI-generated slop. Yes, any AI is too much AI.
- The Apprentice [2024] - 85
A film that’s difficult to either laud or loathe in the early stages of Project 2025, I think the original title of The Apprentice must have been “Making A Murderer” or “Diary of a Madman”… but those were already taken. Following the ambitious, seditious, and unceasingly selfish rise of our glorious, God-given leader, Donald Trump, The Apprentice is, as I mentioned, difficult to pin feelings to. On one hand, it was horrendously difficult to watch: knowing where it all ends up… and fearing where it will go next. On the other, the technical prowess of the editing and pacing are impressive, and both Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong shine as incredibly compelling prospects for the lead/ supporting actor awards. A film certainly worth your time if you’re not too sick already, The Apprentice isn’t likely to be anyone’s favorite film, but it may turn a few heads still on the fence.
- The Eternal Daughter [2022] - 81
Slow, strange, and ultimately satisfying, Joanna Hogg’s eerie drama about loss, guilt, and regret is likely to leave you either deeply thoughtful… or deeply bored. As her mother nears the end of her life, Julie brings her back to a hotel in which she has fond memories; attempting to bridge gaps in her mother’s past, as well as their own relationship, with the ultimate goal of writing a film about the experience. Basically a single-woman show, Tilda Swinton does an excellent job of portraying both Julie and Rosalind, making The Eternal Daughter’s 96-minute runtime feel both full and meaningful… if a little weird [but that’s intentional]. My favorite thing about this film is that, by the end, you can kind of interpret the events and their meaning in almost any way you want to, and you’re going to be right. Theories abound about this little ghost story, but the magic behind them is that they all mean whatever it is you want them to, just like the best parables told around your favorite campfire.
- Threads [1984] - 84
Another entry in the “Too Much to Recommend” category [alongside 2008’s Martyrs], Threads is a 1984 BBC production that’s only ever been aired four times since its creation. Following an undramatic and incredibly bleak depiction of nuclear war and its effects on Britain, there’s something about the calm and matter-of-fact way that Threads presents its subject matter that gives me a recognizably uncomfortable feeling even just thinking about it tow write this. Reading other reviews around the web, they can almost all be summarized as “I watched this when it first aired in the 80’s, and rewatching it now is just as intense". It’s a difficult thing to put my finger on, but there’s a real, deep-rooted horror in this very human story and the grounded nature of its approach. Threads is a movie that’s likely to stick with me for an extremely long time to come.
- Sugarcane [2024] - 72
Nominated for “Best Documentary Feature”, Sugarcane illuminates the horrors, atrocities, and unspeakable things that occurred at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in Canada. A subject I remember breaking across the news and internet as it was being discovered and talked about publicly in 2021, I’m not sure that this submission totally does the issue justice. At 107-minutes long, there was a lot of space to share more experiences, offer stronger statistics, and put more pressure on those responsible or those who claim innocence/ ignorance. I felt that this was a solid preliminary exposure of the nightmare these people have been through, but the volume of its content felt more appropriate for a short-film, instead of a full-length feature. Certainly not bad by any means, I suppose it’s a compliment in some form that what I wanted from Sugarcane was simply more.
- Blink [2024] - 68
Auto-playing after Sugarcane, Blink tells the story of the Pelletier family as they travel the world before three of their children lose their sight to a rare ocular disorder. A generally heartwarming tale that follows a family through the vacation of a lifetime and features great cinematography, Blink falls short in giving the audience anything to chew on once the credits roll. We meet a charming family, learn of their genetic struggles, then venture the world as they build visual memories to try and take with them before they’ll never see anything again. I’m only three days out from my watch of this and, though powerful, the only takeaways I have are the first thing the eldest daughter loses the ability to see are stars, and the scene where the mother has to explain to her 5-year old what “blind” actually means after he’s seemingly accepted his fate. Touching nonetheless, Blink takes what could have been a deeply profound journey into what it means to connect sightlessly to a world just ready to sell you the next shiny thing, and chooses to be something of a cinematic travelogue instead.
- Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story [2023] - 76
On a bit of a lightweight documentary kick, Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story does a little more of what I wanted from Blink, while raising some issues all its own. The tale of a man seeking something he isn’t aware of who meets an abandoned otter cub, Billy and Molly is touching and cute-as-all-hell, but doesn’t forget to sprinkle in moments of prophetic wisdom. Suffering some from the same thing all “human/ wild-animal connection” stories do, it’s difficult to not watch this and think about the potential damage being done to this creature by Billy’s dedication to her, but the story does a decent job of addressing this in semi-gloss passes of finger-waggling that serve me well enough. If you’re looking for something to give big watery “awwww” eyes to for a little over an hour, you’d be hard pressed to find something better than Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story.
- Donnie Darko: Director’s Cut [2004] - 88
A classic growing up during the early 00’s, I don’t think that it would be inflammatory to say that Richard Kelly’s one-hit-wonder, Donnie Darko, was something of a formative film for teenage-Leo. From “what’s a fuck-ass” to “why are you wearing that stupid man suit” to its haunting cover of “Mad World”, there’s a lot of things that Donnie Darko has embedded deep within what Inside Out would call my “core memories”. In a lot of ways, that makes this a difficult film to rate or review, but I also haven’t seen it since my high-school days and am rewatching it now because my partner had never gotten around to it. Having had this re-experience as a 33ish-year old, I can definitely confirm that this film still “slaps”, as the kids say. I’d love to experience this ride for the first time again, but I think that what it has to say in terms of unintended consequences, the ripples we all have on the world around us, and the simple fact that it’s just an interesting scifi-drama keep this afloat as a meaningful and worthwhile piece, nostalgia or no.
