NATHAN WEINBENDER:
2024 wasn’t exactly a banner year for films, and some of the biggest critical darlings haven’t even made it to Spokane yet. But there were still a lot of good movies to go around, and I’ve narrowed everything I saw down to 10 favorites.
At number 10, I have Aaron Schimberg’s cerebral comic nightmare A Different Man, starring Sebastian Stan as an actor with a facial condition, who changes his identity only to be haunted by a better version of his former self.
Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge is much better than your standard Netflix thriller. it’s a searing political text Trojan-horsed inside a neo-western about a guy who takes on a crooked sheriff in a small Southern town.
My 8th favorite film of the year is Kneecap, starring an Irish hip-hop trio playing themselves. It’s funny and scrappy, like early Danny Boyle and Edgar Wright, an entertaining musical origin story and a two-finger salute to cultural censorship.
India Donaldson’s Good One is the smallest film on my list, a coming-of-age drama about a 17-year-old, her dad and his divorced friend on a camping trip. It builds not to action but a single line of dialogue, which lays bare the letdowns and betrayals of the male adult world.
At number 6, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. George Miller returns to his vast post-apocalyptic world for the fifth time, and he somehow makes a long-delayed prequel to a long-delayed sequel that builds and deepens the mythos of the films that came before it.
Anora is the latest film from Sean Baker, the portrait of a New York stripper who gets hitched to the son of a Russian oligarch and goes on a breakneck odyssey through the city. Anchoring the chaos is Mikey Madison’s dazzling central performance, and the film marries the patter of screwball comedy with the tension of a ticking-clock thriller.
Challengers comes in at number 4, the first of two films released by director Luca Guadagnino this year. This is a classic love triangle melodrama set in the world of pro tennis, and the color contrast is cranked up and the Reznor-Ross soundtrack comes at you with a vengeance. Like its characters, it’s sly, sleek and calculated. Unlike them, it’s a lot of fun.
Number 3: La Chimera, directed by Alice Rohrwacher. It’s an earthy, Fellini-esque fable about the Estrucan tombs scattered around the Italian countryside, about the treasures inside, and about the people who pilfer and profit off them. This movie feels alive with possibility, creates its own rules as it goes along, and makes the ethereal seem tangible.
Number 2: His Three Daughters, by Azazel Jacobs. Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters looking after their father, who’s on his deathbed, and the movie is less about grief than the erratic process of going through it. Jacobs’ approach is real and lived-in but also heightened and theatrical, and its final notes of magical realism underline just how elusive catharsis can be.
And my favorite movie of the year: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. He and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins on a heritage tour of Poland, the hometown of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. I’ve seen this movie twice, and both times I’ve been struck by how it breezes by, despite its dark themes. Eisenberg’s dialogue is barbed, bitter, breakneck and often hilarious, and his chemistry with Kieran Culkin is so believable, effortless, combustible. This is an incisive, bruising, poignant comedy, which is the best kind.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.