Category: 2024

Movie Review – The Brutalist

The Brutalist (2024)
Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold
Directed by Brady Corbet

The immigrant has been the subject of a great deal of discourse in the United States for years, with 2025 being a moment when tensions boiled over. There is a convenient amnesia among many Americans who imagine their ancestors arriving on the Mayflower, choosing to ignore the fact that these settlers were invaders of an already populated land. The reality is that most white Americans are descended from immigrants who arrived much later, yet they pretend that the Irish, Italians, and other once-maligned “swarthy” races were always considered white, rather than persecuted in ways not unlike how immigrants from the Global South are targeted today. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a story about an imperfect person, an immigrant, a refugee, who brings talent alongside profound inner turmoil. He is not welcomed with open arms, but with a desire to exploit him and use him up.

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Movie Review – Queer

Queer (2024)
Written by Justin Kuritzkes
Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Luca Guadagnino has been on quite the streak lately. In the last three years alone he’s made Bones and All, Challengers, After the Hunt and this film. While he’s not been to everyone’s taste, I think everything he makes is worth a view and showcases his filmmaking prowess whether on a technical or artistic level or both. Guadagnino resists the temptation to dramatize desire into a standard plot and instead lets longing exist as visual aesthetics. The film treats obsession not as pathology or romance, but as a state of being. It is disorienting, humiliating, sometimes tender, often unbearable. This is a film you feel and if you feel it, the characters and their experiences will linger with you for a long time.

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Movie Review – Nosferatu

Nosferatu (2024)
Written and directed by Robert Eggers

I don’t really care for vampires. I’ve never felt drawn to this particular monster compared to others. I understand all the tropes and metaphors that orbit the vampire, and they’ve simply never appealed to me. What I do enjoy are the full-throttle productions of Robert Eggers, where he fills the screen with a healthy mix of period accuracy and atmosphere that seems to drip off the edges. I’ve enjoyed his previous features, and it didn’t surprise me that Nosferatu was no exception. The vampire here is wonderfully grotesque and inhuman, but it is not the focal point of the film. In my opinion, that distinction belongs to Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, who delivers one of the most surprising and satisfying performances of the year.

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Patron Pick – Soundtrack to a Coup D’état

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Soundtrack to a Coup D’état (2024)
Written and directed by John Grimonprez

Being a media-obsessed person for my whole life, I have come to a new understanding since my university days about the United States and the way it uses media as a weapon. Depending on how far along your understanding of the mass media’s purpose and how power becomes gained & is wielded, you might not see the reality just beneath the surface. As Michael Parenti said in his book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, “Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.” 

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Patron Pick – Carry-On

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Carry-On (2024)
Written by T.J. Fixman
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

It took just a few minutes of watching Carry-On to realize I was watching a type of copaganda. Instead of shilling for the “boys in blue,” this film attempts to make the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) seem like an essential job that protects Americans and is staffed by cool people who look like action stars. The plot is a yawn-inducing cut & paste of every other terrorist thriller you’ve seen, like tossing 1990s thrillers and the TV series 24 into a blender with some pro-TSA propaganda. I’m not very surprised that a Netflix original is a piece of disposable shlock; that’s sort of the brand at this point.

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Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Starforged: Messiahs Part Four

Read the previous part here

I had hoped to get this finished in 2024, but it took me a little longer. Hope you enjoy this final, extra long (nearly 7,000 words) final part to Messiahs.

[Begin a Session: Flashback reveals an aspect of another character, place, or faction]

One of the first things Gerard Linnaeus saw that made him want to go running from Dakhnour was watching a soldier from his house beat a frail al-Raml man to death for stealing a bowl of grain meal. The heir to the corporate house of Celadon felt a rage grow in him that had been there since he was a child. Now in his twenties, as he was being prepped to lead the House by his father, Gerard felt even more disgusted getting to see the Enclave treatment of the natives.

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My Favorite Films of 2024

Honorable Mentions: Longlegs, Cuckoo, Love Lies Bleeding, Sasquatch Sunset, Furiosa, In a Violent Nature, Ghostlight, Janet Planet, Rebel Ridge, Good One, The Apprentice, Problemista, The Boy and The Heron, Last Summer, Flow, and All of Us Strangers

His Three Daughters (directed by Azazel Jacobs)
Listen to our full review here

Three women (Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen) come together as their father is in the final days of hospice care. The audience is thrown into the middle of the situation, quickly figuring out that these sisters’ relationships are tenuous at best. Coon’s middle child swoops in and tries to take over the situation from eldest child, Lyonne. The youngest child, Olsen, is considered a flighty, flakey type but pushes back on her sister’s misconceptions about her. Azazel Jacobs has constructed a very human story about aging and family that never drowns in maudlin sentiment. This mix of empathy and reality is one of the best films I saw all year.

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My Favorite Film Discoveries of 2024

Here are the films that weren’t new in 2024, but they were new to me. Of all my first-time viewings this year, these movies stuck with me.

Mandabi (1968, directed by Ousmane Sembene)
Read my full review here

In 2024, I discovered the films of the late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. Most of Sembene’s work is focused on the colonial/post-colonial era. He looks at how even when the colonizer has been (mostly) physically removed, their specter remains in social and economic structures. That sounds very academic, but Sembene can make it easy to digest and genuinely hilarious in a film like Mandabi. A Senegalese man receives money from a nephew working in Paris. He’s meant to disperse this money in a specific way to particular people, but once news of the money gets around the community, everyone starts showing up to call in debt or plead their case. If you want an introduction to West African cinema, I think Mandabi is a great jumping-off point and had me cracking up many times.

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