Everyone don your sorting hats!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. I saw 29 films in theaters in 2024 that were actually released in 2024. Seven were screenings at the 33nd annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival these past two years, those seven totally count and I’m not cheating by including them. This is, like, just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2024. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference…

On with the better end of the countdown!

10. Wicked: Part I. That box-office smash no one will shut up about because they traded bins full of emeralds to ensure no one ever shuts up about it, least of all the six thousand cross-promotional advertisers in on the take. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande inherited the witch-frenemies’ mantles and soared toward their own horizon amid the best parts of the original show (which our family caught on Broadway in 2016), which translated well to the big screen in the hands of Jon M. Chu as long as you don’t mind the surrounding bloat, which…well, it is a movie musical. Or, more accurately, a movie musical based on half of a stage musical based on a novel that’s a prequel to a movie based on a novel. But all the show’s flaws fell after the intermission, so call me skeptical of the imminent follow-up Wicked II: The Battle of Five Armies.

9. Transformers One. Literally The Best Transformers Movie in World History. The endless toyetic intergalactic robot warfare saga gets a big-screen prequel that covers parsecs’ worth of origin ground. Wacky blue-collar buddy-comedy morphs into serious robo-politics about a society resting on foundational lies, about rebellion and counter-rebellion, about friendships torn apart by political differences, and about the use of playthings to stage a drama, like Todd Haynes’ Superstar with more explosions. Director Josh Cooley navigates weightier matters more convincingly here than in Toy Story 4, and with much clearer camera work than Michael Bay’s overpriced junkyard scrambles, entertaining the kiddos yearning for smash-’em-up and treating adults to better-than-necessary voice work from Chris Hemsworth as Not Peter Cullen (but solid anyway), Jon Hamm as a veritable rock-star hero who falls short of his hype, and Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry imbuing the once and future Megatron with Shakespearean bombast. Cooley’s best magic trick might just be his answer to the question, “What’s so great about Cybertron, anyway?” And in a way Bay never could: he gives us a moment of visual poetry.

8. Small Things Like These. Among Heartland’s higher-profile features was Academy Award Winner Cillian Murphy’s next period piece, a grim Irish story with a fraction of Oppenheimer‘s budget and runtime. As a family man just trying to make a living delivering coal, Murphy exudes repressed turmoil as he stumbles across one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries (read: abusive Roman Catholic girls’ reform schools) on his route, sees a “student” being mistreated, and must decide whether he’s the sort of good man who can witness evil, stand by and do nothing. Tim Mielants previously directed season three of Peaky Blinders, the complete opposite of this extremely quiet novel adaptation, whose best scene is Murphy taking a nighttime meeting with the asylum head (Dune: Prophecy‘s Emily Watson) who offers to buy his silence with a manner at once genteel and threatening-without-threatening. In between much larger productions, Murphy reminds us how great he is on smaller scales as well. And sometimes it only takes a gesture that feels tiny to save a life.

7. Jazzy. One of my favorites from Heartland 2023 was Lily Gladstone in Fancy Dance (now on Apple+!); this year she executive-produced another Native drama, about two preteen trailer-park Lakota girls named Jazzy and Syriah (Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux and Syriah Fool Head Means) who do everything together until one day when their link is suddenly severed without further explanation. Director Morrisa Maltz and her three co-writers, drawing from the actresses’ own stories, approach middle-school BFF heartbreak with distinctly Gerwigian echoes — the fractured female friendship of Frances Ha by way of the micro-episodic editing of Lady Bird. The key event leading to the denouement will feel bittersweetly familiar to fans of the great Reservation Dogs, who’d surely appreciate this tiny slice of neorealism shouting love from the heart of the Badlands.

6. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. The Maze Runner trilogy overseer Wes Ball and screenwriter Josh Friedman (Sarah Connor Chronicles‘ showrunner) take the baton from Matt Reeves for the fourth chapter in the reboot series that’s still earning 100% ape-chievement trophies. Not everything’s coming up monkey-house as history’s important lessons have been forgotten in the centuries after the rebellion and a fake descendant calling himself Proximus Caesar (a brutish, lumbering Kevin Durand) has appointed himself the prime primate meant to rule. A new rebellion must rise up, break the cardinal rule about apes harming apes, hunt MacGuffins that could change everything, and contend with a third party that technically never existed in the original Planets. A thrill-ride through politically resonant mayhem and a promise of a new direction will discourage clock-watchers who get fussy past the two-hour mark; instead they’ll boggle at the daunting post-apoc dioramas dressed with impeccable effects, down to every last MOCAPuchin.

CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER!

5. Abigail. The directing buddy-duo Radio Silence follows up the last two Scream movies by co-opting the title of the 1936 sequel Dracula’s Daughter, which they reinterpret so broadly that it really only qualifies as a Universal Monster Movie remake in the fine print of their contract. (Dracula himself isn’t even in it, strictly speaking!) With a heavyweight ensemble that includes ex-Scream-er Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Giancarlo Esposito, Ant-Man’s daughter, Lala from Black Lightning, Proximus Caesar sans fur, and still more, a team of kidnappers hopes a preteen ballerina can be traded for big money, only to get trapped in her haunted murder-house, having stumbled into “The Ransom of Red Chief” but the annoying kid is replaced by Claudia from Interview with the Vampire. Due to stark competition the wily Alisha Weir (Netflix’s Matilda) is only the year’s second-best vampire, but she’s the undead diva of some slick, lively, constantly surprising action-horror that at times feels more like a superhero movie than a vampire flick, toothily beating that sad sack Morbius at his own game.

4. A Real Pain. Writer/director Jesse Eisenberg continues diverging from his genre-pop acting resumé and draws from his own background for this quiet, affecting road-trip dramedy about two cousins taking a concentration-camp group tour in Poland to honor their grandma, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg assigns himself the subtler straight-man role of the pair (allowing his David some NYC neuroses milder than Woody Allen’s) and humbly defers to Kieran Culkin in his first big-screen role since Succession‘s end. As Benji, an aimless, mercurial, unbridled motormouth with no use for decorum unless his mood happens to swing toward some, Culkin rises above Roman Roy’s razor-tongued man-child as a different breed of one-man party who means better in his own head but is socially illiterate at reading a room. Squabbles ensue as they differ wildly on how to relate to their companions and surroundings, and we’re left wondering whether Benji is immature, broken, high on life, or repressing, or maybe David’s wet-blanket nebbish could stand to loosen up a tad, though not in hackneyed buddy-com fashion. Free of cliché and pat solutions, their escapade is uneasily amusing at times, somber and sobering within the once-horrifying halls of Majdanek, and contemplative as we’re left to puzzle out Benji’s inner workings at the end while he waits for his next chance at connection.

3. Nosferatu. On a purely conceptual level, vampires and humans are entirely different species, one bred to feed upon the other, predator and prey, but for decades authors won’t stop asking, “What if sheep thought wolves were total hotties and wanted to bone them and be them?” After a deceptively BBC-mannered prologue, Robert Eggers eviscerates that notion as he plunges us into his fourth straight artisanal period-piece hellscape of all-consuming madness. The Year’s Best Vampire Flick is a remake of the 1922 silent classic, which in turn was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s biggest hit, but Eggers hews more closely to the celluloid than to the printed page in reimagining 1838 Germany larger than life and shadowier than any abyss, while a stellar cast (Nicholas Hoult! Willem Dafoe! Lily-Rose Depp holding her own!) play fully three-dimensional potential victims and rightly shudder before the impossibly practical spectacle of Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgard as a ruthlessly deromanticized, grotesque Dracula who could only turn a human woman on through magical mental superpowers.

2. Superboys of Malegaon. I haven’t watched that new Christopher Reeve documentary yet, but I didn’t lack for powerful tributes to him. My favorite Heartland film of the year adapts a different true story, that of a small-town theater manager in India (The White Tiger‘s Adarsh Gourav) who, after getting busted for pirating movies, decides to create his own content and recruits friends and neighbors to help him remake Bollywood favorites. His cheesy results are mistaken for sharp parody, and a career is born. Based on a 2008 documentary, this unabashed Movie About the Magic of Movies thrives in the warm-fuzzy spirit of Be Kind Rewind, cycles through the pitfalls of success (fame! ego! break-up! repentance!), and made my heart swell three times larger in the final act, when the crew reunites for one last project to honor one of their own in the best possible way: they grant his wish to fly. Hilarious, touching, wonderful.

(This had reportedly been lined up for a Prime Video release, but I’ve seen no status updates in the past three months. Hopefully that’s still in the works, because I really need someone besides me to watch it. It was thiiis close to taking the top spot.)

A ‘bot amongst the butterflies.

1. The Wild Robot. Pedro Pascal! Catherine O’Hara! Mark Hamill! Matt Berry! Ving Rhames! Bill Nighy! Academy Award Nominee Stephanie Hsu! All come together in support of The Year’s Best Movie Starring Lupita Nyong’o, an animated fish-out-of-water sci-fi parable in which she voices a mass-produced robot helper designated ROZZUM Unit 7134, dropped onto a remote island with the sole directive of offering assistance to the buyer. For lack of input, ROZ looks for needs to fill in an idyllic forest with a realistically merciless food chain (unlike Disney, some animals are harmed in the making), starts with a single purpose and builds from there — learning, studying, reinterpreting its simplistic directives from commoditized servitude into a nobler sort of altruism. It’s A.I. at its most optimistically idealized, but we tag along amused and entranced as ROZ comes to shepherd the instinct-driven denizens of a capricious environment where, as dominoes fall and disaster comes, the animals must somehow rise above their inborn hungers and unite as a community if anyone’s to survive the coming onslaught. Chris Sanders goes all-in on the come-together-or-be-conquered metaphor with the same A-game he brought to Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, overseeing high-speed feral shenanigans in woods that highlight each passing season’s splendor in hazy, naturalistic komorebi using a majestic painterly style that deserves a picture frame glued to every other cel. This isn’t the first time I’ve considered an animated film the Year’s Best, but it’s a heartfelt message that never seems to get irrelevant, exquisitely rendered and utterly delightful.

…

…and that was my 2024 at the movies. Check back with us in the months ahead and see how many times I can be cajoled out of our comfy living room for 2-3 hours of big-screen splendor! They recently opened an Alamo Drafthouse ten minutes from our house, so I should at least go check that out after the grand-opening hubbub dies down, right?