Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2024 I made 29 trips to the theater to see films released or screened in festivals that same year. Meanwhile at home, I kept up with select new releases depending on what was conveniently available through our family’s streaming subscriptions, what sounded most watchable, and/or what felt like potential future Oscar nominees that should be gotten over with in advance to ease my annual Oscar Quest time crunch. For value-added fun, as an anniversary gift from my lovely wife Anne we now have Max, which expanded our options without expanding my available TV free time. I did what I could within the time slots allotted.

Hence the fifth annual installment of the MCC tradition borne of the pandemic: a ranking of all the brand new films I saw on comfy, convenient home video in their year of release. Sure, they could’ve been 20 separate entries written in real time as I consumed them, but that’s not how I roll. The Academy Award nominations announcement is coming up January 17th, assuming the L.A. wildfires are quelled and no further raging of them continues endangering lives or homes. As a teenager Anne survived the ordeal of her family’s home burning to the ground, so we’ve been following those tragic headlines and testimonies as they’ve kept on coming. Our prayers are with all those whose lives have been deeply affected.

So. On with our countdown, ranked from awfullest to awesomest, name-checking which service had them at the time. Some have migrated to different services since then…

20. Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (Netflix). It is I, the hopeless optimist who compulsively watches every Zack Snyder movie except his own do-overs, not for the purpose of playing the MST3K home game but in vain curiosity about whether the promise of his earlier works will ever return. When Netflix unleashed the first Rebel Moon at the end of 2023, I procrastinated it till after New Year’s on purpose so I wouldn’t have to write about it in my “2023 at the Movies at My House” listicle because I just knew how it’d go. About that: you and I have already seen Space Seven Samurai done far better (remember? the one with the lightsabers?), but here’s more of the same with 300% more scenes of earnest space farming. Like, sooooooo much farming, way more than Minari and Interstellar combined. Then comes the Final Showdown, with endless fights choking on smoke and ash as if some Letterboxd vigilante were trying to burn down the sets during filming. At least the first Rebel Moon had one (1) cool fight with Jena Malone as the spider-queen Lolth from Dungeons & Dragons (IIIN SPAAAACE), but the conclusion’s least worst idea is “final boss fight on a capsizing Titanic deck”, which Michael Bay got to first in Six Underground. So no, I will not be adding the R-rated director’s cuts to my queue under some delusion that post-production digital blood-sprays were the secret sauce these needed.

19. Argylle (Apple+). The trailers promised a shiny meta-spy thriller that might give Jessica Chastain and Henry Cavill a more suitable vehicle to share than their respectively disappointing superhero exploits. Instead Matthew Vaughn hurls tons of clutter across an international stage, asks a big-name cast to tote it around for him and make pleasing shapes of it while winking really hard at us. I cannot recall the first time a spy movie pivoted on a SHOCKING TWIST that made everything after it feel utterly ordinary. Worse still, in a film from the same service that overfunds such extravagantly picturesque series as Foundation and For All Mankind, I should not be watching an ostensible “blockbuster” and wonder during the chase scenes if Comcast is throttling our bandwidth, when some of the chase backdrops looked like sloppy, 20-years-ago SD. But its most unforgivable sin: I saw all three 2024 films that costarred Catherine O’Hara, and this one was far and away the worst misuse of her talents.

18. Trap (Max). I first noted Josh Hartnett’s potential waaay back when he was Robert Pastorelli’s son in the American remake of Cracker, so I’m on board with his recent comeback parade and thought he was pretty great in his Black Mirror episode, whose problems weren’t his fault. I was more interested in this film for his name than for M. Night Shyamalan’s, whom I’ve mostly been avoiding for years (and regretted giving him two more chances against my better judgment). So I showed up for Hartnett, who’s deviously chilling as a serial killer baited into taking his daughter to a Not Taylor Swift concert only to be surrounded by hundreds of riot-geared cops who all flunked out of Commandant Lassard’s Police Academy. The stadium allegedly filled with tens of thousands of screaming fans but we never see more than thirty at once, the top-40 singer everyone loves (one of Shyamalan’s own daughters, don’t get me started) with a security staff I wouldn’t trust to guard Monopoly game pieces in a McDonald’s stockroom, multiple signs Shyamalan has never actually attended a concert this size…look, Anne and I don’t drink, but if we did, and if a Trap drinking game insisted we chug after every implausibility, we’d be dead.

17. Emilia Perez (Netflix). French director Jacques Audiard puts the “trans” in “transgressive”, I guess? In possibly the grimdarkest musical since Sweeney Todd, a notorious Mexican drug kingpin (Karla Sofia Gascon) decides to come out as trans and hires attorney Zoe Saldana to arrange every conceivably relevant surgery (one entire song is the complete catalog of them all, down to the last Greco-Latin syllable) paid for with ill-gotten billions in blood money — purportedly to “live her truth” but amounting to going deep undercover to avoid any responsibility or accountability or consequences for all those murders and drugs and more murders and also the murders on top of the murders. The tunes do have a beat and you can dance to them, abetted by the split-second whip-pan prowess of cinematographer Paul Guilhaume around some rather sharp choreography, but I lost all patience for Our Antihero pretty early on. If you’re desperate for new trans representation by any means necessary, here some is.

16. The Bikeriders (Peacock). I’ve enjoyed every Jeff Nichols film except his debut (which I imagine I will if it streams someday) from Take Shelter to Loving. The streak ends here with the first mainstream biker-gang feature in years, loosely inspired by a 1968 coffee-table book. The no-longer-Venomous Tom Hardy adds another mumbly accent to his repertoire as the avatar of every aimless post-WWII male who took away the wrong lessons from watching The Wild One. (Could’ve been worse: thankfully Joker didn’t exist yet.) Elvis‘ Austin Butler is the leaner, silenter Rebel Without a Cause who joins his “club” and Killing Eve‘s Jodie Comer is the woman who has to suffer their pigheadedness while narrating the whole shebang in a thick yet listenable voice sourced from the Five Boroughs via Laverne and Shirley. On one level it’s arguably a solemn critique of misguided machismo, benefiting from too-small contributions by Norman Reedus, Justified‘s Damon Herriman, and Nichols’ muse Michael Shannon,but the second hour’s frame buckles and drags from the weight of self-importance.

15. Civil War (Hulu). Ace near-future imagineer Alex Garland (Annihilation, Devs) insists his primary objective was a hard look at what successful modern photojournalism looks like in a world of 24/7 turmoil, benefiting from a grade-A quartet of actors. I’m partial to Fences‘ Stephen McKinley Henderson, but the indisputable MVPs are Kirsten Dunst as the burned-out veteran and Narcos‘ Wagner Moura as a consummate pro and closet thrill-seeker. But I couldn’t stop laughing at the world-building conceit behind it all: in a shattered America where Texas and California have seceded and joined forces, this timeline only makes the barest sense if it diverged from ours back in the 20th century and everyone’s just now drawing guns over it. Our Heroes go road-tripping around a hazardous Eastern seaboard on a quest to reach D.C. and interview President Nick Offerman, tyrannical winning candidate for the Both-Sides Party. We never get to hear their questions, which is just as well because I imagine they’d be stumpers like “Why can’t we all just get along?” Garland’s threadbare extrapolations beg too many unanswered questions — his work’s never been more predictable, more obtuse, or more British.

14. The Speedway Murders (Hulu). The case has mesmerized us Indianapolis west-siders for decades: one night in 1978 four Burger Chef employees mysteriously disappeared after closing time, only for their bodies to turn up two days later twenty miles away. This happened over in Speedway, two miles from my home when I was six. To this day the case is unsolved, though numerous theories have been floated and some suspects have since died. The latest true-crime deep-dive tries a different tactic: one-half documentary, whose ostensible highlight is a chat with a never-before-interviewed guy who claims one dead person of interest allegedly confessed to him in sordid detail; and one-half reenactments in which the four victims (one of them played by Essie Randles from Peacock’s Apples Never Fall) call time-out on the podcast artifice and discuss the case amongst themselves, trying to pin their killers from beyond the grave. I’m all for shaking up the Forensic Files format that’s more Anne’s thing than mine, but every time they break wall #3½ without breaking the fourth, it’s an eerie kind of wrongness.

13. Dirty Laundry (Heartland Film Festival via Eventive). As with previous years, several Heartland entrants offered a home streaming-rental option in addition to the local theatrical screenings. I’m sorry I missed this micro-indie’s multiple screenings, including a special showing in VHS (!!!) at the Kan-Kan Cinema, which will receive an encore presentation on January 21st. This genteel We Love the ’90s two-hander is mostly a bottle episode set and filmed at a local laundromat, where a mysterious customer bewitches a pair of teenage buddies with the inability to lie, which frightens and confuses them because Liar Liar wasn’t released till February 1997, so they have no frame of callback. While the enchantment is in effect, they decide that’s a smart time to ask each other their secrets, debate the future of their friendship, and dig up a little self-discovery along the way. One performance is noticeably stronger than the other, which creates a distracting imbalance, and a few other aspects feel not-ready-for-prime-time, but I’m curious to see what the makers do next.

12. Conclave (Peacock). The Pope is dead! Long live the new Pope! Whoever he’ll be! Edward Berger’s first American film (after taking home an Oscar two years ago for All Quiet on the Western Front) pulls off high-strung election suspense in a suitably ornate setting as Cardinals Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Gangs of London‘s Lucian Msamati, and other heavyweight thespians must vote again and again and again until and unless God directs them toward the one true successor or to whomever persuades the most colleagues into satisfying his own mortal lust for power. It’s engrossing yet decreasingly surprising, up until the SHOCKING TWIST ENDING whose prevailing throughline is “GOTCHA, CATHOLIC CHURCH! HAW-HAW! WHATCHA GONNA DO NOW!” before cutting to black. MCC’s evergreen Spotlight entry has well established I’m not Catholic and uncompelled to devil’s-advocate for them, but a braver movie would’ve kept going and hypothesized the Church’s response. Movies that end prematurely can spark lively viewer debate that adds to the aesthetic experience; other times, it just looks like Twitter-trolling.

11. Wolfs (Apple+) I nearly skipped this till I remembered George Clooney and Brad Pitt are a charismatic Twinnado whenever they share a screen. This time they’re rival underworld crime-scene cleaners who end up hired for the same job, begrudgingly team up, and play at aggrieved one-upmanship throughout a long night involving a powerful D.A. (Amy Ryan from The Wire), a spry young idiot (Euphoria‘s Austin Abrams), a big bag of drugs, guys with guns, and chase scenes a-plenty. Jon Watts, fresh off the last Spider-Man trilogy and warming up for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, knows his way around action by now and makes the most of this extravagantly budgeted Ocean’s Fewer crime-dramedy up until the last five minutes turn into a twisty lightning round of Everything You Know Is Wrong that dumps ammonia all over the film’s web of logic, which had been a little tenuous but at least it was holding till then. Clooney and Pitt still got it, though.

10. Lumberjack the Monster (Netflix) I can finally say I saw a Takashi Miike film! I’m not a fully accredited member of Film Twitter (merely an occasional lurker) and never got around to his controversial works like Audition or, uhhhh, others I’d have to go look up. I’m sure this one’s among his milder thrillers, about a top-secret project with kiddie subjects and emotion-tampering which leads decades later into a light bout of serial-killing. The subtitles use the word “psychopath” more times than any known Western film, and it seems about as thrilling and sometimes as bloodily stylish as one, which is to say it’s fine but maybe not quite Criterion Channel fine, except one scene with a stupendous axe-throw that’d get quite the rise out of Johnny Carson.

9. Monkey Man (Peacock). One day every nation shall have its own John Wick, and I’m not complaining yet. Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) decided to direct, co-write and star in his own vehicle, but his nameless Kid is still learning the ropes, isn’t a wealthy retired assassin, and doesn’t have access to the finest armorers or crime concierges. With fight-club training and a heart full of vendetta, he rises from amongst the downtrodden to hunt the rotten police chief who oversaw his home village’s annihilation, and there will be blood. Patel is a couple stunt-levels shy of the Leitch/Stahelski ideal, but the single-minded rawness and a complete lack of Wick’s upscale James Bond aggro-luxury lend authenticity to his furious crusade of literal class warfare.

8. Rez Ball (Netflix). I’m not into sports, so I need extenuating circumstances to brake for an inspirational sports film. Consider them extenuated, then, for this based-on-a-true-story basketball-underdog winner from Sterlin Harjo, the creator of the amazingly wonderful Reservation Dogs; director Sydney Freeland, whose resumé includes Rez Dogs, Marvel’s Echo, Strange New Worlds’ space-pirate episode, etc., etc.; and a cast with veterans from Dark Winds, Rutherford Falls, Echo, and Rez Dogs…suffice it to say I’ve been catching the mini-wave of Native TV shows over the past few years and now compulsively name-check Rez Dogs at the slightest provocation. Everyone else here in Indiana can have Hoosiers as their favorite basketball film; I’ll take this, thanks. (P.S.: Rez Dogs Rez Dogs Rez Dogs. IT’S RIGHT THERE ON HULU, PEOPLE.)

7. The Piano Lesson (Netflix). Executive Producer Denzel Washington is on a mission to adapt the works of playwright August Wilson for the screen. Given the results of Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I plan to be here for every installment. Next up is the second film adaptation of Wilson’s 1987 play about a Black family with an heirloom piano bedecked with exquisite carvings by their enslaved ancestors. The argument at hand: whether to keep it for the incalculable worth that money can’t buy, or sell it and use the money to buy the land those same ancestors worked. It drags a little ’round the middle whenever things calm down a mite too much, but the dust doesn’t settle among an ensemble that includes Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler, Samuel L. Jackson, In the Heights‘ Corey Hawkins, Ray “Cyborg” Fisher, Erykah Badu, John David Washington in his least stiff leading role to date, and one mightily raging ghost who might not be the only thing everyone needs exorcised.

6. Hit Man (Netflix). If you dig Richard Linklater in quirky true-story mode (Bernie, Apollo 10½, even the fictionalized Me and Orson Welles), you might be charmed by The Year’s Best Glen Powell Vehicle, in which Our Hero from Twisters, Maverick, and Devotion (who also co-wrote this) flips through an entire Rolodex of accents for a bizarre biopic about Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered professor who fell into moonlighting with the police, posing undercover as an “assassin” who answers classified ads from folks looking to hire themselves a murderer, an act illegal in itself regardless of whether or not the deed is actually done. Powell deftly rolls through each episode of this oddly specific sting operation and holds onto our sympathy as the climax, deviating from Johnson’s reality, shifts hard from SNL whimsy into cornered crime-drama bleakness. It’s a credit to Powell’s folksy magnetism that we don’t feel betrayed, and a credit to Linklater’s manners that the film begins with a warning about its own historical inaccuracies to come, rather than leaving us to find out the hard way, by which I mean Wikipedia or local Texas historians logging in to rack up their WELL ACTUALLY bona fides.

5. Orion and the Dark (Netflix). The best animated feature on the list is not just another Pixar world built on cutesy avatars of intangible concepts. Mikros Animation, the artists behind the surprisingly strong Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, adapt a children’s book by Emma Yarlett about a neurotically fear-fraught youngster named Orion (Room‘s Jacob Tremblay) who’s offered a magical tour of worldwide nighttime as it rolls through each time zone and its appointed servants complete their respective tasks — a tour led by Dark himself. Y’know, THE Dark (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser), herding such coworkers as Sleep, Sweet Dreams, Unexplained Noises, and so on. What feels at first like a Walmart DVD knockoff called Outside In has a secret weapon no clearance bin can contain: screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the mind-freak supreme behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and other existential reality-bending romps. Orion’s adventure, we find, is actually a story within a story, with a storyteller and audience who have their own story, and by the final act you can bet the stories will overlap, bleed through, and defy causality. Kaufman fans know the drill, and now so can their kids! Though they may have a LOT of questions about what they just saw.

4. The Fall Guy (Peacock). Some critics loved this big-budget reboot of an ’80s ABC action drama and were incensed nobody showed up in theaters, which was hardly a shock considering no one ever talks about the show and when fans fondly recall Lee Majors, it isn’t his first role that comes to mind. (It’s like getting mad about no one bringing back T.J. Hooker.) Same deal for me: I never saw an episode and figured why bother. In hindsight now I feel a little guilty for holding out, yet justified in waiting for Peacock’s extended edition that added twenty minutes of, I’m guessing, character-building moments with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. As will-they/won’t-they exes who have to get along on a big-budget film production (ooh, meta!) only for a missing-persons case to foul up the works, our duo hearkens more closely in rhythm to Moonlighting — same network, and that one I watched — while all around them director David Leitch (John Wick! Deadpool 2! more!) unleashes a rumblin’, tumblin’, explodin’, car-chasin’, impossibly jumpin’ salute to the magic of practical stuntwork and the daredevils who make the biggest thrills happen live on set, not on a laptop. For those who actually watched the show, you should know that Yes, There’s a Scene During The Fall Guy End Credits, in which the original stars drop by and bless their successors.

3. Maria (Netflix). My life’s opera highlights are minuscule: the Turandot multi-sniper crossfire in the fifth Mission: Impossible, the amazing song from The Pirates of Penzance that’s entirely sixteenth notes, that one time Elmer Fudd was a Viking, and not much more than that. The best might be an ailing Tom Hanks’ For Your Oscar Consideration scene in Philadelphia when he operasplains Maria Callas’ “La Mamma Morta” to Denzel Washington. At long last I have an origin prequel of sorts about the esteemed Ms. Callas, as embodied by the Angelina Jolie. Rather than a traditional birth-to-death primer or even an Opera 101 starter package, the latest heterodox quasi-biopic from Pablo Larrain (Spencer, El Conde) confines us to the last week of her life, when her once-powerful voice has faltered, her fame has fleeted, and everyone’s healthcare advice is useless against her insulated ego. Her tragic tale’s SHOCKING TWIST is intentionally telegraphed and easy to guess before it’s revealed less than halfway in, as Larrain takes us to an improbable intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Fight Club. Jolie spent seven months training for the part and, to this amateur’s sheltered ears, graduates with honors — versatile enough to fall short of the high notes in moments of polite awkwardness among those too nice to comment, and to nail the very last song of her life with utmost, gracious beauty even for us who don’t speak Italian. This, I think, is why the Kids These Days don’t get opera — it isn’t the baroque pomp or the class snobbery or the eternal jokes about fat ladies; we ugly Americans need someone to invent live opera with English subtitles.

2. Juror #2 (Max). In their latest display of corporate-onset dementia, Warner Brothers took director Clint Eastwood’s best film in years, dumped it in three dozen theaters, and decided that’s all it deserved before relegating it to a subscribers-only shoebox. Dabbling in that endangered “legal thriller” category where studios now fear to tread unless the attorney is also a superhero, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams ask us to buy into a premise with one-in-a-billion odds: the ubiquitous Nicholas Hoult (last seen in Nosferatu) is a magazine journalist trapped in jury duty for a murder case that seems open-and-shut for its gruff defendant (The Night Agent‘s Gabriel Basso) till Hoult slowly realizes he himself might be the real killer. Not a split-personality slasher, or a time-travel epic, or a dream musical, or a clone war — everything is exactly what it is, leaving the clever young husband with a tragic backstory and a baby on the way to decide what he should do. With a powerhouse cast co-led by Toni Collette as the opportunistic prosecutor and a jury that includes a keenly perceptive J.K. Simmons and Leslie Bibb (Popular, Palm Royale) as its Type-A foreperson, Eastwood embraces an old-school sense of civic responsibility as he walks each character through a labyrinth of ethical quandaries in search of quick fixes and cheap Hollywood cop-outs, only to keep slamming doors in their faces and backing them into dead ends with no happy-ending exits.

1. Rebel Ridge (Netflix). The latest thriller from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (the electrified Green Room) is very much of-the-times but resists going for all the easier comfort-activist pleasures for as long as possible. Aaron Pierre, the star of Mufasa who’s since been cast as Green Lantern John Stewart in DC’s in-the-works HBO series, is a nice guy named Terry Richmond who bikes into Louisiana with a backpack full of cash to bail out his not-necessarily-innocent cousin. Within minutes he runs afoul of Don Johnson’s scheming small-town police force, who were Mayberry by-the-book fellows until post-2020 defunding drove them crooked out of financial desperation. When the cops invoke “civil forfeiture”, keep the cash and renege on his cousin’s release, that’s when they learn of Terry’s profession the hard way — first when they Google his job title and find his face on its Wikipedia page, then when he goes fully one-man-army all over them. Saulnier builds multiple levels atop the action-revenge core, abetted by AnnaSophia Robb (Bridge to Terabithia) as a government employee who can’t escape her flawed past and whose invaluable assistance is largely on the paper-trail end and falls far short of White Saviordom. Pierre is riveting as a hypercompetent professional who knows his rights and his limitations, how to troubleshoot on the fly and what it takes to thread the extremely narrow needle’s eye to not just survival, but actual justice. Arguably the most impressive and progressive part is that, given how he’s outnumbered and outgunned in an environment that does not favor a Black man, he runs the gauntlet without killing a single foe. Any audience bloodlust is not his problem.

…

…thus endeth the list. For anyone curious, once again I also kept track of all other films I watched — not just new ones — regardless of release date, platform, or worth. This year’s roster spans between 1920 and 2023:

Adaptation
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Better Days
The Big Chill
The Blackening
The Blue Angel
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
Dazed and Confused
Duck Soup
Dumb Money
Empire of the Sun
The Fate of the Furious
Footloose (1984)
The Golem: How He Came into the World
Hopscotch
Kiss of the Spider-Woman
Lover Come Back
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Make Way for Tomorrow
The Man Who Sold His Skin
Midnight Express
The Mission
The Mothman Prophecies
Murder by Death
Next Goal Wins
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
The Novice
Out of Sight
The Pajama Game
Pinocchio (2020)
Pygmalion
Ready or Not
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
Reminiscence
The Scorpion King
Silent Night
The Snowman
Sound of Freedom
The Sugarland Express
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Throne of Blood
Tokyo Story
To Sir, With Love
12 Strong
Upgrade
The Wild One
Wings of Desire
Wonka

Feel free to ask about any of these. Otherwise, see you around for next year’s movie lists!