Michael Darvell Looks Back at the Year of 2024
Image courtesy of A24
For me the year of 2024 was a challenging one. Between being in hospital or housebound at home, I could not attend any press shows or even visit my local cinemas. However, I have tried to catch up with some of the more important films of the year. I have missed many I would like to have seen, but time marches on and I have made the best of a bad situation. If it was a tough year for me, it also seems to have brought many films dealing with various difficulties to our cinema screens.
Take, for instance, Edward Berger’s Conclave. What could be more challenging than the selection of a new Pope? Ralph Fiennes in this role is torn between tradition and scandals concerning the possible candidates. Then there was Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, where a Mexican cartel leader is forced to disappear by disguising himself in a completely permanent way. Controversial it certainly was but, nevertheless, it made a fine drama with some amazing musical numbers and excellent acting by Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón. Unicorns also involved the art of disguise with Jason Patel playing a drag queen in Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd’s film about an allegedly straight motor mechanic falling in love with Aysha/Ashiq. Fine performances by Ben Hardy and Jason Patel make the film an engrossing joy to watch.
The year was treated to two films by director Luca Guadagnino. Challengers (that word again) shows the relationships between two friends, Patrick and Art, both junior tennis champions and who both fancy another tennis star, Tashi. This starts a series of incidents in a film that goes back and forth across a span of over thirteen years. It offers moments of frustration, but on the whole it is a cunning and deft play out of the sport involved. Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist and Zendaya are impeccable throughout. Guadagnino’s other offering was Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel set in Mexico City in the early 1950s. Daniel Craig plays Lee, a fairly obvious, aging ex-pat queen who stops at nothing to get a piece of trade. He latches on to Eugene, a young US GI, also ex-pat, dragooning him into looking for yagé, a jungle plant that has the purported power of telepathy. Daniel Craig shines like a beacon, Drew Starkey is fairly elusive as Eugene and Lesley Manville plays a weird wicked witch of the Ecuadorian jungle.
Acting is the theme of In Camera from writer-director Naqqash Khalid and deals with the old problem of facing auditions and being rejected or given roles as extras, walk-ons or, as here, lie-downs as the film opens with young would-be actor Aden (a very touching Nabhaan Rizwan) playing a dead body for some film thriller. Constant rejection leads Aden to find his own acting performance when an older woman asks him to dress up and behave like her deceased son, a formidable role for anybody to play, actor or otherwise.
Hard Miles, R.J. Daniel Hanna’s film based on the life of Greg Townsend and his work with Ridgeview Academy cycling team, shows physical challenge at its strongest. Matthew Modine plays Townsend who persuades teenage inmates of the correctional facility to cycle over 760 miles from Denver to the Grand Canyon. After an antipathetic start the boys get used to the idea and go hell for leather to their long-distance ride aboard their own custom-built cycles. It is a life-enhancing look at what people can do when they are allowed to get off their butts and just go for it. Modine and his boys make ideal companions and there is, thankfully, no element of preaching or sentimentality.
Also almost documentary in its tone and approach is All We Imagine as Light, written and directed by Payal Kapadia it’s the story of three nurses in Mumbai. One has a husband living in Germany with whom she had an arranged marriage. Another is having a secret affair with a Muslim man. Together they try to stop the destruction of their third colleague’s tenement for the building of a skyscraper. The film details their lives in a way that recalls the 1960s films of Satyajit Ray who often featured the lives of Indian women. I consider it the best international film of the year.
The oddest film of the year was The Substance which is the work of Coralie Fargeat, a mad science fiction film about rejuvenation. Demi Moore pulls out all the stops in an effort to look younger. She gets a strange parcel summoning her to a backwater where she receives ‘the substance’. After knocking back the potion she has a literally out of body experience. Enough to say that it doesn’t go too well for her as she challenges the outcome of her transformation. There’s more wackiness in the latest production from Aardman Animation and it goes to prove that it is always a good movie year when a new Aardman claymation film hits the screen. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is arguably their best yet as our two heroes battle their old enemy, the fiendish penguin Feathers McGraw. The film is packed with loads of verbal and visual gags; it could be the best action film of 2024.
Finally, let us not forget The Zone of Interest, which opened in the UK in February 2024, thereby receiving all its subsequent awards since then. And it won over 60 international awards and received over 170 nominations. As Film Review Daily sticks to the calendar year, here is a timely reminder that The Zone of Interest was Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary film based on the Martin Amis novel about Rudolf Hess and his family living within earshot of the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was and still is a sobering piece of wartime history, so how challenging is that?
And now the runners-up that might have made the long list:
The Substance/Carry-On/Dune: Part Two/The Order/Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger/The Outrun/Blitz/Civil War/Kneecap/Wicked Little Letters/Hit Man
Michael Darvell’s Favourites
