My ongoing list of 25 best new to me watches of 2024 ...
10. Erin Brockovich (2000) I don't know how I had never seen this. I was watching a lot of movies in 2000 and was invested in things like the Oscars. I was totally in the bag for Steven Soderbergh's other 2000 release, Traffic. So how or why I didn't see Erin Brockovich is pretty puzzling to me. Now over the years, I've seen a lot of this movie in pieces as it aired on TBS/TNT. My wife likes it so she would often have it on. I always said I need to sit down and actually watch it start to finish but it took 24 years to finally make that happen and I can say it was worth the wait. There's nothing flashy about this movie, it's just a good story, solidly told without any tricks from Soderbergh. It was interesting to see him deliver a very straight movie but he chose the right time do so. Standouts: Julia Roberts and Albert Finney. I love them each and especially their relationship with each other. I don't know if either have ever been better. I like the script by Susannah Grant. She chooses to keep Brockvich messy and complicated. She's a hero no doubt but she is still selfish and her career comes at the expense of her children. Excellent choices to not beautify Erin too much.
9. The Quiet Girl (2022)- This is for sure the first film in Gaelic to make one of my lists, but there is definitely a theme running through a lot of my movies this year- kids and maybe even kids who feel lost, isolated, abandoned, disconnected. This debut feature from writer-director Colm Bairead is as the title suggests, a very quiet film. Catherine Clinch plays a withdrawn 9 year old raised in a large, chaotic and negelctful home. One summer she's sent to stay with a pair of relatives that she doesn't know very well. There she experiences a loving, nurturing and stable home for the first time in her life. That's it. There is no murder mystery, no Checkhov's gun waiting to break the story apart, not even a hint of irony. Just a story about a nourishment that the right kind of love and attention can bring to the soul. Standouts: Every performance is great, but first time child actress Catherine Clinch is excellent. But I do think the real best part of the movie are the choices made by the writer-director Colm Bairead to keep it so simple and small. It paid off becoming the highest grossing Irish language film of all time and getting a ton of awards in Europe. It didn't seem to have made the an impact here in the States but it deserves attention.
8. I'm No Longer Here (2019) Here's that isolated and disconnected kid theme again. This time the kid is an older teen and one with a lot of self confidence and sense of self. He starts the film as someone who is anything but isolated or disconneted. 17 year old Ulises is the leader of Los Terkos, a youth gang devoted to a very specific type of old fashion Mexican music: cumbia rebajada. They don't sell drugs or commit armed robberies, they fashion themselves in very unique flamboyant ways and dance. Lots of dancing. Despite living in the slums of Monterrey, Ulises loves his life. He is with his people, being his authentic self. That is until the violence of the drug cartels forces him to illegally emigrate to the US where he finds a world he has no place in and is anything but accepting of his individuality. Standouts: The performance by Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino is magnetic. The entire movie revolves around him, there is a hardly a scene he's not in and he carries the movie effortlessly. This is made even more amazing by the fact that the he wasn't an actor. He was an 18 year old high school dropout, son of a drug dealer discovered by the director while working his construction job. Also this movie can't be mentioned without also saying how great
the cumbia music is.
7. Port of Shadows (1938)- I left a review for this earlier so I am going to start with that:
This is a key movie for the development of film noir. I have to imagine the great European emigre directors who populated Hollywood in the 40s and 50s took inspiration from this. The film description screams noir: Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean, an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, as acts of both revenge and kindness render him front-page news. Any fan of 40s noirs should absolutely check this out. Standouts: The way cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan lights and shoots this basically sets the blueprint for the entire next decade of Hollywood. Eugen Schüfftan won an Oscar for shooting The Hustler but also was behind the special effects for Metropolis creating brand new techniques that filmmakers worldwide adopted. He quietly left an indelible mark on movie history. Oh and Jean Gabin is the star of this and that alone makes it worth the watch. He's an all time great leading man.
6. The Big City (1963)- Sam Van Hallgren of Filmspotting said it quite well:
On paper, it’s melodrama. Lives contorted into drama by coincidence, luck and accident. On screen, with every moment full of acutely observed life, it is a reminder that we’re all only a single event removed from the being thrown into embarrassing emotional extremes. Ray’s project may have been to capture a culture in transition, but what emerges is a definitive portrait of marriage and family life in all its subtly shifting power dynamics, secret shames, and acts of generosity and love. Simply one of the greatest films of all time.
Standouts: Ray's ability to tell the macro story of how Indian society was changing within the micro story of a woman taking on a job to help support her family is exceptional. The performance by Madhabi Mukherjee is among the best of any I've seen this year.
