Cinematic signs of the times From societal breakdown to artificial intelligence, movies in 2024 reflected our anxieties By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 5:47 PM CST Friday, Dec. 27, 2024

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This article was published 27/12/2024 (630 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s hard to do a comprehensive Top 10 movie list when Winnipeg cineastes are once again at that frustrating annual juncture: We’re hearing about some of the buzziest films of the year — titles like The Brutalist, The Nickel Boys, even Universal Language, the much-awarded feature from former Winnipegger Matthew Rankin — but still waiting on them to sneak into our town some time in 2025.

Maybe we can’t be exhaustive. We can, however, be exhausted. This was a wearying, chaotic year out there in the real world, and a lot of those anxieties — about environmental devastation, artificial intelligence, civil strife, political polarization — seemed to have seeped onto the big screen.

Here are some random observations on the movie year that was — the best, the worst and the most nervous.

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

With a bang? With a whimper? How about with a riff on a Neil Young song? From the multiplex to the arthouse, there were a lot of catastrophic cinematic scenarios this year.

Taking a deeply angry but deadpan funny approach to global cataclysm, Rumours is from the made-in-Manitoba directorial team of Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson. This unclassifiable horror/comedy/soap centres on the leaders of the G7 countries, who can be seen wandering ineffectually in a forest as the world descends into some unspecified disaster.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, from Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, is also furiously hilarious (or maybe hilariously furious) as it deals with the ruthlessness of multinational capitalism, the breakdown of liberal democracy and the toxicity of social media. A road-trip flick that drives in circles, it evokes a state of numbness so entrenched that even the apocalypse will feel — as the title suggests — slightly anti-climactic.

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ARE THE EXTENDED UNIVERSES OVER-EXTENDED?

As Marvel’s proliferating timelines and intricately interconnected multiverses have some fans wondering whether we’ve reached peak Marvel Cinematic Universe, Deadpool & Wolverine seems to offer a very meta answer.

The boffo blockbuster is packed with stunt cameos and smirky in-jokes about how superhero movies are just cynical corporate cash-grabs constructed out of infinitely recycled Intellectual Property. Let’s hope admitting you have a problem is the first step to solving it.

Meanwhile, over at DC, Joker: Folie a Deux proved that the only thing worse than a villain origin story is a villain origin story sequel — especially when it involves Joaquin Phoenix singing Jacques Brel.

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HUMAN VS. MACHINE

In June, a London cinema cancelled the premiere of a film written by ChatGPT after complaints from patrons. The film was titled — with what one assumes is machine-learning humour — The Last Screenwriter.

Meanwhile, over in movies still being scripted by actual people, some of the robots were really lovely. In the warm, beautiful cartoon The Wild Robot, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), an AI-powered service bot that’s been stranded in the wilderness, ends up overriding her programming to care for an orphaned gosling.

And in Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger’s wordless and wonderful all-ages animated feature, a lonely dog in ‘80s New York buys a mail-order robot and ends up finding a pal.

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STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

Speaking of AI, here’s what Gemini, Google’s generative AI Chatbot, says about Coralie Fargeat’s highly stylized body-horror flick The Substance: “The film is about a woman who has reached the age of 50, which some say is a feminist twist.”

Good to know that just being a woman over 50 is now a revolutionary political act. But Demi Moore takes it farther than that, bringing ferocious physicality and fierce self-loathing to a speculative sci-fi premise that sees her facing off with a younger, fresher alternative self (played by Margaret Qualley).

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RELIGIOUS WARS

When it comes to questions of faith and doubt, Conclave, with its handsome production values, ambitious ideas and impeccable performances (from Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and more), is the highbrow take.

Heretic, a horror movie with an uncomfortable premise — two young missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are caught in a trap set by a very sinister Hugh Grant — goes low.

Prepare for post-screening theological discussio; both films get in some good points.

SEX SCENES, MORE AND LESS

In The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something has Passed, an unapologetically mopey comic drama from writer-director-star Joanna Arnow, the main character’s penchant for full-frontal nudity and hilariously awkward, arbitrary SM encounters feels deliberately anti-erotic.

Meanwhile in Challengers — from our leading auteur of desire, Luca Guadagnino — a three-way kissing scene involving Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor might be the sexiest thing on screen this year. And everyone keeps their clothes on.

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MAGNIFICENT FAILURES OR JUST FLOPS

Neither Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End nor Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis works. But Oppenheimer’s weird, wistful musical set at the end of the world reminds you that failure can be good thing — idiosyncratic, original, vulnerable and human.

Megalopolis, on the other hand, feels like a failure-failure. Coppola’s self-funded, long-gestating passion project — about a brilliant innovator (Adam Driver) living in a fusion of futuristic New York and ancient Rome — is so bloated and self-indulgent, so visually and ideologically incoherent, it almost argues against itself. This might be an ode to the untrammelled power of the individual creative genius, but one almost wishes some studio bean-counter was telling Coppola to just stop, already.

arts@freepress.mb.ca