There’s every reason to be optimistic about the new year—if you’re
moderately but not overly serious about movies. Last year was a very good
one for emerging filmmakers, international imports, and independent
films—the sort of thing we used to refer to as arthouse fare. We also got
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which was surprisingly awesome.
Here in the Triangle area, we’ve got a whole range of great options to begin
the year. Many international films and prestige pictures from late 2024 are
rotating into local theaters in January and February. Leading the pack:
Nickel Boys is director RaMell Ross’s ambitious adaptation of the 2019
novel from Colson Whitehead, concerning two young Black men and their
experience in a segregated Florida reform school circa 1962.
Nickel Boys technically opened in December and has already topped a lot
of 2024 Top Ten lists among critics and leading publications. Everyone is
buzzing about director Ross’s decision to film the story in a kind of rolling
first-person POV, with perspective regularly switching among the main
characters.
The script is specifically structured to support this bold approach, which
aims to fundamentally shift the storytelling experience. Ross wants to put
us right behind the eyes of these characters. I love the idea and I can’t wait
to see it.
Another late 2024 specimen opening locally this month, The Room Next
Door, is the feature-length English language debut from Spanish filmmaker
Pedro Almodóvar, who is constitutionally incapable of making an
uninteresting movie.
His latest, filmed in Madrid and New York City, stars Tilda Swinton and
Julianne Moore as Martha and Ingrid, two recently reunited friends. When
Ingrid learns that Martha has terminal cancer, the two old friends find a
painful path forward.
Almodóvar is a master at elevating this kind of melodrama into beautiful
and emotionally wrenching cinema. He’s got my number, frankly, and I
always end up crying when I watch an Almodóvar drama. It’s like that
Charlie Brown Christmas TV special or the scene where E.T. dies.
Guaranteed weepies, as my mom used to call them, though at least with
Almodóvar, it’s a more dignified, arthouse kind of breakdown.
For a third option in this month’s heavyweight division, The Brutalist is a
period drama starring Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish
architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America after the war.
The Brutalist is old-school epic filmmaking, filled with big ideas, intense
drama, and a narrative sweep that moves through decades. It’s also
making or topping most of the 2024 critics’ lists.
Interesting note: The movie was filmed in VistaVision, a wide-format film stock developed back in the 1950s. Director Brady Corbet has said that the format is key to the film’s architectural compositions, 1950s setting, and overall aesthetic. Find this
one in IMAX if you can.
Quick Picks
Keke Palmer and SZA headline the buddy comedy One of Them Days, concerning two broke best friends and their quest to raise the rent money…in one day.
Didn’t see this one coming: Critics are extolling the performance of Pamela
Anderson in The Last Showgirl, a drama set in the working-class showbiz
circles of Las Vegas.
Winner of the 2024 Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize, the documentary Porcelain War follows a group of Ukrainian artists as they join the defense forces while still making art, under and versus duress.
The indie comedy-drama The Black Sea is an American-Bulgarian
production starring Derrick B. Harden as Khalid, a Black Brooklynite who
finds himself stranded in, yes, Bulgaria.
Following 2017’s The Mummy and 2020’s The Invisible Man, Universal
Pictures continues its sputtering effort to revive the Universal Monsters
franchise with The Wolf Man, technically a remake of the 1941 original.
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