This has been an exceptional year for film. For the first time post-Covid, the movie industry began to feel like it was back on something resembling the right track. The ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon signaled the possibility that theatrical releases not predicated upon superheroes or decades-old intellectual property could be critically and commercially successful again.
But with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, unfortunate truths about the creative and moral bankruptcy poisoning the studio system were hard to ignore. Problems with the industry also manifested in some of the films it produced, which were some of the most empty-headed releases in recent memory.
As a “professional” who watches hundreds of films a year, please allow me to do my best to separate the wheat from the chaff and offer my thoughts on the year’s must-see and please-miss movies.
The Best
“Oppenheimer”
After the lackluster release of his last film “Tenet,” an indulgent but underrated sci-fi experiment that proved to be the lone failure in his storied career, the idea that Christopher Nolan was going to set the world on fire with a three-hour-long biopic about Robert Oppenheimer seemed incredibly unlikely. But with its dedication to big-screen spectacle and its massive cast of character actors, those hungry for something more nourishing at the box office were fed to the brim. Cillian Murphy’s central performance of a brilliant man cursed by his lack of convictions is haunting and tragic. Criticized for not exploring the specificity of the atomic bomb’s death toll or the psychological effect that devastation had on the Japanese people, “Oppenheimer” is instead a film about delayed consequences and the danger in not facing the potential aftereffects of one’s actions until it’s entirely too late.
“Killers of the Flower Moon”
Martin Scorsese has made a career painting portraits of villainy. All too often, his work is reduced to little more than the stylized glorification of horrible men when, in reality, he has been one of our foremost documenters of masculinity and this country’s history of malice and greed. To that end, “Killers of the Flower Moon” could be considered his magnum opus. It is an epic and horrifying tale of the murders that befell the Osage people in Oklahoma in the early 20th century, just up the road from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The film’s marketing exaggerates a love story between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife Molly (Lily Gladstone in the year’s finest performance), but the film is instead an anti-mystery. Rather than a traditional police procedural trying to solve who is killing these people, the film asks the worst question: who isn’t? No other piece of mainstream filmmaking has better captured the insidiousness and banality of white supremacy’s omnipresent influence over America, a country Scorsese shows to be less of a nation and more an ever-enduring heist.
“The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial”
When William Friedkin passed away earlier this year, it seemed a shame that his last picture would be a Showtime-produced TV movie that would never see the big screen. But this film, based on the same Herman Wouk play whose original novel inspired the 1954 Humphrey Bogart classic “The Caine Mutiny,” far exceeds its standing as something made strictly for cable. The tightly coiled courtroom drama following the case of Officer Maryk (Jake Lacy) on trial for taking over a ship from his captain, Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), houses some of the strongest acting and most thrilling interplay of anything released this year. What it lacks in Friedkin’s usually more edgy visual style it more than makes up for in sturdy film craft and an immaculate turn from character actor Jason Clarke as the conflicted man who has to represent someone he doesn’t believe. Clarke is especially fantastic in the film’s notorious twist ending, an epilogue that once affirmed the jingoistic status quo of post-WWII America. Instead, Friedkin transposes that setting to the present day, leaving a more complex final statement befitting a nation standing in the shadow of the forever wars.
“BlackBerry”
I went into this thinking it would be a mildly charming, B-movie approximation of Silicon Valley biopics like “The Social Network” and “Steve Jobs,” but was instead treated to a lean, mean, and menacing little picture about the once towering smartphone maker’s untimely demise. Anchored by two memorable turns from Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, the brains behind the BlackBerry, and Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the tyrant who turned the company into a global force through sheer will, director Matt Johnson’s film is both utterly hilarious and quietly tragic. Few film scenes this year have more impactful and deflating energy than the inevitable scene where everyone at RIM watches the announcement of the iPhone, foolishly unaware of how obsolete they had just become.
The Worst
“Ghosted”
I already wrote at length about how forgettable and middling this Apple-produced spy-fi rom-com was, but at the time, even I was wrong about how unmemorable it would be. When compiling this list, were it not for the diary I maintain on Letterboxd, I wouldn’t have remembered seeing this picture, much less reviewing it for this paper. Such is the danger in the kind of vaporware cinema these streaming platforms love to churn out.
“Heart of Stone”
Speaking of vaporware, Netflix spent an exorbitant amount of money on this mediocre action thriller with the hopes of launching a new franchise, with superspy Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot in one of her most inert performances) at the helm. Too bad for them, all the fine creatives behind the finished product, and anyone with the unique misfortune of having watched the damn thing, this movie seems to exist solely so “Ghosted” wouldn’t feel so lonely at the “worst movies about spies” table.
“Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania”
Earlier this month, “The Marvels,” the first MCU film to be helmed by a Black female director (Nia DaCosta), suffered the steepest second-weekend drop-off in superhero box office history, ensuring the film would not only be the first Marvel film to lose money definitively but the first to likely fail to cross the $100 million threshold domestically. But a significant portion of the blame for that financial reality can be placed squarely on this bloated, unimaginative mess of a film from earlier this year. Audiences went into “Quantumania” with the expectation that this new phase’s Big Bad (embattled star Jonathan Majors as Kang) would be introduced and the road toward the next climactic pair of “Avengers” films would begin in earnest. Instead, they were subjected to one of the driest, most underwhelming entries in this entire mega-franchise. The result is a film so awful it underperformed enough to turn the next, largely unconnected film with the Marvel logo into a massive bomb. Marvel’s brand has been in decline for a few years now, but when the dust clears, this ugly, boring, and mirthless film will have its place in history as the indisputable inflection point.