5. Friendship
The studio comedy has been dying a slow and painful theatrical death since well before COVID. While we’re past the days when movies like The Hangover or American Pie dominated cineplexes, updates to the studio comedy are still coming out from up-and-coming filmmakers like Friendship writer and director Andrew DeYoung. And he’s struck gold with Friendship by fusing the old with the new: charismatic rom-com veteran Paul Rudd joins forces with a favorite on the bleeding edge of comedy, Tim Robinson. Robinson’s Netflix series I Think You Should Leave has a rabid group of followers, and the show proves that comedy can continue to thrive and be inclusive in an age where comedians disagree whether their jokes can survive cancel culture.
Friendship pairs that charismatic-old with awkward-new by having both Rudd and Robinson play to their respective types. Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a relatively boring family man who works at a marketing agency. When he meets a new neighbor, Austin (Rudd), with a spark for recapturing excitement in the everyday banality of life, Craig becomes enthralled in his new bromance. But when he makes a social misstep and Austin tries to ghost him, Craig can’t let go, leading to a series of cringe-inducing escalations to get him back into Austin’s good graces.
Friendship feels like the best update to the studio comedy since Bridesmaids, which was made over a decade ago. It’s an overdue infusion of new comedy into an old setting, and the chemistry between Robinson and Rudd give me hope that we’ll see more of both in vehicles like this in the future.
4. Cloud
An intriguing combination of character study, lesson on the ills of capitalism, and demonstration of the anonymous and de-humanized nature online interactions, Cloud’s potpourri of concepts, pacing, and genres make it a distinctive choice for Japan’s Oscar submission.
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best-known for his psychological horror films like Cure and Pulse. On its face, Cloud might look like more of the same. The film features eBay-like reseller Yoshii (Masaki Suda) and the people caught in his orbit – ripped off customers, ripped off vendors, offended colleagues. Starting off small, Cloud feels like a slice-of-life film initially, showcasing Yoshii’s efficient and meticulous way of searching out and marking up fake or hard-to-get goods to build a better life for himself and his girlfriend. Yoshii isn’t your standard-issue protagonist, but his strange combination of apathy and greed only adds to the absurdity of the film’s escalating stakes.
As the plot progresses, the slice-of-life story gives way to a feeling of dread, complete with eerie shots and loud jump scares as the people who are impacted by Yoshii’s scams come into focus. Kurosawa gives us a small taste of the psychological horror he’s so well-know for in this middle piece of the film. And as tensions bubble over, ever so gradually, Cloud morphs again and jumps genres, resembling something closer to an action entry in the John Wick universe. Kurosawa’s unique ability to casually shuffle between genres – drama, horror, thriller, absurdist comedy? – keeps Cloud feeling vibrant and suspenseful as it scales up. But one constant throughout the film: the script’s sharp wit.
3. Conclave
It’s kind of a hard sell on paper: a movie about cardinals getting together and electing their new pope. But somehow, Conclave ended up being one of the most riveting films of the entire festival. More political thriller than papal procedural, Conclave features a deep bench of talented actors – among them Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The experience, adapted from the 2016 thriller novel of the same name by Richard Harris, appropriately lies somewhere between watching 12 Angry Men and a reading John le Carré novel.
Together, the cast works through an overwhelming sense of mystery as they’re left to piece together the last wishes of their recently departed pope. Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence, who was already experiencing doubt in his faith, must balance the importance of the skeletons lurking in each candidate’s closet with the overall conclave’s success in electing a pope free of political interference. With the mortal ambitions of the men vying for the vacancy illuminating the flawed, man-made fallacies of the Papacy itself, Lawrence must also distill whether the unhand seen of God – or perhaps the unhand seen of other forces – is trying to guide him in any particular direction.
I’m a sucker for a movie that highlights organized religion’s function as a politics-driven process, complete with the many faults that make up the mortal men who govern it. But director Edward Berger and scriptwriter Peter Straughan’s approach to the source material take a film that could feel more like an airport paperback or guilty pleasure and finesse it into an awards contender. It’s a compelling argument for the fact that high quality talent at every level of the process, both behind and in front of the camera, are often more important than the story itself.
2. Anora
Anora is 2024’s Uncut Gems. If you’ve seen Uncut Gems, you’ll know what I mean, but if not: think of a group of angry people running around New York City frantically searching for something. As they run around, they’re yelling the whole time, and the film is chaotic and violent, and you’re super stressed out, but you’re also laughing? That’s how I’d summarize the Uncut Gems experience, and the Anora experience is similar, with one additional feature that takes it a step further: it actually manages to elicit sympathy on top of those layers of stress and comedy.
Sean Baker has been a critical darling for years for films Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, which all center on the daily lives of marginalized people. Anora joins these ranks, showcasing what is sure to be an awards-garnering performance from Mikey Madison as Annie, a dancer and sex worker who spends a whirlwind week as an escort for a rich Russian oligarch’s son, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn giving an unintentional Timothee Chalamet impression).
Anora’s as deeply funny as it is stressful, as loud as it is heartfelt, and as chaotic as it is meticulous. This is Baker’s best film to date, with incredible performances all around, but especially from Madison’s portrayal of Anora and Yura Borisov’s “I don’t need words when I can act like this with my eyes” performance as Igor. Having already won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, distributor Neon is likely to campaign the film for top prizes in acting, directing, and overall best film.
1. The Brutalist
Perhaps even a harder sell in concept than Conclave, The Brutalist has a lot working against it, on paper. The film clocks in at 3 hours and 35 minutes and revolves around an architect grappling with ambition and The American Dream (echoes of Ayn Rand, anyone?). It’s both written and directed by Brady Corbet, whose previous feature Vox Lux received mixed reviews from critics and in some cases downright apathy from audience members. And yet The Brutalist emerged from the film festival circuit as a buzzy audience favorite, leading to a bidding war (won by A24) for its U.S. distribution rights that reportedly have already recouped the film’s meager $10 million production budget.
It’s hard not to be taken with The Brutalist. It’s a film that jostles comparisons to cinematic yardsticks like Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood, The Godfather, and Oppenheimer for the way it analyzes societal values through the lens of a single man’s negotiation with and ascent to power. Adrien Brody gives what may be his most powerful performance yet as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who has ambitions to create powerful and lasting structures that reflect the brutalist architecture movement. To realize those dreams, Tóth relies on the capital and whims of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce) and his son Harry (Joe Alwyn).
The Brutalist is dense and vast. Like The Fountainhead in scope and its concentration on the powerful achievements of art and the individual, The Brutalist lives on a completely different planet from Ayn Rand in its interpretation of the American dream and what it takes to succeed in a capitalist machine. There’s a portion of the film around the midpoint of The Brutalist where its characters visit a marble quarry to see the product in its natural state. This scene’s worship of raw beauty and the violence that is wrapped around this encounter best showcase the inscrutable ways Corbet marries the film’s preoccupation with architecture to The Brutalist’s political undercurrent.
It’s clear that Corbet is a study if not a fan of the brutalist architecture movement itself, which relies on exposing simple and raw materials, like concrete and wood, devoid of ornate decoration and bright color. Sometimes characterized as cold or imposing, other times heralded as an equalizer and a movement that shuns nostalgia, the philosophical and visual hallmarks of brutalism are also echoed throughout Corbet’s film’s style and tone. If it sounds like heavy stuff, that’s because it is – but the way Corbet doles out the story is riveting and old-school entertainment rather than a homework assignment.