They may be a universe of genres apart, but Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl breathe plenty of the same air, both on the screen and on the red carpet.
Like fellow 90s icon Demi Moore, Pamela Anderson squeezes every dramatic ounce from the role of her lifetime, reigniting her career with a performance steeped in the personal experience of hard truths her character is suddenly forced to confront.
Anderson is Shelly, a longtime showgirl at the Le Razzle Dazzle revue in Las Vegas. Shelly finds purpose in the garish glamour of feathers, sequins and skin, and in her small circle of backstage friends. Dismissing the labels of just another “nudie show,” Shelly will not be denied the dignity she brings to each performance.
But after a three-decade run, the show’s producers announce plans to shut it down, leaving cast and crew to ponder what comes next. The question hits hardest for Shelly, who will soon be left to navigate Las Vegas without the leverage of youthful beauty.
And as the days tick down to that final curtain, Shelly is also juggling a strained relationship with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), mother figure advances from young cast member Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), and a complicated past with Eddie (Dave Bautista), the show’s stage manager.
In her feature debut, screenwriter Kate Gersten provides important moments of authenticity that are doubtlessly rooted in her research time spent with real showgirls in Vegas. Coppola (Palo Alto, Mainstream) showcases it all with subtlety and respect, letting each character-driven moment (including a priceless cameo from Jamie Lee Curtis) personify a longing to savor something that is already gone.
But like Moore’s desperate Elisabeth in The Substance, it is Anderson herself who provides this film’s most authentic layer. She has lived a life celebrated for her face and body, but often mocked when she tried to offer anything else. That hard-won wisdom grounds Anderson’s performance, and makes Shelly’s steadfast defense of her chosen art form anything but laughable.
Coppola’s camera comes in close, and Anderson does not flinch, letting every line on her face tell a story. She hits enough levels of honesty to prove just as vital to her film as Moore is to hers, bringing a clear-eyed engagement that gives The Last Showgirl its – yes I’ll say it – substance, and her career its own reason to be re-born.
We say this most years, but 2024’s horror output kicked all manner of ass. It was tough to narrow our list down to ten, so we want to give some quick love to the honorable mentions.
25. Immaculate
24. Speak No Evil
23. Woman of the Hour
22. Sleep
21. The Devil’s Bath
10. In a Violent Nature
19. Milk & Serial
18. The Vourdalak
17. Handling the Undead
16. Stopmotion
15. Cuckoo
14. Alien: Romulus
13. Late Night with the Devil
12. Smile 2
11. Infested
And now, our ranking of the ten best horror films of 2024.
10. Red Rooms
True crime culture. Serial killer groupies. The Dark Web. Does all of it seem too grim, too of-the-moment, too cliché to make for a deeply affecting thriller these days? Au contraire, mon frère. Québécois Pascal Plante makes nimble use of these elements to craft a nailbiter of a serial killer thriller with his latest effort, Red Rooms.
Plante expertly braids vulnerability and psychopathy, flesh and glass, humanity and the cyber universe for a weirdly compelling peek at how easily one could slide from one world to the other.
His real magic trick—one that remarkably few filmmakers have pulled off—is generating edge-of-your-seat anxiety primarily with keyboard clicks, computer screens and wait times. But the tension Plante builds—thanks to Juliette Gariépy’s precise acting—is excruciating. They keep you disoriented, fascinated, a little repulsed and utterly breathless.
9. Oddity
Carolyn Bracken is Darcy, twin sister of the recently slain Dani (also Bracken). Darcy is a little touched—she still runs the curiosity/antique shop her mother left her and still holds on to the giant wooden man a witch gave her parents for their wedding. Darcy is also blind, so when she arrives at her brother-in-law’s home—the very spot where Dani came to her bloody end—Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new live-in girlfriend (Caroline Menton) don’t know how to politely ask her to leave. And to take her giant wooden friend with her.
Writer/director Damian McCarthy hands this tapestry of folklore and soap opera to a nimble cast and a gifted cinematographer. Together this team casts a spell too fun to break.
8. Longlegs
Maika Monroe is Agent Lee Harker whose “hyper intuitive” nature has her assigned to a confounding case of whole families murdering one another, the only sign of an outside presence being an encoded note left at the scenes. Monroe’s green FBI agent is as stiff and awkwardly internal as Nic Cage’s psycho is theatrical. Her terror is as authentic as his lunacy.
Filmmaker Oz Perkins shines as bright as ever, too. As always, his shot selection and framing evoke dark poetry. His use of light and shadow, architecture and space is like no one else’s. Longlegs is strangely beautiful, deeply unnerving, and a fine reason to be a horror fan.
7. I Saw the TV Glow
Fulfilling the promise of 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up, I Saw the TV Glow, is a hypnotically abstract and dreamily immersive nightmare of longing.
Justice Smith (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) is heartbreakingly endearing, while Bridgette Lundy-Paine (Bill & Ted Face the Music) provides a revelatory turn of alienation and mystery. It’s hard to take your eyes of either one of them, with Schoenbrun often framing their stares through close-ups that become as challenging as they are inviting. And that feels organically right. Because Schoenbrun is channelling characters who imagine life as someone else, to again emerge as a challenging and inviting filmmaker with a thrillingly original voice.
6. Heretic
There is something undeniably fun about Hugh Grant’s villain phase. Filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods craft a villain for the veteran actor that might just wipe those 90s rom-coms from our collective memory. Grant is Mr. Reed, and he’s invited two young Mormon sisters (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, both very solid) into his home to help lead him to enlightenment.
Less terrifying is the trap that’s been laid, more frightening is the absolute authenticity of Grant’s wickedly funny performance. You know this guy—if not in person, then from online comments. He’s absolutely genius, and though the film writes itself into a bit of a corner, there’s no denying this performance.
5. Blink Twice
In her directorial debut, Zoë Kravitz—working from a script she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum—delivers an intoxicating and haunting thriller about privilege.
What transpires feels influenced by the classic The Stepford Wives, as well as Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. The ideas are less borrowed than repeatedly, historically true and Kravitz reconsiders these timeless notions with an unerringly contemporary sensibility and a mean spirit that’s earned. Still, it’s Channing Tatum who effortlessly bridges horror fantasy with “damn, this could really happen.” His morally blurry turn, charmingly evil, has such authenticity to it that the island horror feels more like a reflection of reality than it should.
4. Strange Darling
“Are you a serial killer?” A question usually asked in jest during a first date, but you still judge your date’s facial response as they answer. Was that a nervous laugh? Did that smile come too easy? We’ve all seen too many episodes of Dateline. Strange Darling kicks off with this question and that’s the top of the hill for the cat-and-mouse roller coaster thriller that follows.
The twists are fun, but Willa Fitzgerald (The Fall of the House of Usher) and Kyle Gallner’s (Smile, Dinner in America) performances are the best part of the movie.
3. The Coffee Table
A remarkably well written script fleshed out by a stunning ensemble becomes utter torture as you want so badly for some other outcome. Co-writer/director Caye Casas ties threads, builds anxiety, plunges the depths of “what’s the worst that could happen?” and leaves you shaken.
David Pareja and Estefania de los Santos craft indelible, believable, beautifully flawed characters so convincing that their experience becomes painful for you. Casas salts the wounds with dark comedy, but the tenderness and tragedy collaborate toward something far more crushingly human.
2. The Substance
There are some films that, for better or worse, you never truly forget. With each passing minute, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance proved it would be one of those films. And that shrimp cocktail will never look as appealing again. Holy cow, this movie! What a glorious sledgehammer Fargeat wields!
Demi Moore -in her best performance in decades if not her career – plays Elisabeth, an actress and fitness guru turning 50. Fargeat takes this concept, pulls in inspiration from Cronenberg as well as Brian Yuzna’s Society, strangles subtlety with some legwarmers, and crafts an unforgettable cautionary tale about the way the male gaze corrupts and disfigures women inside and out.
1. Nosferatu
In collaboration with longtime cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and The Northman composer Robin Carolan, filmmaker Robert Eggers conjures an elegant, somber, moody Germany breathlessly awaiting death.
Eggers keeps the Count (Bill Skarsgård) shrouded in darkness long enough to build excitement. What the two deliver is unlike anything in the canon. It’s horrifying and perfectly in keeping with the blunt instrument they’ve made of this remorseless monster. His monstrousness makes the seductive nature of the tale all the more unseemly. This beast, the rats, the stench of contagion infesting the elegant image of Germany and her beautiful bride—it is the stuff of nightmares.
It makes you grateful that Eggers was not intrigued by Stoker’s elegant aristocrat and his tortured love story, but drawn instead to the repulsive carnality of Nosferatu.
Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo has been made into 23 different films, plus a dozen or so mini-series. It’s popular, and with good reason. The 19th Century tale of vengeance, political intrigue, fated romance buckles more swash than you might imagine.
The epic Dumas tale hits big screens again with Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthiew Delaporte’s opulent adaptation.
At a full three hours, the duo’s film does justice to more crisscrossing details than most previous efforts, but their instinct for epic filmmaking ensures engrossed viewing. From the moments of intimacy that nurture vengeance of this scale to the brutal beauty of the adventure-scape to the lavish excesses of the wealthy, every image packs a purposeful wallop. Celia Lafitedupont’s editing emphasizes glamour without distracting from intrigue. The film’s pace allows for scenes to breathe but never drag.
At the center of the treachery and bloody righteousness is Pierre Niney (Franz), whose evolution from humble innocence to hardened vengeance never fails to convince. But who is the Count without his foes? De La Patelliére and Delaporte surround Niney with collaborators able to find something authentic in their characters while supplying just enough moustache twirling to do the job right. Laurent Lafitte and Patrick Mille are a particular delight as the dastardly Villefort and Danglars.
All of which must be balanced by innocence corrupted, and again, the ensemble soars. Julien De Saint Jean introduces uncommonly human layers to the Count’s godson, the “Prince”, and Vassili Schneider (The Vourdalak) as young Albert, innocent pawn in a grand scheme, injects his scenes with touching tenderness.
And of course, the love story—how could you accept all the Count is willing to put into place if you can’t get behind the love he has lost? Anaïs Demoustier’s (Smoking Causes Coughing) Mercedes is no fool, no innocent waif nor tragic beauty. Demoustier offers something genuine that allows the entire saga a note of authenticity.
The result is a rousing, gorgeously cinematic adventure and a reminder of what a movie can be.
Eva (Odessa Young) carries the weight of the 19th century Icelandic fishing outpost’s success since the death of her husband Magnus last season. When she and her crew see a foreign ship sinking not far off the coast, the decision to try to save them—and risk her own men’s lives in the immediate as well as the near future, given the sparsity of rations—falls to her.
She and this tiny, desperate community—isolated and unlikely to endure the winter—make a series of choices. With each they weigh their own survival against the needs of others, but each successive decision is less and less noble. While none is unrealistic, perhaps not even unreasonable, the result leaves the group dangerously torn apart from the inside.
The Damned director Thordur Palsson’s nightmare bears a resemblance to John Carpenter’s masterpiece, The Thing. Desperate, wintery isolation fosters paranoia, and soon it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t, but everything seems supernaturally sinister.
Young’s conflicted turn, balancing stoic strength and resignation sometimes in the same moment, becomes the film’s the gravitational pull. The rest of the ensemble delivers memorable characters in what could easily have been one-dimensional archetypes. Joe Cole’s work is particularly subtle and moving.
Powerful as the performances are, every scene is stolen by the formidable Icelandic seascape—beautiful, terrible and haunting every moment.
Palsson, who co-writes with Jamie Hannigan, develops a parable—a cautionary tale, really—about shame, guilt and grief. Something evil seems to be afoot. Food goes missing, a body disappears, and little by little, members of the community see horrible things. Is this horror the manifestation of a guilty conscience shared by an isolated community, or is it the supernatural?
A subtle but palpable dread wonders whether it’s Eva’s decision making that’s brought this on; whether Magnus would have chosen differently when faced with the unholy decision; whether it was, in fact, her desire to protect and nurture that brought their doom.
Or perhaps it was Magnus, who’d brought them out seeking the opportunity that awaited anyone who could bear the cold and hunger, who’d damned them all?
“The living are always more dangerous than the dead.”
It’s that time again! Our lists were checked at least twice and we came up with what we believe are the best films of 2024. It was a good year.
1. Nosferatu
In collaboration with longtime cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and The Northman composer Robin Carolan, filmmaker Robert Eggers conjures an elegant, somber, moody Germany breathlessly awaiting death.
Eggers keeps the Count (Bill Skarsgård) shrouded in darkness long enough to build excitement. What the two deliver is unlike anything in the canon. It’s horrifying and perfectly in keeping with the blunt instrument they’ve made of this remorseless monster. His monstrousness makes the seductive nature of the tale all the more unseemly. This beast, the rats, the stench of contagion infesting the elegant image of Germany and her beautiful bride—it is the stuff of nightmares.
It makes you grateful that Eggers was not intrigued by Stoker’s elegant aristocrat and his tortured love story, but drawn instead to the repulsive carnality of Nosferatu.
2. Anora
Sean Baker doesn’t shy away from seamy subcultures, and the worthiness of people trying to get by outside of conformity. Yet it hasn’t been until his Palme d’Or winner Anora that he has found one group without any redeeming qualities. This shocking and depraved group of people is, in this case, the jet-setting global elite.
The relationship between the spoiled son of Russian oligarchs living in Brighton Beach and exotic dancer Ani (Mikey Madison) quickly escalates, from sex work outside the club to becoming an exclusive escort to an impromptu Vegas marriage. This being a Baker fairytale, Ani’s whirlwind rags-to-riches marriage is only the beginning of her Cinderella story.
Baker pulls off a risky balance between outright comedy and what is, essentially, the kidnapping of a sex worker by three large, powerfully connected men. None of this would work without Baker’s characteristic empathy for everyone. And it certainly wouldn’t feel so easy-going were it not for the relationship between Ani and the silent strongman Igor, played by Yura Borisov with a standout turn that nearly rivals Madison’s.
3. Sing Sing
To see the film is to witness a filmmaking vision brought to transcendent life by director/co-writer Greg Kwedar, and a tremendous ensemble cast that features many formerly incarcerated members of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at Sing Sing maximum security prison. Another endlessly sympathetic and award-worthy performance from Colman Domingo, personifies the soul-stirring effects of the RTA.
The film’s surface-level message of healing through the arts is well-played and well-earned, but a more universal subtext is never far from the spotlight. Sing Sing soars from the way it invests in the need for expression and inspiration, and in the very souls who found a path to redemption by stepping on stage.
4. Challengers
The relationship triangle at work in Challengers could probably work outside of a tennis court, but director Luca Guadagnino does wonders with the sports angle for a completely engrossing drama of intimate competition. Anchored around a three-set challenge match between Art Donaldson (West Side Story‘s Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor from The Crown), the film drifts back and forth in time as it immerses us in their series of entanglements with tennis phenom Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).
Zendaya, Faist and O’Connor deftly handle the growth of their characters from fresh-faced teens to hardened adults. All three deliver terrific, well-defined performances, and Challengers quickly becomes a film to get lost in, where you’re happy to be hanging on every break point.
5. Love Lies Bleeding
Awash in the stink and the glory of new passion, Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding treads some familiar roadways but leaves an impression solely its own. Glass blends and smears cinematic gender identifiers, particularly those of noir and thriller, concocting an intoxicating new image of sexual awakening and empowerment. She routinely upends images of power and masculinity, subverting expectations and associations and fetishizing the human body anew.
Anyone who’s seen Glass’s magnificent 2021 horror Saint Maudmay be better prepared for the third act than newcomers to the filmmaker’s vision, but it’s a wild and unexpected turn regardless. It’s quite something—bold, original, and wryly funny in the most unexpected moments. There’s heartbreak and horror, sex and revenge, a little magic and a lot of steroids. Glass’s juice has the goods.
6. A Complete Unknown
Instead of attempting a complete life arc, director James Mangold and co-writers Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald wisely choose a four-year whirlwind that changed the course of music and culture.
It’s hard to imagine a mainstream treatment working better than this one. And it’s one propelled by an absolutely transformative performance from Timothée Chalamet. His success at emulating both Dylan’s voice and guitar style is beyond impressive, as is his ease at moving the iconic persona from an ambitious Greenwich Village newbie to the cynical voice of a generation feeling “pulverized by fame.”
7. The Substance
There are some films that, for better or worse, you never truly forget. With each passing minute, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance proved it would be one of those films. And that shrimp cocktail will never look as appealing again. Holy cow, this movie! What a glorious sledgehammer Fargeat wields!
Demi Moore -in her best performance in decades if not her career – plays Elisabeth, an actress and fitness guru turning 50. Fargeat takes this concept, pulls in inspiration from Cronenberg as well as Brian Yuzna’s Society, strangles subtlety with some legwarmers, and crafts an unforgettable cautionary tale about the way the male gaze corrupts and disfigures women inside and out.
8. Will & Harper
Harper Steele loved traveling America and spent years upon years hitchhiking and driving from town to town, dive bar to dive bar, stock car race to pool hall to backwater, savoring every minute of it. But since she transitioned a couple of years ago, she’s afraid to do it anymore. Her friend Will Ferrell thinks maybe she can re-explore the country she loves as her true self if she has a man with her. Preferably a big, lumbering, lovable, friendly, famous friend willing to shift attention away from her whenever she might want him to.
There are so many reasons to watch Will & Harper, not the least of which is to see two of the smartest comedic minds (the two met on SNL when Steele was head writer for the show) riff. Another great reason to watch Will & Harper is that this film fits so beautifully into that American cinematic tradition of emotional, thrilling, deeply human road picture: one relationship changes and deepens with the landscape as America itself is more clearly revealed. Will & Harper just makes you wonder how it can be possible for anyone to be upset by another person’s transition. It also makes you hope those who feel too stigmatized to do it realize that there is a better life.
9. The Piano Lesson
You can often find ghosts lurking in the plays of August Wilson. His characters work to forge a better future for their families, haunted by the trauma and systemic racism that has beaten them down for generations. Those themes also define Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, while a vengeful spirit from the past adds a layer of the supernatural to director and co-writer Malcolm Washington’s debut feature.
As a strong-but-cautious woman fighting for both her past and her future, Danielle Deadwyler is an award-worthy revelation. John David Washington has never been better, managing an impressive balance between manic ambition and his sobering reality.
10. Wicked
Grande gives Glinda’s vanity a charm that is somehow inviting and often quite funny, while Erivo brings a level of tortured longing to Elphaba that makes her journey all the more resonate. The two leads – who often sang live during production – have the pipes to bring their own brand of magic, and they share a wonderful on screen chemistry that anchors the film. But themes of a gaslighting scheister wresting power through deception and greed by turning the populace’s attention toward “others” to fear hits a nerve now that gives the film a depth and power than the stage production or book ever had.
Like James Mangold and the music biopic, director Rachel Morrison is facing the lure of convention with The Fire Inside. Not only is this a sports drama, but the sport is boxing – perhaps the most easily cliched in the genre.
But Morrison has Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins in her corner as screenwriter, and together they give the true story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields the gritty authenticity she deserves.
Shields rose from a hardscrabble upbringing in Flint, Michigan to twice compete for Olympic gold, but the film earns its spot on the podium from the way it shifts the perspective to opponents she fought outside the ring.
Morrison – making her feature debut after television projects and numerous cinematographer credits on films such as Black Panther and Mudbound – avoids easy button pushing (no training montage!) to mine depth from the relationship between Shields (Ryan Destiny from TV’s Grownish and Star) and her trainer, Jason Crutchfield (the great Brian Tyree Henry).
Both Destiny and Henry and fantastic, and their partnership is rooted in a clash of raw determination and hard-won wisdom that’s inherently easy to root for. Morrison sets us up to sweat right beside them, and to understand the real-life trauma that remains when the sold out crowds head home.
Like any good sports movie, the film gives us plenty to cheer for. But that’s the easy part. It’s a bit more difficult to paint heart, humanity, and the drive to never settle with genuine feeling. But it’s clear that Shields has never backed down from a challenge, and The Fire Inside makes sure we don’t forget that.
Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, The Godfather: Part 2, A Woman Under the Influence, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Conversation, Lenny—1974 was a hell of a year in movies! And horror was just as revolutionary.
We celebrate the 50th anniversary of those gems of 1974 with our pick of the five best. But we still love It’s Alive,Dark Star, Sugar Hill, Beyond the Door, Frightmare, CaptainKronos Vampire Hunter, and Abby. We just love these five more.
5. The Phantom of the Paradise
Brian De Palma’s first and only musical is a Phantom of the Opera/Faust/The Picture of Dorian Gray mash up (with some Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and more than a little Rocky Horror thrown in for good measure). That’s a heady mix.
A campy skewering of the soulless music industry, Phantom sees tiny Seventies staple Paul Williams as the Satan-esque Swan, a music executive with a contract for you to sign. Poor Winslow (William Finley) is just as wide-eyed about his music as all those would-be starlets are about their chances for fame and fortune in this evil world of pop super stardom.
Like many horror musicals, the film works best as a comedy, but Finley’s garish visage once he makes his transformation from idealistic musician to mutilated Phantom is pretty horrifically effective. The film as a whole is a hot Seventies mess, but that’s kind of the joy of it, really.
4. Blood for Dracula (Andy Warhol’s Dracula)
The film was also released as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, which is kind of rude since it was actually Paul Morrissey’s Dracula. The longtime Warhol collaborator had just made Flesh for Frankenstein with Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro and Arno Jürging. (Both films were made available in 3D. If you are ever able to screen them theatrically in that format, you are compelled and required to do so!)
Set during a Socialist upswelling just before Fascism took hold in Italy, the film sees a weak and anemic Count reeling from the lack of virgins to eat. He travels with his manservant to the Italian villa of Il Marchese Di Fiore. But he did not take into account that Joe Dallesandro is the handyman there.
Lurid, hot and sloppy in that gloriously garish Morrissey tradition, it’s a trashy treasure.
3. Young Frankenstein
Will you look at this cast? Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman are untouchable comedy gods in this movie (per usual). Gene Wilder is the master of pretending to the a comedy’s straight man but employing every physical instinct for comedy. Peter Boyle, Teri Garr and Marty Feldman round out one of the most spot-on comedic ensembles ever assembled.
But Mel Brooks’s horror comedy is unlike many of his other comedies in that it honors and loves that thing it sends up. He used cinematic techniques popular in the 1930s, shot in black and white and even borrowed actual sets from James Whale’s original Frankenstein laboratory.
The result is a perfectly executed horror comedy.
2. Black Christmas
Director Bob Clark made two Christmas-themed films in his erratic career. His 1940s era A Christmas Story has become a holiday tradition for many families and most cable channels, but we celebrate a darker yule tide tale: Black Christmas.
Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority girls; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.
Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling and the end of the film is a powerful, memorable nightmare.
1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Tobe Hooper’s camera work, so home-movie like, worked with the “based on a true story” tag line like nothing before it, and the result seriously disturbed the folks of 1974.
Hooper sidestepped all the horror gimmicks audiences had grown accustomed to – a spooky score that let you know when to grow tense, shadowy interiors that predicted oncoming scares – and instead shot guerilla-style in broad daylight, outdoors, with no score at all. You just couldn’t predict what was coming.
He dashes your expectations, making you uncomfortable, as if you have no idea what you could be in for. As if, in watching this film, you yourself are in more danger than you’d predicted.
But not more danger than Franklin is in, because Franklin is not in for a good time.
James Mangold’s Walk the Line wasn’t a bad movie. But that 2005 Johnny Cash biopic – along with Taylor Hackford’s Ray from one year earlier – relied so heavily on convention that Jake Kasdan’s 2007 comedy Walk Hard found easy marks for spoofing.
A Complete Unknown has Mangold’s biopic sights set on Bob Dylan, where a tighter historical focus helps him craft a more memorable film.
Instead of attempting a complete life arc, Mangold and co-writers Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald wisely choose a four-year whirlwind that changed the course of music and culture. Opening in 1961 as a 19-year-old Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) travels from Minnesota to visit an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a New York hospital, the film follows Dylan’s legendary rise to savior of the folk music scene, through his defiant choice to turn Judas and “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Dylan became a pop culture enigma long ago, fueled by his obvious delight in tall tales, an antagonistic stage presence and prickly interactions with the press. He’s cared little for letting us know him, leaving the more avant garde approaches to telling his story (especially Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There) as the most compelling.
It’s hard to imagine a mainstream treatment working better than this one. And it’s one propelled by an absolutely transformative performance from Chalamet. His success at emulating both Dylan’s voice and guitar style is beyond impressive, as is his ease at moving the iconic persona from an ambitious Greenwich Village newbie to the cynical voice of a generation feeling “pulverized by fame.”
And maybe most importantly, he crafts Dylan as a soul bursting with song ideas 24/7. This not only provides an important layer for his sometimes cold social behaviors, but it gives the birth of classic compositions a much more organic, believable feel than the revisionist pandering of biopic films looking to simply pad a soundtrack (cough, cough, Bohemian Rhapsody.)
The supporting ensemble provides terrific backup, especially Edward Norton’s turn as folk hero Pete Seeger. A committed pacifist, Seeger serves as gentle mentor to Dylan early on, then nervously tries to navigate the young man’s ascension once it’s clear that his talent is too great to contain.
That early take-and-give is a subtle step toward the intimate triangle that anchors the film: Dylan’s relationships with girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, perfectly supportive, naive and wounded) and singer/activist Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, impressively handling her own assignment of embodying a legend). The film doesn’t shy away from the self-centered way Dylan hedged his bets at both women’s expense. And though it’s clear Dylan was following his artistic voice above all, you never get the sense he’s being entirely forgiven, either.
That’s refreshing, especially since Dylan himself was reportedly involved enough in production to provide some dialog and request the “Sylvia Russo” name change from the real-life Suze Rotolo. He also apparently gave his blessing to a major anachronism in the storyline that will seem egregious to longtime fans but ultimately adds dramatic weight to the final fiasco at Newport. (The ill-advised addition of Chalamet’s face into some real archival footage, though, is a curious misstep.)
For all its many strengths, maybe the most impressive aspect of the film is the way it uses that implied mystery of the title to its advantage. Eschewing the standard biography, this time Mangold paints us the time, the place, and a movement that’s content to tread water, then adds the mystery tramp seemingly sent from outer space as a necessary chaos agent.
As I write this review I’m listening to one of the 16 Dylan albums sitting in my playlist. Major fan here, and the closer I got to seeing this film, the more cautiously optimistic I felt. More than happy to report it exceeds expectations.
A Complete Unknown is an intoxicating, engrossing mix, and one of the best films of the year.
It’s a funny idea, revisiting Nosferatu. F. W. Murnau’s 1922 original is itself a reimagining of Dracula (criminally so, as the filmmaker was successfully sued by Bram Stoker’s estate and all prints of the film were believed destroyed at the time).
But Murnau’s changes to the vampire fable and his approach to the story were compelling enough to motivate Werner Herzog to put his own magnificently bizarre spin on Nosferatu in 1979. And the fascination and horror surrounding the forbidden original inspired E. Elias Merhige’s brilliant 2000 horror comedy Shadow of the Vampire (for which Willem Dafoe earned a much deserved Oscar nomination).
So, there is obviously something there. Something in the criminal DNA of Murnau’s macabre fantasy arouses the most fascinating reincarnations. Since the 1922 masterpiece, none is as assured, as complete or as clearly stand-alone from Stoker’s source material as Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu.
In collaboration with longtime cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and The Northman composer Robin Carolan, Eggers conjures an elegant, somber, moody Austria breathlessly awaiting death.
His film pulls in the shadow play that made Murnau’s film so eerie, as well as the plague-infested storytelling that gave Herzog’s film its touch of madness. But Eggers’s script fills in narrative gaps with a backstory that diverts from any previous tellings, enriching characters with a ripe darkness that influences the entire fable.
Eggers centers his tale on a love triangle, as so many have, but he invests in two characters the other storytellers, including Stoker, mainly wasted. Nicholas Hoult (having a banner year) plays Hutter, the intrepid real estate man sent to Transylvania to finalize accounts with an eccentric nobleman, leaving behind his beautiful bride, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).
Hoult may be the first actor in any version—Nosferatu or Dracula—to give the Hutter/Harker character real depth. He is flawed, terrified, earnest, insecure and loyal. It’s a standout performance in an impeccable ensemble.
Depp mines for something primal, and her performance is unsettling. Isabelle Adjani’s turn in Herzog’s version hints at what obsesses this desperate bride, but Depp is given the space to create a solid, haunted character to hang the movie on.
There are three other characters that every filmmaker has fun with, and Eggers finds ways to freshen up the monster, his minion, and the mad doctor who would be his downfall. Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhert von Franz (the Van Helsing stand in) is just manic enough to be alarming.
As Knock (known in Dracula as Renfield), Simon McBurney is a menacing, manipulative lunatic with a far meatier and messier role in society’s unraveling.
Eggers keeps the Count (Bill Skarsgård) shrouded in darkness long enough to build excitement. What the two deliver is unlike anything in the canon. It’s horrifying and perfectly in keeping with the blunt instrument they’ve made of this remorseless monster.
His monstrousness makes the seductive nature of the tale all the more unseemly. This beast, the rats, the stench of contagion infesting the elegant image of Austria and her beautiful bride—it is the stuff of nightmares.
It makes you grateful that Eggers was not intrigued by Stoker’s elegant aristocrat and his tortured love story, but drawn instead to the repulsive carnality of Nosferatu.
