Hollywood

To say superhero films are in a rut is to understate how bad a state they're in. Deadpool 3 was underwhelming, yet it was still the only superhero film released this year that wasn't terrible. Its competition? Venom 3, Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter and Joker: Folie à Deux.  2023 was a bit better, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both being genuinely great. But otherwise? Ant-Man 3 was unwatchable. The Flash was horrific. The Marvels was aneurysm-inducing. Shazam! 2 was utterly forgettable. I did actually forget that Blue Beetle existed until I started writing this list. Oh yeah, and there was another Aquaman movie. It, like most of the films listed here, flopped.

The title tells it all. It’s a Wonderful Life was first released back in December 1946, in the same week that President Truman was issuing Proclamation 2714, which officially ended hostilities in World War Two, and for that matter prefiguring Donald Trump by proposing that the US buy Greenland. The movie may be seventy-eight years old, but it’s one of those timeless classics, like Casablanca or The Searchers, that actually improve with familiarity. It’s also long since woven its essential message of good cheer into the fabric of our festive season. It’s an unusual plot for a film synonymous with feel-good family entertainment.

Well, nobody could accuse the Golden Globes Foundation — as they are now called — of predictability. Of the films that have been nominated for the ceremony on January 5, the frontrunner is Jacques Audiard’s much-discussed crime musical Emilia Pérez with ten nominations, including Best Film (Musical or Comedy), Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for its stars Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana. The movie, which has met with enormous controversy in some circles because of its unfettered approach to social mores — not least having a trans woman, Karla Sofía Gascón, in the lead — is undeniably a bold and distinctive film that indicates that this is a year of risk-taking rather than complacency. But to what end?

Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, this body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing – turning the scramble for youth and beauty into a monster of immeasurable disgust and immorality – in a huge way. There is nothing minimal or restrained or overly clever here; nothing of the nuance in language or wit that makes its forerunner, The Picture of Dorian Gray, so haunting. This is a presentation of the horror of ageing for the bombastic mash-up age, melding vampire, sci-fi, feminist tragicomedy and dystopian genres. It’s like a reverse Barbie but with lashings of Poor Things, Blonde, the uncomfortably up-close Marilyn Monroe biopic, and plenty more.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — so good, they named it twice. At least, that’s what you would have hoped. Unfortunately, Tim Burton’s latest movie is a dismally confused hotchpotch that aims for a curious mixture of comedy, mild horror and the usual Burton wackiness, along with performances from his regular actors including Michael Keaton, Jenna Ortega and Winona Ryder. Sequel to an Eighties curio that was diverting rather than brilliant in the first place, it has nevertheless capitalized on the ever-present vogue for nostalgia that has permeated theaters over the past few years. It made an astonishing $111 million at the US box office last weekend; the original grossed $75 million worldwide during its entire run at movie theaters, albeit the best part of four decades ago.

After a fairly barren summer movies-wise (I’m just waiting for the Alien: Romulus backlash to begin, and will be only too pleased to join in with it), there are more promising movies coming our way this fall. Yet the one that’s attracted more attention and interest than possibly anything else this year, maybe even this decade, is the grand return of Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis, a self-funded, wildly ambitious folie de grandeur that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to predictably mixed reactions and an overall consensus that, alas, the one-time visionary genius of theater is no longer a force to be reckoned with, however loopily wild his latest (and, one reluctantly assumes, last) movie is.

Last weekend’s opening of Twisters saw the windy picture receive both critical acclaim — although not in this magazine — and commercial success, blowing to a wildly impressive $81 million opening at the US box office. This was by no means a given for the tornado thriller, as the original film, although a smash hit when it opened in 1996, is largely unknown to the millennial audience who make up the majority of moviegoers who will flock to see a film as soon as it comes out; many of them were not even born when it was released. Instead, its appeal lies another way, in the casting of newly minted megastar Glen Powell in one of the lead roles.

Before the news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump blew him off the front pages, the dramatic collapse of the trial of Alec Baldwin in a New Mexico courtroom was the most discussed story in American public life. Those attuned to cosmic ironies might note firstly that both the Trump and Baldwin stories revolved around the discharge of a firearm — accidentally and fatally in the case of Baldwin, deliberately and non-fatally in the case of Trump — and also in the abiding animosity between the two men, fanned by Baldwin’s continued impersonations of the former (and future?) president on Saturday Night Live. Yet the question now for Baldwin is what happens next.

When the news of the Canadian actor Donald Sutherland’s death at the age of eighty-eight was announced yesterday, it was greeted with a sigh and a shout by his peers. A sigh, because every great actor’s death, even at a grand old age, is a sad loss, and a shout, because there will now be the niggling feeling that Sutherland never quite got his due treatment when compared to his peers. Yes, he won an honorary Oscar in 2017, and yes, he appeared in his fair share of hugely acclaimed and iconic pictures, from M*A*S*H to Pride and Prejudice. But Sutherland’s tendency to appear in a lot of undistinguished B-movies, especially in the Eighties, has counted against him.  This is deeply unfair. He was an actor who, even in the weakest films he appeared in, brought class and dignity.