words toward films seen in 2024

Time stays the same. I want to be quiet about Raven Jackson's All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt because it deserves it. I can't stop thinking about these images, the hands, the holdings, the sounds that hear themselves first. The mud swirling in the water and how it seems to turn the whole world to the soundtrack of thunder and rain hymn. This film devours. This film, fasts.

Rachel Lambert's Sometimes I Think About Dying has a spellbroken elegance to it that sounds like the world around it overheard itself and retreated with the design but not with the details. I was afraid, in the viewing, that I'd intrude. Daisy Ridley does precious much with darkness, and makes it not a delicacy but thing asking to be opened correctly. Lovely, slow, awake, and harsh.

Sound touches light and hell goes nowhere. Sight creates a signature eye for the soul to roll around in. Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s You'll Never Find Me places a dual duel in the middle of a very small nowhere and lets terror speak its mouth. We’ll know when they know and we’ll all watch separation punish the detached with isolation and illusion. Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan vibrate, glow, and go swimmingly dark. This whole endeavor hums, quiets, and leaves one left.

Jeff Rutherford's A Perfect Day for Caribou is a blink-and-you'll-see-it film of fast vision and punk fragility and knows that a short story is a long story slowed down. With a ramshackle restraint, it ghosts itself into finding what goes missing when not unleashed. No punches pulled, these are tired people, their cigarettes like little casts for little broken arms. Charlie Plummer, Jeb Berrier, and Dana Millican leave their roles often to walk them just out of view and then walk them back to sit awhile as if movement is the only angel that can touch the earth. Lovely, loved, film.

Where the Devil Roams, written and directed by Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams, suffers beautifully from self-diagnosis and subsequently from phantom dream syndrome to irreversibly give us the nightmare we'll never have. It's a fucking gift. Jaggedly creative, its kitchen sink is real whether or not the blood washed there is.

The body finds itself in a body. How unfair. How brief. Oh my god, this movie. As in, Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow. As in, melancholy plays the long game. Schoenbrun is a giving artist, but knows no charity goes unpunished, nor stays self-harmed, nor arrives outer-healed. Brigette Lundy-Paine gives a searching, locatable performance, and Justice Smith carries everything- the physical, the spiritual, the voice, and the voice changed. Both are prayers of unanswerable theater. I lost something to this, and it lost it back.

I've not seen a more oddly thoughtful movie about abuse and idealization than Jonathan Glazer's Birth. I think there are a couple cards here that could've been shown, that I can't justify them being withheld. But then I start thinking about what withholding means to the film outside of the film, and I feel very close to something dark and clear. Too close, maybe. Some burned shadow. Some former inkling. The scariest thing this movie does is make the present the only afterlife.

Pain waits. Pain goes to the site of pretend pain and gives its weak past a fuller future. Jeremy Saulnier's Rebel Ridge is as patient as pain, and, through the legit vessel of Aaron Pierre's invitingly remote performance, tries to let the wounded off the hook. Or at least give them the chance to switch baits. But no. Histories of perceived offense and abused authority make a nowness of entitlement, and their poison pond asks for the sea. Saulnier brings the flood, Pierre makes waves. 'Rebel Ridge' lives and dies deep in the deception of its broken skin grievance where bones know to know the score.

Dominic Savage's Close To You is a mood piece of sharp melancholy that is awesomely stuck in the now of having a past and in the then of needing that past to be older. Elliot Page gives a performance that treats strength as the delicacy it is, a lived-in performance of enlivened outage that dims toward something more ancient. Hillary Baack is also stellar here, with a performance of frostbite and fire that knows discovery isn't always the first thing there. What a film. It arrives and arrives.