Space Invader: The Top 10 of 2024
The one you've been waiting for!
The Tip Sheet has spun off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
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Here, on the fourth day of the year, we finally post the Top 10 Films for 2024! You probably don’t need any more introduction than that, so let’s dig into the assorted picks including movies about identity, a documentary about a Canadian success story (of a sort), and at least one movie featuring giant worms and people riding them. Let’s get into the ten!
10) Perfect Days – dir. Wim Wenders
Although it was technically a 2023 movie, Perfect Days wasn’t released widely until this past winter, and it’s been a hard movie to not think about all year. Leave it to Wenders to turn what was supposed to be a crassly commercial project to promote Japan’s overly artistic public washrooms into a meditation on simplicity. We follow Kōji Yakusho’s Hirayama as he goes about his day, cleaning the washrooms, reading his books, eating at his favourite haunts, listening to his carefully curated collection of cassettes, and that’s about it. We get hints that Hirayama once lived a life of privilege, or has family that does, but he’s happily embraced a life of simple pleasures, and we should all be so lucky. A pure contemplation on the meaning of contentment and perhaps the most soulful movie of 2024.
Perfect Days is streaming on Crave.
9) A Different Man – dir. Aaron Schimberg
Sebastian Stan may be most well-known for being a Marvel superhero, but he should now be better known for his capital A acting. He knocked it out of the park as Donald Trump in The Apprentice, which is tough enough, but it’s his finely nuanced performance as Edward in A Different Man that might get him an Oscar. Edward is a man with disfiguring neurofibromatosis, until he takes an experimental medical treatment that relieves him of the condition. Years later he meets Oswald, a man with the same condition but eminently more well-adjusted than Edward ever was. Adam Pearson, who is perhaps best known for being the victim Scarlett Johansson’s alien temptress takes pity on in Under the Skin, plays Oswald with such relish and charm that he’s clearing having a good time while Stan’s Edward gets increasingly skittish about how Oswald is living the life he always wanted. In some ways, A Different Man is a typical parable about finding happiness within and being careful what you wish for, but it’s also got considerable bite and dark humour.
A Different Man is streaming on Hoopla, and you can rent it on VOD.
8) Satan Wants You – dir. Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor
So much as we want to snicker about the dysfunction of American politics, Satan Wants You arrives to remind you that Canada has done its fair share of radicalizing. This doc tells the Canadian origin story of the “Satanic Panic”, a B.C. housewife who claimed to recover lost memories of being abused by a Satanic cult when she was a child, and the book she wrote with the shrink who supposedly recovered them. Adams and Horlor’s exhaustive examination of Michelle Remembers leads to one inevitable truth: Things are always more complicated than they appear, and sometimes the things you create can take on a life of their own. There were a lot of movies about devil worship this year, but this real-life story is the one that will haunt you most.
Satan Wants You is streaming on CBC Gem.
7) My Old Ass – dir. Megan Park
There were a couple of very good movies about coming of age in 2024, but only one of them seemed to reach beyond the idea of being a pure nostalgia romp, and that was a Canadian movie. In My Old Ass, Park dares to ask: What would happen if you had an encounter with your older self just as you were about to launch your life post-high school? Maissy Stella, who is more well known for her singing than her acting, does a wonderful job as Elliott, who’s fleeting encounter with her older self (expertly played by queer icon Aubrey Plaza) while on the family farm in Muskoka three weeks before moving to Toronto for university, sets off a chain of events that tests everything she thinks she knows about herself. Park winds you up with the comedy and the camp before hitting you with the gut punch and then leaves you both worried and excited for Elliott in equal measure. A near-perfect tale of youthful innocence with a twist (or maybe two).
My Old Ass is streaming on Prime Video.
6) Fancy Dance – dir. Erica Tremblay
Lily Gladstone didn’t win the Oscar for Best Actress this year, but it’s not because she isn’t a damn fine actress. She proves it again in Fancy Dance, the feature debut of documentarian Tremblay who leans on her Indigenous roots for this story about the power of family and the friction between tradition and the pressures of the modern world. Although technically a story based in the terrible reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Fancy Dance is not trauma porn but incredibly life affirming! It dares to say that we’re not unmade by our traumas, but are meant to overcome them, and at the centre of it all is Gladstone, carefully walking a fine line between hope and despair for the benefit of her niece, holding out one more time that tomorrow might be a better day. A truly beautiful film.
Fancy Dance is streaming on AppleTV+.
5) Challengers – dir. Luca Guadagnino
Love triangles are not new to the movies, but it’s a real question if you can go so far as to call the threesome in Challengers a love triangle. When up and coming tennis star Tashi comes between BFFs Patrick and Art, we think we know where that story is going, but Tashi, played by Zendaya, is not your typical romantic interest. In lesser, coarser hands than Guadagnino’s, Tashi would be played like some kind of femme fatale, and not as a strong, independent woman who’s just fed up with these boys being boys. Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist are just as good playing off each other as they are playing off Zendaya, and throughout the film you’re caught wondering just who’s attracted to who anyway. Plus, the throbbing techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (possibly their best soundtrack yet) makes you feel and energy and the urgency of all this sexual tension. In Challengers, sex is a sport too.
Challengers is streaming on Prime Video.
4) The Substance – dir. Coralie Fargeat
Both gross and engrossing, Fargeat’s social satire about the impossible standards of beauty and perfection we put on women, especially older women, is a powerful and hypnotic watch, assuming you have a strong stomach, especially when you get to that last 20 minutes. Even if you’re not into some of the gnarliest body horror since Brian Yuzna’s Society, you can still dig the great central performance by Demi Moore as an ingénue aged out of Hollywood’s youth misogynist system trying to reclaim past glory by taking a serum that allows her to birth a younger version of herself that she can exist as one week at a time. Naturally, the whole thing goes horribly wrong as Fargeat tests assumptions about identity, agism and yes, being careful what you wish for. The Substance is incredibly re-watchable assuming you can stand all the blood.
The Substance is streaming on Mubi, and you can rent it on VOD.
3) Sing Sing – dir. Greg Kwedar
We typically think of a prison drama as the opposite of life affirming, and then there’s Sing Sing. Based on a real program out of New York’s infamous Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison, the film follows a troupe of theatre performers through their latest production, a play they entirely make up called “Breakin' the Mummy's Code”. And while you get great actors like Colman Domingo and the highly under-appreciated Paul Raci, you also get several graduates from the actual Rehabilitation Through the Arts program including Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin, who does the hardest thing an actor can do: Take an honest and full accounting of his real self and turn that into a performance. There are a lot of movies that want to sell you on the transformational and healing power of the arts, but Sing Sing is one of the few movies that can actually make you feel it.
Sing Sing is now available to rent on Plex.
2) Dune Part Two – dir. Denis Villeneuve
In 1984, producer Dino DeLaurentiis had the idea of making Frank Herbert’s massive tome the template for a franchise to inherit the Star Wars mantle, but it took Quebec’s favourite cinematic son and 40 years to make that a reality. The massive scale and epic scope of Dune Part Two lifts off from the remarkable world building Vileneuve did in Part One, so much so that your able to forget the more ludicrous bits of plotting like how Lady Jessica spends most of the film having whole conversations with her unborn daughter. Dune features big themes and ideas, a star-studded cast, huge sci-fi spectacle, and some genuine show stopping moments. If every blockbuster could be half as good as this, and fire this hard on all cylinders, we would be living in a new Hollywood golden age.
Dune Part Two is streaming on Crave.
1) Anora – dir. Sean Baker
Baker is one of those directors that’s toiled for years making films to suit his own individual taste in the realm of indie cinema. It’s fitting that Anora is his mainstream crossover because it’s a simple Cinderella story with some big complications featuring Mikey Madison as a New York sex worker whose shotgun marriage to the immature son of a Russian oligarch leads to a long night of shouting, fighting, accusations, and recriminations. Like the legendary Ken Loach, Baker has carved out a niche telling tales of work class people trapped in a system that exploits them even if they think they have a chance at escape, but unlike Loach, Baker’s movies are funnier and more life affirming. Madison is so magnetic on screen that you can’t help but fall for her too, and she’s surrounded by a great company of character actors that hit all their marks. It’s the best film of the year, and yet the best may yet to come…
Anora is still playing in select theatres or you can rent it on PVOD.
Finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca