In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2024, Bilge Ebiri, K. Austin Collins, Alison Willmore, and Odie Henderson—about the year in cinema.
Dear Bilge, Odie, Alison, and Kam,
Joan Didion once compared the work of film criticism to “petit-point on Kleenex”: an elaborate embroidery on a surface too ephemeral to sustain it. It’s a devastating burn for sure, of the sort Didion specialized in, but though the image may make every critic briefly question their life’s work, that doesn’t make it true. I keep a screenshot of that quote visible on a corner of my desktop–not to remind myself of the flimsiness of the linguistic needlework I’ve been doing for roughly 20 years, but because I think Didion was wrong and consider it a part of my job to show her so, if only out of spite.
The problem with the “petit-point on Kleenex” image is not just that it’s mean (though it is, so very mean), but that it gets the relationship between writer and subject backward. It’s week-to-week movie coverage that’s arguably the more transitory medium; when most people read film criticism, if they do at all, it’s about new releases they’re considering seeing that weekend. It’s the movies that are the most durable element in this piece of textile work we’re making.
They have a way of enduring, in spite of the rise of streaming TV and the post-COVID slump in theater attendance, the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023, and the havoc wreaked on the industry by [waves arms wildly] everything.
2024 offered no box-office feast on the order of last year’s Barbenheimer weekend—woe unto the wag who tried to make “Glicked” happen—but there was no shortage of movies that got people into theaters en masse, and occasionally even in character costumes. Most of the biggest hits were installments in recent or vintage blockbuster franchises (Dune: Part Two, Deadpool & Wolverine, Inside Out 2, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). Then there were comparatively modest word-of-mouth successes, original midbudget genre films like Longlegs or Civil War or The Substance—none of which I cared for myself, but which, based on anecdotal evidence in my own life, quickly became the kind of movies that people tell each other they have to go see. And when you get down to the level of “art house” releases (“down” in the sense of absolute earnings only, not success relative to their size or, obviously, quality), quite a few critically praised indies did solid business given their limited releases and marketing budgets: Just look at the success of Challengers, Conclave, or Anora (which had the best per-screen opening of the year and the second-best one since COVID hit, and is still playing in theaters around the country months after its release).
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Don’t get me wrong, the film industry is still in a precarious place. The effects of those 2023 strikes are making their way through the movie industry like rodents being digested by a snake. (I’m not sure exactly what the strikes’ effects have in common with rodents, but I feel pretty solid on the Hollywood/snake analogy.) A lot of the tentpole blockbusters that were meant to hold the big studios’ release calendars together—the next Batman, Avatar, and Mission: Impossible movies, for example—have been put off till 2025 or later because of disrupted production schedules. And quite a few of this year’s releases (Furiosa, The Fall Guy, Joker: Folie à Deux) failed to find the audiences that, a few years back, their A-list casts and/or status as prestige sequels would have seemed to guarantee. No one has yet figured out how to win back the audience share the theatrical film business has lost to home streaming services—though if it’s any consolation, the streamers are also at a loss as to how to hold on to viewers in a world of infinite choice and constant customer churn.
But like … most of the above has been true for nearly five years now, and some of it for much longer, and yet somehow here people are still going to movies, talking about them on the way down the multiplex escalator, debating their merits and hidden meanings over dinner, getting annoyed with their omnipresent Oscar campaigns. So I will dispense with further dithering about the meaning of our jobs as film critics and get on with doing mine, starting by throwing out a question to all of you (but first to Bilge, as he’s next in the lineup) about the element of scale in the movies of 2024.
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Related From Slate The 10 Best Movies of 2024 Read More
Scale, not size: that is to say, the relative distinctions between a film’s ambitions, its budget, its narrative sprawl (or compression), and its running time.
I noticed, sizing up the year’s films for my own list, that many of the movies that left a mark played with scale in some way. Bilge, at least two of the movies on your list, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 and Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, were certified sprawlers, running three hours or thereabouts, with stories that spanned generations. My own list contains one movie, Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic The Brutalist, that might be seen as a critique of both its subject’s and its director’s toxic ambition, a vast edifice that even a fan like me must admit has significant cracks in its foundation. And two of the year’s biggest hits, Dune: Part Two and Wicked: Part I, asked audiences to sit in the theater for around two hours and 40 minutes without blinking an eye, as did the brilliant Romanian comedy Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, a film that made my Top 10 list and was at the very top of Alison’s. Yet other great films this year were notable for the deceptive modesty of their scale, like Mike Leigh’s slender yet powerful character study Hard Truths. Another of the mini-yet-mighty entries on my list, the indie chamber piece Good One, is almost Buddhist in its simplicity, but it marks the debut of a major talent in writer-director India Donaldson.
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In its own way, each of these movies plays with our fixed notions of cinematic scale to pose the question of what movies can and should do: How much can they ask for from their viewers, in terms of patience, attention, bladder capacity, and time, and how much can audiences ask in return from them, in terms of creating new worlds to imagine ourselves into or giving us the capacity and perspective to reimagine our own? Bilge, I think of you as a man who appreciates a massive movie—you were the critic who got me into the theater to see the restoration of Sergei Bondarchuk’s seven-hour adaptation of War and Peace a few years back. Which of the giant honking epics of 2024 swept you off your feet, and which just made your buns ache in the theater?
Needle poised over my Kleenex, I remain,
Dana
P.S. My Top 10, in alphabetical order:
Anora
The Brutalist
Challengers
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Eno
Good One
Hard Truths
Janet Planet
Love Lies Bleeding
No Other Land
Runners-up:
All We Imagine as Light
Black Box Diaries
Close Your Eyes
Dahomey
The Seed of the Sacred Fig