The Starlight Journal

Ooohh, what a start to the year this was! Disturbing, hypnotic, enigmatic, mesmerizing, ….. oddly sexy?? Just a few words that can be used to describe Robert Egger’s remake of the Dracula-inspired horror classic. Eggers brought the original vampire story to screen in a new light with some god-tier cinematography, and truly incredible performances from the entire cast. If I had an Oscar ballot, Lily-Rose Depp would’ve made my list for Best Actress. This is a superstar-making performance from her that has already made her an iconic figure in horror cinema. If I had room for Nicholas Hoult in the acting categories, I would’ve given him some love as well.  Bill Skarsgård might be the best in the world at playing evil monster motherfuckers, and Willem Dafoe continues one of the best years of his career with a genuinely sensational performance that might be my Supporting Role of the year. In a banner year for horror movies, this has taken the crown of my favorite of them all.

If this is your first time here at The Starlight Journal, it’s time for your first new piece of lore. Florence Pugh is my favorite actress, and I have unintentionally started a little tradition of revisiting one of her films on her birthday. For this year’s Florence Pugh Day I spent it fighting back tears like my life depended on it. We Live In Time is a movie I’m still shocked isn’t being talked about more, hopefully that changes in the near-future. For me though, it is for sure going to end up on my Best of 2024 list.

Due to putting my desire to be a good son over being caught up on pop-culture event movies, I waited to finally see Wicked until I was able to see it with my mom. It was worth the wait. It’s been over a month since my first viewing, and I’m still at the point where I get giddy whenever “Popular” comes on my work playlist, and still get chills thinking of the “Defying Gravity” ending sequence. This might take the crown for me of great movies with bad trailers, because the marketing had me thinking this was going to be another flop of a Broadway adaptation, and it ended up becoming perhaps our best shot of a musical winning Best Picture since Chicago. Cynthia Erivo brought to life perhaps the most captivating protagonist of the year. Ariana Grande is my pick for Best Supporting Actress. November can’t get here soon enough, because I will be seated day one for Wicked: For Good.

.. And now for something that didn’t work for me at all! There’s always one movie each year that gets a lot of buzz, even ends up on best lists for some publications, and just doesn’t connect with me at all. This is that for me. The trailers intrigued me, the director’s prior film Bodies Bodies Bodies I loved, and who doesn’t love Nicole Kidman? My best way of describing how I viewed Babygirl is a movie that tries so hard to be dark and sexy that it just isn’t. It just becomes uncomfortable. I would like to forget about those glass of milk scenes for the rest of my life. I do have to shoutout the George Michael needle-drop and the rather entertaining climax when everything hits the fan for being the best parts of the movie. From a filmmaking standpoint, this a movie that’s shot, directed, and acted very well, but I can’t say the same about the script, and because of that the movie just was a miss for me.

For an Oscar season with no real obvious frontrunners in a lot of the category, there is one I’m fairly certain about: Kieran Culkin is winning Best Supporting Actor. He makes this movie as special as it is, he’s charming, vulnerable, lights up every scene he’s apart of, and rips your heart out. One of the best performances of the year, period. What a killer script too. Shoutout to Jesse Eisenberg. I’ve always more mixed on him than most, but he’s really good here as both an actor and a director. A great story of family, grief, and how people process their emotions differently. There’s many moments where I had a huge smile on my face, and many moments where I wanted to cry. Really enjoyed this little movie that I wish got a bit more love from the Academy than it ended up getting.

This was a really, really shitty day. I needed a good cry that night, and I got a good cry that night. Thank you, Florence Pugh. I wasn’t as over the moon about this movie as I was after my 1st viewing last year, but it’s still one of my most underrated movies of the last few years.

You may be shocked to learn that this was my first time seeing this, and I had fun with it. It’s so weird seeing a young Aaron Taylor-Johnson here, but this has Matthew Vaughn’s trademarks all over it, and has so many fun characters and hilarious, badass moments. I have been told the second one is, um, not good, so I’m in no rush to watch that, but hey at least I’m in agreement that this was…. well, the title says it all.

One of those movie experiences that just left me in awe over what I just watched in the moments after I finished The Substance. Let me just say, THAT ENDING!!! 2024 truly has had some spectacular endings to films (we’re discussing a few in this article), but none had me as stunned but as enthralled as the last twenty minutes of this film. This is Demi Moore’s magnum opus. Breaking down Hollywood beauty standards, aging, and self-loathing through Coralie Fargeat’s tour de force in body horror. This is Demi Moore’s magnum opus. I really wish Margaret Qualley got a Supporting Actress nomination as well, she deserved to be recognized for how good the two of them were, their performances don’t work without the other. The trippy ass, surreal, nightmare fuel cinematography and camera angles, and perfectly fitting score also deserve some praise for just making this one of the best watches of the year.

I do have some critiques, I am notoriously very picky with horror movies being over 2 hours long, and at 2 hours 20 minutes, I think you could’ve shaved at least 20 minutes off the runtime and the movie wouldn’t have suffered. Needless to say though, this was still an experience unlike any other, and I mean that. Respect the Balance.

I have given movies higher ratings this year, but The Brutalist will end up making my top 10 of the year, because this film to me was filmmaking at it’s finest. A masterful feat of the art form. It is the cinematic experience personified. From the opening overture, to the intermission (very much appreciated for its extensive runtime, normalize this for longer movies please Hollywood), it gave me the feeling of going to see a play, or going to an old-timey theater. It felt like the movies. The way Brady Corbet and the cast and crew crafted this film, that alone makes it worthy of all its accolades. The cinematography, the performances, the SCORE, there’s so much that just entranced me as a lover of film. If it wins Best Picture, I’ll celebrate it.

Adrien Brody, weird A.I. controversy aside that I still don’t fully understand, is my pick for Best Actor. I realized about 20 minutes in that this was the best performance I’ve seen all year, period. Without his performance, this movie could’ve floundered. Ditto to Felicity Jones. Guy Pearce & Joe Alwyn (sorry Swifties) alternate between being the kind and trustworthy rich folk we all think are fictional these days, to the slimy, lying, evil rich folk we are all too familiar with in a post-Musk salute society. Every single performance in the film lands.

At 3 and half hours long, even with the intermission, I still can’t excuse the film being this long. The 2-part structure is also a blessing and a curse, because while the second act was very good, the first act was so unbelievable that pretty much everything after that would’ve seemed inferior by comparison. Still, The Brutalist was everything I loved about filmmaking, and if it ends up being the movie that cleans up at this year’s Oscars, you will have no complaints from me.

Perhaps my pick for the most underrated and slept-on movie of the year, this movie rules. A perfect blend of genres that made for one of the most entertaining, addictive watches of the year. A horror rom-com that somehow ends up being a better retelling of Beauty and the Beast than, well, just about every live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast? Sign me up. Melissa Barrera continued her excellent year by being a force of nature, continuing to show that Scream made a terrible decision pushing her aside. The songs were catchy, the movie looks gorgeous, and a perfect ending that I have gone back to rewatch at least three times since my initial watch. If you have Max, check this out now.

More like Kraven deez nu- *gunshots*

And the Sony Spider-Man But Not Spider-Man Universe goes out with a whimper. Every movie in the franchise was a dud, and sadly it seems like all my favorite characters from the 90s Spidey cartoon are destined to never work on film. I think the Kraven character *could* work in live-action, I’d like to see the alternate timeline where Kraven did end up being the villain for what would become Spider-Man: No Way Home, this movie just isn’t that. Aaron Taylor-Johnson tries his best (gotta be an accomplishment to be in one of the best and worst movies of the year released a week apart from each other???), but the movie is filled with groan-inducing moments aplenty, talented actors painfully miscast, and somehow a worse adaptation of Rhino than whatever that was in Amazing Spider-Man 2? Because I love Spider-Man I forced myself to watch this, but like the rest of Sony’s weird spin-offs, I can’t say I’ll ever choose to revisit this willingly again. If this is truly the end of that shared universe, ending 2024 with 3 shit films in one year sure is a poetic way to go out.

Another movie I don’t think I can watch again, but for an entirely different reason. Through a masterful usage of cinematography, editing and direction, director RaMell Ross brings this powerfully horrifying story to life. A film that is more reminiscent of a 1970s cinema verité documentary than that of a typical narrative film, it reminded me of terrifying documentaries I had to watch in film school that showed the terrible, inhumane conditions of old mental institutions, or the horrors of the Jim Crow South or Holocaust concentration camps. It’s the kind of imagery that stays with you for a long time after you watch it. This was not an easy watch, it was a heavy one, but also an important one. Once the pieces of the puzzle started to form in my ending as we approached the ending, it packed an insane punch. While I don’t quite know if it’ll end up on my Best of 2024 list, it certainly needs to be seen, and is a very worthy Best Picture nominee.