A lot of energy is expended this time of year on the best films that hit theaters (or streaming) in the last 12 months. It can get a bit repetitive. Most of us here love “The Brutalist,” “Anora,” and “Nickel Boys” too but they’re getting so much attention (even from us) that it can push deserving alternative works out of the conversation. We asked our regular critics to pick a film from this year that they’d love more people to see and talk about. The results are a wonderful display of the range of not only film this year but the taste of the people who write about it RogerEbert.com.
“Exhibiting Forgiveness”
Orbiting the pain of the hidden and open wounds shared between parents and children, yet intertwined with patient grace, few films explore the messy reality of forgiveness better than writer-director Titus Kaphar’s debut feature “Exhibiting Forgiveness.”
There’s often a dangerous conflation between forgiveness and reconciliation, and Kaphar’s film is a righteous rebuke to that indiscretion, meditating on how forgiveness can be a near-impossible task. Initially conceived as a documentary before Kaphar thought a fiction framing would do justice to the narrative, the film focuses on a successful painter, Tarrell (André Holland) who keeps his painful and traumatic past at an arms’ distance by working through his emotions via art. He’s been able to hide his past from his wife, Aisha (Andra Day) and son, Jermaine (Daniel Michael Barriere), but the barriers he’s erected crumble when his estranged father, La’ron (John Earl Jelks) comes back into his life, seeking to reconcile. Having found God and desiring to make amends for physically and mentally abusing Tarrell, La’ron is eager to bury the past and start anew with his son, but for Tarrell, the process of “forgiving and forgetting” is far from straightforward. He begrudgingly accepts to talk with La’ron at his mother’s (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) insistence.
The way Elks and Holland navigate their father-son dynamic is masterful, and Elks, in particular, stirs as one who garners our empathy but never uses that to excuse the harm he’s committed unto his son. Kaphar’s artistic sensibilities shine not only in the visual language of the film (the marigold and earthy tones that make up the color palette of his paintings coat scenes like a glaze) but also in his direction. He trusts his actors, letting them stumble and unearth the pain they’ve long buried in the recesses of their minds. The camera lingers on their faces and we see, in live time, the impact of Kaphar’s words marking their visage, like coarse paint strokes on canvas. Kaphar’s time spent in seminary also manifests here in the way he explores with nuance, the ways religious spaces misconstrue forgiveness to mean total absolution and often demand that those who have been wronged try to make amends before they are ready.
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” courses with uncomfortable vulnerability, and, while it promises no easy answers for its characters, it acts as a benediction all the same, challenging those willing to engage with its pain to imagine that forgiveness is a gift that can only be granted by the victim not demanded by the perpetrator. We forgive, not necessarily to restore, but to begin our own journey to true healing. And that is enough. – Zachary Lee
Now on VOD.
“Touch”
Baltasar Kormákur is best known for Hollywood action films like “2 Guns” and “Beast,” but “Touch,” based on a novel by Olaf Olafsson is a delicate, tender story of love, loss, regret, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) learns that he is in the early stages of memory loss just as the world is shutting down in 2020 due to the pandemic. He decides he has just one goal: to see his first love again, half a century after she left him without explanation. The film goes back and forth from the search in 2020 to the romance he is remembering from the 1960s, with the young Kristófer played by Palmi Kormákur, son of the director.
The journey is grand in scope, spanning time and space, beginning in Iceland, then England, where Kristófer met Miko (Kôki) when he got a job at her father’s restaurant, and then to Japan. But the story has an intimate timelessness, allowing Kristófer and us a bit of breathing room. The search is his focus, but its urgency does not prevent him from taking time to appreciate the people and places he encounters. He is impelled to see Miko again, but it is not to find answers about the past or get an apology. There is no anger, regret, or resentment. “Touch” is as delicate as its title suggests, its tone and lush visuals perfectly suited to the kind of first love that is utterly captivating to the young and then, no matter how many years go by, imperishably vital.
Now on VOD.
“Rob Peace”
Written, directed by and co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, “Rob Peace” is an example of two types of endangered commercial filmmaking: it’s a biography of somebody who isn’t famous, and a handsomely produced and realistic movie about Black-American life that’s filled with details that ring true.
The title character (Jay Will, in an all-timer of a lead performance) is a gifted student from East Orange, New Jersey who overcomes all manner of challenges to become a biochemistry student at Yale. But he keeps getting pulled under by the tragic undertow of his personal life: his father Skeet (Ejiofor) was sent to prison for killing two women with a handgun after a prosecution that might have been a frame-up. Rob turns a portion of his gifts towards helping his father in his endless legal battle to overturn the conviction, selling designer weed that he developed himself to pay attorney’s fees. He also uses it recreationally himself, and it’s a part of his popularity on campus; this is not a movie that paints its main character as a plaster saint, only a complicated young man.
As a filmmaker, Ejiofor keeps the focus on Rob but takes care to fill out numerous supporting characters (including Rob’s supportive mom, played by Mary J. Blige) and creates a big, bustling canvas filled with life. The screenplay especially is a marvel of economy, giving you crucial information you need when you need it but never feeling as if it’s rushing you along to the next plot point. The scenes feel fuller in the memory than they actually were. You come away from it moved but not sure quite what to think, which may be the rarest quality of all in a movie like this.
Now on Netflix.
“The Last Stop in Yuma County”
There was a time, young readers, when everyone wanted to be the next Quentin Tarantino. After the landscape-shifting success of “Pulp Fiction,” dozens of writers sold their scripts about tough-talking idiots and the mistakes they made in the middle of a crime spree. Most of them were truly horrible, only making Tarantino’s voice more laudable by comparison. And the over-saturation led to the genre basically drifting away until it felt like no one knew how to make a fun crime movie anymore. In that era, even amidst all the copycats, Francis Galluppi’s feature debut would have stood out as a damn fun movie. Unpretentiously delivered by a stacked cast, it’s the kind of “good time” that I truly think more people are looking for in an era when so many independent films take themselves a few degrees too seriously. It’s a movie that just needs to find its audience.
Set in the 1970s, “Yuma County” starts by following a traveling knives salesman (Jim Cummings, who should be a household name and who I often wish could have been active during the prime of the Coen brothers because of how perfectly he nails that deadpan tone) who ends up at a filling station in the middle of nowhere. As he waits for the refueling truck so he can be on his way, a pair of bank robbers enter the station, and, well, things get unpredictable from there. With appearances from living legends like Richard Brake and Barbara Crampton, alongside great supporting turns from Jocelin Donahue and Sierra McCormick, this is a movie that I keep waiting to drop on Netflix so it can rocket to the top of their charts and find the audience it deserves. For better or worse, that’s how it works in 2024. We just have to wait for the streaming fuel truck to get to this one. – Brian Tallerico
Now on VOD.
“Limbo”
Jack Huston’s terrific “Day of the Fight” was one of at least two outstanding 2024 pictures to make purposeful, evocative, emotion-stirring use of black-and-white cinematography. The other is less known and should be more widely seen. The other is the Australian crime picture “Limbo,” which, astonishingly, was not only written and directed by Ivan Sen but co-produced, shot, and edited by him. And he did the music too. Sen has an Indigenous mother, and most of his films — this is his seventh feature — dwell on the topic of identity in modern Australia.
The actor Simon Baker, here playing a retired cop turned detective who comes to the town of Limbo to investigate a murder case that’s been cold for twenty years now, is a beautifully concentrated co-conspirator with Sen. As I wrote in my review of the picture of the actor, who’s been best known for his television work, “he is not shy about letting Sen’s camera […] pick up every crease and wrinkle on his tanned face. His acting here, understated, enigmatic, mindfully physical, is of a different order than I’ve ever seen it. And it grounds this terse, unsettling mystery that’s inextricable from the shame of not only the title town in which the story is set, but all of Australia itself.” While the sociopolitical dimension of the movie is crucial, I’m wary of leaning on it too much as I entreat film lovers to seek the movie out: “Limbo” is also what they call a crackerjack thriller that grabs you by the throat even as it shakes at your conscience. – Glenn Kenny
Now on VOD.
“Good One”
India Donaldson’s quiet, fearless debut ...
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