Top 10 best movies 2024

Notes: Even though Jos Stelling is one of the most highly regarded directors from the Netherlands, I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with his work. Indeed, I have seen only his previous directorial effort, ‘Het Meisje en de Dood’ which did win the Golden Calf for the best Dutch film of the year but, to be honest, I didn’t care much for it. Well, even though the rest of the film club was really enthusiast, I have to admit that I had a hard time to really connect with this (probably) last movie from the Dutch master. I mean, I have to admit that it was visually really neat and definitely from another level than your average Dutch production, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, the movie itself was just too cryptic for my taste and I would have a really hard time to tell what Stelling was trying to tell or to achieve here. Another thing that bothered me was the gimmick of the mute main character. In my opinion, it is a rather cheap trick to make your character deep and mysterious by having him saying nothing but he felt more like an empty shell than an actual human-being. Above all, I don’t think he was really interesting and this Russian woman who he met half way through was actually much more intriguing. The other tricky thing with this movie was that it was so random and it’s as if Stelling created his own logic as he went along and, like the rest of the movie, I guess it is really a matter of taste if you’re going to appreciate this approach. Anyway, even if it didn’t really work for me, I gave it a few extra points for being so artistic and challenging.

Notes: Ever since ‘Godzilla’ was released 10 years ago, I have seen all the movies in this franchise when they were released but, to be honest, I barely remember any of them though. Eventually, the only real issue was the fact that, to keep this franchise going, the mythology is becoming increasingly convoluted but, even if this new installment was nothing really amazing, it might actually be the best of the bunch so far though, no less than that. Indeed, I did appreciate the fact that they didn’t take themselves too seriously this time around and, above all, Brian Tyree Henry and Dan Stevens were actually quite fun together. Furthermore, their approach was to focus on only a smaller group of human characters which was definitely a wise choice as it was definitely an issue with the previous installments which very often had to deal with a dozen of really half-baked individuals. The other thing I enjoyed was the fact that all the massive fights involving these huge monsters were in broad daylight and not at night and/or under some heavy rain which is too often the case in this genre (it was something that really bothered me with ‘Pacific Rim’ for example). It is also pretty neat that Adam Wingard apparently understands that such brainless blockbusters never need to last more than 2 hrs. Still, it is rather weird that, even though Godzilla is one of the main draws, he does show up only for 10 mins in each film.

Notes: After hearing so many bad things about this movie, I seriously lowered my expectations but I still ended up watching the damned thing in the movie theater. Anyway, probably because I was expecting something so awful but I don’t think it was so bad after all. Sure, it was nothing amazing and it did feel indeed rather half-baked but I thought the end-result was harmless and there were even a couple of decent ideas. I mean, it was directed by a woman with a cast of interesting actresses (Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Emma Roberts) and I liked how all these characters were connected together. Unfortunately, even though Tahar Rahim is a fine actor, his bad guy was just so underwhelming. Basically, he was some kind of villainous version of Spider-Man shooting some poison instead of webs. Anyway, the guy was pretty lame. Furthermore, it was pretty obvious that they struggled with the script (according to Dakota Johnson, the end-result had actually pretty much nothing to do anymore with the script she signed on to make). I mean, you get to see the main character driving around, she drops the girls into some random woods so she can go back to New York just to read some journal and goes back again to these woods and all this with the same stolen cab. Then, after this very clunky sequence, she then dumped then again so she could make some trip to Peru which was just weird. The ending was also hardly convincing. Indeed, it is not as if all these girls were orphans so it didn’t make sense that Cassandra Webb would become their foster somehow.

Notes: to be added soon...