2024 Year in Review: At the Movies

Last year, I introduced an adventures-in-moviegoing-style column to the Year in Review series. This year, I christen it At the Movies, in tribute to my favorite writer and critic, Roger Ebert. In April 2025, it will be 12 years since his death, but he is never far from my mind or my heart, and whether consciously or not, I carry him with me every time I walk into the theater.

In the spring, I read Matt Singer’s essential Opposable Thumbs, which recounts the history of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert as professional rivals entered into a mutually beneficial pact that evolved into a unique brotherhood. It also tells the tale of Siskel and Ebert™, the cultural force that would define the way generations watched, discussed, and thought about movies. It gets my highest Last Cinema Book Club recommendation. (Remember when I tried to make that a thing? Perhaps I’ll bring it back.)

I wrote the following in this piece last time around: “We’ll start in my neighborhood, a scant 10-minute walk from my front door, at the Highland Park Theater, itself the subject of closure rumors. As of now, it survives.” From the time I published those words, it would survive just another 51 days. The 100-year-old theater closed Feb. 29, 2024. 

Community chatter about potentially reopening it started pretty much immediately but died out quickly after. It sits vacant, the marquee marked by graffiti. Most days, you still can see inside. Despite the end-of-February closure, for a while, someone continued to update the posters in the lobby. The last such update came with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which released May 10. That poster still hangs, and there is something haunting about that ghost of a theater forever advertising a film it never got to show and probably never will.

There are many such haunted houses in the city, the most prominent of which is probably the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard. One of the COVID pandemic’s many economic casualties, the dome just sits there at that vacant intersection, waiting for some hero of the cinema to come save it. It supposedly was set for a 2025 reopening, but the last anyone heard about that was in 2023. I’ll give it a couple more years, then start the Last Cinerama Dome Standing Fund and buy it myself, if necessary. Quentin Tarantino can’t save them all.

And, that’s as fine a transition as any to a May 22 screening of Pulp Fiction at Tarantino’s own New Beverly Cinema. The theater hosted a week of showings to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the film’s triumphant debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. Though I had seen the film bordering on 50 times, I had never seen it on the big screen. It was like seeing it with fresh eyes. Everything that is radical and inventive and shocking about that film – the kinds of rough edges that get sanded away by cultural ubiquity – felt new and exciting again.

A couple weeks before, I caught Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece High and Low at the New Beverly, as well. It’s hardly breaking new ground to call it one of the great director’s best. I look forward to Spike Lee and Denzel Washington reinterpreting and remixing the premise for our modern age with a film that is slated to come out in 2025.

Staying on that side of town, the programming at the Academy Museum continues to impress, as one might expect. A couple days before Pulp Fiction at the New Bev, I visited the Academy for a screening of the Telugu megahit RRR. This was my fourth viewing but first in a theater. It is a spectacle that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible with the loudest speakers, both of which describe the Academy Museum to a ‘T.’ The crowd was raucous and lively, cheering and hooting and hollering. Super fans compared résumés – ‘I’ve seen it 15 times in theaters’; ‘I’ve seen it 20!’ I had a wonderful time, but once is enough, thanks.

On the other hand, a couple days after my birthday in July, the Academy screened a film I could never tire of watching. The Addams Family is on a short list of films that potentially could lay claim to the title of movie I have seen the most times in my life. My best guess puts it right at the top, just ahead of Addams Family Values. It was shown as part of the Branch Selects program, in which a different branch of the Academy selects a movie each week that represents the best of its craft. This particular screening was hosted by the Makeup and Hairstylists branch and was preceded by an introduction by Kevin Haney, one of the film’s makeup artists.

Seeing it on the big screen was a reminder of what a miracle that film is. It could have been a cash grab, a relatively untapped piece of IP, generated to prey on Boomer nostalgia. In that respect, it worked and was a massive hit. But, it is also a beautifully crafted piece of art when it didn’t need to be. The depth and texture of the set design. The inventiveness of the camera moves. Of course, that wonderful makeup. Those performances. A C+ movie would have been a hit. These artists went for the A+ and the extra credit. Their reward: a legacy as a multigenerational cultural touchstone.

From one gothic treat to another, my annual sojourn to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for its Halloween programming consisted of a night under the stars watching modern horror anthology classic Trick ‘r Treat. Director Michael Dougherty made a surprise appearance before the screening to talk a little about the difficulty in getting the film made. He seemed genuinely moved to be speaking to a thousand-plus fans who made the trip out to demonstrate their love for his creation.

The programming of the American Cinematheque is a highlight of any year of moviegoing. I didn’t make it out to the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica as much as might have liked, though advanced screenings of Nickel Boys and Nightbitch were particular highlights. Likewise, I still have not attended a film at the newly reopened Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, but I expect to rectify that in 2025. On the other hand, I found myself at the Los Feliz 3 often for many of the Cinematheque’s wonderful offerings.

In July, I caught an early showing of Sean Wang’s excellent coming-of-age film Dìdi. Wang and cast members Izaac Wang and Joan Chen hung out for a truly insightful Q&A afterward. In October, I attended a special double bill of Guy Maddin’s Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton and My Winnipeg, part of a tribute to the filmmaker in honor of his latest release, Rumours. Maddin spoke afterward and was exactly as rye, prickly, and brilliant as I had always hoped. 

Finally, in December, the Cinematheque presented a series of Steve McQueen films around the release of Blitz. I attended a late-night showing of Lovers Rock, widely considered the crowning achievement of the filmmaker’s monumental Small Axe. You’ll hear no argument from me, and it was an absolute privilege to see this Amazon-produced pandemic release on the big screen, where it belongs.

There were other special experiences this year such as catching writer-director-star Lake Bell and cast at the Eagle Theatre for a 10th anniversary screening of her excellent debut, In a World; a very early screening of the magnificent Sing Sing at the Alamo Drafthouse with a live-streamed cast Q&A afterward; and the Alamo’s Bob Dylan Costume Party attached to an advanced showing of A Complete Unknown.

But, I’d like to close with some thoughts on three movies that reminded me of what I love so much about the cinema. I saw a lot of blockbusters this year and probably caught more movies in IMAX than in any previous year that I can recall. Dune Part II, Twisters, Alien: Romulus, etc. Spectacle is alive and well on the big screen. I support that fully. I am a great enjoyer of popcorn and soda and explosions and stunning vistas and grand images projected to unfathomable heights.

This year, however, what I appreciated most were the movies with the opposite intent. If cinema is the only church I attend – and it is – then occasionally, I’d like that church to be a place of reflection and meditation, of peace, calm, and tranquility. So much of life is noise and distraction that to find two hours, more or less, to be unburdened, unbothered, and untethered feels like a necessary balm for the spiritual wounds we endure.

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, Ryuske Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light could rightly be classified as slow cinema, but I prefer to think of them as the cinema of mindfulness. There is no room for split attention. You are either fully in or fully out. These films insist that you be present in the moment, that you engage your mind, body, and spirit, and that you give yourself over to these filmmakers and their worlds. It’s a rare and humbling thing when it happens, and it speaks to everything I want from the cinema. Here’s to another great year at the movies.

First Tuesday Book Club: Life Itself

Max in writer-director Adam Elliot's Mary and Max, joining us this month for the Last Cinema First Tuesday Book Club

Welcome to the Last Cinema First Tuesday Book Club, a monthly dive into the world of film through the pages of books. From memoirs and biographies to historical accounts and critiques, we will try to view the legacy of cinema through the words of those who shaped it and those who have explored it.

The Last Cinema First Tuesday Book Club presents:

Life Itself: A Memoir, by Roger Ebert (2011)

Four years ago today, Roger Ebert died. If you will forgive the whimsical contradiction, it feels like so much longer that we have been without him, but in ways real and imagined, it seems he has never left. Such is the impact of a great man.

I do not need to tell you Ebert was my favorite writer; that I have written copious words to that effect here and here.

I do not need to tell you Ebert’s prose stands alongside that of any of the giants held dear by the literary canon; that he could toss off in the middle of paragraphs words of such beauty and poetry other, lesser writers would base entire novels around them.

I do not need to tell you his opinions shaped the cultural conversation; that to this day, no lover of film goes to the cinema without wondering, ‘What would Roger think?’

Roger Ebert, in his office

I do not need to tell you praise from Ebert could craft the legacy of a film, of a director; that much of what we appreciate in the past half-century and more of moviemaking we owe both directly and indirectly to his influence.

I do not need to tell you any of that because you are here and, thus, must already know, but it bears repeating Ebert was the first and last word for most of the film-going public on what mattered at the movieplex.

In 2012, I was writing a feature on Little Miss Sunshine filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris in advance of their second feature, Ruby Sparks. While interviewing Dayton’s mother for the piece, I mentioned to her Ebert had given the film three stars and written kindly of it. She said, “Well, if Roger liked it, that’s good.”

Life Itself is a memoir filled with the recollections of a life well lived, deeply felt, and extensively explored, but it is as much about the idea of memory as the memories themselves. Though a fair portion of its chapters were pulled from the blog that made Ebert foremost among the internet commentariat, a majority of it was written as he approached the end of his life. He knew it was coming as his body betrayed him time and again – cancer – but his mind was as alive as or more so than ever.

The prologue of Life Itself is titled “Memory,” and it ends thusly:

The blog let loose the flood of memories. Told sometimes that I should write my memoirs, I failed to see how I possibly could. I had memories, I had lived a good life in an interesting time, but I was at a loss to see how I could organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It was the blog that taught me how. It pushed me into first-person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable fragments. Some of these words, since rewritten and expanded, first appeared in blog forms. Most are here for the first time. They come pouring forth in a flood of relief.

From there, we are whisked away into the world of the most prominent film critic of his time or any other. All the highlights are there, the stories you want to hear about the glitterati and the celebrities, the film festivals and the films, but those tales – as wonderfully told as they are – are but a small fraction of the book’s intrigue.

Its heart and soul exist in Ebert’s reflections on his youth, particularly regarding his mother, his friends and their wild times in the Chicago newspaper scene of the late 1960s and ’70s, and most of all Chaz, his wife, the love of his life, and the person he credits with helping him hang onto this life as long as he did, in more ways than one.

He writes in chapter 19 “All By Myself Alone”:

Roger and Chaz Ebert

I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.

More than anything else, Ebert’s memoir is an opportunity to sit on the deck with one of the great communicators of his time and regard the waves of one of the great lives of the 20th and 21st centuries. One wishes perhaps there had been just one more high tide, one more swell on the seemingly endless ocean of words and ideas he left us.

It is like the exchange between Steve Carell’s and Keira Knightley’s characters as they face down the possibility of oblivion at the end of Lorena Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. She says: “It isn’t enough time.” He replies: “It never would have been.” And isn’t that always the case? When we lose a loved one or a hero, we cry over the life lost, yes, but more, I believe, we cry over the life not yet lived. We wish for one more smile, one more joke, one more kind word, and while we recognize it could never be enough, well, at least we would have had one more.

I do not only think of Ebert when I sit in the dark of the cinema, though I always think of him when I am there. Rather, I think of him also when I read the news, when I look out on the world and wonder what the hell has happened. As cited before in this space, Ebert was the person who said movies are “like a machine that generates empathy.” I would argue Ebert’s writing functions in much the same way because throughout his life, particularly on his blog but in all his work, he focused on the experiences of others, on their lives, on their hopes, dreams, and fears.

He understood not one among us is better than any other, and he pulled no punches in calling out the hypocrisy and absurdity of believing any differently. Sometimes I am thankful he did not live to see the ugly turn this world and this country in particular have taken. But at other times, I wish we had just one more piece from him, one more reflection, one more word about the state of things. Maybe it would not change the state of things, but at least we would have one more wave to ride gently across the sea before we came crashing down again on the reality of the shore.

Next month: Young Orson, by Patrick McGilligan

New movie review: 99 Homes

Andrew Garfield stars in writer-director Ramin Bahrani's masterpiece 99 Homes.

If the soul exists, it must have no price. If the soul exists, it must be an essential part of a person. If the soul exists, it must be the most valuable thing one can possess. That is – if the soul exists. The way we often speak of it, the soul is intangible, and being such, we do not have a lot of use for it in our daily lives. Our families cannot eat it, take shelter in it, or survive off it, so its value seems rather negligible against the raw realities of life.

Speaking in a strictly areligious sense, the devil knows this. Maybe the devil is your boss, asking you to sacrifice a part of yourself for the company. Maybe the devil is your spouse, asking you to sacrifice a part of yourself for your family. Maybe the devil is you, and you sacrifice a small part of yourself every time you go against your better judgment or your reason or your ethics. These small trades for money, love, or comfort cost us little on the surface, but if the soul exists and makes you who you are, then every piece you give up is another piece of yourself lost.

In the magnificent legal thriller 99 Homes, from writer-director Ramin Bahrani, Andrew Garfield plays a man who makes a Faustian bargain with the devil he knows, and we stare on breathlessly as he loses himself piece by piece. The suspense comes from watching and wondering how long this man will allow himself to fall apart before he realizes what he has done and tries to put everything back together. It is a shattering, heart-rending experience, and it is one of the best films of the year.

Garfield plays Dennis Nash, who struggles to provide for his mother (Laura Dern) and young son (Noah Lomax). When they can no longer afford to pay the mortgage, they are evicted from their longtime family home and forced to live in a hotel, where many other families have suffered the same fate. Real estate operator Rick Carver, played by Michael Shannon, is in charge of the eviction. Carver makes his money evicting people from their homes and exploiting government and banking loopholes in the wake of the housing market crash.

Nash earns what little money he can working odds-and-ends construction jobs until Carver offers him a deal. Carver will buy the Nash family home if Nash agrees to work for him to pay off the debt. Nash signs off on the deal, and that is how easy it is to make a pact with the devil. For the rest of the film, Nash will descend further and further into the morass and compromise more and more of what he stands for with every transaction until he resembles Carver more than himself.

Michael Shannon in 99 Homes.

Garfield and Shannon are excellent as two men with competing loyalties whose interests are briefly aligned. Shannon turns in the kind of work befitting one of the best actors of his generation. He is menacing and pragmatic but just vulnerable enough to suggest how Nash could fall into Carver’s trap. He may be playing the devil, but Shannon’s performance shows us how even the devil cannot do his job without being stained by it.

The true revelation, however, is Garfield, who was so good in 2010’s The Social Network but has been lost down the rabbit hole of superhero movies for the last five years. In fact, 99 Homes is his first non-The Amazing Spider-man movie since The Social Network, and it is a great relief to see Garfield once again with a tremendous role to play. As Nash, he is resolute and determined but beaten down by a system that has no regard for him or his family. Garfield is just 32 years old, but he slides easily into the role of weary family man. His youth works for the film thematically as well and suggests problems of poverty and debt will affect generations to come.

Speaking of youth, there is the film’s co-writer and director. Bahrani is 40 years old and has made six feature films. In 2005, Man Push Cart launched him into the critical consciousness, and after his superb 2009 feature Goodbye Solo, no less than Roger Ebert called him unequivocally “the new great American director.” Bahrani even shows up in Steve James’ Ebert documentary Life Itself, and Ebert gifts him a puzzle once owned by Marilyn Monroe. Though Ebert long championed Bahrani’s work, the puzzle felt like a passing of the torch. Here, Bahrani returns the favor by dedicating his masterpiece to Ebert.

And a masterpiece, it is. The American-born son of Iranian immigrants, Bahrani has specialized in films about the struggle to achieve the American Dream. For the first time though, he turns his focus in 99 Homes to the difficulty in maintaining that dream. This is a film about mostly good people whose lives are destroyed by greed and corruption. Nash is but one of many people who got the home they always dreamed of but could not afford to keep it. The banks preyed on these people from the beginning, and what we are watching as Carver evicts them is the final kill.

Bahrani shows us row after row of homes in the Orlando, Fla., suburbs where the film takes place. Each house represents a family, and many are abandoned. They are not empty because of people like Carver. Carver is an opportunist, but he serves a higher master – the banks, those institutions we were told are too big to fail. Implicit in that oft-trotted-out maxim is the little-discussed fact that Nash and you and I are not too big to fail. In fact, we are too small to matter.

This is the kind of film that should make us angry about the world in which we live. Hopefully, none of us will endure the pain and heartbreak of losing our homes, but statistically, some of us will. Some of us have, and our options are few. Around the midpoint of the film, Carver tells Nash, “America was built by bailing out the winners.” Nash has seen losing and does not want to see it again. He takes Carver’s deal because it is the only one on the table. No other help is on its way. For his son, his mother, and his own dignity, he trades away a part of himself, but if the soul exists, what good to his family is a man without one?

See it? Yes.

Ha! Judd Apatow and Sick in the Head

Writer-producer-director Judd Apatow's book Sick in the Head is an essential read.

When you’re always picked last, you always get the worst position, like right field in baseball. Then, since you are always in the worst position, the ball never comes your way, so you never get a chance to show anyone that you are, in fact, good at this sport. But the truth is, you are not good at this sport because you are never involved in a play, because you are always in the worst position. When it is time to step up to bat, you feel so much pressure to do something incredible, like hit a home run, that you usually whiff. If you somehow manage to get a hit, your accomplishment is ignored by your peers, who chalk it up to luck … Then the kid who is picked last never gets a girl to like him, because he has been labeled a loser. Therefore, what else is there to do except decide that everyone else is the loser and you are the cool one?

– Judd Apatow, Sick in the Head, “Introduction: Why Comedy?”

I have a short list of celebrity idols – the people on whose careers I wish to model my own, whose work ethic I admire, and whose approach to life and philosophy either lines up with mine or more likely has directly informed mine. Roger Ebert, Woody Allen, Sam Raimi, Albert Brooks, Dan Harmon. In ways both large and small, these people have made me the person I am and give me targets for the person I want to be.

Recently, another prominent figure has cropped up whose views on work and life I find intoxicating. Much to my surprise, he comes from the world of comedy: Judd Apatow. Now, I enjoy comedies (see above: Allen, Brooks, Harmon), but it is not really what I do. I am drawn to the dark, the serious, and the macabre, but seen in that light, maybe it is not so surprising. The old cliché often seems true: There are few people darker or angrier than comedians.

Apatow discusses this topic at length in his recent collection of interviews with comedians, Sick in the Head. He is fascinated by what drives comedians to do what they do and how a few performers – notably, Jerry Seinfeld – pull off the trick of being funny and being happy. It is among the many themes running through the book, a New York Times bestseller released earlier this year.

My copy of Sick in the Head, signed by Apatow.

The premise of the book is simply that Apatow has spent his life in comedy and talking to comedians about their craft. At its most basic, Sick in the Head is a collection of this accumulated knowledge related through interviews with famous comedians at various points in their careers. However, beneath the surface, it is much more than that. It is a guide for overcoming fears and anxieties, for putting our troubled pasts behind us, and for carving out a better future for us and ours.

My single biggest takeaway from the book – which is as revealing about Apatow as it is about his interview subjects – is, to paraphrase Nike, just to do it. We all have problems. We all have concerns. We all have excuses. In the end, none of that matters. There is either action or inaction. Admittedly, this is the kind of moral shared elsewhere countless times, but for me, to hear it articulated by people I admire so much while learning of their personal struggles, well, it is invaluable.

Fellow writers will attest to this: Writing often is easy; sitting down to write is one of the hardest things in the world. Sick in the Head inspires me to write. It makes me want to sit down and fill blank page after blank page with ideas, and I cannot convey how empowering it is simply to have the will to write.

I recently returned from Hollywood, where I was in town for three days to pitch movie ideas to studios, agents, and managers, which is a draining and dispiriting process even when it goes well. I packed only the essentials – a change of clothes, some toiletries, and an autographed copy of Sick in the Head. I read it the whole flight there and the whole flight back. I read it in my hotel room. I read it at the bar. There is something essential in those pages, something that got me through times when I felt bad or exhausted or like packing it in and going home.

I don’t know that I can ask for more from a book than the will to carry on. I don’t know that I can ask for more from anything. So, thanks, Judd Apatow, and thanks to everybody who inspires anybody to do better.

My favorite writer: Two years without Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert died April 4, 2013.

Sometimes, I feel a little silly telling people that my favorite writer was a film critic. Not Charles Dickens or Henry David Thoreau or Richard Yates – though they are all great – but Chicago movie writer Roger Ebert. Of course, those of us who read Ebert’s work every week and hung on his every word know that he was much more than a film critic. He was a life critic, someone who could see the logic and the flaw in any argument and always sought to be on the side of right, whatever that was.

He died two years ago today, and each day since, it has been difficult not to feel that I am missing something valuable from my life. His longtime colleague and friend Richard Roeper spoke for all of us last year on the first anniversary of Ebert’s death when he said: “What would Roger say? What would Roger write? What would Roger’s take be? Those thoughts cross my mind nearly every time I exit a screening.”

No one can speak for Ebert. I certainly cannot, but there are a few things I am sure of. He would have loved 12 Years a Slave. As a fan of Michael Apted’s fabulous Seven Up series, he would have been floored by Boyhood. He would be just as excited as the rest of us to see Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating passion project Silence finally make it to screens this year. I feel certain of these things, but damn, I wish he were around to write about them.

His work expanded on the Internet from film reviews to blog posts and other columns, and so did the scope of his interests. As much as I loved his reviews and his television show – At the Movies was appointment viewing when I was in high school – I lived for his columns on spirituality, gun violence, and American culture at large. Growing up, I never wanted to be anything other than a writer, and Ebert’s columns showed me all the different things being a writer could mean. It means being observant, honest, optimistic, and most of all compassionate.

Ebert is not my favorite writer because I think he is the best, although I would put his simple, elegant prose alongside any of the giants of English literature. No, he is my favorite because he is the one who makes me love what I do and makes me want to keep doing it. There is nothing in this life I am more suited to than writing, and it was Ebert whose work convinced me this pursuit could be more than words on a page. He showed me this could be important and valuable, and I don’t think we can ask too much more of our heroes.

I have told my Roger Ebert story before. You can read it in my review of director Steve James’ great documentary on Ebert, Life Itself, which is on Netflix Instantwatch now, by the way. So, rather than retell that, I thought I would share some of his work that influenced me most and most changed the way I think about movies and about life. Click on any of the below links to go and read the piece.

A Leave of Presence

The Great Movies: La Dolce Vita

O, Synecdoche, My Synecdoche!

In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye

Ending Up in a Kind of Soundlessly Spinning Ethereal Void As We All Must

How I Believe in God

Gatsby Without Greatness

Thank you, Roger, for all of it. I only wish there were more, but I guess the same could be said about this whole crazy life of ours.