Adam's Holiday Movie Recommendations

Adam's Notes for December 5, 2024

The holidays are upon us. Whether you celebrate or not, I hope you’ll have some time to get away from the rush of daily life, to take a few moments to just chill out for a bit and recharge for the year ahead. And if you need something good to watch during your downtime, don’t sweat it, I’ve got you covered.

I don’t really consider myself a movie guy, but I do watch movies and I try to avoid the Marvel slop that feels like it’s being forced down our throats. Below I’ve compiled a list of everything I watched this year, arranged very roughly from my most favourite to least favourite. There’s a lot here, and so I hope you’ll find something worth watching over the holidays—let me know if you do.

Oh, and yes, most of my comments are taken from my letterboxd account, only slightly edited, because I’m taking it easy, too.

Adam’s holiday movie recommendations:

Chimes at Midnight (1965). Safe to say I’m going to be thinking about this for the rest of my life.

La Chimera (2023). Absolutely magnificent, a film that immediately earned it’s place on my list of favourites. A down-and-out British archaeologist/young widower involved with a group of Italian tombaroli, or tomb raiders. Normally archaeology is portrayed as sort of glamorous, and while there’s the slightest hint of that here, it’s mostly the opposite. These guys are basically all homeless, scamming landowners and peasants alike, and just trying to stay one step ahead of the cops. Also neat that they’re after Etruscan artifacts instead of Roman stuff.

Beasts (2022). I wrote about this in a previous newsletter.

A Ciambra (2017). Very stressful film. About a Romani kid in Italy. He basically just goes around stealing stuff until he messes with the wrong people and his family kicks him out of the house. But then it turns out all the Romani actors were were played by this kid's real family, more or less playing themselves? Insane film. It’s part of a trilogy, and it’s sequel A Chiara is really good too, about the daughter of a low level mafia family coming to terms with what her father does—basically that one episode of The Sopranos where Tony takes Meadow to look at colleges. I haven’t yet seen the first film in the trilogy, Mediterranea, which is about a refugee trying to make it to Europe.

My Brilliant Friend (season 4) (2024). The HBO series based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. I avoided the books for a long time, then someone told me it’s a mafia story from the pov of the victims, at which point I was all in. I’d die for Lenu. I’m serious.

Transit (2018). Brilliant film, and more timely than ever. Based on Anna Seghers's 1944 novel of the same name, about political refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany, except this is set in the present day except it’s still about Nazis. Even watching it as recently as 2018 this felt a bit fantastic and distant, but watching it now I realized if you tell yourself the Germans are hunting them because they used the P-word then it reads as just 100% contemporary. Petzold is one of my all time favourite directors, and I think this one is only just behind his latest film, Afire. Trailer.

The Delinquents (2023). Really great heist film that knows how to take its time and just chill out, and it ends up becoming so much more. Also a great pastoral film full of beautiful landscape imagery, and the stuff in Buenos Aires looks beautiful too. It has a brief, blink-and-you'll-miss-it Marvel Comics joke that's better than anything in the Marvel movies. It's a hangout movie about the tragedy of not being able to hang out. Three hours long with an intermission in the middle but worth every second.

Scavengers Reign (2023). This is what science fiction is supposed to be. Really imaginative alien biologies, each with their own logics but refusing to neatly spell things out. No “they can fly now” stuff.

Line of Duty (2012—2021). British police procedural about a trio of cops who investigate dirty cops—or “bent coppers,” as the gaffer likes to say approximately every five seconds. It’s crazy because it’s great as a whodunnit (or whydunnit, I guess), but it also has a lot of worldbuilding that should feel out of place in a cop show but ends up working. Adrian Dunbar is great as Ted Hastings aka the gaffer, who has a sort of earnest dedication to his job that reminds me a lot of Adam West’s Batman, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this show is naive. There’s a ton of intense interrogation scenes, and it does a good job of looking at how cutting corners leads to real corruption.

Criminal Record (2024). Peter Capaldi clashes with a rookie cop over an old case. Great series about racism in policing that explores its issues but not in that preachy way that you get with a lot of shows now.

Non-Fiction (2018). A French novelist and his French publisher cheat on their French wives and worry about the future of French publishing. Directed by Olivier “Essayist” Assayas and starring Vincent Macaigne, who is sort of a nebbish Bob Odenkirk. Rewatched this recently and the Star Wars/Haneke/Holocaust movie blowjob mixup still cracked me up. Macaigne trying to explain what Haneke's movie is about and a woman in the audience just buries her face in her hands. They should do an American remake of this but have YA be the threat that's going to ruin literature. Orders of magnitude more worrying than ebooks, certainly.

Barton Fink (1991). I’m more than a little late to the Coen brothers. All of their movies have been great, but I’m not really in a rush to watch more than one or two a year. I wouldn’t put this one with their best. If you don’t agree that’s fine, let’s just keep going.

Dune 2 (2024). ᑐᑌᑎᕮ.

Thief (1981). Still an absolute beaut of a film. Showed this to Dad and he got it.

The Killing (1956). Early Kubrick film about a robbery at a racetrack. Great ending.

Hundreds of Beavers (2022). One of the best action movies I’ve seen in years. Buster Keaton would be proud.

Ripley (2024). Funnily enough this is my first encounter with the Ripleyverse. I’ll check out the novels, obviously, but with of the other movies are worth watching? Sound off in the comments.

Teacher’s Lounge (2024) and The Night of (2016) and Les Sauvages (2019). I reviewed these briefly in a previous edition of this newsletter. The Night of rules, Teacher’s Lounge is great, but skip Les Sauvages.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). It's no Fury Road, but then, what is? I'm a sucker for this exact sort of world building, something very Merovingian about it all. Loved how extras crashed or died in seemingly every action shot. Wonderful.

Mars Express (2023). Very cool animated film with a lot of neat ideas. Loved the cellphone with gossamer insect wings that fluttered to its owner's ear, and the immobilizing putty that's replaced car air bags, and the hotwheels track space launches. But really the main technological advance here is, "what if the internet of things was even just a little bit real." A couple of little plot points bugged me (how did the cops miss the body if the protagonist and her robot could both smell it? What's really motivating the pair of private detectives to stay on the case with no payday?), but who cares, that's not the point. The point is to see weird looking robots with crazy locomotion, and we've got plenty of that. Once in a while some of the background animation is a bit too cgi smooth, but on the other hand I really liked the little details of the familiar tile patterns and drop ceilings. Mundane Mars really made the more fantastic elements pop. Between this, Scavenger’s Reign, and The Spine of Night, I kind of wonder if there isn’t a little animation renaissance underway.

Miller’s Crossing (1990). The Coen brothers are really the only people I trust to make this time period interesting. I can't explain it, but there's something really offputting to me about pre-war settings. Too many bad Cancon productions, I guess. Maybe because the recent past is very rarely portrayed as grimy, which feels counter to how it must have been. You get these big sets and costumes and model Ts where everything is just a little too clean, a little too clearly borrowed from collectors. Drives me up the wall. It's even in this, although not as bad as other films, and anyway the plot is so gripping that you can ignore it.

Decameron (1971). The Pasolini version. Really enjoyed this style of medievalism, where it’s all just peasants who can do what they want with their time but they all end up bumping up against each other. Sorry I know that doesn’t make sense. The Decameron is maybe not a great choice of subject matter because the thing with Italian novellas is that they’re all a little too one note. Just-so stories with a lot of wind up and the punchline is either so old it hardly registers as a joke, or else it’s horny nonsense. Although I guess the horny nonsense was revolutionary when this was being filmed. Still, loved all the weird buildings in Naples and the scaffolding in the church and the junglelike vineyard where they kill the kid.

Presumed Innocent (2024). Love a good look at sleazy lawyers. Incredibly well done twist ending.

L.627 (1992). Really grimy early 90s cop movie. He's dedicated to the job but he sees that the drug war is a losing proposition. Almost but doesn't quite suffer any cognitive dissonance from this—mostly it’s just an excuse to let the cops by racist and sexist. All the main cop’s co-workers are mostly just lazy and trying to have fun, and they’re great. Love seeing all the little ways the cops don't do their jobs: throwing little potlucks in the makeshift basement bar they built, playing Risk all day in the portable, tricking each other into getting soaked by the prisoners in the cell with a window above the station’s main entrance. Fun too seeing the strange bureaucracy and the last vestige of the pre-digital workspace: they have to work on manual typewriter, not electric, because of the frequent power strikes at power plants, lol), bargaining with functionaries and mechanics to get your van fixed. I thought there was going to be a switcheroo with the wedding tape and the undercover tape, but i guess not. Trailer.

Rap World (2024). Download a copy of this and tuck it away so you’ll have something to show your grandkids when they ask you what life was like in 2009.

Say Nothing (2024). Nuanced take on the IRA, juxtaposing the romance and thrill of guerrilla warfare with the tragedy and hard truths. But also maybe a little too nuanced, because I mean come on we know who the good guys were in that one and it wasn’t the English. Has this weird way of celebrating the IRA for being cool, but then condemning them for violence, but then also condemning Gerry Adams for working toward an end to the violence. This Counterpunch article about the book is good, as is this old War Nerd article about the IRA’s strategy.

True Detective, Season 4 (2024). My first thought was that the new True Detective is so bad that the onus is now on Jodie Foster to impress us. Then I remembered every season has a fair amount of stuff that doesn’t quite work. Also, I’ve said this before, but the fact that a prestige American production—maybe one of the most talked about shows on tv—used Iceland to stand in for Alaska really feels like a sign of the end of American dominance.

Armoured Car Robbery (1950). The ending is a mix of the ending from Heat, Kubrick's The Killing, and that one episode of The Wire where Kima gets shot. Also they pronounce burlesque the way you pronounce barbecue, or at least that's how the rookie cop says it. “Bur-lee-cue.” Shoutout to Sam Wiebe for recommending this in one of his newsletters. And The Killing, too, I think.

Monsieur Spade (2024). What’s in a name? I keep going back and forth on this. It was fun to watch, but did it need to be Sam Spade? They get the voice of the character down but it’s set in France, after the war, which is lightyears away from Hammett’s San Francisco, and the plot becomes more of a spy thing than a good detective noir. All I can think of is that if it wasn’t Sam Spade you’d have to explain why he acts like that. Or if it wasn’t Sam Spade, you couldn’t have him act like that, because it wouldn’t feel like a noir it would feel like one of those awful pastiches from the 80s, where they get all the superficial details right but everything is too bright and stuffy and for some reason the actors are all eighty years old.

Bastarden (The Promised Land) (2023). A weird film. Like a Danish western, but as much about the brutality of farming the Jutland peninsula as it is about the violence of settling land. When they boiled that guy alive I figured okay, yeah, this is going to be about the progress of triumph, bougie capitalism taking down an aristo with the ultimate weapon: the potato. But no, it manages to complicate that quite a bit. Not sure what to make of the racial politics. There's no action but there's some crazy violence. Sentimental without being too corny. Some great landscape photography. Mads Mikkelsen as great as ever. Trailer.

Croupier (1998). Clive Owen as a croupier in a seedy British casino. Maybe half the movie (anything directly about gambling) is pretty cool, but then so much of the rest is cringe, usually from trying so hard to be cool. Odd.

Sexy Beast (2000). British gangster film that’s more about trying to convince a guy to do a heist than it is about the heist itself. Not even a very late 90s/early aughts rabbit man can drag this down. I tried to watch the recent miniseries remake of this, too, but it was so awful I couldn’t finish it. Trailer.

American Fiction (2023). Wish I could be gunned down while accepting a literary award.

Reign of Fire (2002). McConaughey and Bale in an acting competition to see who can take this very silly assignment more seriously. Loved the Dying Earth vibes. Loved the sets, a lot of very lovely wreckage and half-constructed things, and of course the fire extinguishers on the castle wall are a great touch. CGI is passable. It has a bit of trouble passing from 90s blockbuster to the slicker movies of the aughts. The attempts at high emotion are a bit insulting after a while, considering this is a movie about a dragon.

House the Dragon S02 (2024). Not as into HoD as other people are. It’s fine. I want stuff like this but not this. Fantasy politicking is cool, but just like in Succession and Game of Thrones, it eventually runs out of other ideas until it’s nothing but politicking. You know the formula: people plotting openly or scheming in secret and then a few brief scenes where they roll the dice and then back to plotting. Ultimately, I don’t think this has the juice. I mean, it’s a show inspired by medieval weirdness but with all the historical limits removed, so it really shouldn’t have so many scenes set around a fucking conference table. Also the candle placements used to really bug me but I’ve managed to force myself to just roll with that aspect of it.

The Night of the Twelfth (2022). The sort of procedural where a guy can get away with saying, “There’s something wrong between men and women.” Offers everything you need from a prestige procedural: an economically depressed town in an otherwise beautiful location, cops who are obviously losers but at least one guy who has the determination to take this thing seriously, investigations that let you look ever so slightly at something deeper in the suspects, touching on important issues but (mostly) avoiding platitudes. Trailer.

Miss Osaka (2021). A naïve Norwegian girl has a brief-but-intense friendship with a more experienced Japanese tourist. The tourist dies and the Norwegian girl assumes her friend’s identity, moving to Japan and taking over her friend’s apartment and job at a hostess club. Complications ensue. Worth sticking through the Norwegian section for the stuff in Japan. The boyfriend getting locked up added a needed dose of humour.

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013). A slow, quiet Romanian film that’s mostly a study in body language. A director and his lead actress painstakingly rehearse a scene and embark on an affair. I know that sounds clichéd but it’s really a parody of that kind of film, I think. The stuff about Chinese food really dragged this down. Otherwise an interesting film about making films.

Arthur Rambo (2021). Film exploring le culturé de cancel, but in a more thoughtful way than that sounds. You're rooting for him but it’s still clunky at times

A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010). A somewhat good film. Stellan Skarsgård as a guy fresh out of jail, struggling to keep his dignity and get by in the modern world, while his old mob boss wants him to go back to murder. A bit too quirky for me, would’ve liked to see the material played straight.

Boom Boom (1936). John Dolan aka the War Nerd posted this on facebook and said it's like an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. As ever, he's dead on. The ending in particular, with the enemies bound in barbed wire. Loved seeing Porky Pig fatly try to army crawl through a trench, too.

Red Soil (2020). Good environmental film. Nour loses her job at the hospital and her father gets her a job at the factory where he's head of the union and a member of the Green Party––but the fight's gone out of him, this is clearly a Frank Sobotka situation, where he's just trying to hold on to what little is left. Nour hooking up with a journalist and a small network of likeminded individuals, her father's faceturn, the company being totally blindsided––the second half all felt a bit rushed. Still, it's a good look at all the complications that keep us from fighting for what's right. Oh, and setting the mining company's headquarters in Canada was just chef's kiss perfect.

The Endless Trench (2019). Lacked the revolutionary spirit I would've liked to see, but I'm desperate for Spanish Civil War content so I'll take whatever I can get. Starts off with a fun action sequence that makes you think it’s gonna be a thriller, then it slows down as the guy is stuck in his hole for days, weeks, months, there’s no end in sight. It starts to feel ridiculous because of how fast the time is passing, then you realize dozens or even hundreds of men must've lived this way, the only way to survive in Franco’s brutal regime, and then you remember Franco was in power until the 70s... Wild.

The Second Act (2024). Compellingly strange at first, but in a way that draws you in, making you ask what’s going on here. The reveal is both clever and funny, but ultimately the social commentary the movie offers isn't particularly deep—but then it wouldn't be, given the source, would it? It's amusing, but not anything special.

By the way, they built an impressively long dolly for this film, you see it at the end. That’s the star of the movie.

Curb Your Enthusiasm, season 12 (2024). Meh.

Tokyo Vice, season 2 (2024). Watched maybe 2-3 episodes, then quit. Loved the book, fascinating premise, but Ansel Elgorptq is a terrible actor, and that’s putting aside the sex assault allegations. Somehow he has the worst English on the show, which is really saying something when you consider he’s a white American and the vast majority of the cast consists of Japanese actors who are either ESL or literally only learned their lines for the scenes.

Napoleon (2023). This was on in another room while I was trying to compose an email. I took breaks to look at the cooler battle scenes, so it counts. The email was stressing me out, I kept wondering if it was my Austerlitz or Waterloo.

Decameron (2024). The recent Netflix series. Gave up after one episode. Go watch the Pasolini version or Aubrey Plaza in The Little Hours. That’s the future of the Renaissance.

Il capitale umano (2013). Oh yeah I'll just hand over all my money to an Italian banker and let him invest it, what could go wrong? An Italian film based on an American novel, which isn’t something you see everyday.

Human Capital (2019). Oh yeah I'll just hand over all my money to Peter Sarsgaard and let him invest it, what could go wrong? An American film based on an Italian film based on an American novel, which isn’t something you see everyday.

Nobody from Nowhere (2014). This one felt weirdly Breaking Bad-coded (middle aged, downwardly mobile man embarks on a criminal venture for reasons he cannot articulate to himself), but became hard to take seriously the minute I realized Matthieu Kassovitz was going to be playing multiple roles under heavy makeup. It's really a farce laundering itself as a thriller (again, kind of like Breaking Bad). Most of the movie he's impersonating a musician who can no longer perform, establishing a relationship with the son that the musician has never acknowledged. The impersonator has no emotional intelligence, so after citing the musician's remarks (taken from televised interviews) proves disastrous, he goes to the last Blockbuster in Paris, asks for a movie about a father reconnecting with a son, and memorizes and recites the Marlon Brando stuff from Superman. It's pretty funny.

Only the Animals (2019). Watched this hoping it would be more of a procedural a la The Night of the Twelfth by the same guy, but this is more of an aughts-style everything-is-connected sort of thing, and a comedy of errors. Your appreciation will come down to whether you can accept all the coincidences. There are some good parts, and I liked seeing the Ivory Coast scammers and the French farmers, but they left the lesbian girl's storyline unfinished. The wife, too, for that matter, and the loner really just kills himself to take himself out of the story.

Hacks (2021–2024). Watched way too many episodes of this show over the course of a long weekend, at the end of which I asked myself what the fuck was I doing. It’s fine but it’s not really my cup of tea. I know the red-headed comedian is supposed to be shallow but she comes off as too shallow.

House of Tolerance (2011) and The Beast (2023). Starting to think Bonello’s excellent Nocturama was a one-off.

The Line (2022). An evil film that should not exist. Was trying to figure out why I hated this Swiss film so much and realized that really it’s taking all its cues from American indie films of the aughts, films that took real problems and played them not even for laughs but for quirkiness points because they don’t have the guts to say anything. Still, I liked the opening scene of very operatic, slow motion domestic violence as the daughter with anger issues attacks the self-absorbed mother. Trailer.

For more Adam movie posts, check out this thread.

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