It’s that time of year again! Every December, I roll out a list of the best Crime Movies of the Year. This is my favorite list to make, because I love movies so much. It’s not easy… but someone has to do it.
This year wasn’t last year in terms of movies, I’ll be honest. I have no idea what the Oscars are going to look like this year. But there were some very, very good crime movies in the mix. If the Edgar Awards still had their film category, there might be some stiff competition, this awards cycle. That’s all I’m saying.
Anyway, to the movies:
Strange Darling
I absolutely loved Strange Darling, JT Mollner’s wild and weird serial killer movie, which was shot all on 35 mm film by the actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. And man, he’s a good DP. Strange Darling is as much as a visual treat as it is a narrative extravaganza, a fully controlled and impressive story told in an innovative way. It stars a superb Willa Fitzgerald as a young woman (simply called “the lady”) and an impressive Kyle Gallner (simply called “the demon”) and it drops us in the middle of their night, a night that has started as a one night stand and has twisted into a terrifying cat-and-mouse chase puppeted by a serial killer. The shot that plays during the opening credits, of Fitzgerald’s character running desperately across a green field in bright red scrubs, her ear having been blasted off by a shotgun, is one of the most arresting things I’ve seen at the movies in a while. And the movie only gets more, well, arresting from there.
Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s deft, impressive adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel about a sinister, segregated detention camp for boys in the 1950s, is a bracing and commanding achievement—in its handling of narrative but also through its particularly innovative camera use. It is heavy with subjective shots, in ways that tease intimacy but really hold the audience at a distance until the film’s charged, unforgettable climax and denouement. I can’t remember being so riveted in sickly agony and sheer amazement by a film in such a long time. Truly, I’ve never seen a film like this before. You must see it. You must.
Hit Man
Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater and co-written by Linklater and Glen Powell, isn’t really about a hit man. It’s about the myth of the hit man, or at least “the hitman-for-hire.” Powell plays Gary Johnson, a dorky philosophy professor who moonlights doing surveillance for the local police department. But one day, he finds himself out of the van and part of a sting; he’s a plant, pretending to be a hit man for a guy who has tried to hire one. His job is simply to seem legit enough that the suspect ends up incriminating himself. But, it turns out, Gary’s really, really good at pretending to be a killer. And things spin out of control from there. I liked the first act the most (with its explorations of performance and identity), but then it becomes a charming, mid-budget studio rom-com of sorts, and I enjoyed that too.
Anora
Sean Baker is back!!! The scrappy, low-budget director of The Florida Project and Tangerine has made his best film yet: a twisted, jubilant crimey Cinderella story about a stripper (Mikey Madison) who marries the young, handsome son of a Russian oligarch. And when his family is not happy about his new life decision and sends agents to force them to annul the marriage, he goes on the run. Baker is known for his stories about working-class strivers and those who live in the shadows of preposterous wealth and tawdry glamour, and Anora is his most affecting undertaking yet: part effervescent rom-com, part bleak crime story, part class-conscious melodrama.
Conclave
Thank GOD for Conclave, a simmering whodunnit set in the Vatican. If that sentence hasn’t sold you, I don’t know what will… but read on, my child. In Conclave, Ralph Fiennes plays Dean-Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Vatican official charged with organizing a papal conclave to elect a new pope, following the death of the previous one. But, once all the cardinals have been sequestered together and political schmoozing begins in earnest, Cardinal Lawrence finds himself not only in charge of the proceedings, but also finding out what really happened to the previous pope, whose death seems to have been a bit suspicious. So, yes, Conclave is a detective story. But Cardinal Lawrence ain’t no Father Brown. This is a tense, staid film… and more than make Lawrence a sleuth, wisely, in all ways, the film makes the WHOLE THING a mystery. I’ll explain. This is a film about a man who, in his vocation to and service of the Church, has lived for a long time accepting the senses of mystery in his life, but who suddenly finds that everything around him is very, very mysterious: the political motivations of his colleagues, the secret ambitions of his friends, and even the Church’s ability to carry out the work of God. In a world of whispers and gossip and secrets and rumors and pleas and deals, Cardinal Lawrence becomes the only man asking questions.
The Fall Guy
I took my grandmother to see The Fall Guy and her review of it was simply the phrase “it was entertainment!” This is true! The Fall Guy is a high-octane love letter to stuntmen and stunt coordinators and action movie technicians, and it’s fun, to boot! Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers (this is, after all, an adaptation of the Lee Majors TV show of the same name), a formerly-injured stuntman who comes back to work on the film set of the woman he loves whom he once jilted (Emily Blunt) to give her a hand, not only with the stunts, but also with a huge behind-the-scenes problem: the lead actor, whom Colt doubles for, has gone missing. Lights, camera, action!
Juror #2
Your Honor, I’m thrilled to report that Clint Eastwood has still got it. In Juror #2, a fascinating, tense legal thriller that asks what exactly we owe to each other, a juror in a high profile murder case realizes that he has a connection to the events at hand… and struggles with what that means for himself and the man on the stand. In its erecting a legal proscenium to interrogate the importance of “doing the right thing,” it’s Twelve Angry Men for our fraught modern era.
Thelma
Thelma!!! What a JOY Thelma is! In Josh Margolin’s new film, June Squibb plays an active nonagenarian who falls for a “hello grandma” phone scam and sends $10,000 in the mail because she is tricked into thinking her beloved young grandson (Fred Hechinger) is in trouble. He’s not, and when she learns this, she feels sheepish… so she decides to go track down the scammer, herself, and get her money back. This film also features Richard Roundtree in his final role, and he delivers a remarkable performance. A wonderful, wonderful time.
The Killer
John Woo is back, doing John Woo! Yes, Woo remade his film The Killer from 1989. Yes, The Killer, the remarkable, un-remake-able classic Chow Yun-fat/Danny Lee vehicle. But Woo doesn’t remake The Killer! Not exactly. He just makes it again, the way someone would revive a play: a new cast, a new vision, but the same foundation. This time, Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy are the assassin and cop playing cat-and-mouse, and the results… are fun. They’re fun!
Trap
Whatever, I loved Trap. I know it’s contentious!!! It isn’t perfect. I know that. There are the kind of pitfalls that always seem to pop up in M. Night Shyamalan’s movies (a tendency to over-explain some things… some strange or stilted dialogue… plot elements buckling under the ostensible pressure to lead to a satisfying “twist”), but I find these things less “pitfalls” than funny markers of style. Shyamalan is an auteur in the truest sense of the word, and, in an era of endless sequels and unwanted franchises, I find it a breath of fresh air that he always seems able to turn out a new, original idea. And Trap, which is a movie about a serial killer who realizes that the FBI are closing in on him while he takes his tween daughter to a Taylor Swift-style pop concert, is not only a delightful and original premise, but it is also executed with such love and care that it feels almost impossible not to enjoy.
First and foremost, it is a father-daughter movie! Our protagonist, the slick murderer Cooper (Josh Hartnett), adores his young daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), and is so excited to be able to be with her to enjoy her favorite artist, the pop singer Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). His clear love for her and his family plays out nicely against his increasing need for self-preservation; as the walls begin to close in, he clings tight to his daughter, and it’s clear that for maybe the first time, he’s beginning to worry if this will be a day his daughter won’t forget not for its specialness, but its potential to ruin her life. And second, Shyamalan’s own daughter Saleka, herself a singer-songwriter and musician, plays such a large part in this film, that it is clear that Trap is a family-affair, behind the scenes just as much as in front of the camera. I find it incredibly charming that, at the start of Shyamalan’s career, he was marketed as an extremely mysterious figure with a dark imagination, and now, maybe years later, he is perhaps most famous for seeming to be a very good dad?
