As the year winds down, here are my favourite discoveries of 2024.
Nine Queens (2000) No discovery filled me with as much exhilaration this year as Nine Queens. Fabian Bielinsky’s tale of con artistry and philately is a dazzling piece of cinematic legerdemain and best enjoyed knowing as little about it before viewing as possible. Suffice to say that it’s considered a classic in its native Argentina (how could it be otherwise?) and I went hunting for a DVD to add to my collection as soon as the end credits finished rolling.
Repeat Performance (1947) In the aftermath of a murder on New Year’s Eve, actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) wishes she could live the past year over again. Her wish is granted—but fate has a wicked sense of humour. Repeat Performance is a marvel, a sui generis hybrid of film noir and fantasy which fully commits to its premise and develops it into something compelling. Leslie is a winning heroine, but the real standouts are Tom Conway as Sheila’s loyal producer and Richard Baseheart as the only one of her friends with enough imagination to suspect her premonitions might be real.
The Last Seduction (1994) A twisted neo-noir featuring one of the deadliest femme fatales in fiction. Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) is a Venus flytrap, ensnaring her husband (Bill Pullman, always a welcome presence), her lover (Peter Berg) and anyone else unlucky enough to cross her path. None of them realise they’re doomed until the trap snaps shut.
Defending Your Life (1991) Albert Brooks’ vision of the afterlife is also a design for living, a philosophical treatise on the nature of the universe and a transcendental love story.
Eyewitness (1981) Starring William Hurt as New York’s most charismatic janitor. Every character in Peter Yates’ off-kilter neo-noir has a convincing inner life, from Hurt’s oddball veteran and television news enthusiast to Morgan Freeman’s cop, who spends his downtime during a stakeout confessing his anxieties about fatherhood to his partner. They all behave like real people—as we might expect them to rather than as the plot demands—and the film is the richer for it. Best of all is Christopher Plummer’s activist, whose motives and emotions are revealed like the layers of an onion.
Sorcerer (1977) There is no sorcery in Sorcerer, save for the spell money casts on desperate men. Roy Scheider leads an international ensemble as Jackie Scanlon, a getaway driver for the mob who is forced to flee the US and washes up at a remote South American backwater, where he ekes out a brutal existence. When an oil company makes a lucrative but potentially lethal offer, Scanlon and three other fugitives seize on it. The only things they have left to lose are their lives.
…One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942) The first film Powell and Pressburger made as the Archers. The tone is set by the opening credits, which introduce us to the crew of B for Bertie mid-flight with documentary immediacy—each airman is shown in close-up, manning his station in the cramped bomber that is, for the space of a mission, their entire world. Aircraft’s narrative is episodic in a way that feels spontaneous and the cast, from Googie Withers to Archers mainstay Eric Portman and an improbably young Peter Ustinov, is superb.
Out of Sight (1998) A slice of nineties neo-noir cool, courtesy of Elmore Leonard and Steven Soderbergh. Jack Foley (George Clooney) breaks out of jail and immediately collides with US Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). The ensuing manhunt plays out in parallel with a most unusual courtship. The film revels in its own playfulness, with sly dialogue (Scott Frank adapted Leonard’s novel), a narrative which spools backwards and forwards at will (the editing was by the legendary Anne V. Coates) and a cast who seem as delighted to perform and we are to watch.
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