The Brattle Theatre’s “(Some of) The Best of 2024” series continues this week with double features for every taste. If it’s high-octane action you want, stop by on Thursday for Dev Patel’s John Wickian directorial debut “Monkey Man,” paired with the Hong Kong smash-up sensation “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.” On Friday and Saturday, you can catch two of last year’s smartest and sexiest crowd-pleasers, Sean Baker’s “Anora” (which all but swept this year’s awards at the Boston Society of Film Critics) and Luca Gudagnino’s “Challengers.” If it’s body-horror-inflected satires of conventional beauty standards you’re after, Sunday brings Coralie Fargeat’s instant midnight-movie classic “The Substance” and Aaron Schimberg’s wry black comedy “A Different Man.” Lastly, on Wednesday, see last year’s Boston Underground Film Festival favorite “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” and Jane Schoenbrun’s deeply personal “I Saw the TV Glow,” two very different teen coming-of-age stories run through a neon genre filter.
In between, there are a few films that stand alone. Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow,” a gentle, wordless animated fantasy about a cat traversing a strange, postapocalyptic landscape, has been one of the most pleasant surprises of this year’s awards cycle; it runs in family-friendly matinees Saturday and Sunday. The delightfully off-kilter “Problemista,” which confidently announces comedian Julio Torres’ arrival as a cinematic visionary, plays Monday, as does Radu Jude’s blisteringly satirical “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.” On Tuesday, catch “Evil Does Not Exist,” Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s lyrical, timely tale of environmental displacement. 2024 was a banner year cinematically (if not necessarily in many other sectors), and the breadth of The Brattle’s program is a testament to an art form still vibrant in spite of itself.
The Harvard Film Archive’s tribute to “The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig” continues, documenting the actor’s transition to one of the most recognizable stars of the French New Wave to one of its most uncompromising directors. In the mid-1970s, Seyrig joined forces with fellow iconoclasts Carole Roussopoulos, Nadja Ringart and Ioana Wieder to form Les Insoumuses, an experimental video art collective; the group’s 1975 “Maso and Miso Go Boating,” a faux TV special parodying the French government’s condescending feints toward feminism, screens Friday. The HFA screens Seyrig’s lone solo directorial effort, “Be Pretty and Shut Up” (1981) on Saturday. In it, Seyrig interviews fellow actors – among them Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn and Shirley MacLaine – about the inequities they’d experienced in the patriarchal film industry. In addition to Seyrig’s work as auteur, the HFA screens her appearances in Alain Resnais’ “Muriel, or the Time of Return” (1963) on Friday and Marguerite Duras’ “Baxter, Vera Baxter” (1977) on Saturday, plus encore presentations of “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) on Sunday.
As part of the ongoing series of 35 mm Friday matinees co-presented by ScreenBoston, The Brattle on Friday screens Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” (1985). By this point in his career, Eastwood had been the face of American westerns for over a quarter-century (going back at least as far as his role as Rowdy Yates on TV’s “Bonanza”) and was well-established as a director in his own right, with as firm a handle on his own persona as any actor-director in the medium’s history; as Roger Ebert observed in his original review, Eastwood “understands so well how he works on the screen that the movie has a resonance that probably was not even there in the screenplay.” “Pale Rider” presents the mythology of the American west as actual mythology, with Eastwood playing an ambiguously supernatural outlaw bent on revenge. At 94, Eastwood is still going strong in front of and behind the camera; he has been a master on both sides for longer than much of his audience has been alive.
The Harvard Film Archive begins a retrospective Monday of this year’s McMillan-Stewart fellow, Cameroonian documentary filmmaker Rosine Mbakam. Raised in the village of Yaoundé and based in Brussels, Mbakam has work interrogating the place of African women in global society and the framework and limitations of the documentary medium itself. The series begins with one of Mbakam’s most deeply personal works, “The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman” (2018). In it, Mbakam returns to Yaoundé with her (white, European) husband and their young son, turning her camera on her own mother and, more broadly, the spirit that compels the women of her village to thrive despite adversity. The series continues through the first week of February, culminating in a pair of appearances from Mbakam.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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