December 2024: Searing Political Documentaries and Hallmark Holiday Movies
Monthly Roundup Post
Welcome to my monthly round up post. Here you will find all my writing from the previous month, plus a look at everything I watched.
Writing-wise, I finished out the month with one review, an interview, several pieces for Letterboxd, my annual end-of-the-year stint on Filmspotting, and more.
Humphrey Bogart’s First And Last Foray Into Sci-Fi Is A Strange One
Watchlist This! Our December 2024 picks of the best new bubbling-under films: The Girl With The Needle and Reinas
🎄 Christmas Will Break Your Heart ❤️🩹 - Last Christmas, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and My Own Teenage Near Death Medical Experience
First Class: our favorite first-time watches of 2024: Razan AlSalah’s Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018)
Like Dylan in the Movies: a comprehensive breakdown of A Complete Unknown and the relationship between Bob Dylan and cinema
Podcast: Top 10 Films of 2024 with Michael Phillips and Marya E. Gates
The Great Performances of 2024, Part Two: Josh Hartnett in Trap
The Great Craft of 2024: Cinematography, Jomo Fray - Nickel Boys
73 Films Directed By Women From 2024 Available To Rent Or Stream
14 Underrated Movies of 2024: Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife
I mostly watched a bunch of mid made-for-tv Christmas movies (and one brilliant one) in December as a way of letting my brain relax a bit towards the end of the year, so this month’s favorite new-to-me list is much smaller than usual. You can see everything I watched and read quick thoughts for most films on Letterboxd.
I’m glad I finally caught up with Raoul Peck’s great documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Along with the parallels Cole found between the life he documented in his home country of South Africa and what he saw once he immigrated to the United States, it’s hard to also see the corollaries once again between apartheid era South Africa and what is happening to Palestinians in their own country, and those in the diaspora, who must always remain so far from home.
I’m grateful to the Media City Film Festival for including Razan AlSalah’s latest film A Stone’s Throw as part of their online offering. The experimental short film uses the story of Amine, a Palestinian elder who has been exiled twice over, to examine the history of Palestinian resistance, particularly shining a light on an incident in 1936 when the oil workers of Haifa blew up a BP pipeline. As with her previous films, AlSalah continues to uses digital technology to explore the blurred lines between the past and present for a people and a culture whose entire existence is continually at risk of being erased completely.
Most of the Hallmark Christmas movies are pretty middling. Some of them, like The Santa Summit, can be pretty good. But I’d never seen one that felt more like a “real” movie than A Biltmore Christmas, which absolutely could have been a Kate & Leopold like box office hit given the right budget and cast. That’s not to diss the cast of Hallmark players in this film though, especially Kristoffer Polaha who brings big Rock Hudson energy to his role as a charming Old Hollywood leading man. The film is about a screenwriter named Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz) who is tasked with updating a classic film called His Merry Wife! (inspired by The Bishop’s Wife), who, while on a trip to the titular Biltmore estate in order to research the location where the original film was shot, finds herself in a time warp that sends her back to 1947 where she falls in love with the film’s star Jack Huston (Polaha). It’s all so much fun and truly catnip for fans of Old Hollywood.
Lastly, I want to shout out Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk, and Bonni Cohen’s The White House Effect, which has not yet had a proper U.S. release. The film uses archival material like news reports, press conferences, and commercials from the last fifty years (spanning the presidential administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush) to trace how got where we are with the global climate crisis, how science became a partisan issue (especially in the United States), and makes a pretty good case that both Ronald Reagan and especially the George H.W. Bush administration made decisions that got us to this dire moment, which could be the point of no return for all of humanity. This is a truly infuriating film and one that should be seen by all.
P.S. - Don’t forget every week on Friday afternoons paid subscribers get my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, with picks for new releases and streaming hidden gems.
