Seven Stellar Films to Close the Year

As the year draws to a close, it’s natural to take stock. To be frank, 2024 was a bit much! Will 2025 offer more of the same, or something substantially different? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But at least we had movies.

It’s a good time to celebrate the cinematic pleasures from the past year, good, bad and sometimes cheeseball, that offered not only respite and comfort, but a reason to keep on keeping on.

For pure pleasure, watch ‘Wallace & Gromit’ and ‘Wicked’

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Sometimes getting exactly what you expected is not such a bad thing. In the case of everyone’s favourite dotty inventor and his long-suffering canine companion that have been the subject of several beloved British stop-motion animated series, television specials and now two feature-length films, this is especially true.

Vengeance picks up where the previous Wallace & Gromit outing left off in 2005. Feathers McGraw, the evil mastermind from The Wrong Trousers, is in jail (actually, the local zoo), but even a stint in the big house has not stemmed the dastardly dude’s love for havoc. Like a great many evil geniuses (the film gives a gentle nod to Cape Fear’s Max Cady), Feathers is busy plotting his revenge on the people who put him there.

Meanwhile, the blissfully oblivious Wallace is busy with his newest invention, Norbot, a preternaturally cheerful and smart gnome designed to help with household chores. Before you can say holy Westworld, something goes terribly awry with the chipper little guy. Cue up screwball chaos.

The curious experience of longing to visit a place that doesn’t exist is one of the chief pleasures of Wallace & Gromit’s world, a universe full of twee English villages, tea and jam, cheese toasties and canal boats. It’s so bucolic, one might pass out from ingesting so much whimsy. But it’s the holidays, so indulge.

More cheese, please!

Wicked

I have to admit, I didn’t quite get all the fuss being made over the cinematic adaptation of the long-running Broadway sensation. But then I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to any musicals since the original version of West Side Story.

Much has been made of Wicked’s two leads, Ariana Grande (Glinda) and Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba), who embody their iconic archetypes with gusto. Even if you’re not a hard-core theatre kid who will lose their proverbial mind when Broadway legends Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel make an appearance, there is still a lot to enjoy.

Going in with no preconceptions isn’t a bad way to partake of this slice of singing, dancing, thespian confection. And “slice” doesn’t quite suffice. This is the whole damn cake, covered in confetti-pink icing and packed to the rafters with musical numbers designed to overwhelm the senses. Yes, there is a towering amount of sweetness, but thankfully the sugar overload is cut through with a bittersweet filling of pain, suffering and loneliness.

Between soaring odes to friendship, self-actualization and defiance, there is also a sizable amount of social commentary levelled into the story. Racism, intolerance and oppression make up the cake underneath all that pink and green icing.

Even if you’re not a fan of people bursting into song every few moments, who can say no to flying monkeys and Jeff Goldblum?

’Tis the season of the music biopic

A duelling pair of cinematic biographies is entering theatres this holiday season. Movie studios seem to favour Christmas-season release dates for films of this genre.

Is there something about the week between Dec. 25 and New Year’s Day that brings out our collective need to see Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas, or Timothée Chalamet as American folk icon Bob Dylan? Must be all that cheese and rum balls.

Maria

The reimagining of diva Maria Callas’s final days from director Pablo Larraín opens with Angelina Jolie, something of a diva herself, lip-synching to the most famous soprano in history. To say this is an odd choice is putting it mildly.

Larraín has made a career out of famous women wafting wanly about sumptuous apartments, whether it’s Jackie O. or Princess Diana and now Callas. It’s an airless and often suffocating approach that sucks all the energy out of these larger-than-life women. In the case of Maria Callas, this seems particularly egregious. Drama attended Callas throughout her life. She made a career of portraying fiery operatic heroines like Medea, Tosca, Norma and Violetta — that her own life would be any less than epic would seem terribly out of character.

After withdrawing from the stage, the diva has become something of a recluse. Self-doubt and deep grief have metastasized into a serious drug habit that Callas’s staff do their best to mitigate. They go through the singer’s pockets and purses to see where she has hidden pills. It's hard to tell how much of what Callas is seeing is real or a feature of her addiction. When a documentary film crew shows up to interview her, the fact that the callow young man posing questions is named after her drug of choice suggests that not everything is as it seems.

The central drama revolves around Callas trying to regain her once-towering ability as a singer, but the division between who she is and who she was is cavernous. It’s an interesting conceit, but if you really want to see the singer in action, there are a number of excellent documentaries infinitely preferable to this wax-museum piece.

A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan biopic is a hoot and a hootenanny. Based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! that documented the singer-songwriter’s transition from folkie superstar into bona fide rock star, it’s everything you could want in a musical biography.

Long before he became a national troubadour and treasure, Dylan (a.k.a. Robert Zimmerman) is just another scraggly-haired youth hitchhiking his way across the country to land in New York’s Greenwich Village. The wee dude is on a pilgrimage to see his musical hero Woody Guthrie, who is hospitalized with Huntington’s disease and attended by his longtime friend Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton).

When Dylan and his guitar pay a visit, the young musician is invited to play a song for his idols. Of course, it’s a goddamn masterpiece. From there, it’s a quick rise through the city’s coffee house scene under the mentorship of Seeger.

Along the way, Dylan meets fellow folkie Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro). The chemistry between the two is immediate and combustible, not unlike a romantic ballad of old. The fact that Dylan has already acquired a girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, does little to forestall the pair consummating their shared attraction.

The pleasures of the film are many and generous, but of course, it’s those songs. The moment they hit, just give up, surrender all your critical faculties and let the music roll over you like a freight train.

Sure, it’s a conventional retelling of the Dylan mythology, and often corny as hell, but it’s also great.

Three doses of inspiration: ‘Conclave,’ ‘Sing Sing’ and ‘September 5’

There were a fair number of other pleasures to be derived from films this year, even if the overall story failed to compel.

A case in point: Conclave. In amongst all the major thespian emoting, I found myself transfixed by the details of costume, set and the protocol used to create an overall sense of place and community. Delicious fun.

A thoroughly great story about the liberating power of art, Sing Sing follows a group of incarcerated men involved in a theatre group. The narrative is immediate and compelling — more akin to documentary than to narrative fiction. It’s little wonder, since many of the men in the film are non-professionals, essentially playing themselves. But then aren’t we all actors of some variety, as Billy Shakespeare famously said?

A painstaking recreation of the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Games in Munich, Germany, September 5 is riveting from start to finish. Told from the perspective of the ABC sports journalists who were covering the competition, the mixture of recreations and archival footage from the Games is masterful.

But the most compelling aspect is the media team, under the direction of Roone Arledge, who follow the story with every single tool they can muster.

It’s a stunning reminder of what media can do when not bending a knee to the powers that be.

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Happy holidays, readers. Our comment threads will be closed until Jan. 2 to give our moderators a much-deserved break. See you in 2025!