Best Supporting Actress
I have saved both of the female acting categories for last because, frankly, they are my favorites. "Actressing at the edges", as the great Brian Herrera termed it, is a great ability to serve a film's narrative and a protagonist's journey without having to take center stage; you do want more, you can imagine a life outside the confines of her screentime, but you're also given a perfect portrait in just a fraction of the total runtime, so vividly is a character performed, even if she's not written as such. And here are my five favorite examples of this talent.
Michele Austin dips out of Hard Truths' narrative just early enough to be supporting, but her performance in the first half is vital to the whole: she has her frustrations and her unspoken feelings, but she lets people be who they are; her scene where she tries to get through to sister Pansy is heartbreaking because you can see her trying multiple tactics, thinking she's got a solution, knowing if she just says the right thing it'll hit...and she's at a loss when none of it works. Felicity Jones is so direct in The Brutalist in both Hungarian and English, she reminded me of my German grandmother (Euros of a certain generation...), it's a wilfulness that gives the film one of its greatest scenes, but there is still the trauma of her experiences in the camps under the surface, a fragility evident not just in her body but in the determination to make her sentences strong. The Thicket is a solid western in general, but Juliette Lewis as the villainous Cut Throat Bill is the reason to watch, the showier aspects obviously being the makeup and the croaking voice, but it would be an incredible performance without those, so layered is the tension between her need for companionship and her psychotic brutality, one minute defending a woman from rape and the next ready to execute her if she doesn't satisfy Bill's needs; I genuinely think this is a movie and a performance we/re gonna talk about a lot more in future. Isabella Rossellini has the briefest turn in Conclave, but, in the great tradition of Room at the Top's Hermione Baddeley, Network's Beatrice Straight, or, indeed, Network's Marlene Warfield, her posture, line delivery, and silent reactions to the world around her give you a great sense of this woman's entire life, her well-timed curtsey a crowd-pleaser (my theater broke out in applause), her entire performance so indicative of the quality of the film that she is, oopsie-daisy, its best performance. Lisa Soberano subverts all expectations of the popular head cheerleader prom queen stereotype, and that's built into the screenplay for Lisa Frankenstein, but she sells it while also surprising with the rhythm of her speech patterns and not just the quality of her scream queen screams but with the expressions she uses for them: she's a perfect princess while also being genuinely good, a difficult thing to sell but dammit, here she is!
The winner is:
Michele Austin as Chantelle
Hard Truths
2. Lisa Soberano in Lisa Frankenstein; 3. Isabella Rossellini in Conclave; 4. Felicity Jones in The Brutalist; 5. Juliette Lewis in The Thicket
Best Editing
For me, the rubric is simple: was I ever bored, and did it go by quickly without feeling rushed? If I can add to this base a particular edit or montage or anything that hit me, it’s a plus.
The Brutalist excels at all this, its three-and-a-half-hour length full but never dull, often dreamlike in its choices - the visit to the Italian quarry, the heroin binge. Conclave moves with the pace of an airport thriller, the voting scenes poetry, the copy machine sequence a dilly. Hard Truths gives its performances room to breathe and cuts for greatest emotional impact, as in the Mother’s Day luncheon. I Saw the TV Glow paces itself as a memory at first but soon plays with our sense of reality - the climactic hard cut from revelation and truth to the return of “normalcy” is a punch to the gut. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is dizzying in its info dump set to the rhythms of the musicians used as dupes.
The winner is:
I Saw the TV Glow
Sofi Marshall
2. Soundtrack to a Coup d'État; 3. The Brutalist; 4. Conclave; 5. Hard Truths
Best Sound
The click of cameras, the cacophony of warfare, the silence of waiting, all in the midst of Civil War. The battle between acoustic and electric, the difference between bars and festival stages and television soundstages, all caught in A Complete Unknown. Kneecap's rowdy fans and homegrown freestyles becoming studio-backed productions. The blood-sucking terror, the bone-crunching horror, the underscored menace of Nosferatu. With a deep thunk and an unthinkable splash, you know what horrors Terrifier 3 holds in store even when it's off-screen.
The winner is:
Nosferatu
Damian Volpe, re-recording mixer / sound designer / supervising sound editor
Michael Fentum, sound designer
Samir Foco / Mariusz Glabinski, sound effects editors
David Giammarco, re-recording mixer
Steve Kuttkem supervising sound editor
2. Terrifier 3; 3. A Complete Unknown; 4. Civil War; 5. Kneecap
Best Score
Ranked from fifth to first:
5. I Saw the TV Glow
Alex G
4. Nosferatu
Robin Carolan
3. She is Conann
Pierre Desprats
2. Megalopolis
Osvaldo Golijov
1. The Brutalist
Daniel Blumberg
Best Actress
In Cabrini, Christiana Dell’Anna exudes strength, a stubbornness borne not of ego but of moral clarity; you believe she can take all of New York and the church…and she does! A star is born in Nosferatu, as Lily-Rose Depp’s perfectly-calibrated vocal intonations give both old-fashioned damsel in distress quivering and breathless carnality, while her physicality in possession scenes is genuinely shocking, hard to watch. Cynthia Erivo gives the most grounded performance in Wicked: Part One, we believe in this world of enchantment (and deception) because she makes it real - and she is just as thoughtful and layered in her singing as she is in her dialogue. Marianne Jean-Baptiste takes Hard Truths from comedy to tragedy without suddenly switching up her performance, but by slowly closing herself more and more, her venomously hilarious diatribes eventually giving way to lockjawed silence - but you see the pain, the toll it takes on her, it is like she, too, is possessed by something she can’t control. Demi Moore gives a humorous, agonizing, career-best performance in The Substance, allowing us to believe in the reality of the movie by committing fully to the anger and determination of Elisabeth Sparkle.
The winner is:
Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy Deacon
2. Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu; 3. Demi Moore in The Substance; 4. Cynthia Erivo in Wicked: Part One; 5. Christiana Dell’Anna in Cabrini
Finally, the big prize. I submitted my Top Ten alphabetically with all the reasons why each of the films spoke to me. Now, here are those same films ranked - beginning with my winner for...
Best Motion Picture of the Year
I Saw the TV Glow
produced by Ali Herting / Luca Intili / Dave McCary / Emma Stone / Sarah Winshall
2. The Brutalist; 3. Soundtrack to a Coup d'État; 4. Hard Truths; 5. Conclave
6. Nosferatu; 7. September 5; 8. She is Conann; 9. Queer; 10. Sing Sing
That's a wrap for my 2024. I Saw the TV Glow won the big prize and the most awards overall with five, The Brutalist won four, Nosferatu won three, Hard Truths two, and one apiece for Conclave, Gladiator II, Hundreds of Beavers, and Soundtrack to a Coup d'État.
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