The 2024 Clare Awards

My favorite films, performances, albums & more

I’m running a New Years Sale! Get 20% off! That’s so much!

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Last year, in lieu of making a big to-do about my “top movies of the year,” I invented something called the Clare Awards. In its inaugural iteration, I honored 4 performances from the year to eschew the problem of ranking movies without having seen a lot of the year’s critical standouts. This year, I have seen more than enough movies to judge and rank the year’s output with my beloved, critical, and unique eye for making unconventional choices. Beyond that, I feel compelled to make my end of the year post more generally robust. Forthwith, I will share the Clare nominees, honorees, and winners in film, music, and “reading.” As I wrote last year: these are my awards, and I make the rules.

Some housekeeping:

• I still haven’t seen some important things that are delayed or that I missed at NYFF, i.e. Nickel Boys. I would have liked to check out Between the Temples, Janet Planet, but I don’t have time for everything. I am not yet gainfully employed as our nation's leading cultural critic!

• I was even worse about reading new books and listening to new music, but I read some old stuff like this and this that I didn’t include in the reading/book recommendations part of this post. I was also hyper fixated on Fontaines D.C.’s Skinty Fia after Romance came out, as well as One Direction :(.

Thank you!!!

In July, I turned this newsletter from a hobby I forgot about for months at a time into a hobby I put real effort into which helps support my career, and I have met friends doing it and become a stronger, more efficient writer. Thank you to everyone who is a paid or free subscriber. If you’d like to suggest something for me to write about or a book club I should host in the new year (Wicked?), please DM me or leave a comment. And, if you would like to upgrade your subscription, there’s a New Years Sale. I love you all a normal, at-arm's-length amount!

Film

When this year began, I was developing a deeply seeded and vicious loathing for Daniel Craig, Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Robert Zemickis, and Robin Wright. I’ll break this down for you: 1) the Knives Out series is one of the most grotesque excuses for studio movie making, and James Bond is a sad contemporary facsimile for Mission: Impossible that steals the latter’s valour and obfuscates its glamour; 2) Zendaya had only ever been in children’s movies, Malcolm & Marie (LOL), and Dune, and she had never shown me that she can perform as an actor in any of those; 3) Bones and All was one of the worst movies I’ve seen theatrically in the last decade; 4) Zemickis’s The Witches remake made me rescind any half-joking praise I’d heaped on Welcome to Marwen; and 5) Robin Wright is a 30-year psy-op of a woman that reminds me of evil AI, and she is Wonder Woman’s mother.

this

Much of the reasoning behind my favorite films of the year is sheer delight, as I was surprised to learn that none of these peoples’ outputs were bad, at all; they were, in fact, quite good.

Reflecting on the film’s best performances, my four favorites don’t emerge in any particular pattern, i.e. it’s difficult and inauthentic to pick 2 boys and 2 girls in leading and supporting categories. Instead, I’ve chosen to take a page from the woke-mind-infected Gotham Awards and do gender-neutral nominations, from which I have awarded 4 people. I’ve briefly reflected on all the performances I liked enough to nominate for a Clare, as well as on what I consider to be the 5 worst and best films of 2024.

A word on Here & Emilia Pérez…

In her review of The Brutalist, known Zionist Club Chalamet writes:

Coming in at 3 hours 35 mins with a 20 min intermission, The Brutalist is a powerful story of hope and hopes destroyed and then reinvigorated outside of mysterious oppressive obsessions. It's such a well-made film on such a tight budget with a genuine old-school 50s feel to it that along with the haunting persistent score by Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist is a remarkable achievement in filming in what can be created under the constraints that the protagonist of the film experiences.

These are not the words of someone who understands what they just watched. It is also, in form and content, the way a lot of people talk about liking The Brutalist, or hating Here and Emilia Pérez: empty vocabulary that signposts attention to broad trends in wokeness and highbrow art without any real engagement with the films themselves.

Zemickis’s Here has the sheen of a boomer-twinged movie about family, or about getting older. It is, admittedly, ridiculous (read: Benjamin Franklin is a character in the film). But, as MMF has thoughtfully written, the gimmick of a camera never moving from its place does not feel gimmicky, but oppressive and depressing. The movie is very earnestly about how having children—doing all the things you’re “supposed to” as part of a nuclear family—ruins your life. You become trapped in this house with these people who just get sadder and sadder, with less and less time and space to do anything they want. As hard as I laughed at the COVID/BLM subplot, I also felt very moved and saddened by the agitating realities of “family.” It is a thoughtful and—genuinely—aesthetically novel movie and, even if it swings too big sometimes, it is not offensive in any way.

I am sympathetic to the old man undertones of Here grating on you, though, as I am also sympathetic to being offended by the premise of Emilia Pérez (spoiler for Emilia Pérez: the leader of a Mexican drug cartel is trans and her transition makes her nice, kind of, so she is canonized). On paper, everything about Emilia Pérez seems, if not callously tone deaf, annoyingly stupid. There is definitely a political problem in the film, which is that there is a “dangerous” and “bad” “cartel” in the country of Mexico. But the way the body/gender stuff—and even some of the cartel stuff!—plays out is aesthetically novel and ideologically, truly provocative. Moreover, the “cartel” and Emilia Perez’s transition are treated as banal plot points, two of one million other parts of the story and milieu. I thought the music and choreography were very good, and I thought every performance ranged from serviceable to great. If you watch Emilia Pérez willing to meet it where it is, instead of with the sole intention of crafting a Letterboxd review that will assimilate you to a pantheon of childish armchair critics, you might laugh, or even, have fun!

…& Queer

That Queer is at all divisive makes me wish I could pull my brain through my ear and hurl it at detractors, killing myself in the process. Every 2 months, a movie is released that is so exceedingly normal—aesthetically and narratively straightforward—and people with accounts on Internet websites react as though it is impenetrably strange, or like it is a movie for babies, and to like it is to have a child’s mind. I think Queer is an obvious story about how, sometimes, you need the guy who is blowing you to tell you he loves you or you’re going to kill yourself. There is some very no-frills visual poetry about this—feeling like you’re crawling in each others’ skin during the act, but finding your partner inaccessibly, un-poetically stoic once it's over—but the movie is otherwise a series of funny or sexy things that happen, leaving you and the titular Queer wanting more: but My Drew won’t give it to you. You can’t say, as an insult, that something so emboldened by simplicity, so unabashed in thesis, can be “childish” or “weird.” That’s like, if I came up to you, and said to your face, “I’m weird and childish.” And you smirked and scoffed like Brady Corbet from under his fat, be-chained neck, and said, “Well, I think you’re weird and childish.” Is that supposed to be a genius piece of insight or an insult?

Anyway…

I already wrote about Conclave and Megalopolis, which are amazing products of ensemble, writing, and direction, so its actors are less represented here. I also already wrote about Babygirl, which was so excellent I don’t feel compelled to say much more about. I feel the same way about Queer, Here, and Emilia Pérez (lions and tigers and bears, oh my), but wanted to give them some flowers and defense before I start listing proper nouns with reckless abandon.

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Nominees for Actor in a Supporting Role, winners in bold:

Denzel Washington, Gladiator II

Shia LaBeouf, Megalopolis

Austin Butler, Dune: Part Two

Jodie Comer, Bikeriders

Antonio Banderas, Babygirl

Isabella Rossellini, Conclave

Winner: Selena Gomez, Emilia Pérez

Winner: Aubrey Plaza, Megalopolis

I know what you’re thinking: Jodie Comer?!. Alongside Daniel Craig, Zendaya, and Robin Wright, Jodie Comer has always been someone I don’t trust, understand, or enjoy. But she was very funny and interesting in Bikeriders, delivering a performance I remember around 150x more than Austin Butler’s. I know what else you’re thinking: Austin Butler didn’t win??. My interests in Austin Butler exceed and trespass “performances in movies,” and he was not the most memorable part of Dune 2.

I bet you’re thinking one more thing, regarding the winners: Do you need to be euthanized to relieve your strange attitudes and hysteria?. Probably. But I also hated Aubrey Plaza before this year, but I think she was born for Megalopolis and makes the movie soar. Selena Gomez almost made me cry in Emilia Pérez, both ironically and not. I think her only talent is acting and comedy, both of which she did with memorable zeal and intrigue. It was close, between these two and Shia LaBeouf and Denzel Washington, but, as they might say in the world of Emilia Pérez, soy feminista.

Nominees for Actor in a Leading Role: