MOVIE OF THE WEEK January 3, 2025: Team #MOTW’s Favorite MOTWs of 2024
Team #MOTW looks back at the films we featured during 2024 and highlights our favorites. There are many things about 2024 that we want to forget, but these femme-helmed/femme centric films that brought inspiration, understanding, compassion, and respite replete with laughter are not among them — and they must not slip into oblivion. Their themes, topics and genres are diverse, and each one of them is a gem. Add them to your must watch list. Share the titles with friends. To find out more about each of the selected films, click on the highlighted titles for links to the full #MOTW coverage that was published on AWFJ.org on the day of their release. Enjoy all of them! — Team #MOTW
Team #MOTW’s favorite MOTWs of 2024:
Prepare yourself for a joyride through the messy yet magnificent lives of childhood best friends, Dawn and Eden, as they navigate the trials of adulting and motherhood with less-than-optimal but highly enjoyable results. Co-written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, and directed by Pamela Adlon, Babes is a cinematic truth serum of neonatal hijinks and hallucinogenic hilarity, resulting in a film as loving as it is raunchy and as tender as it is shameless. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau’s alchemic performances infuse the story with lived-in authenticity. Both women struggle with what life delivers. Eden is fundamentally without family (other than her deadbeat dad). While Dawn has all the family she can handle, and nothing is going well. The supporting cast, including Hasan Minhaj and Stephan James, is just as magnetic—delivering grounded and resonant characters. These complexities combined with the comedy kept me oscillating between snort-laughing and heart-clutching. As Dawn and Eden grapple with the plights of being friends for life, the story hurls us into various challenges, cascading poop, benders, and the triumphs of a friendship built tough as family. Babes is a celebration of love in every form, proving our friendships with our girls can and should sustain us through life’s messiest moments.
BLACK BOX DIARIES – Loren King
Combining aspects of criminal investigation, police procedural, and a deeply personal account of her sexual assault at the dawn of the #MeToo movement, Japanese journalist Shiori Ito’s extraordinary verite documentary Black Box Diaries succeeds as an expose by any standard. That it is also Ito’s personal manifesto and authentic reckoning makes this unique autobiographical documentary even more of a revelation. . Tracing the years of trauma that began with her sexual assault in 2015 when she was 25, Ito, a tenacious journalist and compelling subject, documents police and court indifference and inaction because her assailant was a powerful and well connected man. Read full review.
Frida is an unforgettable documentary from filmmaker Carla Gutierrez, who combines archival footage and narrated diaries and interviews to create a fascinating chronicle of the legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s life and works. The voice actor narrating the words of Kahlo (Mexican stage and screen actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero) does a tremendous job of imbuing Kahlo’s journal entries with a visceral emotional range. Kahlo’s language is brutally honest, about everything from her thoughts about condescending rich art patrons to her despair at Diego Rivera’s repeated infidelity to her anguish over being permanently disabled from a life-altering bus accident. The film animates Kahlo’s paintings, which purists might decry but I found quite powerful. Whether you know a little or a lot about the fiercely feminist artist, Frida offers a riveting, first-person account of her story.
The crushing weight of grief and the healing power of theater are explored with touching authenticity in Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s poignant dramedy Ghostlight. As it gradually reveals the heartbreaking loss at the center of its main characters’ lives, the film shows how the impact of that loss has left them all reeling, unable to move forward until one of Shakespeare’s most iconic plays helps them find a way to process it together. Ghostlight marks O’Sullivan’s feature directorial debut, and she and Thompson demonstrate a clear knack for capturing scenes that are almost documentary-like in their genuineness and intimacy. The characters talk like real people, and they make mistakes like real people. That makes it all the more affecting when they demonstrate growth and positive change. And the fact that Dan, Sharon, and Daisy are played by a real family gives their performances and interactions that much more emotional weight. The end result is a delicate, heartfelt film that’s likely to leave you smiling through tears.
In Alice Rohrwacher’s romantic, Felliniesque, tragicomic adventure tale, an English archaeologist-turned-“pot-hunter” named Arthur (Josh O’Connor) leads a merry band of grave robbers who plunder ancient Etruscan tombs, eking out a meager living BY selling the stolen artifacts to collectors. Arthur uses a dowsing rod to find the hidden tombs but really seems guided by an otherworldly sense that connects him to the graves and causes him to often collapse when he gets close. Arthur is a man of two worlds, a kind of chimera, who is haunted by the memory of his lost love, Beniamina. In his sorrow, he visits her mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini), a former opera star living in a crumbling mansion and teaching singing to students whom she treats like servants. Arthur tells Flora he is still searching for her daughter, even though he knows she’s dead. Director/writer Alice Rohrwacher weaves a magical, almost fable-like tale, in this film filled with wonderful performances, as she takes us on a series of adventures, while sometimes moving us from this world to that of the dead, until finally delivering us to just the right ending.
Director/co-writer Monica Sorelle brings us into a vibrant world, the neighborhood of Haitian immigrants near Miami, gorgeously filmed by Javier Labrador Deulofeu. Sheila Anozier is radiant as Esperance, who wears her headscarf and native dress at home and creates beautiful, lace-trimmed gowns for celebrations, but goes out into the world in generic American garb. The magnetic intimacy she creates with Atibon Nazaire as her husband, Xavier, is palpable. The family is in the middle of many relatable challenges: a young adult son who wants to follow his own dreams and refuses to learn his parents’ native language, the balance of identity and assimilation, and Xavier’s job demolishing the homes and even the church in his neighborhood to make room for upscale gentrification. All of the performances are excellent and Sorelle deftly handles the telling details and the grand themes in a really impressive debut.
THE LAST SHOWGIRL – Pam Grady:
There is a certain irony built into this evocative, character-driven drama from director Gia Coppola: While the film is built around the pending demise of a Las Vegas showgirl’s career, its star, Pamela Anderson, reignites her own with her shaded, empathetic performance in the lead role. The actress plays Shelley, a dancer in a long-running show on the Las Vegas Strip, a one-time ingenue who is now not just a chorine but also the unofficial den mother to the younger women on the line, including Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song). As she grapples with the ways she has failed her own daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) in her relentless pursuit of show business success, Shelley confronts an uncertain future with the impending closing of her show and the dawning recognition that, at 57, there may be no more sequined gowns or feathered headdresses in her future. The entire cast, which includes Jamie Lee Curtis as Shelley’s ex-dancer best friend Annette, Dave Bautista as the show’s manager Eddie, and burlesque artist Dita Von Teese’s dancers as the rest of the show’s line, is fantastic. The seedy Vegas milieu of Shelley’s home life contrasts starkly with the vintage Bob Mackie costumes in which she sparkles in a film that depicts that scary uncertainty when one chapter of life ends while the next remains an uncertain blur.
THE TEACHERS LOUNGE – Liz Whittemore
Ms. Carla Nowak is a first-year teacher trying to reach her students and fit in with the staff. When a child gets accused of theft, Carla’s best intentions cause a spiral of events affecting the entire school. The Teachers’ Lounge is a battle between work politics and the protective intuition of the job. Clever class dialogue foreshadows the dramatic dynamics Carla finds herself caught up in. Teacher and student behavior mirror one another as The Teachers’ Lounge becomes increasingly tense and emotionally chaotic. Leonie Benesch plays Carla with the grace and complexity accompanying modern-day teaching. You don’t go into the profession for money or fame. You do it to break through to kids who need it most. But times have changed. The age of parents supporting the adults in the room has somehow morphed into zero accountability for students. Benesch commands the screen with a brilliant mix of tenderness and firm authenticity. She navigates this emotional roller coaster like a star. When you think the screenplay could not get more explosive, writers Johannes Duncker and Ilker Çatak (who also directs) repeatedly prove you wrong. The Teachers’ Lounge vividly portrays the volatility of the profession. Teachers and administrators everywhere will sweat watching this film. I can speak from experience. I don’t miss it one bit. Then and now, you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.
I love how the press notes for The Wasp call it “a story with a sting in its tail”, because it’s the perfect description of this taut thriller. It offers a wonderful platform for two spectacularly talented actors to perform together, and Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer have more than enough skill and talent to navigate the sharp shifts required in The Wasp, moment by moment, in the name of storytelling and character development. Women are often, in reality, very different from how we express ourselves in the world and how the world sees us, a fact very well captured within The Wasp‘s 1 1/2 running time. At the core of it, though, the movie is just a fun, twisty, turn-y psycho-thriller. Really, The Wasp had me stunned and stung by the performances of Naomi Harris and Natalie Dormer. As acting partners, the two together are *chef’s kiss*. They really should be the next two leads in True Detective, but in the meantime, fly to see The Wasp at your local theater so you can support their badassery on the big screen. Read full review
Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now is an exquisitely crafted, brilliantly acted and thoroughly heart wrenching coming of age drama. It is an intimate look at the relationship between two 12 year old African-American boys growing up in Chicago’s notoriously dangerous Cabrini Green housing project. The boys are best friends and inseparable, until they are separated by circumstances. Key to setting the film’s milieu is the heinous real life police shooting of young Dantrell Davis at the Cabrini Green housing project in 1992 and the terror and rage it instilled in project residents. Baig’s sensitive approach to the story from the boys’ perspective brings you fully into the devastating angst. We Be Grown is a stunning eye-opening must see. And Minhal Baig is a director to watch closely.
