2024 Catch-Up: A Real Pain, Azrael, The Shade, The Bikeriders

And not a one of them pulls out ahead.

One of the hardest things to do as a critic — especially one who more often writes professionally about TV — is keeping up with every cool-lookin’ movie that comes out in a given year. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, a cold feeling hits my stomach: Best Of lists are forthcoming! Do I know where I stand? Have I seen enough films this year to have an opinion on the best among them? Every year, this happens to me. Like clockwork.  

Luckily, DoomRocket exists. If I want to write capsule reviews on a host of movies I’d missed out on until now, that’s what it’s there for! And so, with the holidays bearing down on us and general review coverage slowing down until the new year, that’s what I’ll be doing — catching up on all the festival darlings, off-the-beaten-path genre flicks, and VOD schlock-a-thons that have caught my eye since January 1, 2024. This is my road until our annual YEAR IN REVIEW drops in the last week of December, so stay tuned for that. 

Now! What’s been good? Barring that, what's been decent, bad (but secretly good), or plain rotten this year? Let’s take a look-see. This week, I fear, is me riding the middle of the road. Onward!

A REAL PAIN

If, on the off-chance, you're curious whether the title of Jesse Eisenberg's latest directorial effort has a double meaning, let me help you — of course it does. A Real Pain is meant to be amusing and serious, nuanced and obvious, and that's about how I'd describe the movie, too. 

It follows two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who go on a Holocaust tour in Poland to honor their recently departed grandmother, a survivor of Hitler's genocide. David's relationship with her seemed respectful if distant, while Benji was in awe of the woman and was shaken by her passing. That just sums up their contrasting personalities, which wouldn't be out of place in a more rambunctious road movie: David is a buttoned-down cluster of responsibilities and neuroses, while Benji, a consummate weed-toker, can turn any social gathering — even a somber Holocaust tour — into a party. One scene has Benji cajoling their fellow tour-goers into posing with the Warsaw Uprising Fighters monument while David fusses with the photos. 

That's the tempo of A Real Pain: Benji pops off, sometimes in unpredictable, funny ways, and David mopes. This energy might have taken place during the film's production, too; Culkin's firecracker performance, manic but manageable, is often muted by Eisenberg's fussy direction. He stifles the dramatic twists in David and Benji's story (possibly out of respect, considering the places they go in this story), doling them out too conscientiously, his execution sterile when the emotions his screenplay reaches for are messy and raw. It made me wonder what Alexander Payne might have done with the material. Does that qualify as a compliment? 

6 / 10

Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg.
Cinematography by Michał Dymek.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes.
Produced by Ewa Puszczyńska, Jennifer Semler, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Ali Herting, and Dave McCary.

Rated R for a real deep case of the sads. 

AZRAEL

You don't realize how crucial screams are to a horror movie until you watch one without any. In theory, there are plenty of pulse-quickening sequences of dread and death in E.L. Katz's Azrael. Throats are opened, people are buried alive, blood gushes in torrents, and there's some business with a meat cleaver towards the end that damn near had me jumping off my couch. But when such carnage involves a cast of stone-silent people, as it does in Katz's post-Rapture scenario in which some (but not all) of Earth's surviving penitents swear a vow of silence, the visceral charge of screeching terror is replaced by the sounds of scuffling, grunting, and splurting — Horror ASMR. 

Samara Weaving stars as Azrael, a woman who seeks revenge against a cult of… well, I couldn't rightly say what these people worship. I noted they had a statue of Jesus Christ in their ramshackle church, but I also saw them sacrifice people to the wandering charcoal vampires that lumber around the forests in which this film is set, so the jury's still out. The cult kidnaps her boyfriend, at any rate. She sets off after them, and predictably, things quickly get out of hand. 

I appreciate Katz's aim here — tension, release, and tension again in a world where people express themselves using implements of mayhem instead of their words — but his mopey, sullen, silent cast kept me from fully appreciating Azrael's predicament. Since nobody was around to lay the ground rules for her war, I was confused about why I should be rooting for her. Am I supposed to take for granted that she's the good guy? Because the film's ending, which I mostly liked, muddies things quite a bit in that regard. Despite Katz's admirable attempt to prove otherwise, when it comes to establishing shocks, communication is key. 

5.5 / 10

Directed by E.L. Katz.
Written by Simon Barrett.
Cinematography by Mart Taniel.
Starring Samara Weaving, Vic Carmen Sonne, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett.
Produced by Dan Kagan, Simon Barrett, and Dave Caplan.

Rated R for some admittedly effective splashes of gore.

 THE SHADE

The Shade was the longest two hours I've spent watching a movie. It's one of those slow-burn jobs with an hour-long first act — a series of minor details saturated with meaning doled out with the solemnity of a wake. By the time a creepy demon starts poking her head around corners, you're not scared so much as relieved for the change of pace. At least she looks like she's having fun.

Tyler Chipman's psychological horror film leans heavily on character and theme, and I admire the hell out of that. It shows forethought. His story, about an edgy tattoo artist named Ryan (Chris Galust), who struggles to keep his family on track following the untimely death of his father, feels informed by personal experience. Sometimes, the movie's depiction of depression and familial anxiety feels true. It's whenever the horror elements creep in, as they do when Ryan's troubled older brother (Dylan McTee) suddenly pops by, that it feels like Chipman is at odds with the kind of story he wants to tell. A drama can idle on mood and subtext for ages, but a horror movie can't coast on dread forever. Something's got to give, and when the bottom finally drops out under The Shade, it amounts to a middle-fingered two-gun salute. I'd applaud this swagger if I felt it was justified. 

Still, I liked the atmosphere. Tom Fitzgerald, the cinematographer, coats the movie in overcast gloom, and the dark scenes are lit well enough so we can better glimpse the metaphorical beast that stalks Ryan's emotionally fraught Me Time — points in my book. The soundtrack is mostly a faint, soft riff on the score to Silent Hill 2, which I loved. And the performances are all around thoughtful and genuine; Ryan's little brother (Sam Duncan) was terrific, and Galust managed to play a tormented artiste with dodgy tattoos without letting his character come off like a total yutz. The problem here is that Chipman's world is a tortured haze of interpretation and frustration. It's so fuzzy, in fact, that its director can't find a way to trim the film into a more disturbing, frightening shape. 

5 / 10 

Written and directed by Tyler Chipman.
Cinematography by Tom Fitzgerald. 
Starring Chris Galust, Mariel Molino, Brendan Sexton III, and Laura Benanti.
Produced by Benjamin C. Dewey, Jack Ludden, and David Purdy.

Unrated. Contains naked trauma monsters.

THE BIKERIDERS

Whenever it felt like I was finally cruising alongside Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders, I ran into a wall. It's not difficult to see where the movie stalls out. Its structure, for starters, which requires Jodie Comer to gargle out a blow-by-blow account of the real-life Vandals motorcycle club with a very brave Chicaw-go accent, is frustrating, messy, and obvious. It's a sub-Scorsese attempt to beguile the audience with era-appropriate needle drops and captivating performances so that when the hammer drops, as it must, the impact is acutely felt — Goodfellas on bikes. No dice. 

The second killing blow is Nichols's lack of chill when threading the story's tragic elements. If we'd all flipped through Danny Lyon's book on the subject, we'd already know how the story shakes out. Most of us didn't, a fact of which Nichols is acutely aware. So he telegraphs the hard left turns to come, signaling to us with both arms: "Dangerous curves ahead!" Indeed.

Finally, and this bit kills me because it makes no sense, is how Nichols draped Austin Butler, one of the most captivating new actors on the planet, behind this curtain of rose-tinted anecdotes. This gripe is married to my first point: the focus is all wrong. The story here isn't how Comer's character became a retired biker's moll, regaling Lyon (Mike Faist) with updates on where each member of the Vandals wound up and why. (Snooze!) The friendship between Butler and Tom Hardy's character, Johnny, is where the operatic drama Nichols so desperately wants to convey lies. Yet they ride shotgun, passive players in their own story. Still, I can't totally write off The Bikeriders; it boasts some of this generation's most fascinating character actors cruising atop thunderous engines set to a jukebox soundtrack from a halcyon age. Candy for the soul. And that's my beef: it has plenty of vroom-vroom but not enough oomph.

6 / 10 

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols.
Cinematography by Adam Stone.
Starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, and Norman Reedus.
Produced by Sarah Green, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and Arnon Milchan.

Rated R for rough-and-tumble scrapes and motorcycle ouchies.