Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora. (Courtesy Neon)
Eighty members of the Southeastern Film Critic’s Association have voted Anora as the best film of 2024. The organization polls its members, including this columnist, annually to determine the 10 best films of the year, and award outstanding acting performances, as well as awards for writing and directing.
It was a contentious year for the critics.The closest category in this year’s balloting was for Best Documentary. With only two ballots left to be tabulated, the category was a three-way tie between Will & Harper, Sugarcane, and Super/Man the Christopher Reeve Story. When the final two votes were added, Sugarcane, an investigation into the Canadian Indian residential school system by directors Julian Brave, NoiseCat, and Emily Cassie, took the crown.
Another close result resulted in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow just missing the top 10. The acclaimed A24 film about a TV show’s increasingly creepy fandom was narrowly edged out by James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, which hits theaters on Christmas Day.
“Between theatrical distribution and streaming, releases can be a bit scattered and hard to find, but if you take the time to find the better films of 2024, they form a potent lineup. We hope that film fans out there can use our Top 10 list to catch up on some of the best that 2024 had to offer.”
Look for my Best of 2024 in next week’s issue of the Memphis Flyer. Meanwhile, here are the complete results of the SEFCA’s poll.
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora. (Courtesy Neon)
Sean Baker has a thing for sex workers. The fiercely independent director’s 2015 breakthrough work Tangerine followed Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a transgender sex worker, who just got out of prison and is ready to take revenge on her cheating boyfriend. In his next film, The Florida Project, a stripper named Halley (Bria Vinaite) loses her job for refusing to have sex with clients, and is thrown into extreme poverty with her six-year-old daughter. Baker’s 2021 film Red Rocket starred Simon Rex as Mikey “Saber” Davies, a down-on-his luck porn star who returns to his Texas hometown, looking for a way to get back on top.
Now, in his latest venture, Baker has created his latest, and greatest sex worker character yet, Anora “Ani” Mikheeva. Played by Mikey Madison, whose breakthrough role was as Manson Family murderer Susan Atkins in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Ani is a stripper in a high-end Manhattan gentleman’s club called HQ. She lives with her sister in Brighton Beach, where her Russian immigrant grandmother taught her the language of the home country. Those Russian language skills come in handy when her boss tells her to look after a high roller named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn).
I love films about work, particularly ones about the differences between the masks we wear in the public personae we bring to the workplace, and who we think we really are. That dichotomy is never greater than for a sex worker. From the moment Ani meets Vanya, her carefully constructed stripper facade starts to crumble. Vanya is too good to be true. He’s a 21-year-old college student who never goes to class with a seemingly unlimited supply of money. When she realizes he really digs her, she naturally decides to get busy exploiting him for all he’s worth, performing “forbidden” acts in the private room as the money rains down. When he asks her for a private session, she says yes. When she arrives at his home, she’s taken aback. This skinny kid lives in a waterfront mansion with gorgeous views of the city. The private sessions go so well, he invites her to his New Year’s Eve party. The mansion is lit up and filled to brim with well-heeled young revelers and disco lights. As the party is still raging, they retire to his bedroom, where he asks for a week of her time, in exchange for $10,000 cash. What’s a girl to do but say yes?
Ani is dazzled by the money, the drugs, and Vanya’s disarming, boyish look. For her $10K week, they could just lounge around the house and get freaky, but instead, Vanya loads up his friends into a private jet and they head to Las Vegas, where they can get “the good ketamine.” It is there that Ani, and the audience, get their first taste of who Vanya really is. They are greeted at the door of the luxury hotel and casino by the manager, who assures Vanya that he can have his usual suite as soon as they’re finished kicking out the guests who are staying there now. Vanya, it turns out, is Ivan Zakharov, the son of a ruthless Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov) with ties to Russian organized crime in America.
The trip plays out like a fever dream of wealth, as the boisterous friends float from pool to party to IV hangover bar and back again. Ani never wants the party to end, and when one morning, Vanya professes his love for her and asks her to marry him so he can become a citizen and escape from the clutches of his dysfunctional wealthy family, she says yes. Since they’re already conveniently in Vegas, the happy couple ties the knot in a wedding chapel on the Strip. The bride wore blue jeans and a bustier.
Just as Ani’s mask totally slips away, heir honeymoon is interrupted when Vanya’s parents get wind of the nuptials. They task Toros (frequent Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian), a Russian Orthodox priest/gangland fixer, with arranging an annulment. He sends two goons, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) to get to the bottom of the situation. Their arrival at the mansion is a 20-minute tour de force of queasy slapstick which veers from the hilarious to the horrifying.
The world Baker builds is at once exotic and all too real. Madison is absolutely perfect as a Cinderella who gets a glimpse of ultimate upward mobility, only to have it all crash down around her in a flurry of broken glass, baseball bats, and trashed SUVs. Anora is a gorgeous film that walks the line between screwball comedy and tragedy. Only someone with mad skills like Sean Baker can choose to do both.
Welcome to our final installment of the Indie Memphis Greatest Hits series, which brings our list of the top vote getters in the Best of Indie Memphis poll to the present day. If you need to catch up, here’s part one, part two, part three, and part four.
Lights, Camera, Bullshit (2014)
It’s hard out there for a…well, you know.
14 years after starring in The Poor And Hungry, Eric Tate joined director Chad Allen Barton and Piano Man Pictures to cast a satirical eye on the whole indie film thing. Tate stars as a filmmaker who comes to Memphis to make art, but finds himself constantly sidetracked by increasingly absurd obstacles. His boss is a delusional crook who wants to stay in business despite the fact that his business has literally burned to the ground. And he being hunted by a terrorist organization who wear masks of Presidents. Lights, Camera, Bullshit is a maze of jokes and old school indie surrealism that takes on the myth of the self-sufficient auteur. Tate puts himself in the tradition of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd as the last sane man in a world gone nuts.
Comments from voters:
“The irreverence of the story to all things political as a subplot. The main plot was interesting, dealing with a power hungry record producer who hires a young man to work on a film who has his own ideas…. the diversified cast with so many fine performances. The Memphis locations were also a highlight…Also great photography.”
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo
Anomolisa (2014)
Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman used stop motion to adapt his stage play about a man drowning in depression who meets and briefly falls in love with a woman at a conference in an anonymous hotel. It’s safe to say that this is not familiar ground for an animation disciple best known for Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons battling Jason and the Argonauts. Anomolisa uses its formal tricks to great emotional payoff.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (2)
Movement + Location (2014)
Lots of people want to move to the big city, reinvent themselves, and forget their past life. That’s Kim Getty’s (Bodine Boling) plan when she arrives in Brooklyn. What’s different about Kim is that she’s from 400 years in the future, a time when the planet is overcrowded, resources are scarce and life is miserable. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the luxury of the early 21st century, when there was enough clean water to boil pasta? The problem is the past—which is to say, the future—is not done with Kim yet. Movement + Location is directed by Alexis Boling, and the combination of shadowy tension and Bodine’s intense performance made this low-budget sci fi a big Indie Memphis hit.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (3)
The Keepers (2015)
The Keepers won the hearts of the Indie Memphis audiences in 2015 by exploring the relationship between animals and people in a humane and empathetic way. With subjects like the staff of the Memphis Zoo and a skittish teenage giraffe, getting people to care was a matter of patience and editing in this cinéma vérité tour de force. “It was a very tight edit,” says Joanne Self Selvidge, who co-directed The Keepers with Sara Kaye Larson. Amy Scott, who was our editor, is a total badass. She started with a 2 1/2 hour cut, and got it down to 70 minutes. I had done all the editing at that point, but Amy was wham bam thank you ma’am done. It was amazing.”
Larson and Selvidge started their festival run with a win at the Nashville Film Festival and made it two for two at Indie Memphis. The director/producers hustled to transform their festival wins into wider success. “We were able to secure national distribution, which was huge. We worked at that. We were approached by a couple of people who thought it seemed like an interesting film…” before signing with Vigil, Selvidge says.
Now on Hulu, the film got a name change to See The Keepers: At The Zoo. Selvidge and Larson were recently approached by Real South to air the film on more than 200 PBS stations across the country, and possibly internationally as well. The pair are currently back in the editing room creating a 56 minute TV version.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (4)
Tangerine (2015)
The technological revolution that made the digital indie era possible has only accelerated. When Indie Memphis started, submissions were on VHS. Director Sean Baker shot Tangerine with three iPhone 5s, and it is visually beautiful. But it’s not the gimmick that makes Tangerine special, but the layered performance of Kitana Kiki Rodrigiez as Sin-Dee Rella, a transgendered sex worker just out of jail who tries to get to the bottom of her boyfriend’s alleged infidelity. Indie Memphis was lucky to get one of the defining moments of this film decade.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (5)
Carol (2015)
Indie film hero Todd Haynes brought a Douglas Sirk aesthetic to this period piece of forbidden lesbian love in an America on the verge of a cultural revolution. The list of accolades won by the film is long enough to rate its own Wikipedia page, so if you haven’t seen it, you probably should.
Voter comment: “One of my favorite films of the century so far, from its resplendently photographed Christmas-mode period trappings to its aching expression of unspoken longing to its “Brief Encounter” cribbing structure, “Carol” is my idea of pure heaven. It’s a coming-of-age story AND a midlife reckoning in which neither lead is a navel-gazing, dissatisfied man, and one of whom is Cate Blanchett. Need I say more?”
Cameraperson (2016)
Every filmmaker finds out quickly that you have to throw out perfectly good material in order to make the whole film stronger. Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson saved memorable shots and moments that didn’t make the cut from her twenty year career shooting all over the world, and then put them all together in this tribute to the emotional power of collage. Cameraperson is one of my personal favorite documentaries ever to screen at Indie Memphis, and I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one that felt that way.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (6)
Jackson (2016)
The human cost of the culture wars is front and center in this arresting doc about the relentless assault on women’s reproductive rights in Mississippi. Jackson won Best Documentary Feature at Indie Memphis 2016, and it’s currently finding a national audience on Showtime.
Voter comment:
“This documentary pissed me off and made me feel hopeless, but it also encouraged me to talk to strangers about these feelings. Our national apathy (veiled contempt?) directed toward women and their bodily agency is unacceptable, particularly when it comes to poor women of color. Jackson didn’t flinch.”
“On The Sufferings Of The World” (2016)
Filmmaker (and Memphis Flyer contributor) Ben Siler is one of Memphis’ most prolific filmmakers. His work got a lot of votes in the our poll, and unexpectedly “whichever Ben Siler film gets the most votes” was a fairly common response. I’ll let his fans speak for themselves:
“Ben Siler was always an unsung hero for me in Memphis movie-making. His strange and unexpectedly poignant short films were always favorites of mine.”
“Just everything Ben Siler’s done. He’s one of the few filmmakers, in Memphis or elsewhere, with a truly unique voice.”
“Ben Siler should be at the top of every list. I idolize him as an experimental filmmaker.”
“Ben Siler is literally a genius and all of his films should be in the Smithsonian.”
The Siler film that closes out our list of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits is one of the most radical works ever produced in the Bluff City. Funded by IndieGrant, a program begun in 2014 to give competitive grants to Memphis filmmakers, it’s a collaboration between directors Siler, Edward Valibus, actresses Jessica Morgan and Alexis Grace that started when Siler wanted to marry images with philosopher Arthur Shopenhaur’s essay “On The Sufferings of the World”. It’s most striking feature, the layers of images that are similar but not quite the same, came about when Valibus and Siler were trying to reconcile different cuts of the film. It’s a haunting, beautiful end to our retrospective of the best films of indie Memphis’ first twenty years.
It’s a neat trick in storytelling to have emotions come in late. Frontload your story with the crassness of everyday human interaction, then sucker punch the audience in the home stretch with the emotions drama usually has from the start. Comedies like Withnail and I or In the Loop do it. It mirrors how life is: Your routine predominates, but entropy leaks it away to reveal passion or despair.
Sean Baker’s breakout hit Tangerine pulled this off well, sketching a comic, over-the-top Los Angeles skid row but slowly winding its way to the emotional concerns of its lead prostitutes and john. Baker’s follow-up, The Florida Project, is longer and more pastel, with twice the scenes that veer into humorous non sequiturs about life in the cheap hotels next to Disney World. This time, it’s a little long in the buildup. It keeps its heart off its sleeve almost all throughout.
Our gateways are impish six-year-olds who appear at first as the annoying kids of Magic Castle and Futureland, de facto housing projects originally for tourists. The kids are introduced spitting on a car from a balcony. When its owner threatens to come after them, they tell her, “Go ahead, you ratchet bitch. You are shit” and other phrases humorously beyond their years. They speak mostly in one-sentence jokes and behave like little con men, telling blatantly false sob stories for ice cream money, turning electrical breakers off for fun, and setting an abandoned building on fire. But slowly they become more likeable. Beleaguered apartment manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) shifts from responding to their infractions to being protective, letting their zest for life infect his own.
Both their joy and terror are imitations of little nightmare Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), who never stops grifting, but can never pay the rent. Halley is the movie’s central figure, resolute against the quieter notes of a more traditional struggling film mom. She sells thrift perfume in parking lots and steals Disney World passes from her johns. Unlike Tangerine‘s Sin-Dee, who constantly shot off one-liners and whose hard edges eventually showed softness, Halley’s lust for life long ago curdled into self-rationalization. She encourages the kids’ reign of terror.
Bobby also never quite makes the obvious dramatic step of covering for the family and endangering his job. Instead it blinds him. He sneers as he puts Halley’s rent money under UV light and coldly films her vacated room to prevent her from establishing residency. The characters’ place on the cooler end of the spectrum is a clue to the film’s larger themes: People who can’t make money get tossed aside, and those who endanger others’ ability to obtain it are the highest-order threats. This keeps ostensibly good people like Bobby from reacting humanely.
The kids of The Florida Project
The kids are like the free spirits of Daisies, Los Olvidados, Looney Tunes, or the credits suggest, Our Gang. They are less characters than just tiny factories of funny observation and unchecked will. They can only afford one ice cream cone and share it, then fight adults over cleaning up drops. They call asbestos “ghost poop” and free associate pet alligator names. Moonee wipes ketchup on her pillow and declares it her right.
This is a follow-up to a hit in every sense. It has a higher budget, a famous actor, and plays many of the same tricks to less effect. But those tricks are worthwhile. The universe the kids inhabit is tacky: They walk repeatedly through wide shot compositions of rundown tourist traps, one with a giant plastic wizard perched atop. The hotel they live in is purple.
The people are slightly less garish. Is it exploitation? The movie’s wry in how it presents them. It certainly does not give them the level of dignity Moonlight did. Baker has a People of Walmart aesthetic. There’s an element of “look at these crazy poor people and revel in their pluck.” But there is a humanity, even with characters who keep their inner selves hidden and present only hard edges. Late in the story, when Halley gets a hug, she looks bewildered. When one of the kids reacts to the unfairness of her situation, it’s a long, uncomfortable close-up of a crying child — and well-acted. Life does not present itself as a series of speeches but rather as humdrum interactions that reveal themselves piecemeal. Slowly, you learn about a person.
Memphis filmmakers Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s documentary The Keepers will be the opening night film for this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival. The film focuses on the people who keep the nationally acclaimed Memphis Zoo running, and their complex and sometimes heartbreaking relationships with the animals in their care.
Carolyn Horton in The Keepers
The closing night feature will also be a documentary. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, directed by British filmmaker Jeanne Finley, cuts to the origin of the “Elvis Is Still Alive” myth. In the late 1970s, a man named Jimmie Ellis who had a voice that was uncannily like The King’s made a name for himself as a masked singer named Orion, who, rumor had it, was actually Elvis.
Orion
Among the other movies announced for the festival today are Todd Haynes’ Carol, starring Cate Blanchett, and a 25th anniversary screening of Metropolitan, a pioneering indie production that created a blueprint for countless low-budget ensemble pieces, with director Whit Stillman. The second opening night feature, Tangerine, is a surreal crime drama shot entirely on iPhones by director Sean Baker. You can see clips from all of the announced films in this short video. For more information, go to the Indie Memphis website.
