How Clint Eastwood’s great movie was failed by its studio.

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2024, Bilge Ebiri, K. Austin Collins, Alison Willmore, and Odie Henderson—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

How do you do, fellow people who write good,

The question of what one goes to the movies to look for is an interesting one, and yet also maybe impossible for a critic to answer. At least this critic. I go to the movies all the time—for work, for pleasure, because I’m a parent, because I have time to kill, etc.—but I so rarely ask myself, What do I actually want to see? Of course, I’m lucky: The kinds of movies I like are often the kinds of movies I wind up seeing and writing about in some way, and I suspect that you guys might be in a similar boat. As I think back, though, on the 2024 movies that I might have put on a Most Anticipated list early in the year, I’m drawing a bit of a blank—which is hilarious, as Alison can tell you, because as part of our jobs over the course of the year, both of us are regularly asked to contribute blurbs to assorted Most Anticipated lists.

But also, I moved out of New York City late last year, so the question of what I want to see in a theater is almost moot. The two suburban multiplexes near me were never going to show Close Your Eyes, I can tell you that much. Or Green Border. Or Girls Will Be Girls. As I write this, Nickel Boys is about to open theatrically, but good luck finding it playing anywhere near New Haven, Connecticut. I assume as the film goes wider (will it go wider?), it could make its way here. When might that happen? Fandango doesn’t know. The Cinemark app doesn’t know. Remember when people just knew when movies were opening, and where? Or, for that matter, that these movies even existed?

We’ve talked a bit about the current state of moviegoing (and I agree, Alison, it does sometimes get tiresome and predictable when every critical conversation devolves into a meditation on the fate of the theatrical experience), but more often than not, what I find is that most people just don’t even know what movies are playing for them to go to. Allow me to illustrate this with a story I’ve probably shared elsewhere. Sometime in May, I found myself in a lengthy conversation with an Uber driver, a middle-aged gentleman who I think was a few years older than me. (This probably means he was a few years younger than me, but I digress.) We got to talking about film, and he mentioned that he loves going out to the movies. He asked me for some recommendations. I immediately suggested The Fall Guy, which had opened earlier that month. “The Fall Guy, like the old TV show?” he asked. I said yes. “That was my favorite show!” he exclaimed. He asked me who was in it. I told him Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. He then exclaimed that he loved Ryan Gosling. “I had no idea they made a movie of that,” he muttered.

All I could think was: We, as a society, have failed this man. Here’s a guy who goes to the movies, who loved The Fall Guy TV show, who loves Ryan Gosling, who loves action … and yet had no idea The Fall Guy was in theaters, or even that it existed. And we’re not talking about some random, barely marketed indie oddity here. If anything, The Fall Guy was marketed to death: There were multiple trailers, ads everywhere, a promotional bit during the Oscars (by its two Oscar-nominated stars), a Saturday Night Live hosting gig by Gosling (a god-tier repeat SNL host), a fancy festival premiere, positive reviews galore. Not to mention good word of mouth: The people who did see it tended to like it, which was reflected in its solid legs after a not-so-great first weekend. I know that in the wake of the film’s release, there were some social-media killjoys who smugly declared that its soft opening proved that it was bad, or mediocre; hilariously/tragically, a couple of weeks later, some of these same people decided that Furiosa’s soft opening was evidence that audiences were stupid, or that Warner Bros. had dumped the movie.

Look, we’re all humans, and we love to build narratives out of the things that happen around us, and those narratives often just serve to confirm our own biases. I’m probably doing a bit of the same when I say that there is a crisis happening in movie marketing. One of the reasons huge franchises still do so well is because large, existing fan bases are easier to market to. (But they’ll also turn on you quickly, as the Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web people found out; even Marvel wound up in the wilderness before Deadpool & Wolverine saved its ass.)

Outside of that, it’s not that people don’t want to see the movies; it’s that they don’t really know that the movies are there. Once upon a time, we had newspaper ads for movies (which a lot of us loved turning to as kids—can you name any other industry whose advertising was so popular for so long?), we had trailers people enjoyed watching (because they weren’t being inundated with them), and we had posters on streets and at bus stops and in shopping malls that people noticed because they weren’t looking down at their phones the whole time. I know this sounds like an “Old Man Yells at Cloud” situation, but I wouldn’t be harping on the past so much if these things had been replaced by something more tangible or effective. What’s replaced these? Banner ads? Annoying pop-up videos that play automatically? Quick—name the last banner ad you remember seeing. Now we go out of our way to block this crap out. How is anyone even supposed to know that a movie is coming out, let alone that it exists? Even theater marquees have kind of gone by the wayside. Remember when the marquees advertised what movies were showing? Well, many of them no longer do. Is it because changing the letters costs too much time, materials, and labor?

And then there are those bizarre cases where the distributors themselves don’t want people knowing about their movies. I enjoyed Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2 quite a bit and was shocked along with everyone else that Warner Bros. seemed determined to bury it. Here was a well-mounted, well-acted, absorbing legal drama of the type nobody makes anymore; it made both Kam’s and Alison’s lists, and while it didn’t make mine, I did consider it. So what did Warner do? It released it in a tiny smattering of theaters (dumb), with very little promotion (cruel), and didn’t report box-office grosses (weird). It seemed the studio wasn’t even going to screen it for critics until it relented at the last minute and let a few of us see it one afternoon deep in the basement of the AMC Lincoln Square, in the theater’s smallest room. The film was warmly received, and it appeared to do well even within its limited rollout—so much so that the studio did wind up adding a few theaters. I saw it again at an Alamo Drafthouse a few days after its release, and the theater was fully sold out. Hell, even the greater New Haven area eventually got it for a hot second, I seem to recall.

Speaking of distribution: Dana mentioned No Other Land, the documentary about the ongoing destruction of a West Bank village, which spent the year winning awards at festivals (and is also currently cleaning up at critics’ circles) but still somehow couldn’t find a distributor, though in this case it got a brief self-distributed run in New York to qualify for awards, and it looks as if it will be opening at Film Forum in January.

But No Other Land’s distribution travails to me are secondary to its spectacular achievement as a movie. It’s worth thinking of it in the context of our earlier discussion about scale and scope. No Other Land is not a “big” movie—it’s only 95 minutes long, but its scope is massive, taking place over years. As the film’s protagonists remind us, nobody in the outside world is interested in seeing one chicken coop get destroyed or one well get filled with concrete. And the Israel Defense Forces knows this. By limiting its incursions to these seemingly minor affairs, it gradually wipes entire villages off the map. But by compressing time, the filmmakers of No Other Land allow us to witness the overarching pattern of destruction. That gives the film documentary urgency, but it also makes for great art; its use of scope has both political and aesthetic power.

All this makes me ponder this question, which I submit to you: If there was one underseen movie from this year that you could magically make everyone watch, knowing that they would probably enjoy it, what would it be? For me, it would not be my No. 1 film, Close Your Eyes, nor my No. 2, Nickel Boys, if only because they’re the kinds of formally bold works that divide audiences. It would also not be the enormously entertaining Fall Guy (my No. 4) because, well, America had its chance to see that one. I think it might be my No. 3 film, Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, a brutal black-and-white drama about the treatment of refugees along Poland’s border with Belarus. It’s an expansive epic that confronts the issue from a multitude of perspectives, but it also has all the old-fashioned virtues: It’s moving, suspenseful, and tragic, with compelling characters—it even ends on a somewhat hopeful note. (Holland is a director who has worked in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Hollywood, and she also helmed some notable shows of the Peak TV era, including The Wire and House of Cards. She’s an incredibly versatile director who makes accessible films.) People would hate me for making them watch it, but I think they would wind up loving the film.

There: I got through an entire post without once mentioning Megalopolis … d’oh!

Bilge

Read all of the entries in Slate’s 2024 Movie Club.