A Constant Visual Feast

I’m increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer crushing force of positive response accorded to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and while handing out this year’s Cool Material awards, I happily snatched a chance to explain, in short, why it’s such a colossally misread and overpraised insult to its own themes and subjects. Basically: it is doing the exact same thing it accuses Hollywood of doing, though I concede with much less handsy harassment. No matter. There isn’t a movie released in 2024 that so capably defeats its own premise, or which does such a frankly awful job fleshing its premise out. I loathe it.

But I love all the other movies that got their laurels! So you should just go over to Cool Material to check out the piece! We’ve got Flow, where a cat and a capybara and a dog and other animals row their way to relative safety in a global flood; we’ve got Hundreds of Beavers, whose title promises one thing only and keeps that promise; we’ve got, of course, Omen, a movie that has still flown under the critical radar despite being superb; and we’ve got Radu Jude.