→ January 7, 2025
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Kneecap.

Kneecap tells the story, loosely, of the founding of the popular Irish-language rap trio of the same name, with the three members playing themselves. It’s mostly fictional and entirely hilarious. (It’s on Netflix in the U.S.)

The band Kneecap has risen to significant prominence in both their native Northern Ireland and in Ireland over the last decade, but this biopic blends truth with fiction, although writer/director Rich Peppiatt told NPR that the wilder stuff is the truth and the “mundane” stuff is fabricated. The two MCs switch between Irish and English, between pro-Republican and pro-Irish language activism and rhymes about drinking and drugs, rapping over beats that draw more from the golden age of hip-hop than anything in the last 30 years of American rap. Their second album, Fine Art, featured guest spots from Fontaines D.C. vocalist Grian Chatten and British rapper Jelani Blackman, and the song “3CAG” became a top 10 hit on Ireland’s pop chart.

Kneecap’s script creates some structure around the group, from member Naoise’s father being an ex-Republican paramilitary who faked his death to avoid arrest to a story about how the two rappers connected with their schoolteacher DJ. The throughline, and the real heart of the film, is the rapid, organic rise in popularity that came from their live gigs and a protest campaign that got one of their first songs played on an Irish-language radio station across the island. It has some of the trappings of classic up-from-obscurity music biopics, but avoids many of the tropes of the genre – the drug use is almost entirely comic, rather than leading to some sort of tragedy or downfall; the band doesn’t break up only to come together at the end; there’s a love interest that doesn’t divide the band or otherwise derail them.

The trio’s ascent has been rapid enough that the screenplay instead layers on a political story, from Naoise’s father, played with brilliant understatement by Michael Fassbender, to a Northern Irish police officer who believes they’re dangerous activists, to run-ins with a group called Radical Republicans Against Drugs. Nearly all of this is made up for the movie, and it’s just about all funny even when there’s a serious subtext like the suppression of native Irish language and culture in British-ruled Ulster. The three members of Kneecap are natural performers, to the point where I thought for much of the film that DJ Próvaí was being played by an actor when he’s just playing himself.

The Irish Film & Television Academy submitted Kneecap as the country’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, and it made the December shortlist of 15 titles. Only one Irish film has ever made the final list of nominations, 2022’s The Quiet Girl (which is fantastic), but Kneecap appears to have a real shot to become the second, and I’d be thrilled if it means more people seek this movie out. It’s a riot, and it’s something novel – it’s not a straight biopic, it’s not a parody or a mockumentary, and it’s about a specific culture that was mostly new to me (I mean, I’ve watched Derry Girls). And because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, or seriously at all, the underlying theme of pride in one’s culture and language is far more effective than it would have been if they’d played it straight. It’s not going to beat Emilia Perez for the Oscar, but it’s a way better film.

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→ December 24, 2024
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Top 24 albums of 2024.

My gimmick of ranking a number of albums equal to the last two digits of the year lives once more, although I think I may just have to cap it at 25 next December before it gets out of hand. I had plenty of albums to consider in 2024, though, as it was a strong year for albums overall and for albums that might be 1-1 worthy in any year. Some honorable mentions include Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere (some brilliant music, but I just can’t do with that much of the death metal trappings), Childish Gambino – Bando Stone & the New World, Bob Vylan – Humble as the Sun, Katie Gavin – What a Relief, Parsnip – Behold, Japandroids – Fate & Alcohol.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2024 will go up some time in the next week.

24. Griff – Vertigo

Griff is a pretty big deal in the U.K. and opened for Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift this year, although she hasn’t broken through at all in the U.S. yet. I’m generally not a fan of highly polished pop music, but her brand of sophisticated pop that isn’t overproduced and that lets her powerful alto voice shine is much more in line with my tastes. Highlights include the title track, “Astronaut,” and “Tears for Fun.”

23. Wheel – Charismatic Leaders

Wheel keeps changing personnel, with only lead singer/guitarist James Lascelles left from the original lineup, but the sound remains the same. This is heavy, crunchy prog metal, driven by powerful and intricate guitar work, but never deviates into blast beats or death growls that might destroy the intense vibe of the music. I don’t think this is their best album, but it’s so much in my wheelhouse (pun intended) that I still like it quite a bit. Highlights include “Empire,” “Submission,” and “Porcelain.”

22. Pond – Stung!

Pond are all over the place yet again, and I’m good with it because the highs are high enough. They’re an experimental rock band from Australia with a heavy emphasis on psychedelic rock, but are comfortable veering into funk-pop (“So Lo”) or a mélange of 1970s hard rock and 1960s Motown rhythms (“(I’m) Stung”), or just straight-up psychedelic rock that your parents might have heard at Woodstock (“Neon River”). The album is 14 songs and 54+ minutes long, so it does wear out its welcome a bit as it goes on, so it’s a little lower here than it would have been at midyear, when I had it on my unordered list over some other titles like Ride’s Interplay.

21. HINDS – Viva Hinds

HINDS went back to its original lineup, shedding two members to become a duo again, and their first album since 2020’s The Prettiest Curse is their most assured and polished record yet. HINDS has always thrived on a bit of chaos, the question of whether these two women can really even play their instruments or carry a decent tune, only to have them pull it together with a strong chorus or wry lyrics. On Viva Hinds, they’ve tightened things up across the board but haven’t lost that sense that they’re always on the verge of careening off the track. It’s lo-fi and proud of it, but now it’s not quite so rough around the edges. Standouts include “Boom Boom Back” (featuring Beck), “Mala Vista,” and “En Forma.”

20. Foxing – Foxing

Pitchfork summarized this album by calling it “Nearer My God’s evil genius twin,” and I can’t beat that. It’s wild and weird and ambitious and despairing, the sound of someone coming apart at the seams, with death metal-style screaming, soaring and haunting backing tracks, and despondent lyrics about mortality and isolation. It’s incredible, but also a difficult listen – and, as you might guess, it’s really hard to talk about individual tracks here, although if forced I’d highlight “Barking” and “Hell 99.”

19. GIFT – Illuminator

This Brooklyn psychedelic rock band put out an album in 2022, Momentary Presence, that was largely recorded by singer/guitarist TJ Freda during the early days of the pandemic, when getting the whole band together wasn’t possible, so while Illuminator is their second album, it’s also a first in some ways – and it shows. This is a stronger, more coherent record, and it’s full of bright hooks and a blend of psychedelia and shoegaze that manages to feel fresh even though those styles date back decades. Highlights include “Wish Me Away,” “Going in Circles,” “Later,” and “Light Runner.”

18. Elbow – Audio Vertigo

I admit to being very late to the party on Elbow; I didn’t love their most acclaimed album, The Seldom Seen Kid, winner of the 2008 Mercury Prize, and kind of wrote them off as a dream-pop band that was too chill to hold my attention. That was unfair to them and probably to my ears, as they’re way more ambitious and experimental than that, which showed on their tenth album, Audio Vertigo, a wide-ranging collection of songs that go from the mellower sounds of Kid to some aggressively uptempo and progressive tracks like my favorites on this record, “Lovers’ Leap” and “Good Blood Mexico City.”

17. Ride – Interplay

Ride hit their stride here on their third post-reunion album, with a more mature sound that blends the shoegaze of their first incarnation with mellower synth-pop sounds from their influences, producing a record that shimmers enough to stand apart even with the glut of neo-shoegaze releases that have flooded the scene in the last two years. Standout tracks include “Peace Sign,” “Last Frontier,” and “Portland Rocks.”

16. SPRINTS – Letter to Self

The long-awaited debut full-length from this Dublin punk-rock band did not disappoint, and it’s one of the most true-to-form punk albums of the last few years, with spare lyrics and repeated lines over fast-paced guitar lines that mostly get out in under 3½ minutes. (Unfortunately, lead guitarist Colm O’Reilly left the band abruptly in mid-May.) Highlights include “Heavy,” “Adore Adore Adore,” “Literary Mind,” and “Up and Comer.”

15. Kid Kapichi – There Goes the Neighborhood

They’re probably never quite going to match their incredible, no-skips debut album, but Kid Kapichi keeps churning out angry yet catchy working-class anthems with a touch of Alex Turner in the lyrics but a heavier, crunchier backdrop of guitars more inspired by punk and pub-rock. Highlights here include “Let’s Get to Work,” “Can EU Hear Me?,” and the wonderfully weird “Tamagotchi.”

14. Charly Bliss – Forever

This is the album I was waiting for Charly Bliss to make, after the promising but a little tepid Young Enough in 2019. It’s mostly sunny power-pop goodness, with bigger and better hooks than their previous albums, although the ballad “Nineteen” is a stunner on its own thanks to Eva Hendricks’s plaintive vocals. Other highlights include “Calling You Out” and “Back There Now.”

13. Mysterines – Afraid of Tomorrows

I was all about the Mysterines’ earliest singles and EPs, but was disappointed when their debut album, Reeling, saw them take the pedal off the gas, eschewing some of the heavier, snarling riffs and vocals that made me a fan of the band and specifically of singer/guitarist Lia Metcalfe. This is a much stronger, more confident record, and has far more hooks than its predecessor. Unfortunately, the band cancelled their fall/winter tour at the last minute with an ominous note saying it was “due to recent circumstances,” with no further word from the band since that message on August 31st. Highlights include “Sink Ya Teeth,” “Stray,” and “The Last Dance.”

12. Yard Act – Where’s My Utopia?

Yard Act’s first album, 2022’s The Overload, was my #3 record of that year, as they nailed their contemporary twist on the classic post-punk sounds of Gang of Four and the Fall; their sophomore album finds them expanding their musical palate, with more electronic and disco elements and less post-punk in the music, although that ethos remains in the lyrics. I preferred The Overload, but this one still has some bangers, including “We Make Hits,” “Dream Job,” and “When the Laughter Stops.”

11. Courting – New Last Name

Courting sound like they’re having a blast on just about every song they produce, and the result is that this album, their second full-length, explodes with joy and youthful exuberance throughout. They’ve dialed back a little of the weirdness from their debut, Guitar Music, but they’re still off-kilter in smaller ways, including some of the tones they use for the lead guitars and the often lo-fi production that contrasts with the electronic elements that seep in. Standout tracks include “Throw,” “Flex,” and “We Look Good Together (Big Words).”

10. The Cure – Songs of a Lost World

The Cure hadn’t released an album in 16 years, to the point where I assumed Robert Smith, now 65 years old, was probably done writing new material. Instead he surprised everyone (I think) with the band’s best record since their best album, Disintegration, came out 35 years ago. Songs of a Lost World is, of course, a dark and brooding record, with mortality a major theme throughout the album, anchored by the melancholy “Alone” and “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” although there’s more of a hint of the band’s prior melodic leanings in “A Fragile Thing,” my favorite track from the album.

9. Opeth – The Last Will and Testament

When I heard Opeth was bringing back the death growls for their first new album in five years, I had mixed feelings; their 2001 album Blackwater Park, which is a progressive death metal record that has those vocals, might be my favorite metal record of all time, but they had gone so long without visiting that style that I worried this would come off as gimmicky or outdated. That worry was misplaced – this is a fantastic, complex, rich record that doesn’t overdo the death growls and still puts their intricate guitarwork front and center. It’s a concept record where all tracks but the last one are just named with the section symbol and a number, and if you listen straight through there isn’t the typical variation between songs, although if I had to pick one or two to isolate as the best it would be “§1” and “§3.” It’s a return to form, certainly, even though I liked their prog phase for what it was.

8. Jack White – No Name

Man, I’ve been waiting for White to rock out like this for a decade, at least, and he finally delivered. This is a crunchy, loud, old-fashioned rock album. It grabs you by the throat from the start, with the first four tracks all guitar-driven riff-fests, and doesn’t really let go. It’s not a White Stripes album, but it might be the most similar thing he’s done to peak White Stripes since they broke up. Highlights include “That’s How I’m Feeling,” “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking,” and “Old Scratch Blues.”

7. Michael Kiwanuka – Small Changes

Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize with his last album, KIWANUKA, which leaned more into 1970s R&B with a dash of funk, including some unbelievable bass lines. On his follow-up, Small Changes, he goes for a much more understated sound, with slower tempos and sparse production (by Danger Mouse and inflo) that put much greater emphasis on his vocals. He doesn’t swing for the fences anywhere on the record, in his lyrics or the music, producing something that’s a little less immediate but ends up quite lovely in its own way. Highlights include “Floating Parade,” “Lowdown (part i),” and the title track.

6. Waxahatchee – Tiger’s Blood

I loved Katie Crutchfield’s 2020 album Saint Cloud, and still think that’s the superior album of the two, but she is on a heck of a run right now with those LPs and her newest single “Much Ado About Nothing.” Tiger’s Blood is a slower, more tenebrous affair than the previous record, and I prefer her music when she incorporates a little more rock or folk and works less in the traditional country lane. There are some great hooks here, though, and her voice shines throughout, perhaps even more so on the more somber tracks that don’t appeal to me as much with their music. Highlights include “3 Sisters,” “Evil Spawn,” “Bored,” and “Crimes of the Heart.”

5. Ezra Collective – Dance, No One’s Watching

This is the latest example of a band winning the Mercury Prize for an album that didn’t do much for me, only for their follow-up to become one of my favorites of its year; the same thing happened with Sampha, to pick one other case. Ezra Collective is a jazz quintet that brings in a lot of Afrobeat and other African musical traditions, and on their latest album they leaned a little more into Afropop and even just mainstream pop sounds to create an album that’s a bit more accessible and certainly more full of hooks. Highlights include “God Gave Me Feet for Dancing,” “Ajala,” and “No One’s Watching Me.”

4. Fontaines D.C. – Romance

Fontaines D.C. went from punk to something between punk and post-punk between their second and third albums, but on their fourth album, they went in a totally different musical and lyrical direction – several directions, really, delivering one of the most unusual and ambitious records of the year. Vocalist Grian Chatten is still front and center with his commanding delivery, while they go from sheer pop beauty on “Favourite” to something like nu-metal on “Starburster” to a bluesy, funky groove on “Death Kink.” There are elements of shoegaze, nods to rap, and still some vestiges of their punk origins. It doesn’t always work, but they absolutely went for it, and few bands have that kind of vision or musical courage.

3. Alcest – Les chantes de l’aurore

Alcest started out as a death-metal project for the musician who goes by Neige, then incorporated shoegaze sounds to create something called “blackgaze” that was later co-opted by Deafheaven (with whom Neige has worked), after which Alcest added a second member and released an album that was all shoegaze with no metal. They’ve varied their mix of genres on subsequent albums, but this latest one gets the balance right, as they did on 2016’s incredible Kodama. The album is primarily heavy shoegaze, with some very infrequent screamed vocals deeper in the mix, so the wall-of-guitars sound is really the emphasis. Highlights include “Flamme Junelle,” “Komorebi,” and “L’envol.”

2. Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice

Hailing from Niger, a country that has been torn by political strife including a military coup this time last year, Moctar blends Tuareg music with western rock styles, particularly psychedelic rock and blues rock, crafting indelible guitar riffs and furious solos beneath the protest lyrics (sung in his native language, Tamasheq) that have boosted his popularity in the Sahel. I caught the last show of Moctar’s U.S. tour, at Union Transfer in Philly, and he blew the doors off the place, with incredible shredding and extended jams for several of the songs he played, including jumping into the crowd for his final guitar solo. Highlights include the title track, “Imouhar,” and “Oh France.”

1. The Libertines – All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

I ended up flipping this with Funeral for Justice because this is by far the album I came back to the most this year; if I’m pretending to be a professional critic, I probably put Mdou Moctar first, but the fact is this was my favorite record of 2024 and nothing else was close. The likely lads came back better than ever, with a slew of intoxicating and surprisingly upbeat tracks – ”Oh Shit,” “Run Run Run,” “Shiver,” and “Night of the Hunter” – that still bear that clear Doherty/Barât sound, just with better production and less breaking and entering. That this album exists at all might itself be a wonderful gift to their fans; that it’s this good is musical miracle.

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→ December 22, 2024
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Top 20 board games of 2024, part two.

My annual post of the top 10 games of the year is now up over at Paste. Compiling that list has gotten harder each year, because I play more new games in a calendar year than before, and because there are more games coming out each year – good and less good. I started out with 17 possible titles for the top ten, cut it down for Paste, and then decided to throw together a second post here with the next ten. I’ll just reiterate that there are also games that came out in 2024 that I didn’t play but that might make the list based on what other people have said about them, what I’ve seen, and what the response and ratings are for the games on Boardgamegeek.

11. Harmonies

This might have made my top ten if I’d ever played the physical version, but I’ve only played it on Board Game Arena, and I think I really need to see the physical components. It’s a simple game with tight, medium-complex scoring, taking the general gist of Calico and making it somehow a little more forgiving without taking away what makes Calico good. On each turn, you take all three colored tokens from one spot on the board, and then place each of them on to spots on your own little map of hex tiles, with each color representing a different terrain type with its own placement and scoring rules. You can also select a new scoring card if you have room, with a maximum of four at any time, although once you fill all the spots on any scoring card you can set it aside and draw a new one. The game continues until someone has two or fewer empty hexes remaining. I’m also not 100% sold that all of the starter scoring cards are balanced, but that aside, it’s a wonderful thinker of a game, and really easy to learn – just hard to play well.

12. Dracula vs. Van Helsing

A great asymmetrical two-player game where the players play with the same deck of four colors with cards numbered 1-8 but have different goals: Dracula wants to kill four humans in any of the board’s five districts, while Van Helsing wants to drain all of Dracula’s hit points before that happens. To set up, each player draws five cards and lays them on their side of each of the five regions in the order in which they were drawn. Each number has a specific power that activates when you discard it, so on your turn, you’ll draw one card and either replace a card in front of you (discarding and activating that one) or discard the newly drawn one (activating that). Once the discard pile has at least six cards in it, either player can choose to end the round, giving their opponent another turn, or end it immediately by discarding a value-8 card. It’s surprisingly balanced for its asymmetry, and extremely tense like a sudden-death overtime because the game can end at any time. (Full review)

13. Harvest

A reworking of a 2017 game published by the now-defunct Tasty Minstrel Games, Harvest streamlined some rules and made the boards and components much nicer while retaining the “kinder Agricola” vibe. You’ll place three workers in each of the game’s four rounds, gathering and planting seeds, collecting water and compost, tending plants, and harvesting them, while also clearing more land and building buildings for powers and points. The core of the game is in the plants, but there are multiple ways to win here; you can focus on certain plants over others, or go heavy on buildings, and so on. It’s not as punishing as Agricola, which has a huge penalty if you can’t feed all of your family members at the end of certain rounds, but you can still end up knee-deep in compost if you don’t manager your resources well. (Buy it here)

14. Gnome Hollow

Gnome Hollow was a huge hit at Gen Con with its bright, colorful components and combo of route-building and set collection. You draw and place two hexagonal tiles from the market on every turn, placing them on the map all players are building in the center of the table, and then move one of your two gnome workers to take an action – claiming a path in progress, selling mushrooms at the market, gathering a flower, or visiting a signpost to grab some extra mushrooms. When you complete a path, you get the mushrooms shown on the path, and then you move one of your path tokens on your board, gaining a bonus if the path covers 5 to 7 tiles, and scoring more points at game-end the more ring tokens you’ve moved. The scoring is extremely simple, and there’s plenty of interaction on the map and in the competition for the best spaces at the mushroom market. It’s a very solid game across the board, pun intended. (Buy it here; full review coming in January.)

15. Castle Combo

I find it hard to separate this game entirely from Faraway, as they both came from the same US publisher/distributor (Pandasaurus) in almost exactly the same box size with similar cartoonish art. The designers aren’t the same, and the games don’t have a ton in common other than one trait – you will play cards early that will determine your card choices later on, because they only pay out if you get the right cards and place them the right way. You’re all building a 3×3 grid of cards, selecting from two rows, and on your turn you can only select one of the three cards in the row where the Messenger sits. You can pay a key to move him or to refresh the cards in the row. You pay the price in gold to buy a card and then place it wherever you want, usually getting some immediate return in gold or keys (with some other possibilities), and then earning points at game-end from that card based on what else is in its row or column or just your whole tableau. It’s just 9 turns and managing your resources while ensuring you snag the card you need keeps the game tense right to the last turn. These two designers have a very promising new game, Zenith, coming out next year from the company that published the next game on this list. (Buy it here)

16. Captain Flip

The first release from PlayPunk, the new publishing imprint from designer Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Tokaido) and Thomas Provoost (co-founder of the publisher Repos), Captain Flip is a light family game where players try to fill their pirate ships with different crew tiles. Your ship has five columns of varying sizes, anywhere from one to five spaces high, and the powers or rewards of tiles you place often depend on what else is in that row or column. If you don’t like the crew member on the tile you drew, you can flip it to the other side, but then you have to play that one, even if it might hurt you to do so. One character, the Gunner, gets you 5 coins (points) when you play it, but if you have to place your third Gunner, you lose immediately. It was one of the three finalists for this year’s Spiel des Jahres, losing out to Sky Team. (Buy it here)

17. Fairy Ring

This might deserve to be a little higher but I need to get more plays in before deciding. It is a really clever family-level game that blew away my expectations in terms of its strategic depth – the rules are simple, but you can play it pretty seriously regardless of your age. Players play mushroom cards to the area (village) in front of them, stacking them by type if you wish, and then moving their fairies around the table based on the number on the card they just played, passing through all players’ villages and taking points from the card on which they land. If your fairy ends up on one of your own mushrooms, you score based on the mushroom type. If it ends up on another player’s mushroom, that player gets points, and you only score if you have at least one of the same mushroom type in your village. The game has two seasons with different decks, bringing higher numbers in the second deck. Each season has six rounds, so you get just twelve rounds in total, limiting the game time. The big strategic question here is how to set up your village to maximize your points without handing too much to your opponents, with all the information out for players to see, so everyone can follow that plan if they wish. (Buy it here)

18. Seers Catalog

Seers Catalog is a card-shedding game where you play tricks to try to get rid of most of your cards – someone objected to me calling this a “trick-taking” game because you don’t take the tricks, but you do play them, so sue me – but not all of them. If you have five or fewer cards remaining in your hand at the end of the round, you gain points equal to the face value of the lowest card in your hand. Then all players lose 1 point per card in their hands. The catch is that once you’ve got 5 cards or fewer left, you can’t pass during a trick – you have to play if at all possible, so someone else can potentially bait you into playing your last card. There are two ‘artifact’ cards with 0 value (mostly) but special powers that spice up each game as well. Seers Catalog is also quite unusual for a trick-playing game in that it works well with two players. (Full review)

19. Pixies

Designer Johannes Goupy made my top 10 with Faraway and also designed 2023’s very solid Rauha and the complex game From the Moon (which I haven’t played), and he’s here as well with this wonderful small-box game for just about all ages – maybe 7 and up, to put an actual limit on it. The whole game is a deck of cards in four colors, numbered 1 through 9, and you can only play a card face-up to its matching space in your 3×3 tableau. If you can’t or don’t want to do so, you can flip the card face-down and put it anywhere. If you place a card in its proper space on top of a face-down card, or a space that already has a card of that number in it, it’s “validated” and scores its face value. You also score the net of the various positive and negative symbols on all of your face-up cards, and score for the largest contiguous area of one color. You play four rounds, one for each season, with the area bonus increasing in each round. The card-drafting mechanic (very similar to Faraway’s) gives you some real player interaction, too. (Full review)

20. Life in Reterra

Earth is on the rebound, as some unstated disaster has led to a world where humanity has to start over. In Life in Reterra (get it? it took me way too long), players place terrain tiles with various symbols on them that allow the placement of citizens, relic tokens, or buildings, the last of which can give you additional powers or gain you extra points. The real strength of Life in Reterra is its flexibility: in every game, you choose five buildings to use, taking one of the three recommended sets or just mixing and matching as you please, as long as you match all five required building shapes. Once everyone has filled their 4×4 grid, you score. It’s got a longer runway with the various building tiles’ rules, but the game play itself is very quick. (Full review)

Honorable mentions: Courtisans (full review), River of Gold, Parks Roll & Hike (full review).

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→ December 10, 2024
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The Gang.

I admit I was pretty skeptical when I heard about The Gang, a new small-box game that was described to me as “cooperative poker.” It is that, but it works far better than I expected it to.

The Gang is based specifically on Texas Hold ‘Em, where players begin with two cards in their hand (pocket cards) that other players can’t see, and then five cards are revealed in three stages, first three (the flop), then one more (the turn), and then the last one (the river). In actual poker, players bet after each of these stages, but nothing is resolved until after all five cards are out and the betting has concluded. In the Gang, the players try to determine the ranking of all players’ best hands, best to worst, after the river card is flipped, but must not communicate at all about what’s in their hands. The only communication comes by taking the ranking tokens after each step – so, for example, if after the flop, your best hand is nine-high (which is terrible), you would probably grab the one-star token for that round, which is the lowest one. Someone else might try to take it as well, so you have to decide whether to let them have it or whether to swipe it from them as a way of signalling that, hey, your hand really sucks. You can never have more than one of those ranking tokens in front of you, and you can’t put a token in front of someone else – only in front of yourself or back to the middle of the table.

There are four sets of those tokens, one set for each stage, but you only ‘score’ the set for after the river. If all players have the correct ranking tokens based on their best possible hand, your team has completed the challenge and gets to flip a heist card; if any player is out of ranking order, you have triggered the alarm and flip one of those cards instead. You all play a best-of-five, so if you get three heist cards before you trigger three alarms, you win the game.

The game also comes with various cards to increase the difficulty or change some of the rules, like giving each player a specific power or requiring you to win in four rather than five. I understand why these exist, since otherwise the entire game is a regular deck of playing cards and the 16 tokens, but I don’t think it needs them. It just overcomplicates things without making the game any more interesting. I might feel better if I played this a few dozen times and maybe got tired of it, but there are just so many possible combinations from a deck of 52 cards that I think it’s got a lot of legs.

The one caveat I would offer is one the tutorial app acknowledges – the game plays 3 to 6, but with only 3 players, it’s just not that challenging. There are only six possible configurations of tokens/rankings with three players, so you could accidentally get it right now and then, and that takes a good bit of the fun away. I played with 4 and 5 and it was appropriately difficult, winnable but not easily so, and that meant that when we nailed it, everyone got that positive feeling from a job well done. We had one people where we had three people whose hands were separated by just four cards – something like queen high, jack high, nine high – and we got it right. That was incredibly satisfying. The group had a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old, and both were able to grasp the concept and the scoring with the help of the reference cards (which just shows the hierarchy of the values of possible hands), although the 8-year-old struggled a little bit with the nuance of being, say, second-highest – if he saw he had a good hand, he wanted the top token. I imagine that will smooth out with more plays.

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→ December 3, 2024
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A Real Pain.

Jesse Eisenberg has come into plenty of acclaim as an actor, but A Real Pain, his second turn as a director and writer might herald an even brighter future on that side of the camera. He co-stars in this taut, funny, thoughtful film with Kieran Culkin, who gets the better character here and plays the absolute hell out of it, relegating Eisenberg to straight-man status for large stretches of the story, as Culkin seizes the film by the throat and refuses to let go.

The two men play cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), who meet up at an airport at the start of the film as they embark on a weeklong tour of Poland that is focused on the history of Polish Jews, including a visit to a concentration camp, after which the two will peel off on their own and visit the house where their recently deceased grandmother grew up. Both were close to her, but Benji was especially so, and he has struggled to cope with her death. The two form a classic odd couple, as David is successful, straitlaced, anxious, and extremely worried about Benjy; while Benjy is outspoken, charming, unbounded, and seems to lack a purpose in life.

The two are joined on a tour by the recently divorced Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a man who fled the Rwandan genocide as a boy and later converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan), and a somewhat older Jewish couple with an ancestor from Poland who came to the U.S. well before World War II (Daniel Oreskes & Liza Sadovy). The tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), isn’t Jewish, for which he seems to apologize in every other sentence, and he takes his job as guide extremely seriously.

Benjy is the smoke bomb thrown in the middle of the group, as he swears constantly, asks uncomfortable questions, and generally speaks his mind even in situations where decorum might call for him to say less. He’s the conscience of the story, though, saying what needs to be said, even if his delivery could use some work. David, of course, is appalled by much of his cousin’s behavior – including Benjy smuggling cannabis into Poland – but also envies Benjy’s apparently carefree attitude and the way that other people gravitate so much more strongly to his cousin, something that’s especially apparent as the two men say goodbye to the tour group to go to their grandmother’s hometown.

The visit to the Majdanek concentration camp, which fleeing Nazi forces failed to destroy as Soviet troops approached, also provides Eisenberg with one of his strongest scenes as director. The imagery is so potent that it requires very little dialogue, and you would expect these people to be nearly silent in their discomfort, horror, grief, and so on. The shots of the tourists walking by the gas chamber are brief, but so strong, and when it’s followed by James’s explanation that the blue stains on the walls are the residues of the hydrogen cyanide gas used to murder Jews and other inmates at the camp, it ties back somberly to something Benjy said earlier to the group that at the time might have seemed histrionic. The script ends up validating Benjy many times over, without exactly excusing some of his more boorish actions.

Culkin is on another level here, way beyond the solid performances he gave on Succession; Benjy is far more interesting and nuanced than Roman, who was an entitled and often gross little prat, and didn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities or even a good reason for why he was the way he was. Benjy is such a rich, intelligently written character, and Culkin plays him perfectly, making it clear why he is the life of the party while also showing that that’s something of a façade. He’s much better than Eisenberg, who plays that character he nearly always plays, the nebbish, fast-talking guy who doesn’t seem to have feelings; there is one scene, at a restaurant, where Eisenberg gets the floor, and we finally see inside David, and the film could probably have used a little more of that. Sharpe, who was so good in Giri/Haji and very good in The White Lotus, is excellent in a smaller role, nailing his interactions with Benjy so that you feel his discomfort and understand the evolution of his reactions over the course of the tour.

The only film I’ve seen in this cycle that was better than this is Anora, and that’s largely because that film is more ambitious; A Real Pain is tight and trim at 90 minutes and wastes none of it, doing what it set out to do and dropping you back at the airport before you know what hit you. Culkin seems like a lock to get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and I really hope this ends up with a Best Picture nod or, at worst, a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Eisenberg. It’s better than Conclave and so much better than Emilia Pérez, just to name two movies that have better current odds for a Best Picture nod. I can not imagine I’ll see ten better films from 2024 than this.

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→ November 25, 2024
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Dracula vs. Van Helsing.

Dracula vs. Van Helsing is a new, asymmetrical two-player game (first out in 2023 in Europe) from the co-designers of The LOOP, one of whom also co-designed Sea Salt & Paper, Draftosaurus, and Rauha. This particular game offers a new twist on the capture-the-flag style of two-player games, with a couple of mechanics that make the game extremely tense, where one player can end the round without warning and you often won’t know the results until all of the cards are revealed. I have found it really hard to play well, more so from the Dracula side, which has made it a fun challenge to try. (It’s also at Target if Noble Knight is sold out.)

There’s a little board between the two players with five district and four spaces for humans in each of them. Dracula wins if he infects all four humans in any single area, or if he’s still alive after five rounds; Van Helsing wins if he brings Dracula’s health points from 11 to 0 before that happens. In each round, each player will play one card to each of five regions, moving and swapping cards over the course of the round to try to get the best alignment of cards for the reveal, at which point the cards are compared, with Dracula biting a human if their card wins, and Dracula losing a health point if Van Helsing’s card wins.

The deck has cards from 1 through 8 in four colors, and in each round one color starts out as the trump. At the reveal, a card in the trump color defeats any other color, with the higher trump card winning if they’re both in that color. If neither card is the trump color, the higher number wins, and if they have the same number, there’s an order to the colors that is also variable and then determines the winner.

Each number has a specific action associated with it, and when you discard a card, you take that action. On a turn, you draw the next card from the deck and decide whether you want to discard it or to play it to one of your five spaces, discarding the card that was already there and taking that card’s action. Actions include (in order from 1 to 7) revealing one of your own cards, revealing the next card in the deck, revealing one of your opponent’s card, swapping two of your own cards, taking another turn, swapping one card with your opponent’s card in the same district, and changing the trump suit to one of your choice. The 8 card’s action is to end the round immediately, but you can only do so once there are at least six cards in the discard pile, giving each player a fair chance to compete. Either player can call to end the round without discarding an 8, but that gives the other player one last turn, and that’s a huge risk to take.

At the end of the round, you evaluate each district from left to right, and if either player meets their victory condition, the game ends immediately without evaluating any further districts. If you haven’t played five rounds yet and neither player has won, you reshuffle all cards but leave the trump suit and suit order as they were at the end of the previous round.

I’ve played this a bunch on BGA, and it took me forever to win my first game – for some reason I kept getting the Dracula side – because I wasn’t aggressive enough at protecting my health points. There’s a lot of randomness in any game where you draw one card (tile, whatever) and then must play it immediately, but there’s also a ton of skill in this game around what cards to hang on to and when to ditch certain ones. Swapping the trump color (7) and then ending the round immediately (8) on consecutive turns can be a death blow to your opponent, and the swap cards with your opponent (6) and then ending the round immediately can be almost as good. There are times when it’s okay to reveal one of your own cards, and if your opponent reveals one of yours, maybe you want to ditch that card sooner. There are little strategies with each number and then the broader strategy of protecting yourself while trying to strike surgically (if you’re Dracula) or more broadly (if you’re Van Helsing), and if you play it well you can even overcome some bad card draws. It’s a strong two-player game in the vein of Jaipur or Battle Line, where the competition against your opponent is very intense, but with the added twist of asymmetrical goals even though you play from the same deck.

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→ November 21, 2024
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Anora

Writer/director Sean Baker has carved out a niche for himself with stories about sex workers that rely on a small number of well-developed characters and a strong element of time and place. Anora is his biggest film to date, showing that his eye for character and mood translate well even when the stakes of the story are much higher.

Anora is the given name of Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer at the club HQ in New York whose life is turned upside down when Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, shows up in the club, asking for a girl who speaks Russian and throwing around $100 bills. Vanya is 21, seldom sober, and living the high life, often literally, on his father’s ruble. He buys a week of Ani’s time, flies to Las Vegas with her and several friends, and then marries her at a Vegas chapel, complete with a 3-carat ring. The fun and games end when one of Vanya’s handlers tells him that Vanya’s parents are flying to the U.S. for force an annulment and bring the prodigal son back to Russia to join his father’s business, taking the film in a darkly comic direction that only further underscores how little agency Ani has in her own life.

Ani is a flawed heroine, looking out for herself at every turn because it’s clear no one else would; she’s 23 and effectively on her own, living with her older sister, with a mother in Florida who appears to be absent from her life and no mention of any other family. Ani squabbles with her boss and some of the other dancers over mostly petty matters, but when she’s cornered, she’s vicious – often appropriately so – because she has so little to call her own. She lives a precarious existence, both in finances and in safety, as most sex workers do, a fact that is only underscored when Vanya’s handlers, including the amoral Orthodox priest Toros, show up and force her to help them find the fugitive Vanya in a mad and often funny chase across the city. When the resolution comes, Ani takes control in the only way left available to her, although in the end it becomes clear to her (and the audience) just how little she has.

Each of Baker’s prior two films revolved around a strongly written character played extremely well, with a plot good enough to move the pieces along and get the character to the right conclusion. Ani is just as well-written as The Florida Project’s Mooney or Red Rocket’s Mikey, and Madison gives the best performance of the trio, but the story does suffer a little under the strain of the second half. The plot strains credulity at a few points to either increase Ani’s helplessness or to amp up the comedic aspects, although the courtroom scene – one of those less believable moments – did deliver some big laughs.

Baker’s The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, and his follow-up Red Rocket made my top ten in 2021, but neither received the plaudits that Anora has so far. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is atop most of the Oscar prediction lists right now (although it’s still early days), while Madison appears to be a strong favorite to win Best Actress. I’ve seen just four of the Best Picture contenders, and this is easily the best, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I see something better. It isn’t up to the level of The Florida Project, and is more ambitious than Red Rocket without the latter’s taut story. Madison, though, is a revelation – I’ve never seen her before, but other than her overdone Noo Yawk accent, she’s delivers the kind of performance that deserves all of the awards. The contrast between Madison’s tiny stature and Ani’s big, smart-assed, and foul-mouthed personality perfectly encapsulates the struggle the character faces as a woman in a misogynistic world, working in an even more misogynistic industry, trying to make a living in what may be the only way available to her.

Anora lacks some of the stronger secondary characters who popped up in Baker’s previous two films as well, making this even more of a character study than either of them was. Mark Eydelshteyn plays Vanya as a Russian cosplaying as a louche Timothée Chalamet, and the character turns out to be disappointingly one-note and is usurped in the second half by the film’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Garnick and Igor. Vanya’s parents, especially his mother, are caricatures. Even Toros, who contributes some humorous moments because of his desperation to get the marriage annulled before Vanya’s parents walk off the plane, literally leaving in the middle of a baptism to go find him, turns out to be just craven, nothing more.

Which ultimately adds up to Anora being merely very, very good, when Baker has been transcendent before. Mikey Madison takes a great character and plays it to the hilt, keeping you on her side even when you don’t like or understand what she’s doing, in a performance that will probably see me actively rooting for her to win everything this winter. I wish the characters around her were more interesting and less idiotic.

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→ November 19, 2024
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Runemasters.

Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense board game for up to four players, with a solo mode, that is really, really hard to beat. I’m pretty impressed by the design, even though I honestly have no idea what a winning strategy would be. (I only played this one solo, and no, I haven’t beaten it.)

In Runemasters, players are “guardians” trying to defend a tower against incoming hordes of monsters. The players win if at least one guardian is still alive and the tower is still standing when the monster deck reaches the Dawn card, which is randomly shuffled into the bottom three cards during setup. The monsters attack via four paths, each with its own color, and only one guardian can guard each pathway. Each monster has two to four spaces on it representing “weak points,” and once players have filled those via attacks, the monster is vanquished. Don’t worry, more are coming behind it. The game goes back and forth between player turns and monster attacks until either the players win or they all die.

On a turn, the active player rolls four dice and then uses each one for an action of their choice. Red, green, yellow, or blue symbols allow the player to move to the matching pathway, or to put an injury token on the matching weak point of a monster in the path they’re guarding. Purple symbols let the player move to any pathway, or to deal an injury to a purple weak point. When a player moves their guardian to an occupied pathway entrance, they swap places with that guardian, which is a good way to get another player out of trouble. The white symbol lets a player use their special ability, which can include healing any guardian of one hit point, moving a monster to another pathway, or putting a shield on any guardian to protect them from attacks for one round. Discarding two matching dice allows a player to place a blockade on their pathway for one round, as it’s destroyed by the next monster attack. A player may discard any die entirely to charge up their superpower, which is active when fully charged (level 4) and then may be recharged and used one more time before it is done for the entire game.

Players start the game with 4 health points and 4 mana points. The health points are the things you need to not die. Dying is very easy, as it turns out; livin’s the hard part. Mana is more useful, and easier to get, as it’s the reward for beating every monster type except dragons. You can spend one mana to reroll as many dice as you like one time. If a monster is at the nearest space in a pathway (space 1 – pathways have 5 spaces and new monsters spawn in space 3) and your mana is full, you can spend all 4 mana points to destroy the monster immediately.

After each player’s turn, all monsters move one space towards the tower, if able – only one monster can occupy a space. A monster in space 1 then attacks the guardian guarding that pathway, dealing 1 damage. If there’s no guardian, the damage hits the tower, which has 4 or 6 health points depending on the player count. To spare you a little math, I’ll spell this out: In a four-player game, monsters will attack four times between your actual turns. This is a very efficient way to kill a guardian, since you only have four health points, so if there’s a monster in space 1 and someone doesn’t move you out of the way, you’re dead before your turn will come back around again – and that’s even assuming you have 4 health points left, which, let’s face it, you don’t.

There are different monster types with some different attributes to contribute a little more chaos to the game. Archers can attack from any space as long as there isn’t a monster in front of them. Warriors can’t be killed by rerolled dice. Wizards can’t be killed by the four-mana trick. Dragons’ weak points don’t have colored icons on them; you kill a dragon with three matching dice, or with the four-mana trick, after which you get 1 mana and 1 health point. There’s also a small Event deck that combines some good and bad rules tweaks to each round, and that allows you to calibrate the difficulty a little bit.

Since I soloed this game and recently did the same with Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs, I couldn’t avoid a comparison, and this game is far superior. It’s so much less fiddly to learn or play, even with some issues in the rule book (possibly a translation issue, although I found at least two errors around icons that were reversed in the rules). It’s also harder to beat, which I suppose will ultimately have a ceiling, but I was happy to keep banging my head against the tower wall for a while. It’s not my favorite genre or theme, but if you like tower-defense games, or want a good small-box cooperative experience, Runemasters is pretty solid.

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→ November 14, 2024
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Time’s Arrow.

Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, which was the basis for last year’s Oscar-winning film adaptation, wasn’t his first foray into Holocaust fiction; he explored the same subject in a very different fashion in 1991’s Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence, which is one of the most brilliant works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. The entire novel takes place in reverse, narrated by a second consciousness inside of a person who has just died – or un-died, and will go through life backwards through the eyes of our narrator.

Tod T. Friendly, as the newly alived person is known when the novel begins, is a doctor in the U.S. whose life will ravel across the pages, moving into his career, his carnal affairs, and eventually out of the country and back to his place of origin. While there is a big mystery that the nameless narrator is trying to figure out, he (I’m assuming a gender here) also discusses some of the most, uh, personal biological matters – but in reverse. Imagine defecation, but you sit on the toilet for the feces to go into your colon. You “eat,” but food exits your stomach and ends up on the plate intact. The narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of these and other mundane matters of life, such as any financial transactions, make the novel quite funny almost all of the way through … until, of course, we get to Tod T. Friendly’s younger days and our narrator has to make sense of the senseless.

Part of the genius of Time’s Arrow is in its construction; there has been plenty of fiction where time flows backwards in some fashion, with Memento (or maybe Irréversible) the best-known example. Philip K. Dick wrote something very similar in his novel Counter-Clock World, where time begins to flow backwards for everyone, so they live their lives in reverse. Amis’s conceit here is that the man we meet as Tod T. Friendly lived his life in normal, forward-flowing time; the narrator experiences it in the wrong direction, so he misunderstands causality and conceives wrong and often hilarious explanations for all sorts of events.

The other bit of genius is the same that Amis displayed in The Zone of Interest: he uses the Holocaust as a backdrop for a novel that simultaneously isn’t about the Holocaust … but it also is. It’s such a tightrope for any artist to walk, mining one of the worst episodes in human history for absurd comedy that also helps reveal things about the human condition. The Zone of Interest explored the banality of evil. Time’s Arrow shows how unthinkable the Nazis’ atrocities were: they make sense to our narrator, sort of, because he sees events in reverse. You have to turn history on its head to see any sense in it at all. Viewed normally, the actions of the Nazis, as a group or individually, are just inexplicable.

Time’s Arrow runs a scant 168 pages, which is probably about as far as you could take a gimmick like this, between the bathroom humor that populates the majority of the book and then the glimpses inside a concentration camp. There’s a limit to how far an author can go with either of those ideas – I certainly don’t want more scatological humor than this novel offers, and I don’t know how Amis could have spent any more time on the atrocities themselves without turning this into a very different sort of book. It is unique, and it works spectacularly well as a brisk, witty, often silly read that left me with deep unease and broader philosophical questions.

Next up: Anne de Marcken’s novella It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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→ October 23, 2024
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Daughters.

Daughters is a documentary about a single father-daughter dance, remarkable because the fathers are all incarcerated, some for many years to come, and the dance is part of a program that began in Richmond, Virginia, called Date with Dad.

The film follows several daughters and an entire circle of fathers at a prison in Washington, D.C., from when the men start their required fatherhood coaching sessions about ten weeks before the dance through the event itself and its immediate aftermath. There is no narration, as the subjects do all of the necessary talking to the camera or in groups. We hear from the girls and some of their mothers about how hard it is for them to grow up without their fathers around, sometimes going months or years without touching their dads and maybe talking to them once a week for 15 minutes – for which the mothers are charged outrageous fees. The fathers open up quite a bit about their feelings about being absent fathers, sometimes as children of absent fathers themselves, and the film wisely avoids telling us anything about why they’re incarcerated. Some of the strongest scenes are the smallest ones, like the one where the men, who are provided with suits and haircuts before the dance, are tying their ties, with one man showing a group of the others how to tie a Windsor knot; or the one of Aubrey, the youngest of the daughters we meet, as she rattles off her multiplication tables but who is too young to fully grasp how long her father will be gone. The daughters we see range in ages from 5 to about 15, and their feelings range from sorrow to confusion to outright anger at their dads for their life choices.

When we finally get to the day of the dance, and those girls start walking down the hall towards their fathers, who are sitting in a row of plastic chairs in their suits and polished shoes, I dare you not to cry. I just dare you. Those reactions, both of the daughters and the fathers, are as pure a distillation of what it means to be human as you will see in years of movies. There is far more to the movie than that – the conversations the fathers and daughters have in the dance itself are illuminating and direct and often heartbreaking – but that one moment is the perfect unscripted scene.

I can’t relate to these men completely, because I have never been in that situation, where I couldn’t see my daughter, or hold her, or even talk to her whenever I wanted. That scene where the dads see their daughters for the first time the night of the dance did remind me of one thing, though: the fear that gripped me for almost all of my daughter’s childhood that I would die before she was an adult. I just imagined the grief, the hole in her life, all the things I didn’t get to do or say. When they tell you that being a parent means living with your heart outside of your body, they aren’t even scratching the surface. Being a parent meant living for her more than I was even living for myself.

Daughters follows the dance with brief looks at the aftermath for both sides, with one man, whose daughter couldn’t make it but who is there in suit and tie (and perhaps thought she was coming?), giving a speech to the other dads that is so open and vulnerable that it underscores again their humanity and the cruelty of our prison system. The film ends with two-sentence updates on a few of the incarcerated dads and their daughters, one of whom is now in a facility that doesn’t allow visitation rights. I don’t think I knew that was possible outside of people held in solitary confinement (which is, itself, cruel and unusual punishment), but what Daughters underscores is that such a policy harms more than just the inmates: Regardless of what the father did, depriving his children of the right to even see him – not for a dance, or even a “touch visit,” but literally just to see him to talk to him – harms the kids, and I can’t imagine what the benefit or justification is for the policy other than spite. Our national addiction to incarceration is bad enough, but this film makes it clear how the carceral state also harms succeeding generations. The damage done when we are deprived of a parent, regardless of the reason, is immense. The Date with Dads program boasts a 5% recidivism rate, meaning 95% of fathers who go through the program and are subsequently released from prison do not reoffend. That such a simple program has such powerful results should be reason enough to expand its reach.

Avoiding mention of the fathers’ crimes, alleged or otherwise, is a choice, of course. If we found out that one of these men was responsible for someone’s death – which I don’t think is true given what we hear about the lengths of their sentences – it would alter our view of him whether we want it to or not. That choice by the directors, documentarian Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, keeps the focus where it belongs, on the people themselves and the essential relationship between fathers and daughters that will resonate with most of the viewing audience. There are some outtakes from the dance that play alongside the closing credits, and they are definitely worth hanging around to watch, as they show more joy from the night itself than is immediately evident from the main footage, which doesn’t show a whole lot of actual dancing, a choice I understand (this is about their relationships, not the Harlem Shuffle) but that they could have balanced differently.

Daughters won two Audience Awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, U.S. Documentary and Festival Favorite, after which Netflix picked it up; it’s already showing up on top of predictions for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with another Netflix documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, that premieres today. I imagine the powerful social justice angle here will help Daughters in awards season, and I hope that encourages more people to watch it and to consider doing something to help fight the incarceration cycle.

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