Ralph Fiennes – RazorFine Review

Top Ten Movies of 2024

Alan Rapp / January 8, 2025 / Top Tens & Lists

2024 wasn’t as top-heavy as some years, but there was a wide variety of good movies. Here’s a look back at my favorites from those movies I was lucky enough to view this year. Despite my best efforts there will always be some not included here if access was limited, the film wasn’t released in time for review before the end of 2024, the film wasn’t made available for awards consideration, or I simply ran out of time. Likely some of those other films you’ll see reviews for later in 2025 but they are not in consideration here. Here then, is my list of the best movies of 2024.

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Conclave

Alan Rapp / December 23, 2024 / Movie Reviews

Title: Conclave
IMDb: link

Far less silly than Angels & Demons (at least until its final ten minutes), and with less conspiracy and murder, Conclave tackles the election of a new pope by the sequestered College of Cardinals. Our main protagonist throughout events is Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) who despite his recent religious struggles finds himself in charge of the proceedings where he sides with the more modern liberal candidates (Stanley Tucci and Lucian Msamati) for the open position over other candidates (John Lithgow and Sergio Castellitto).

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The Top 10 Movies of 2014

Alan Rapp / January 2, 2015 / Top Tens & Lists

Family, friendship, and the struggle to find oneself’s place in the world were the big themes on my list this year. Looking back the year might not have offered me the clear winner to top the list (I gave out no perfect score for any film this year), but it still offered a solid list of ten movies worth noting and celebrating. As always, I tried to see as much as possible but there are a few films, most notably Whiplash and Gone Girl, which eluded me. Others like Foxcatcher, Inherent Vice, and American Sniper won’t release in my home market in 2014 (and which I was unable to view and/or review before the publishing of this list) are also not included (although you might see a couple of them turn up in my mid-year list of Best Movies of 2015 So Far next year). Enough with what didn’t make the cut, here is my list of the Top Ten Movies of 2014.

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The Top Ten Movies of 2014 (so far)

Alan Rapp / July 4, 2014 / Top Tens & Lists

We’ve hit the halfway point of the year and, as has become the custom, that means it’s time to look back on the best movies of the year so far. This year’s list includes three animated films, two sequels, the return of a beloved television character, a latest (and in one case the last) from few big name directors, and a pair of small indie films topping the list of what has been a pretty damn good first-half of the year at the movies.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel

Alan Rapp / March 27, 2014 / Movie Reviews

Title: The Grand Budapest Hotel
IMDB: link

For his latest film writer/director Wes Anderson takes his trademark style to the fictional Republic of Zubrowka and a once-proud mountainside resort known as The Grand Budapest Hotel with a rich history to share. Relying heavily on narration, the film struggles a bit to get going by beginning in the present and slowly peeling back layers (each jumping 20 years or so into the past) until we finally arrive in the pre-World War II 1930s and the story of fastidious old-school concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his the new lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori).

During the overly-elaborate and unnecessarily complicated (although certainly not boring) first 20-minutes or so as the movie introduces an elderly author (Tom Wilkinson) beginning his own flashbacks to his time at the hotel as a younger man (Jude Law) when he happened to meet the elderly version of Zero (F. Murray Abraham) and thus learned his story, Anderson relies on a variety of his usual bag of tricks involving beautiful cinematography and set design highlighted by the use of some marvelous miniatures.

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