24 Movies You Probably Missed This Year, But Should Totally See

24 Movies You Probably Missed This Year, But Should Totally See

I've only seen two of them.

Snowpiercer is like an alternate version of The Hunger Games, if the latter had been written for adults by somebody who had just binge-watched all nine episodes of Supertrain on bad acid. I can't really say that I enjoyed the film, but I was mesmerized by it, and can tentatively recommend it for people who look for something outside the box and more than a bit demented.

The Skeleton Twins is the movie with Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader in dramatic roles. They are both excellent, but the film is the familiar self-pitying indie wallow in substance abuse, low self-esteem, suicide and all the other themes that sponsor a float in almost every indie parade. To make matters worse, it adds Hollywood plot contrivance to indie aesthetics. It is what you would end up with if you were charged with creating a "made for Sundance" film. Since it is a variant on Cartman's "gay cowboys eating pudding" formula, it was naturally a hit at Sundance and with critics, which goes to show you how far critics are from being able to relate to their potential audiences.

I agree line-by-line with one of the very few critics who disliked it: "The Skeleton Twins is yet another wan indie comedy-drama that plays like an adaptation of something plucked from the slush pile of short story submissions in the fiction editor’s office at The New Yorker. This is director Craig Johnson’s second film, but it plays like a first, like the product of a smart, sensitive person who sets out to make a movie before having anything particularly interesting to say."