Christmas movie review roundup: 'Nosferatu,' 'Better Man,' 'Los Frikis' and 'The Fire Inside'

A look at the last new movies of 2024

I hope everyone who celebrates had a Merry Christmas, and Happy Hanukkah to my fellow Jews.

As is the case most years, there were quite a few big movie releases, either limited or wide, on or around Christmas Day. I have already reviewed a few of those, such as A Complete Unknown, which is now out in wide release. The Room Next Door and The Seed of the Secret Fig, both of which I saw during the fall festival season, are also now in theaters. The Brutalist, my favorite 2024 film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles and is set to go wider in January.

My review of another Christmas Day release, Babygirl, should be going up on Splice Today this week.

Meanwhile, here are some reviews of some other films, most of which I first saw a while ago, that are now in theaters:

Nosferatu

Robert Eggers’ latest film is a super-stylized remake of the silent classic from 1922, which has been remade a couple of other times since then, which is to say nothing of the many other versions of Dracula that have come out over the years. This version, like some of the others, even credits Mary Shelley’s novel as source material.

I didn’t like this nearly as much as Eggers’ other work, most notably The Northman and The Lighthouse.

This one stars Bill Skarsgård as the titular vampire, also known as Count Orlok, while his prey is Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter; Nicolas Hoult plays her husband.

The film certainly looks amazing, but I had trouble connecting with it. Depp’s performance has been widely praised but I thought it just consisted mostly of screaming, while Hoult isn’t as successful here as in Juror #2 and other recent roles.

I thought the film was dead on screen whenever Willem Dafoe wasn’t around. Not only is he an Eggers regular, but he also played the vampire (or rather, a vampire playing the vampire) in the satirical Nosferatu making-of from 2000, Shadow of the Vampire.

Better Man

Yes, that’s right, it’s the biopic of rock star Robbie Williams, in which Williams is only ever seen as a chimpanzee. I give the film credit for doing something a little different with the music biopic formula, although I’m not quite sure this weird swing connects.

Directed by Michael Gracey, best known for The Greatest Showman, the film can certainly stage musical numbers well. But again, the gimmick doesn’t quite work, strange as it is to watch a chimp do drugs or a have a human girlfriend.

Williams, famously, was huge in Britain and only crossed over in the U.S. briefly, and I don’t know that his life story is interesting enough to justify a biopic. And finally, once again, “why is he a monkey?”

Los Frikis

Directed by the Peanut Butter Falcon team of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, this is a fact-based drama about a group of people in Cuba, in the early 1990s, who purposely injected themselves with the HIV virus, to live at a special facility that was much more comfortable than typical Cuban life.

I’ve been to Cuba, and I thought the locations successfully faked what it looks like there. Plus, the cast consists mostly of unknown Cuban actors, although also on board are Héctor Medina, and Adria Arjona, best known from Hit Man.

The characters all love rock music and baseball, and are for some reason big fans of baseball journeyman Chili Davis. In fact, we see them watching the 1991 World Series, including Davis’ homer in Game 2, which I happened to be in attendance for:

The Fire Inside

This film has a strong pedigree, as the feature directorial debut of Oscar-winning cinematographer Rachel Morrison, with a script from Barry Jenkins. But it doesn’t do much to get beyond sports biopic cliche.

The Fire Inside is a biopic of Claressa "T-Rex" Shields, the Olympic gold medal-winning female boxer, and her numerous struggles, in which she’s aided by Brian Tyree Henry as her supportive coach.

Despite fine performances from Henry and Ryan Destiny as Shields, there’s not much to this one. I’ll give the film this, though: It’s not the worst movie Barry Jenkins is involved with this month.