10 Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
This wildly popular stop-motion animation is the ultimate beneficiary of the new hunger for something real and organic in the movies.
Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate's film is so airy, so tiny, so eccentric, so exotic, that it appears to break every rule of instant relatability. It whimsically avoids the easy grasp and the elevator pitch. Even the title is baffling and forgettable
- are the first and third words supposed to rhyme? - requiring two or three repetitions before it can be committed to memory.
It's a movie with a grassroots fanbase that had already been cultivated online, as it was developed from a wacky YouTube series. The premise is that the director has moved into an Airbnb after the breakup of his marriage to discover that someone or something is already in the house: a seashell the size of a thumbnail called Marcel.
Marcel has a big blinking eye and dinky little shoes. And he is looking after his seashellgranny (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) who loves the poetry of Philip Larkin.
It is an intensely likable and lovable movie that alchemically converts bafflement or exasperation into affection. The quirky, funny relationship between real-life grownup Dean and the imaginary tiny, childlike seashell Marcel is the bromance of the year. Peter Bradshaw
9 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
The Sackler family wanted their name to be synonymous with art, high-brow prestige and patrician good taste. But it became synonymous with something else: pain.
Part of the Sackler family were behind the Purdue Pharma corporation marketing the ruinously addictive OxyContin opioid pill, which physicians across the US were persuaded to prescribe for essentially non-serious issues.
This story is from the December 22, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the December 22, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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