Best of 2024
You know the drill
Foreword
This was not a strong year for movies, but in these waning days of 2024 talk has ramped up around one film predicted to define our era, showing up on increasingly more year-end lists (including this one, at #7) after lying in wait to be discovered for months. I suspect we’ll be arguing over it for years to come, though what do I know. Not on this list: The Brutalist, which, while technically impressive, fails to match the dramaturgical greatness of any of its proudly-mimicked influences. (Also not on this list: Nickel Boys, but only because it hasn’t screened for plebeians in D.C. yet; I’ll write about it next month.) Perfection (aesthetic, dramatic, or otherwise) was in short supply this year—maybe only three movies on my list come even close to it—but a cinephilia that can’t tolerate the imperfections among the virtues of the year’s crop of new films would be more of an affliction than a vocation. So with all that said, enjoy my list of the movies I enjoyed this year, flaws and all.
My Favorite Films of 2024
If I already wrote about a film in this newsletter, I’ve included an excerpt and a link to the full writeup. Close Your Eyes and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World were on last year’s list. Now, on with it!
Honorable Mentions: In Our Day and Evil Does Not Exist
This year’s award for best movie by Hong Sang-soo goes to In Our Day, which finds the prolific director–writer–editor–producer–composer back in autobiographic form and swapping out the soju for nonalcoholic alternatives.
I knew too much about Evil Does Not Exist going in to it so it left me uncharacteristically lukewarm for a Hamaguchi movie, but I love a good town hall scene and I’m sure I’ll revisit this one with renewed interest someday soon.
20. Problemista
Julio Torres ports his singular Toys “R” Us surrealism from the world of TV comedy to the big screen, finding a perfect match for his sensibilities in a bedraggled, magenta-haired Tilda Swinton. Landmark’s E Street Cinema played the trailer for this movie so many times over the course of about 10 months (its release was pushed from last year due to the SAG-AFTRA strike) that I never wanted to think about it ever again, but at the encouragement of coworkers I gave it a chance and was rewarded with a disarmingly heartfelt take on the New York immigrant story, with only minimally irritating quirks.
19. The Shadowless Tower
Middle age is a time for taking stock of all the ways the people and places you’ve grown up with have changed, irreparably, and usually not for the better. Or at least that’s what I got out of Zhang Lu’s Beijing-set Drama for Adults, a few days in the life of a food critic who doesn’t actually get to do his job very much with life always getting in the way.
18. Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars [short]
Just like enterprising editors keep finding unfinished books by deceased authors to publish posthumously, the Jean-Luc Godard estate keeps turning up fragments of films to foist upon an unsuspecting public. I thought this one was supposed to be his last one but then a different one premiered at Cannes this year so I guess we’ll just keep getting these in perpetuity, or as long as there’s a market for them at film festivals. I don’t know what exactly this “trailer” assembled from stray audio clips and collages from the desk of Godard is trying to say (not that this is the first time I’ve felt this way about one of his movies), but it was more interesting than most of the movies I saw this year, which is enough to earn a place on the list.
17. The Summer with Carmen
Two Greek gay besties go to the beach and workshop a screenplay about the time one of them had to look after his ex’s dog for a summer, cycling through all the tropes of contemporary LGBTQ cinema on their way to saying something truthful about gay life in fiction. It’s a queer film that refreshingly doesn’t take itself too seriously, which cannot be said for every such movie that came out this year (pun not intended).
16. Anora
Anora holds the distinction of being the first Sean Baker movie I’ve actually liked; there’s a first time for everything in this line of business. Anora/“Ani” (Mikey Madison) is a young woman who lives in Brooklyn and works at a strip club. Besides that, we know hardly anything else about her—we’re told there’s a mom in Miami, a grandmother who only spoke Russian, and that’s about it. Whenever a Slav wanders into the club looking for a girl who can talk Russian to him, Ani’s on deck to keep him entertained in her rusty second language. One such customer is Ivan/“Vanya”/“Vanka”/“Vanechka”/etc. (Mark Eydelshteyn), a hotshot 21 year old of über-rich parentage. He pays Ani to visit him at his Brooklyn mansion, which leads to him paying her to be his girlfriend for a week, which snowballs into them getting married in Vegas. This rags to riches arc is edited within an inch of its life, a nonstop stream of reckless youth making poor decisions.
15. All We Imagine as Light
I have been on the record as a Payal Kapadia hype-man, so it’s gratifying to see the ranks of her fans grow this year. All We Imagine as Light finds her working in the narrative mode she adopted for her early short films, though I personally think her filmmaking is at its best when she’s leaning more into documentary, as in A Night of Knowing Nothing. Light is easy to admire, a tale of two roommates filmed across countless color-saturated nights in Mumbai. There’s a quiet undercurrent of the same left-wing political concerns that animated Kapadia’s previous work; the Modi government’s displeasure with her views is behind India’s choice not to select Light as its submission to the Oscars. I don’t think the film quite pulls off its dreamlike turn in the last act, but the attempt is valiant and indicative, one hopes, of even greater works in Kapadia’s future.
14. Dune Part 2
One of the clear advantages Villeneuve’s version of Dune has over Lynch’s is the verisimilitude you get from shooting on location with extra-wide shots instead of boxed-in sets. Like in the previous installment, Villeneuve and DP Greig Fraser’s shooting philosophy lets awe arise as a natural response to the totally immersive coverage instead of imposing it on the viewer with #OnePerfectShot-ready frames telling the viewer to Feel Awe Now. The one time where I feel they miss the mark is in the otherwise well-executed scene where Paul rides a sand worm for the first time. The lead up is tense but then when he actually mounts the thing you…like…don’t see it? I know I can’t be crazy here but they cut away to the Fremen cheering him on without actually showing the worm once he’s on it, right? (This is not a problem in the Lynch version.)
13. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
The worst thing I can think of to say about this thoroughly engrossing alternate history of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba through text and song is “we have jazz records and two and a half hours to waste on Wikipedia at home,” so you may as well opt for seeing Soundtrack in a theater where at least you get to turn your phone off.
12. La Chimera
Borrowing some elements of a hangout movie and pointlessly stretching on to well over two hours, La Chimera is littered with Rohrwacher’s trademark small delights. The frame rate speeds up for a minute just because it can; a character directly addresses the camera in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment; Arthur is thrice flipped upside-down in a sort of cinematic tricolon crescens. If there were too many of these little touches, the movie would be unbearably twee. If Rohrwacher cared at all about symmetry, you’d better believe we’d be discoursing about whether she’s the Italian Wes Anderson. She’s not, though just as Wes’s whimsy frequently belies heavier emotions, La Chimera is haunted by a fundamental sadness for things lost to history and the derelict state of the present.
11. Juror #2
Clint Eastwood’s new courtroom drama is classical to a fault; the camera rarely does anything surprising, which, rather than detract from the film, actually makes it as easy as possible for the viewer to lock in. Why do the people (read: film critics) rally behind a morality tale told so simply? Maybe it’s a middle finger to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, whose company dumped this movie in a mere 50 theaters before sending it straight to streaming. It’s just as likely out of respect for how Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams have fashioned genuinely edge-of-your-seat suspense out of the ruins of American institutions and one man’s malfunctioning moral compass.
10. Union
Story and Maing thread a tricky needle between the uplifting story of the underdog union taking on the business Goliath (or is it more of a Godzilla?) and the unglamorous two-steps-forward, one-step-back of democratic procedure. The story of the Staten Island workers is ongoing—title cards at the end of the film explain that Amazon has yet to go to the bargaining table with them—and efforts to unionize neighboring warehouses have come up short. All eyes are on Staten Island as the futures of the 1.5 million–strong Amazon workforce (to say nothing of workers everywhere) hang in the balance, making Union the rare documentary that begs for a sequel.
9. Youth (Spring)
The immensity of Wang Bing’s first installment in a three-part trilogy about sweatshop workers in China’s Zhejiang province belies its fundamentally intimate approach. Only three minutes shorter than The Brutalist (and without an intermission), Youth (Spring) is just as concerned with capitalism’s human toll but told from an unwaveringly worker’s-eye point of view. The countless tons of children’s clothes manufactured in the dimly-lit shops that stretch out into the Zhejiang horizon like a concrete purgatory are a cruel and potent symbol of capitalist waste, commodities whose use will literally be outgrown in nearly the time it takes to watch this movie (I exaggerate, but only a bit). Yet life for Bing’s subjects carries on as it does in any other workplace, the human spirit and the drive to organize alive and ready to put up a fight (forthcoming in Youth (Hard Times), I gather).
8. Janet Planet
Growing up in eastern Massachusetts, I never actually spent any time in the western part of the state, that fabled land of earthy and artistic types, so going west to visit colleges out in the New England wilderness as a high school senior was revelatory. It’s also a revelation to watch Zoe Ziegler inhabit that same locale in Janet Planet, the 90s-set filmmaking debut of playwright Annie Baker. These days it’s all too common to accuse young actors in period pieces of having eyes that know what smartphones are, so when a child actor’s performance works as well as Ziegler’s does it’s worth investigating why. Ziegler’s acting chops aside, I credit Baker’s writing—she didn’t win a Pulitzer for nothing—which traps Ziegler’s precocious 11-year-old Lacy in the orbit of an alluring mother and her mysterious friends-slash-lovers. The film gently pushes Lacy out of codependency toward adulthood, refraining from hitting you or her over the head with big revelations or capital-m Messages. Life comes at Lacy fast, which is probably a feeling the screen-aware Ziegler knows all too well. Breaking from the recent spate of theater-indebted movies that are shot like filmed plays, Baker actually goes to the trouble of thinking about how to plan her shots cinematically. At times it’s a bit belabored, but it’s nonetheless exciting to watch a virtuoso of one medium enthusiastically try her hand at another.
7. Red Rooms
This queasily modern parable—and I do think it helps to read it as such—had me pacing around my living room with hands on head for most of its runtime, so good job to the sound and image engineers who made this nightmare happen and kudos to anyone who survived it in a theater. I’ve seen people say that Red Rooms is about what happens when true-crime junkies go overboard. But the film itself is telling a different sort of story, one that traffics in extremes but speaks to the anxieties of even everyday life online in 2024.
Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépry) is a model who lives a bizarrely hermetic life, seemingly subsisting on an all-smoothie diet, working out to YouTube videos, making bitcoin off of online poker (the trick, she says, is to exploit the other players’ insecurities) and never turning on an overhead light in her apartment. In other words, she’s basically a psychopath. Every morning she’s first in line to attend the trial of a high-profile murderer, but we don’t really have any evidence to support the idea that Kelly-Anne is serial killer–obsessed in a general sense. What we have instead are indicators that Kelly-Anne is interested in moral codes—the Greek cross she conspicuously wears, the Arthuriana around her apartment and woven into her online personas, the fact that she reprogrammed her AI assistant to be less sexist and racist. The questions then are what kind of code Kelly-Anne is living by if she’s hunting for the murderer’s snuff films, and what state her soul is in before and after deciding to watch them.
Kelly-Anne’s behavior is erratic enough to suggest she’s been contaminated (if not just underwritten by the screenwriter), but she’s clearly motivated by a desire for some form of justice, if not necessarily a compassionate urge to bear witness to the victims’ suffering (an idea floated by the prosecutor to the jury in the film’s pivotal opening moments). If the young victims of the man on trial can’t be brought back from the dead, the next best thing perhaps would be to establish the killer’s guilt beyond any shadow of a doubt—so as to save the real true crime obsessives, like the hitchhiking groupie Kelly-Anne meets in the courtroom, from falling for, and perpetuating, lies. Whether it’s worth all the trouble and whether Kelly-Ann’s trip into the dark web says anything about our own relationships to the unseen forces that structure our online lives are left to the thoroughly rattled viewer to decide.
6. Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, or The Swagless Mr. Ripley, takes us to the French countryside to see what happens when a handsome (by pre-Instagram standards) interloper commits a crime and makes a mess of covering his tracks. Guiraudie’s schtick has always been to push the bounds of respectability in queer cinema, and what this movie lacks in the explicitness that characterizes his earlier works it more than makes up for in perverse desires. His most narratively satisfying work by a mile, it’s also his third, and most successful, collaboration with cinematographer Claire Mathon, who reimagines the noir for the digital age with antiseptically clean interiors contrasted with evocatively foggy woodlands at daybreak.
5. Dahomey
Short and sweet: Mati Diop’s Berlinale winner starts with the journey of a fantastically sentient Beninese statue from a Parisian museum back to Africa and ends with a town hall debate over the significance (or lack thereof) of the French gesture of returning a mere fraction of their colonial spoils. More interested in problematizing than problem-solving, Diop’s film will be screened at the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art in February, which I’m sure will go over just great and won’t make anyone angry at all.
4. Challengers
3. Last Summer
Catherine Breillat unexpectedly makes her Movie Enthusiast debut with her take on May el-Toukhy’s 2019 film Queen of Hearts. Scenes of this remake are always starting with characters mid-motion, which lends the appearance of inevitability to lawyer Anne (an astonishing Léa Drucker)’s affair with her teenage stepson Théo (Samuel Kircher). Infidelity is as French as apple pie is American, which is to say only reductively, so what makes or breaks a movie of this kind is what it does with the concept in the end. A third, American riff on this material would surely be peppered with finger-wagging to make sure we know Anne is in the wrong. For Breillat and her dispassionate camera, desire coupled with power is a self-evidently dangerous combination requiring no editorializing, while retribution for predatory behavior is anything but a given. The flawless closing shot, a prolonged fade to black punctured by the glint of a wedding ring, disturbingly points outwards from the actions of one terrible individual to the team effort it takes to protect those who abuse power from suffering consequences.
2. No Other Land
The film’s title derives from a line spoken by one of the elderly women of Masafer Yatta. Her people, who have been in the same place for generations, have literally no other land to go to should the IDF succeed in fully displacing them; all that would await them is resettlement in cramped city apartment blocks, cut off from their livestock, their harvests, their history. This last piece is maybe the most important of all. As Rashid Khalidi argues in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, “the surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.” Adra et al. are very aware of the importance of keeping their history alive and in the public eye, especially since the IDF’s behavior rests on the ahistorical claim that the people of Masefer Yatta are trespassers on grounds that have always belonged to the Israeli military.
1. Chime [short]
Like Pulse and Cure before it, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new micro-horror imagines an invisible and indefeasible social contagion. It all starts when a standoffish boy in a cooking class complains to the teacher that wind chimes only he can hear are telling him to do unspeakably evil things, and it’s all downhill from there. This is a film of clean lines, fluid camera movements, brief yet grisly violence, and maddening opacity. It’s a distillation of the things that Kurosawa does best, and basically only those things; the singleminded attention to mise en scène and unsettling soundscapes underwrites a sort of narrative nihilism that’s scarier than anything you actually see or hear. At only 45 minutes long, Chime ends with both explanations and resolutions tantalizingly out of reach. It pulls off a difficult feat, in that it leaves you both wanting to know more and also relieved for it to be over.
The Extras
Best Director
Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, No Other Land
Catherine Breillat, Last Summer
Luca Guadagnino, Challengers
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Chime
Pascal Plante, Red Rooms
Best Actor
Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
Daniel Craig, Queer
Nicholas Hoult, Juror #2
Josh O’Connor, Challengers / La Chimera
Sebastian Stan, A Different Man
Best Actress
Léa Drucker, Last Summer
Juliette Gariépry, Red Rooms
Mikey Madison, Anora
Léa Seydoux, The Beast
Zoe Ziegler, Janet Planet
Best Supporting Actor
Simon Bennebjerg, The Promised Land
Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Andreas Lampropoulos, The Summer with Carmen
Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
Adam Pearson, A Different Man
Best Supporting Actress
Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
Toni Colette, Juror #2
Divya Prabha, All We Imagine as Light
Isabella Rosselini, La Chimera / Conclave
Léa Seydoux, Dune Part 2
Best Ensemble
Anora
Evil Does Not Exist
Juror # 2
Misericordia
Sing Sing
Best Editing
Dominique Auvray, Xu Bingyuan, and Liyo Gong, Youth (Spring)
Rik Chaubet, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
Marco Costa, Challengers
Dávid Jancsó, The Brutalist
Jonah Malak, Red Rooms
Best Original Screenplay
Jonathan A. Abrams, Juror #2
Annie Baker, Janet Planet
Catherine Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer, Last Summer
Alain Guiraudie, Misericordia
Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers
Best Adapted Screenplay
[cricket noises]
Best Cinematography
Vincent Biron, Red Rooms
Ranabir Das, All We Imagine as Light
Kôichi Furuya, Chime
Maria von Hausswolff, Janet Planet
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Challengers / Queer
Best Original Score
Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist
Celia Hollander, Good One
Eiko Ishibashi, Evil Does Not Exist
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Challengers
Umberto Smerilli, A Different Man
Best Needle Drop
Psychic Wound (King Woman), I Saw the TV Glow
Dirty Boots (Sonic Youth), Last Summer
Uncle ACE (Blood Orange), Challengers
Leave Me Alone (New Order), Queer
Best Sound
A Complete Unknown
Chime
Dune Part 2
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Red Rooms
Best Hair and Makeup
A Different Man
Dune Part 2
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Hit Man
Queer
Best Costume Design
Jonathan Anderson, Challengers
Jenny Beavan, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Loredana Buscemi, La Chimera
Lindsey Kear, The Bikeriders
Jacqueline West, Dune Part 2
Best Production Design
Judy Becker, The Brutalist
Colin Gibson, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Jette Lehman, The Promised Land
Teresa Mastropierro, Janet Planet
Patrice Vermette, Dune Part 2
Queer Palme
The Summer with Carmen
Best Animal
Carmen, The Summer with Carmen
Best Theatrical Experience
Challengers (first time)
Runner-up: Challengers (second time)
Best Location Scouting
The Brutalist
Runner up: Janet Planet
Best Typography
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
Worst Typography
Queer
Best Endings
Challengers
Juror #2
Last Summer
Misericordia
…and Megalopolis (because it was over)