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by Walter Chaw I’ve spent decades predicting the fall, but when the fall came, I certainly didn’t feel like doing a victory lap. When the pandemic shut down everything for a while, I realized that my worst fears had come true, and then, for the first time in as long as I could remember, my depression quieted like a rash that’s lost its savagery. Respite, because my worst fears weren’t looming anymore–they’d finally arrived. All that was left to do was find a new way through. Is this why apocalyptic scenarios have been so seductive for us the last few years? It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
The best films of 2024 are explicitly ours. We are chained to them. And 50 years from now, anthropologists will point to details in them with surprise and pity: “They knew what was happening to them… Isn’t it terrible?” As the blind seer Tiresias tells his buddy Oedipus, “Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that’s wise!” And such is film: excellent at chronicling, every so often okay at predicting, and only occasionally effective at preventing. Film is Cassandra’s medium.
As tradition dictates, I don’t put documentaries on here and try to stick to movies that have found distribution in the United States. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the only film you actually need to see: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, and Hamdan Ballal’s No Other Land, a Palestinian/Israeli joint venture detailing the pre-Oct. 7 campaign of ethnic cleansing that the West is engaged in on the Gaza Strip. If all we can do is bear witness to genocide, then pay close attention. Soak it all in. Let it seep into every pore until our complicity is pickled in it. Understand the totality of our shame and wear it until we are dead and beyond. The single largest financial investment I made in 2024 was, through taxes paid dutifully and meekly, the slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
There is blood on all our hands. There is no justice. The bad sleep well and are free of consequences for their misdeeds. They are unimaginably wealthy and secure. Everything we have been told is a lie.
But you know this. You have always known this.
I think a lot about that line in North by Northwest, where Roger observes the human cost of “victory” and suggests that if this is it, “Perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars.” I also think about Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star and the remnants of a dead civilization we find in a few light years, destroyed utterly because a Christian God needed a blazing celestial beacon to guide the way to his revelation.
When I look at movies these days, I see them through the wrong end of a telescope. What value will they hold for our pathologists? Will they know how sorry we were? Will they care how we wept? Do we deserve empathy?
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This list is formatted in the usual way, with titles presented in ascending order in ten groups of five. As for honourable mentions: Rap World, Longlegs, Life After Fighting, Smile 2, Terrestrial Verses, The Order, Green Border, and The Count of Monte-Cristo, for starters.
The Last Stop in Yuma County would have made it, but I am too biased by personal relationships to include it in good conscience.
Terrifier 3 and Megalopolis are our two Chaplin films from 2024, each inviting a consideration of the conditions that brought the Little Tramp to those last few minutes of The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin breaks character and the fourth wall to lecture–plead with, really–humanity to listen to the better angels of their nature…to no avail then, and no avail now.
Then you have the gently loopy but tuned-in Drugstore June, the best Harold & Kumar film since the first one; the grim-unto-nihilistic Chinese noirOnly the River Flows; the Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A, which heralded an inevitable avalanche of “choice” films; and the bold swings and misses from perennial stalwarts Guadagnino and Lanthimos (Queer and Kinds of Kindness, respectively).
Okay, ready? Me, too. Let’s go:
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50. The Outrun At least a portion of the first parts of our lives is spent in a dream state, a fugue of impulse, instinct, and wild emotion over which we have very little control and which we only dimly remember afterwards. I have wondered if addiction extends the rapture of those thoughtless, kaleidoscope depths for the addicted. Is it, for them, a treatment for lucidity? Is it a secret history that ties them to a larger drama in denial of the unbearable inconsequence of their lives? Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun launches this year’s list with a speculation about addiction that begins underwater in the company of seals as our hero, Rona (Saoirse Ronan), relates the Irish myth of the “selkie”–the one John Sayles essayed so powerfully in his The Secret of Roan Inish. A selkie, you see, can shed its seal skin and dance in human form by the light of the moon. If a human sees one, however, the selkie becomes locked to the land, forever pining for the sea. The first time The Outrun breaks the usual flow of addiction melodrama, it provides an animated telling of the origin of the Orkney Islands–the teeth of the freshly slain Mester Muckle Stoor Worm. Rona narrates these interludes, these bits and pieces of folklore that constitute the history of this place. She wants to twine the story of her creation with the story of all creation. The weight of that is so heavy you can’t imagine. So Rona drinks, and parties, and gets beaten up sometimes. And when she sobers up for a while, the outside world is streaked like a watercolour left in Scottish rain. She loses the necklace her father gave her one night. It’s a compass. Now she’ll never find his way. Now she’ll have to forge her own.
49. Vermiglio 48. Hit Man Maura Delpino’s Vermiglio is very much like a lost Taviani Brothers film, a spiritual companion to The Night of the Shooting Stars set in the Italian Alps and the small, war-torn village of Vermiglio tucked therein in the unquiet year of 1944. At question are the lives of a schoolteacher and his wife, the heads of a large family of children entering their period of delusions of grandiosity and importance. Remember when everything was the first time and you were the only one ever to feel this way with this kind of poetry and suffer the terrible maelstrom of it? What’s important to them is contextualized by the largeness of the setting. The looming Alps, the eye-stabbing grandeur of insensate Nature, none of its majesty cares about the quotidian tribulations of the village and its inhabitants. The totality of a person’s existence is spent focused on quintessences of dust. Everything ends, nothing is remembered, and only the mountain remains. Richard Linklater, our own chronicler of time passing, also submits a fable of shifting identities in 2024 with stud-of-the-moment Glen Powell (the smirky, good-times analogue to besmirched Armie Hammer and handsome fun guy Jon Hamm) as Gary Johnson, a teacher-cum-undercover agent whose ease with assuming identities as a parade of fantasy hired assassins brings to mind Cary Grant’s turn as moral chameleon Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest. Gary meets unbelievably hot maiden fair Madison (Adria Arjona) and has some vintage ’90s erotic-thriller sexytime with her, and Hit Man makes a good-natured riot of contract killers and the ordinary people who would like to arrange the murder of someone. The impulse, I have to say, has never seemed more natural or relatable.
44. Handling the Undead 43. Exhuma I’m a sucker for stuff like Thea Hvistendahl’s feature debut Handling the Undead, a slow, thoughtful, sad film about what one might do if a cherished loved one who has died were to show up on the front steps one day, monkey’s paw-style. Dan Simmons wrote a lovely story about that once called “The River Styx Flows Upstream,” wherein the dearly departed are not entirely right when they come back in the fashion of things that have been ripped from the grasp of eternity and returned as mortal soil. Hvistendahl’s film, based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In, Border), is told in muted tones rather than screams: more resignation in the face of “another fucking thing” than a call to arms. Of particular interest to me among the three stories told here is the one in which young mother Renate Reinsve does her best to conjure up maternal love again after having already grieved and buried her little boy. Her brief elation on his return almost immediately sours into fear and disgust. A mother knows, after all, who her child is and who he is not. There’s a subtext of nursing in a few of the films from this year that I find to be compelling–a wisp of the desperate conclusion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps, or maybe just a commentary on how we have taken a monster to our breast because we’re all fools ruled by instinct rather than intelligence.
I’m a sucker for stuff like Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma, too, following shaman Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and feng shui master Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik), who run a business together diagnosing and curing unexplained illnesses by settling unrestful souls infecting folks from beyond the grave. Hired by a wealthy real estate mogul to figure out what’s going on with his infant grandchild, the pair decide an exhumation and reburial of a tortured ancestor is required in a remote country location. Alas, one of the workers hired for the project fumbles the ritual, unleashing a haunting that recalls Korea’s unresolved colonial and wartime trauma in the form of a…well, you’ll see. Magnificently creepy and teeming with social and familial significance in its depths (check out the scene where a devoted son is shamed into inviting the spectre of his father into his home), Exhuma nails a delicate balance between supernatural detective story and good old-fashioned spook romp.
41. The Sweet East Sean Price Williams lands with the year’s best Andrea Arnold film not directed by Andrea Arnold, The Sweet East. It’s a road flick that takes on some of Gregg Araki’s dangerous surrealism in telling the tale of Lillian (Talia Ryder, ascendant) and her fraught journey from rags to the verge of silver-screen stardom (as befitting her silent-movie legend namesake) before introducing her to the unquiet, seething underbelly of the American nightmare. Following a narrow escape from a QAnon freak, she falls in with a group of anarchists and occupies the spare bedroom of mild-mannered Nazi professor Lawrence (Simon Rex, doing a great Peter Coyote), who promises to be a gentleman even as Lillian delights in spending his money on lingerie she flaunts in their common spaces. A bad decision results in a chance meeting with student filmmakers (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris) who see a star in her–and then…and then… Williams ups the stakes repeatedly with a shocking eruption of violence, a breathless escape marred by sinister undertones, and a reset of sorts that serves as the preface for a presumed lifetime of dangerous wandering. Lillian is one of 2024’s great American heroines, along with The Outrun‘s Rona and Anora’s Ani: the master of her interior and exterior landscapes; the sufferer of unimaginable slings and arrows, hardened and cured, in the end, by the fires of a forge designed to destroy her.
39. American Star An Unforgiven for the British gangster cycle, American Star finds dapper contract killer Wilson (Ian McShane), a werewolf of Blackburn in dark glasses, a pressed suit, and a debonair state of mind, loosed in Fuerteventura on the Canary Islands in pursuit of his latest quarry. He has a few days to take the lay of the land and catches the eye–chastely–of beautiful French expat Gloria (Nora Arnezeder), who likes his company and hopes, vaguely, to set him up with her mom (Fanny Ardant). “I don’t think I’m her type,” he says, and Gloria’s a bit sad about that but resigned, too: “I don’t think anyone is,” she says. Gonzalo López-Gallego’s American Star is similarly enigmatic, a slow action thriller whose “thrilling action” is mainly the extended, even leisurely build to the inevitable burst of violence the genre demands. For the rest of it, it’s soft conversations, dancing by candlelight, and good meals and good drink as the sun rises and sets over the ocean. The “American Star” of the title is a breached cargo ship listing off the coast in a treacherous cross-current: an offscreen metaphor for a bloated nation in its last throes as the rest of the world plays out its own futile struggles. But there’s still time to find some grace and mine a little beauty. That’s all we got–and, really, a moment of light is all we ever have.
37. Maria 36. MadS The third of Pablo Larraín’s portraits of splendid isolation (after Jackie and Spencer) sets its sights on Greek soprano Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) in her dotage. Her voice is failing, she’s dependent on drugs to level her mood and anxiety, and her heart is failing–a diagnosis she’s made herself to explain her melancholy and solitude. She knocks about in her palatial estate in Paris, attended to by a housekeeper and a manservant, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), who does his best to control her pharmaceutical intake while guarding her ego and reputation from a curious populace and an intrusive press. She goes to her favourite cafes, where she sits outside–not to enjoy the weather or even to eat, but to, as she says, “be adored.” Often, she is. Sometimes she isn’t. Jolie disappears inside Callas, scrutinized for her weight and her affairs (with billionaire playboy and pig Aristotle Onassis, for one), her controversial talent marked by an unusually low timbre and manifold imperfections. Callas, who died too young, is the embodiment of the idea of the diva as artist. There’s another film this year that attempts to crack the code of how to portray genius, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, but where that movie’s diva is an impregnable wall of churlish incoherence, Maria paints a portrait of a sad, existentially tortured artist with not the first idea of how her gift works, why she was cursed with it, or why in the end it abandoned her. Jolie’s playing a version of herself here, and her body of late work–as a director especially, but as an actor as well–will come to be seen in similar terms to the great film divas: the Bette Davises and Ida Lupinos. Maria is beautiful.
Staying in France, David Moreau’s one-shot rage-zombie flick MadS opens with party boy Romain (Milton Riche) driving too fast in his dad’s convertible when a young woman, wrapped in bandages, jumps into the passenger seat and starts stabbing herself in the face. Romain tries to do the right thing, taking her home to figure out the next steps–but first, a quick shower to wash this blood off. Then she disappears, and his girlfriend and obnoxious buddies show up, wanting him to stop being such a drag and go dancing with them. Romain, feeling not quite himself and maybe going a touch blind, enthusiastically agrees. I mean, no one calls Romain a drag, amiright? It’s the end of the world as a result of peer pressure, sex, car accidents, and the countless poor decisions you make when you’re sniffing at the first hints of freedom, and we watch in horror as a virus jumps from host to host while DP Philip Lozano weaves visual poetry out of one super-spreader event after another. MadS is terrifying and topical, sure, but it’s also hilarious, illustrating what would happen if a person in the middle of transforming into something else were driving a car or riding bitch on a scooter. There’s a little Buster Keaton in here among the flesh-tearing and blood-weeping, and it can’t be an accident there are so many takes on the apocalypse in the year of no lord, 2024. Watch it with Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s classic 28 Weeks Later, which ends, as it happens, with a quick glimpse of Paris. This is a worthy unofficial sequel–and possibly the most viscerally exciting movie of the year.
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35. The Seed of the Sacred Fig I asked a room full of college freshman in our first class following this year’s election if, as we enter into a period of open fascism in the United States, they were prepared to go to jail for their art. Their response was heartening and overwhelming, though I wonder how much of that is bravado in the face of the unknown–youthful arrogance tends to make us martyred resisters of injustice in our hero fantasies, after all. When I watch modern films from Iran, a country that has existed for as long as I can remember with our crosshairs aimed at them, I’m filled with dismay and an overwhelming dread for their creators. Filmmakers of notable brilliance are persecuted from within by a fundamentalist regime and from without by the prejudices and designs of the industrialized West. From exile, Mohammad Rasoulof directed his latest, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which details the life of Iman (Missagh Zareh), a bureaucrat whose job is so corrupt and loathsome that his identity is kept secret from the public. It’s advised that he not even tell his family (wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and his two teen daughters, Sana (Setareh Maleki) and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami)), but he does. He shows his wife the gun the government has issued him for self-defense, and then one day, in the middle of national protests over the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, his gun disappears.
It’s impossible as an American not to see what’s reality in Iran as what’s about to become a reality in the United States: the secret police, the extrajudicial persecution, the suffocating theocracy… Not to mention what’s already happening at home: police brutality against children protesting genocide, prosecutorial immunity gifted to plutocrats, and the fracturing of families along generational lines. Rasoulof has chosen the vehicle of a domestic thriller where the parents turn their home into a prison, interrogating their children like political prisoners and accusing the young future of their country of treason. The ending is a tour-de-force staged among ruins that reminds of an M.C. Escher painting, with staircases leading to nothing or looping back on themselves as the family struggles to hide from one another. It’s like a German Expressionist set representing a proud, ancient culture falling down around its citizens while the engineers of their strife sit, air-conditioned and invisible, above the deadly and chaotic distractions they’ve created. When students protested on the campus where I teach in the heart of Denver, our administrators immediately called the police to disperse and arrest them. I turned on the news to hear our Democratic national leadership refer to kids as Nazis for protesting the wholesale displacement and murder of civilians in our name, with our money. We are already in Hell, ruled by a gerontocracy of despots and robber barons, and I’m afraid the leaders of our resistance were summarily executed, one by one, at the end of the 1960s. There are no adults in the room. There’s no one at the wheel.
33. It’s Not Me Leos Carax’s The Beaches of Agnes, It’s Not Me is an impressionistic, playful, clips-heavy experimental montage that joins Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere and Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides among 2024’s mellifluous memoirs of lives spent capturing weltschmerz in moving images. A self-declared homage to Jean-Luc Godard, the film deals with issues of fatherhood, nationalism, masculinity, and the mortal introspection that typically accompanies the suicide of loved ones and mentors. Carax is interested in the junction between dreams and making movies, telling his daughter early on that his lack of heroism in her dreams has nothing to do with him and everything to do with her. But the passage casts a long shadow over the rest of this rumination as Polanski is invoked and condemned, of course, but explained to be the product of a century of the blackest human atrocities. A cavalcade of fascists underscores that the first order of business in most authoritarian regimes involves establishing ministries of culture (or film festivals, remembering that the Venice fest is one of Mussolini’s babies), while an excerpt of frequent collaborator Denis Lavant exulting to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” in Mauvais Sang is juxtaposed against the same sequence recreated by Carax’s marionette “Baby Annette.” The line between the real and the manufactured, between youth and the illusion of it, blurs along with the border between past and present. How can David Bowie die when his art has engendered itself in the minds of generations of creative people? How can one be removed from the spirit of their age and the call of their wildernesses? What has remained a constant for over a century is film: empathy generator, time machine, and amber for the preservation of fleeting moments, resurrected by flickering light.
30. Hard Truths Arguably Mike Leigh’s tetchiest film since Secrets & Lies is Hard Truths, the tale of a very frightened wife and mother (a commanding Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who is so scared she violently pushes away everyone in her life, including those unfortunate enough to cross her path in the wild: a dental hygienist, a grocery clerk, anyone she thinks might be looking at her sideways or harbouring an uncharitable thought towards her. Her saddest victims, besides herself, are her miserable husband (David Webber) and moribund son (Tuwaine Barrett), the latter so harried and destroyed by her constant criticism that he’s barely vocal anymore and drowns his sorrow in binge-eating and video games. The woman, Pansy, is the articulation of everyone who doesn’t recognize their surroundings anymore. Leigh captures the feeling of agoraphobia arising from a complete cultural shift, real or imagined, that has turned everyone into ideological zombies hellbent on your destruction and pushing in on every side. The only sane response is to shoot first and ask questions later. Still, Pansy’s sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) isn’t ready to leave Pansy to her caustic solipsism, and what begins as an essay of a singularly despicable creature suddenly becomes an attempt to save an essentially good person deranged by the cruelty of a planet swiftly tilting to the right. Hard Truths is the best of several such films in 2024, films about parents driven mad while under various levels of siege (Never Let Go, Arcadian, Hold Your Breath). If you ask me, the hard truths of the title refer to how their rage and paranoia are probably justified, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who love them and root for their return to earth.
28. Janet Planet 27. Kneecap 26. Meanwhile on Earth Annie Baker’s discomfiting, vaguely alien Janet Planet opens with young Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) calling from summer camp, complaining about boredom or bullying and threatening suicide or whatever will best convey her desire to be rescued to the faceless, doubtless-exasperated guardian on the other end of the line. Lacy is obviously bright and obviously neurodivergent–the sort of kid we used to call “weird” or a “freak” or “spaz” or the r-word. (Looking back, I’m surprised anyone survived Gen-X’s gestation period.) By the time her mom, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), arrives to collect her, Lacy has changed her mind and would like to stay. Rather than scold, Janet reasons with her, drives her home, mothers her in her quiet, strange way. She talks to Lacy as though she were an equal and shares with her in one haunted moment how she learned at some point in her life that if she tried, she could make any man fall in love with her. “Can you stop trying?” Lacy asks. Janet doesn’t think so. And yet they’re alone together and perfect in their impenetrable imperfection: a tiny island that repulses colonization. There were several movies about motherhood in 2024–of course there were. A glut of films about the role of women in a culture that has declared to them they are only life-support systems for their reproductive organs.
Irish rappers Kneecap are indicated by fury, too, as defenders of the Irish language and sworn enemies of Northern Irish Catholics and the loathsome English, natch. On the one hand, Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap documents the formation of the real-life band with slick, propulsive pop mythologizing (the rise from rags, with dad (Michael Fassbender) imprisoned for his politics at the discretion of Mother England; the first shows; the breakthrough for our boys, Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí). On the other, it identifies the suppression of the native Irish tongue as symptomatic of the Troubles, which never truly went away. It’s smart as fuck, in other words, in addition to being a fleet punk-rebellion flick–a film that seems timed to serve as a rallying cry against fascism, colonialism, and, particularly, the Israeli genocide of Palestine. Defiant against bans, known to start “Free Palestine” chants at their concerts and for wearing Palestinian football jerseys, badges, and flags, Kneecap have made themselves the voice for a generation we’re doing our best to silence. They’re the West’s Pussy Riot. I thought there’d be more by now.
Jérémy Clapin’s follow-up to his difficult-to-describe I Lost My Body is another tale of unfortunate separations and aspirational reunions. Meanwhile on Earth follows listless, dissolute Elsa (Megan Northam), a hospice worker, amateur-but-dedicated vandal, and sister to an astronaut who has been lost in space for long enough that the government erected a statue in his honour. Shrunken by grief, given to midnight missions spray-painting her brother’s monograph around town, she hears a voice in her head one night that claims to be an alien in need of human hosts for itself and its buddies. In return? They’ll ship brother Franck (Sébastien Pouderoux), whom they’re apparently holding prisoner, back to her. In a delightful sequence that suggests extra-dimensional GPS, a newly-focused Elsa is led to a specific clearing in the woods where she’s to bring her prey. She starts with would-be rapists and graduates to residents of the nursing home, and when that’s still not enough, she turns her attention to people more likely to be missed. But Meanwhile on Earth isn’t a thriller about a budding serial killer–it’s not even horror or sci-fi, really. It’s best described as a character study of how extraordinary melancholy colours everything in a patina of pale blue and sepia yellow. Elsa’s emotions are rounded off and dull. She sees things distorted through aquarium glass. Hope that Franck might be alive and that she could have a hand in saving him brings her back to a reality that is, unfortunately, tied to her having traded in her sanity for a handful of ash.
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25. Rebel Ridge 24. The Shadowless Tower 23. Chime 22. Red Rooms 21. Bird I will watch anything Jeremy Saulnier makes. Rebel Ridge is his latest mousetrap: a duck-ass tight hellraiser of a piece in which a military martial arts expert (“He’s on the Wikipedia page!”) is racially profiled and harassed by a backwater police racket engineered by terrifying Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson). In a star-making turn, Aaron Pierre plays Terry, the aggrieved hero in question. His commitment to snatching justice from the jaws of the same old shit–without the use of firearms–is a testament to creative mayhem and clever screenwriting. Saulnier is a master of intelligent genre pieces, tapping the fidelity of our social faultlines with unerring precision. My favourite detail is that the backstory of Terry’s mentor, Mr. Liu (Dana Lee), a character who would be an afterthought in a lesser picture, confirms how the poor and “of colour” will always have more in common with each other than a regular Joe will ever have in common with the wealthy and the powerful.
Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower follows quiet poet and filmmaker Gu (Xin Baiqing), a mostly lost soul marooned in the middle of his life. He’s failed at marriage and failed as a son, and as the film opens, he’s at a cemetery with his young daughter and some relatives. Someone has left a bouquet of yellow flowers at his mother’s grave. It’s a mystery, a call to adventure, an invitation for Gu to reconcile with his estranged father finally–and if, along the way, Gu gets to know his flatmate, Wenhui (Huang Yao), the model who rents the other bedroom in his mother’s sad, cramped apartment, well, who’s complaining? The title refers to a landmark in Old Beijing, designed in such a way as to make its shadow difficult to see. I kept thinking, however, of Art Spiegelman’s dirge for the World Trade Center in graphic novel form, In the Shadow of No Towers. Zhang’s film, then, exists for me as the architectural puzzle on the one side, the culture-mutating atrocity on the other–two absences like the holes in Gu’s life. When he reunites with his father at last, the father is played by legendary Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang, and now I’m thinking about It’s Not Me and the honouring of not just the fathers of the flesh but the fathers of one’s soul.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime mines horror from the muted currencies of subterranean machinations: gears thrumming beneath the range of human hearing you can still feel in your back teeth and the small bones behind your eyes. I went on an impromptu road trip once out of high school with my best friend down to the Great Sand Dunes in south Colorado. We got disc sleds and loaded up with beer and snacks, arriving around midnight with the moon illuminating the purple outlines of the dunes stretching for miles and miles. I felt it then, the invisible thrum. We both did. Spooked, we hightailed it back to town and a motor lodge to wait for dawn. In the morning, at a diner for breakfast, a few locals asked what we were up to and then told us they’d seen black helicopters flying over the area for a few weeks and, at night, experienced that low-level hum everywhere it shouldn’t be. I felt it again some 30 years later during Chime when a young culinary student cocks his head and puts a butcher knife into the base of his neck to show his quiet, serious teacher (Mutsuo Yoshioka) where the noises are coming from. Throughout Chime are hints and intimations that something is…off. The machineries of joy are grinding now, metal on metal, and we’re acting differently than we used to. I see you, but I don’t recognize you anymore. Is it because I’m different, or because you are?
The same could be asked of beautiful, enigmatic high-fashion model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), who, in Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, converts her earnings into crypto to bid in online auctions on the dark web for the privilege of watching snuff videos. Not the kid’s stuff of fatal car accidents and workplace misadventures on TikTok, but the boutique stuff, the police evidence/serial killer’s personal-library stuff. At least, I think that’s what she’s doing. On its surface, Red Rooms is about a gorgeous woman so obsessed with the trial of child-murderer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) that she sleeps outside to be first in court and eventually cosplays as one of his victims. What’s wrong with her, you ask? I don’t know, what’s wrong with you? You with your Terrifier 3 and 24/7 dismembered Palestinian children; you with your wish for Plante to turn the camera around so you can watch the videos along with the stunned jury and nauseated families. The trouble may be that a needle was pushed past “red” until a circuit burned out in our heads. Once you stop being able to believe in justice, you’re left with a couple of choices: compartmentalize suffering to a place you never visit, or deny it exists until it happens to you. In either case, you can now look at things you never could before. It’s funny how that happens. Meanwhile, make money and find the few diminishing and expensive ways to spend it that might still trigger an endorphin rush. Go on. There’s a good boy.
Andrea Arnold’s Bird is a living, breathing Edward Hopper painting. It is longing and isolation in the midst of bustle and circumstance, the best stealth musical in a year that saw another one (Joker: Folie à Deux) collapse under its arrogance. The spine of its tale is fashioned around the learning of a Blur song that proves elusive to twitchy, unpredictable Bug (Barry Keoghan). Bug is a single father to sad-eyed Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who dreams she could be a bird. What’s that Joni Mitchell song? “River”? The one that goes, “I wish I had a river so long/I would teach my feet to fly.” Like that. Bailey sees Bird (Franz Rogowski) one day, just standing there, and when she looks again, he’s gone. I thought about Alan Parker’s Birdy and its collection of damaged men who imagine they’re birds able to fly away from gilded cages and the decoys and blinds that lure them there. Arnold’s Bird likes to trill and coo. He has a good face. He’s kind to Bailey and her nieces. They ride the trolley to look at the ocean, and Bailey smiles a secret smile only the camera can see. I remember thinking, “Watch out, keep an eye on Bird, because this day is so perfect he might fly away.” Arnold gets it. She gets how we feel when we’re at our most desperately, achingly forsaking and lonesome. She paints watercolour tableaux, and when the music comes, it is divine revelation.
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20. The Girl with the Needle It was a rough year for children, to say the least. When a modern army sets about an ethnic cleansing campaign that targets schools, hospitals, and churches–most in designated “safe” zones, well… The films reflected that with devastating slaughters of children in Terrifier 3, Coffee Table, Handling the Undead, The First Omen, Never Let Go, Red Rooms, Chime, The Devil’s Bath, The Vourdalak, Immaculate, and Nosferatu. I’m not saying that kids never died in movies before, only that it felt different to me this year, overlapping as it did with so much rhetoric about women’s reproductive choices. I don’t know if the movies changed or I changed, but it felt personal in 2024: savage, targeted–nowhere more so than in Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, based on the true story of serial killer Dagmar Overbye. It seems that good Ms. Dagmar, between 1913 and 1920, murdered up to 25 infants turned over to her care by oppressed mothers of babies born out of wedlock. Trine Dyrholm portrays her as a kind-eyed candy store proprietor who promises to rehome unwanted babies for a small fee. She promptly pockets the fee and dispatches with the infants, though she’s considered a hero for finding a humane solution to a tough problem. Dagmar isn’t the girl with the needle, however–that would be strange Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), and the needle is a knitting one she uses in a public bath to try to abort her own unwanted pregnancy. As Karoline is unschooled, unkempt, and without hope for advancement, she becomes the ideal apprentice for Dagmar’s profit-driven crusade. Or so Dagmar thinks. The Girl with the Needle is as bleak as its high-contrast black-and-white cinematography. It pulls no punches, offers no easy straw men in the abortion debate, and provides for the single most unwatchable murder in a year packed with them. Films are no longer empathy generators but empathy tests. I don’t know if I passed this one, but I did turn my eyes away.
Like Carax’s It’s Not Me and Tsai Ming-liang’s documentary Abiding Nowhere, Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides is a travelogue of sorts through a personal, creative landscape following working-class Qiao Qiao (Jia’s wife and frequent collaborator, Zhao Tao) as she crosses areas affected by the Three Gorges Dam in search of her manager and lover. Jia is best known perhaps as the loudest voice among the Chinese Sixth Generation of directors, starting his career as an underground filmmaker before assimilating into the mainstream without–arguably–diluting his satirical voice. Again taking aim, after his 2006 film Still Life, at the tumult in the wake of the Three Gorges Dam project, Caught by the Tides is a literal journey across generations, from modernity to the recent past, as China rolls uneasily into the twenty-first century. Qiao Qiao’s ambition to be a singer despite much evidence of ability or inspiration brings to mind the core, misdirected dreams of fame in Altman’s Nashville, and indeed, the scope of Jia’s pictures, with its multiplicity of “small” characters set against enormous temporal shifts, feels like films from America’s own transition through the middle stages of capitalism.
In a way, capitalism at the foundation of a country could also define Mike Cheslik’s clever Hundreds of Beavers, in which a bad beaver levels the orchard of applejack moonshine salesman Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), leading him into the life of a fur trapper in colonial America. Made using silent-film techniques (or affecting silent-film techniques), cartoon slapstick, and more ingenuity than one usually finds in a dozen movies, Hundreds of Beavers maintains a breakneck pace and a steady stream of ridiculous gags for what seems like an impossible duration. This is maybe the most inventive film of 2024 at a fraction of the price of the year’s mega-budgeted blockbusters. Its rumoured budget of around $150,000 is a pittance, especially when the product is this uniform in its vision and execution. Sometimes a cult classic takes years to become one. Sometimes it happens instantly.
15. The People’s Joker 14. Good One 13. All We Imagine as Light 12. Evil Does Not Exist Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is the best superhero movie of 2024, using, without permission, the conventions of Batman, in particular, to tell a tale of punishment, resilience, and rebirth as a metaphor for coming out as trans. Along the way, there are psychotropic drugs and hormone treatments; there is abuse and grooming by mentors and the general rejection by a society unprepared for our clown protagonist. Best, Drew demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of Batman lore and, through her interpretation of it, how comic books, at their best, provide a voice for the traditionally voiceless and a community for the outcast. We hemorrhaged some of that when bullies started making comic-book movies–the jocks playing at nerd. Here’s Drew, taking it all back in one glorious explosion of self-acceptance, transcendent literary criticism, and “beat” performance monologuing in the Spalding Gray school. As we enter the second Trump Presidency, won in large part due to a culture war in which the trans community was targeted for the crimes committed habitually by Republican representatives and Catholic priests, it’s more important than ever to hold fast to works of authentic, unfiltered rebellion. This is what we’re fighting for. And this is how.
I love the moment where addled, exhausted dad Chris (James Le Gros), on a camping trip with his oldest buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy) and teen daughter Sam (Lily Collias), is presented with a problem he’s in no mood to solve and perhaps incapable of solving. The look on his face is, I imagine, not unlike mine when one of my teenage offspring presents me with a conundrum I had not expected to deal with for years, if ever. All of India Donaldson’s Good One possesses the same exquisite attention to detail. Nothing “big” happens in it, exactly, but each glance, each touch, each answer (or non-answer, as it were) takes on extraordinary weight. On the one side, issues of sexual identity, gender fluidity, and sexual preference; on the other, the need for parents to reintroduce themselves to their grown children. All of it packed into a single trip: a short hike, a night spent in tents, then the long drive back to civilization. We have a lot of explaining to do to our children for the burnt legacy we’ve left them, and they owe us nothing. Our only job is to support them and arm them with self-confidence, knowledge, and the certainty they are loved ferociously for who they are. It’s the very least we can do.
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light begins like a Sofia Coppola film: metropolis-set and focused on lovelorn young women making their way against a flood of humanity flowing around them like a stream around stones. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are roommates, Malayali nurses worked to the bone in overcrowded Mumbai. They are both in love with men who are, by circumstance or prejudice, invisible and, in many ways, unavailable to them. Perhaps that’s what’s imaginary in the title: the silhouettes of mates conjured by Prabha, whose husband has left her, and by Anu, whose boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon) is Muslim and therefore sticks to backdoor subterfuge and carefully arranged liaisons. They’re real people, mind; it’s the role the women hope they will play in their lives that is the work of fancy–a necessary conjuring to battle days spent performing quotidian tasks. The first half of All We Imagine as Light pushes up against what is real while the second is spent through the veil. It ends like an Apichatpong Weerasathakul film. Prabha rescues a drowning man and, as they wait for a doctor, he becomes the estranged husband so she can finally let go of him and free herself from the chains that have bound her spirit since the day he vanished with a promise to return. The story is about a lie that binds and, moreover, what it means for a woman to be free.
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi follows up his astounding one-two of 2021, Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, with a film that is unlike either, Evil Does Not Exist. His hero is Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower and outdoorsman who quietly goes about his days in the small mountain village of Misubiki, chopping wood, collecting water, and teaching his young daughter, Hana (Ryo Nichikawa), the names and uses of all the trees and plants. One day, developers come, wanting to build a “glamping” site upstream from Takumi’s village with no consideration of what a septic tank upriver could do to the locals’ well water. A tense meeting with a PR firm hired to handle the yokels dissolves into a shouting match. One of the PR guys, Keisuke (Ryuji Kosaka), is sickened enough by what he’s being asked to do that he switches sides, asking Takumi to teach him a few things about chopping wood and identifying plants so that he might himself apply for a caretaking job to keep the developers under control. Or so he imagines. Takumi has no such illusions. The title suggests a promise a parent makes to a child who’s trembling from a nightmare, but how hollow such promises ring in the face of a reality sick with monsters. It also suggests–and this is the meaning the film adopts–that nature has no illusions about morality. Evil does not exist, but neither does goodness. It’s about surviving long enough to procreate or dying before you can. That’s it. Everything else is art and self-deceit.
10. The Settlers 9. The Beast 8. Close Your Eyes Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s The Settlers is vicious. It’s this year’s True History of the Kelly Gang, a filthy blood-and-dirt history of Chile’s early colonial days set in Tierra del Fuego, where an order has been sent out to “clean the island” all the way to the sea to clear a route for the sheep so that boats can carry them across the ocean. The idea of cleansing a thin piece of land of its inhabitants for profit and glory should send shivers of recognition up the spines of every single person whose government is actively pursuing–or has pursued–acts of genocide in the name of God and profit. The Settlers sees ethnic cleansing for what it is: an abomination that cannot be excused or explained, justified, euphemized, ignored, or forgotten. The foreman tasked to carry out the murderous final solutions of aristocrat Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) is Scotsman MacLennan (Mark Stanley), who eventually comes to see the dark irony of a Scot acting in the role of the genocidal colonizer. MacLennan’s team includes Native marksman Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) and brute Yank Bill (Benjamin Westfall), and as they ride across the savage landscape on their demonic mission, cracks begin to show within each of them and their dynamic. The last of the film’s four sections provides an opportunity for survivors of the events that shaped modern Chile to express their trauma to historians bound by the victors to tell only of their achievements and not the gouts of the blood of innocents that watered them.
Since discovering it in my first semester of grad school, I have been in love with Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle. I’ve read it a number of times, and like all great art, it changes as I change, becoming more difficult to understand intellectually as I accumulate experience while growing easier to grasp emotionally. I am inarticulate before it. It’s another of James’s tales of obsession, featuring one in a long line of his Prufrocks haunted by desires they successfully channel into safer pursuits until they realize it’s too late to free the only bits of themselves that ever wanted to be alive. And it ends with the “beast” of James’s carnal jungle leaping and the hero turning and falling as if stricken, although I always read it as the hero assuming the posture of his animal nature and pouncing into the final moments of his life. Bertrand Bonello offers three interpretations of the story in his The Beast, each unfolding in a different era. An extraordinary Léa Seydoux star as Gabrielle, who seeks to suppress her (sexual) feelings in the belief that they’re interfering with her daily function and could hurt her job prospects in a 2044 where sexual longing is seen as a detriment. (This goes for her 1910 and present-day incarnations as well.) The problem is that in every life, she has a Louis (George MacKay) waiting in the wings to be her downfall. I’ll be ‘reading’ this critical analysis of James’s story for as long as I’ve read the actual novella. The secret to life is in here, or at least how to endure it.
Victor Erice, an undisputed master of the cinema, has made only five films in his career, Close Your Eyes being his fifth. I have…we have all waited 30 years for it. Appropriately, it’s about an aging filmmaker who is approached towards the end of his life with the question of why he stopped making movies. That’s not how the film starts, though–the film starts with a fragment of the film the director Miguel (Manolo Solo) was unable to complete decades ago because his star and muse, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), left in the middle of shooting and disappeared into the ether. The lost film is called “The Farewell Gaze,” and this film is Close Your Eyes, and one soon gets the sense the maestro is inviting us to consider how ways of seeing things can be different from ways of remembering. The picture reunites Erice with Ana Torrent, who, as a child of six, starred in his unspeakably beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive as a little girl who discovers a dying soldier hidden in a bunker and conflates him with Frankenstein’s misunderstood, doomed monster. Torrent’s character played Julio’s child, and when Miguel shows her an old film of his, she remembers having played his daughter but not Julio as her father. It’s slippery, and we’re all slipping. I won’t say whether Miguel finds Julio, but I will tell you there is perhaps no living filmmaker better suited to warning us about how time is a rapidly flowing river that doesn’t notice when you get in and won’t remember where you got out.
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World 4. Nosferatu 3. I Saw the TV Glow 2. ME Don Hertzfeldt is a genius, and ME is his latest. In twenty dialogue-free minutes, it tells the story of our detachment from one another, the development of an electronic web, the destruction of interpersonal connection under the illusion of intimacy, and finally…what? The end of the universe? Maybe just the expiration of our miraculous and complex neural network–but isn’t that the same thing? The music was supposed to be composed specifically for the piece, but instead it’s drop-needles, starting with two Brent Lewis percussion tracks. They’re propulsive. They give Hertzfeldt’s dying civilization a sense of manic, useless energy: a kicked anthill, its inhabitants swarming in a million directions at once in a symphony of mechanical reactions to unknowable stimuli. ME centres on a miserable man who’s working on a contraption inspired by the inventor’s abuse at the hands of his angry father. The device creates the illusion of closeness without being able to simulate human touch. I’m haunted by the thought bubbles provided for the oldest people left on the planet who are still able to express a love emoji, whereas the younger generations, the architects of detachment and apocalypse, are only able to conjure question marks and exclamations. The film ends with Joan Sutherland’s rendition of the Balfe aria “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” the song that plays in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence at a flower shop–a scene that evokes for me a similar setting in Vertigo and, by extension, a similar feeling of doom. No, it’s melancholy that killed the beast, brought about by too much sight leading to too much seeing. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang or a whimper. Maybe a sigh, maybe a needle sliding with a scratch into the runout groove at the end of side two. The singing is done, the song is over, “but I also dreamt which charmed me most/That you loved me still the same/That you loved me…” Now the dream is over, and I’m awake.
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga I wrestled for a long time with this list, as I do every year, but once I finished, I realized that most of the consensus favourites from 2024 were absent from my summary. I enjoy playing the role of the iconoclast now and again, but when I fall this far from the mainstream, I can’t help wondering if I’ve aged out of this gig. Time waits for no man, and the enthusiasm for films that are able assemblages of innovation rather than themselves innovative is exhausting. Granted, this isn’t a new phenomenon, so I may have just had enough. Pauline Kael suggested as much once upon a time: that there comes a point where you’ve “seen it all.” I used to think that was a ridiculous thing to say–you can never see everything you want to see–but now I get it. You reach a point where you watch Strange Darling or A Complete Unknown or even The Brutalist or A Real Pain and immediately think of a dozen movies that were either just like them or obvious inspirations for them. Conclave? A redux of Executive Suite with a hot-topic, straw-man twist. The Substance? Society + Cronenberg’s The Fly + Henenlotter + Verhoeven. Minus complexity. Anyway, I’m not here to start a fight, merely to go on record as saying George Miller’s Furiosa is about a young woman who, after being whisked away from a doomed matriarchal sanctuary, enslaved and mutilated, and positioned as a broodmare for monstrous men, chooses who to love and how she’ll live, and launches a revolution that starts with the liberation of a woman’s right to reproductive choice. It is the definitive film of 2024: the one with elements of silent film in its DNA, with a view of the future past the end of the future, and with an opinion on men that sees them as driven by sexual jealousy and greed. Furiosa is where we are. It’ll tell anyone who’s asking what they need to know.
