The Top 10 Films of 2024
10 ranked favorites and 10 alphabetical runners-up from the year in cinema
When it came to movies, 2024 didn’t have the sheer breadth of greatness as some recent years (like 2023 or especially 2021). I was easily able to fill this list of 20 (the top 10 and 10 runner-ups), but I didn’t have to agonize too much over what was left off. That said, when the movies were great, they were truly something special, and there is an awful lot of depth on this list, the top 10 in particular filled with some truly remarkable features I’ll be carrying forward long past 2024.
In fact, when I look at the main 10 films assembled here, I see the story of 2024: themes of dystopia and utopia, questions of how we fix a broken society, the role of journalism in a collapsing democracy, whether it is possible to escape the transactional cycles of late-stage capitalism, and how we carve out niches for ourselves amidst the storm outside. The guiding principle for me, assembling this list, wasn’t just how strongly I felt about each of these 10 films – though that was certainly part of it – but how strongly these films clarified the year that was 2024 for me, in real time. If, in the future, I want to remember or explain what this year felt like – what questions it made us ask, what reactions it engendered, what crises it prompted within us – these 10 films will be an invaluable time capsule.
The ground rules are, as always, simple: A “2024 movie” means a film that made its commercial debut in the United States in 2024, either theatrically or on streaming. Some of these films are listed as 2023 releases on sources like Letterboxd or IMDB because of festival or overseas debuts, but they are 2024 movies as available here in America.
So without further ado, let’s dive in with 10 great films that didn’t quite make the cut:
Part I: Honorable Mentions (Alphabetical)
One of two films Luca Guadagnino made this year – both in my top 20 – Challengers can accurately be described as “the tennis threesome movie,” because although its nominal subject matter is tennis, it’s really a movie about a woman trying to get two male best friends with staggering levels of unresolved sexual tension to finally bang, a Sisyphean task she struggles at for over a decade until, in the movie’s final moments – well, I suppose I shouldn’t spoil things. Just make sure you give it a watch, not only for the great performances by Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, but for an outstanding Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score that doubles as one of 2024’s best albums. Read my full review here.
Neon had another outstanding year of releases – you’ll see three of the films they distributed on my top 20, including one near the very top – including a trio of horror films that announced or cemented exciting new talent. And while I liked Longlegs and Immaculate a fair amount, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is the one I loved. Protean, unpredictable, and constantly keeping viewers on their toes, the film builds to a memorably potent climactic image visualizing the contestation over women’s bodies by men in power – an essential moment of and for 2024. It’s all brought together by a spectacular lead performance from Hunter Schafer, cementing herself as one of Hollywood’s most exciting young stars, alongside a great turn from Dan Stevens, giving a very convincing audition to play a James Bond villain.
A haunting slow cinema fable that refuses easy answers or obvious lessons, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Evil Does Not Exist is purposefully glacial in its observation of the world’s rhythms: Of walking through the woods. Of taking water from a stream. Of chopping firewood. Of a contentious town meeting. Of a soul-sucking Zoom call. Of taking a long drive with a coworker who isn’t quite a friend. In all these things, Hamaguchi’s careful, slow progression through each scene, methodical and clear-eyed, attunes us to the differences in rhythm between acts of and in the natural world and those imposed by nefarious human systems. We know they must intersect at some point, and that when they do, something bad will happen. Ishibashi Eiko’s ominous, arresting score makes it clear this collision is coming – yet when it does, we’re still unprepared to fully understand it.
I am 100% sure that if Richard Linklater’s Hit Man had gone to theaters instead of being tossed unceremoniously into the dark bowels of Netflix, it would have been a genuine word-of-mouth hit. It’s smart, sexy, funny, a little bit thought provoking, and absolutely hits the sweet spot of being both a crowd pleaser and a conversation starter. Were it released in venues where people went to watch and enjoy movies together, instead of cloistered alone in their homes, the public would have been talking about this one for weeks.
Hong Sangsoo’s In Water is mostly familiar material for the director – a reflexive story about a young filmmaker struggling to figure out what he wants to make – except for the fact that Hong elected to shoot the entire film out-of-focus, defamiliarizing his style in the most astonishing of ways. The blurry, watercolor-esque digital images literalize the themes of artistic block, even as they challenge us as viewers to see beyond the literal. The closing shot is the single greatest film image of 2024, and it’s not particularly close.
Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding is a decadent three-course gourmet meal of a movie: funny and sexy, scary and violent, real and surreal, and always blisteringly romantic. The lesbian answer to the run of 1980s hard-body movies about masculinity in crisis, the film is also a reclamation of Freud and psychoanalytic narratives through a female gaze, serving up both an Oedipal narrative and one about the body as fetish object. It is scorchingly hot as a romance, but the best moments come from watching Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian look at each other and respond to the other’s gaze. And it ends on one of the most romantic gestures I’ve ever seen in a movie – not in spite of that gesture involving strangulation and casual roadside corpse disposal, but because it involves strangulation and casual roadside corpse disposal.
Even if David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger was just a clip show of The Archers’ work projected on the big screen, it would comfortably be one of the best times I had in a movie theater this year. But as a guided tour through their filmography, led by none other than Martin Scorsese, Made in England is truly something special on its own terms. Scorsese is as great a film teacher as he is a filmmaker, and the way he both guides us through these films while also reflecting on the many ways they influenced his long career is exquisite. This is a documentary I cannot wait to teach to film students someday; it is an invaluable resource.
Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is loose, experimental, and meandering, in a way that sometimes makes it feel like a minor work, until it reaches points of accumulation where it feels absolutely towering. There is a scene right around the midpoint where Daniel Craig’s character meticulously prepares and then shoots up heroin, all performed in a single long take scored to New Order’s “Leave Me Alone,” and were it cut out of the film and presented as its own standalone short, it might be in my Top 5 of the year. The film’s use of expressive and subjective imagery is stunning – including use of superimpositions, miniatures, models, rear projection, and other great 20th-century techniques – and any movie that ends on a long wordless dream sequence, leaving its denouement to pure visual abstraction, is a winner in my book. The film is a strange, quiet paean to the vulnerability of desire, and on that wavelength, it worked me over pretty powerfully.
Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui make a crucial choice at the outset of Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story: That although they will tell the story of Reeve through the lens of his accident and disability – rather than relegating it to a postscript at the end of a film about his time as Superman – their film will not for one second be about pitying him. This excellent, life-affirming documentary is all about honoring Reeve, principally narrated by his family to illustrate how much love he had in his life, and how much strength he gave the world. As someone who lost his own father very young, the movie had me by the heart from the outset. Reeve’s celebrity is secondary – this is a story about a family dealing with hardship, and finding strength in moving forward. From start to finish, it is beautifully done.
Even setting aside all the real-world context around the film’s production, release, and intersection with contemporary Iranian politics, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is comfortably one of the year’s best films. It’s a paranoid surveillance thriller with shades of The Conversation or The Lives of Others,but instead of focusing on the man doing an ethically dubious job, it’s all about the women in his family living amidst the atmosphere of paranoia in which the patriarch is complicit. The film is deeply engaging and entertaining, beautifully constructed and awash in detail, vividly portraying these characters and their world; and it just gets better and better as it goes along and gains steam, building to a truly harrowing third act. And when you do consider the real-world context – in which Rasoulof had to make the film in secret, and was ultimately forced to flee Iran on foot after shooting finished, with the footage smuggled out separately – Sacred Fig becomes one for the ages. The movie is an act of rebellion even as it is about the conditions from which rebellion arises, which makes every inch of it all the more arresting.
Part II: The Top 10 Films of 2024
10. Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is, without competition, the strangest and most forthrightly avant-garde movie I have ever paid money to see in a for-profit corporate multiplex, let alone an IMAX theater. It is not an inexplicable or unfair reaction to describe the film as a hot mess, narratively disjointed and tonally scattershot, and I know it would sound insufferable to anyone struggling with the movie for me to say “yes, that’s pretty much right, and it’s also why the movie is beautiful and maybe even great.” But that’s also my honest reaction. This is a film that is both powerfully, at times uncomfortably earnest – optimistic and heartfelt and truly affectionate in how it envisions love and art and human potential – and deeply, absurdly playful and tongue-in-cheek. It is a movie that wants to overwhelm the audience with a great big bear hug of artistic excess even as it winks at us about just how silly the act of performing and making art can be. The film is actively negotiating an extremely stark push-and-pull in tone in each and every scene, and for every moment of discordance or discomfort that creates, I think it’s also a productive tension that, at the film’s best, results in a real joy radiating off the screen and into the audience.
Megalopolis is, at its essence, about the act of making art. It is also about architecture, and city planning, and politics, and the nature of civilization, and the concept of ‘utopia,’ and much of it is rooted in love and loss. But every theme Coppola introduces is ultimately collapsed into a central set of multivalent metaphors where Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina strives to create a new, self-sustaining, utopian city called ‘Megalopolis,’ from a new transforming material called ‘Megalon.’ The metaphor is the movie, as Megalopolis the film is a deeply reflexive work less ‘about’ the events in the fictional diegesis than it is the act of its own creation. It is a film reveling in the vast possibilities that exist when a bunch of individuals get together to make some art: all the images that can be conjured, all the tones that can be invoked, all the styles of performance an actor can tap into, and all the unique interactions that can arise from an ensemble actively challenging themselves and each other. The city Catilina dreams of building is still a work in progress when the movie ends, and in every glimpse of it we see, the ‘Megalopolis’ of the title is a sprawling, awkward mess, a mass of oddly shaped metal and strange circuitous paths that seems a bit incomprehensible. In that way, it is a potent visualization of utopia, of a post-capitalist world – something we can only imagine, and which we have never actually seen, and which must therefore be messy – but it is also a synecdoche for the film itself. Megalopolis the film is also a sprawling, unwieldy mess, a mass of oddly shaped characters and plots and relationships that take strange circuitous paths, and are often incomprehensible. But just as Cesar urges the citizens of his world, Coppola’s film encourages us to shift our way of thinking away from considering a perfect, unified, stable state of ‘completion,’ towards the inevitably messy but also beautiful and profound act of making something new, of imagining an unknown future; and if we can do that, there is a whole other layer of beauty and meaning we realize we miss out on, in seeking the comfort and predictability of what is ‘finished,’ familiar, and stable.
Cesar’s ‘Megalopolis’ and Coppola’s Megalopolis are both, in short, projects about shifting the locus of meaning away from the finished product towards the act of people working together to get there. And just as a society cannot be engineered without its citizens, art cannot be made without an audience. The act of watching the film, and being bewildered by it, and sharing a confused glance with the person sitting next to you, and noticing how many people are getting up and leaving, while also feeling the silent camaraderie that develops in the ether between everyone who stays and sees it through – that is all part of what Megalopolis ‘is,’ too, as much as anything happening on screen. And this is why I found myself loving Coppola’s film, not despite its supposed ‘flaws,’ but because of them: because the deeper it goes, and the stranger it becomes, the more I found myself aware of the basic, easily taken-for-granted act of watching a movie. Of laughing at it, and being moved by it, and tilting my head in confusion, and leaning forward in excitement, and opening my eyes wide in awe at a particularly spectacular image. There is a real, palpable magic in the fact that a film, any film, exists, and the fact that we get to sit together in a dark theater watching it unfold; but it’s a magic we can so easily forget about when we’ve done it enough times. The highest praise I can give Megalopolis, I think, is that in splattering creativity across the screen the way Jackson Pollack tossed paint against a canvas, we are reminded anew of the magic that fuels all levels of filmmaking, including the part we play as audience members.
Megalopolis is currently available to rent from digital retailers, and will be released on Blu-ray and 4K UHD in 2025.
Read my full review of MEGALOPOLIS here.
9. Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM
Directed by Fukuda Mitsuo
While not quite as long in the making as Megalopolis, the latest film in the Gundam franchise is also the product of decades of frustrated ambition, a long-promised sequel and finale to two of the most popular Gundam TV series: 2002’s Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and 2004’s Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, helmed by the husband/wife creative team of director Fukuda Mitsuo and writer Morosawa Chiaki. Preliminary work on FREEDOM began way back in 2006, before the illness that struck Morosawa near the end of Destiny slowed its momentum. Sadly, she never fully recovered; though a draft of the script was completed, she ultimately passed away in 2016, leaving Fukuda to complete her screenplay and see the film to fruition, now released eighteen years on from its conception.
The finished product absolutely feels like it fell through a wormhole from two decades prior, winding up in 2024 with its character designs, animation, music, storytelling, and direction all a dead ringer for the first Gundam works of the 21st century. That leads to some awkwardness here and there – these character designs, made for standard-definition animation in the early aughts, don’t really look ‘right’ on a big screen a quarter-century later – but I ultimately found myself falling in love all over again: with the outstanding vocal performances, with Fukuda’s unmistakable direction, with Sahashi Toshihiko’s incredibly rousing and moving musical score, and with the maximalist action symphony of the wildly ambitious final hour, which bests almost any attempts at spectacle Hollywood offered up this year. And of course, I fell back in love with the story, as FREEDOM offers both a direct sequel to SEED Destiny and a redux of the major conflict and themes that creatively troubled series never managed to fully wrap its hands around. It puts original SEED protagonists Kira Yamato and Lacus Clyne front and center, after their baffling mis-characterization in Destiny, and immediately gives them their humanity back. Kira was a much more interesting and complex character than the hollow shell we saw in Destiny; in FREEDOM, he gets to become a hero again, and so does Lacus, both fighting to protect the hard-won future they barely managed to open up in the original SEED.
Through this central relationship, FREEDOM is also a love story, and a shockingly poignant one at that. The most interesting thing the film does, thematically, is to extend the challenging interpersonal dynamics of a romantic partnership to ideas of how society should be structured, arguing that how one views and acts on ideas of ‘love’ is mirrored in our politics. In the film’s riskiest scene, Lacus is nearly sexually assaulted by the film’s antagonist; if it were done with even an ounce less sensitivity, the moment could bring the film down. Instead, it is where Morosawa’s script delivers its thesis statement: that love cannot be forced, and neither can leadership or societal betterment. There is a maturity to this film’s depiction of romance that feels both true to this series – SEED was, after all, the first Gundam to directly depict its characters as sexual beings – and like the characters have grown up a bit since we last saw them. That FREEDOM is a film directed by a husband working from a script his late wife started writing nearly twenty years ago inevitably makes it all the more poignant; when characters question what love is or why we choose to love each other, or Kira and Lacus reckon with whether they can love each other and work to better the world at the same time, it doesn’t feel like platitudes, but an honest grappling with issues of the heart from two creators whose most famous works were created as a married couple. And the resulting film is about as true a case of ‘better late than never’ as I can imagine.
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM is currently streaming on Netflix, but only in an atrocious English dub that should be avoided like the plague. The proper Japanese version can be imported on DVD or Blu-ray from Japan with English subtitles, or you can elect to sail the high seas and find it elsewhere.
Read my full review of MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM SEED FREEDOM here, and listen to Sean Chapman and I discuss the film on our Japanimation Station podcast here.
8. Nosferatu
Directed by Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a remake of the landmark 1922 German expressionist film of the same name by F.W. Murnau, but it is also, as Murnau’s film (illicitly) was, a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which means it belongs to the larger corpus of Dracula adaptations. The core gambit that sets Eggers’ vision apart from a century of reinterpretations is that he largely minimizes the Vampyre himself as a physical presence. Apart from the very last scene, Eggers never lets us get a particularly good look at Orlok, keeping the Count at least half in shadow at his most visible, and more often blocking scenes so that we are watching characters react to the Vampyre, and not seeing the Count’s body ourselves. In the glimpses we do catch, this is a particularly deformed, decayed, and corpse-like vision of Dracula, rotted, fetid, and revolting, and played to great effect by Bill Skarsgård.
But those glimpses are few and far between, and in place of the body, the terror of Nosferatu becomes a much broader presence, an intangible atmosphere, a specter haunting these people and spaces and the images of the film itself. Eggers’ vampyre is a horror unbound by physicality; it invades and infects the body, but also tortures the mind, creeps into every dark corner, seeps into dreams and erases the line between sleep and wake. He uses all the tools of filmmaking at his disposal, all its possibilities of visual expression, to captivate us into a very particular mood. Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is technically in color, but so drained of vibrancy that it often looks monochromatic; combined with extremely low lighting and deep, pervasive shadows, we are often looking at images being overwhelmed by darkness, fighting to see clearly through the miasma. In lesser hands, this could be disastrous; but in Eggers’ vision, we become lost in the image, terrified by what we cannot see, overwhelmed by the cold, oppressive atmosphere. Careful and precise sound design, echoing with a depth that makes those shadows feel even more vast and all-enveloping, along with a truly great score by Robin Carolan that is rich in pathos and dread, work to further shroud the viewer in the affect of dreams and nightmares. Orlok comes to seem less like a discrete on-screen character than a specter floating through the darkness, invading the mind and chilling the air, extending past the screen to be felt in the space of the theatrical auditorium itself.
Alongside Skarsgård, the film features great turns from Nicholas Hoult and especially Willem Dafoe, in the best Van Helsing interpretation I’ve seen on screen. The true revelation, though, is Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen, the ultimate object of Orlok’s schemes. She is a force of nature, modulating from extreme buttoned-down propriety to so overflowing with rage and grief and passion that her body can barely contain it. Every Dracula rendition can be measured, to some extent, by its treatment of the story’s inherent sexual qualities; here, Eggers has constructed his Nosferatu as a grand, damning expression of sexual shame. The true root of its horror is the dread that comes from bottling up desire and rendering it a shameful secret, a disgrace to be guarded and ignored. The film is about 19th-century attitudes towards women, but in so doing it is also, of course, about 21stcentury attitudes, and the destructive force that is willful male ignorance. Stoker’s Dracula has a ‘happy’ ending, for Jonathan and Mina at least, one in which domestic harmony is restored; Murnau’s Nosferatu does not, and that refusal to see this story as one in which such harmony can or should be reestablished is, as much as any aesthetic component, what unites Eggers to this specific 102-year-old telling. Eggers’ intense refusal to give easy answers or offer reassurance gives his film my favorite finale of any Dracula adaptation, the film ending on a note that is at once horrifying, disgusting, and quietly cathartic; one might even call its extraordinary final shot ‘beautiful,’ in the gothic sense of ‘beauty’ as an aesthetic force, a strength of expression and compositional rigor that sparks a wide and messy range of unresolvable pathos.
Nosferatu is currently playing in theaters everywhere.
Read my full review of NOSFERATU here.
7. Dune: Part Two
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is one of the biggest movies I have ever seen. In scope, in ambition, in the enormity of its images, in the amount of story it tells, in the number of bodies on screen; in the sheer volume and impact of its sound design and music, and in the way the entire production exponentially escalates like a freight train gaining speed towards the mouth of Hell. There is a sense we are not just watching epic fantasy, but something far bigger, the images conjured by a fire-and-brimstone Preacher bringing the words of God down from the mountain. I thought to myself, as Paul Muad’Dib’s army of sandworms came crashing through the surface of the earth to consume the Messiah’s enemies, that this is what it would look and feel like if a filmmaker were given $200 million and took an honest stab at adapting the Old Testament. The entire film is a slowly ratcheting acceleration of celestial inevitability, of destruction and rage and bloodletting on a totemic scale, and my stomach kept working itself in tighter and tighter nots as the net this story casts out pulls closer around its world. When the full jihad of the Fremen comes to fruition, when these apocalyptic forces Paul Atreides wraps his hands around are fully unleashed, we are overwhelmed by awe and anxiety, by wonder and dread, by ecstasy and torment, each side of the coin intrinsically linked. I cannot immediately think of a clear cinematic analogue for what Villeneuve taps into here. This is probably the ‘biggest’ big-budget Hollywood production since Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, but in its religious, mythological tenor, it feels more like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, where whole worlds are made and unmade and individual emotions pour forth as light and fire igniting creation.
It also fully pays off on part of Denis Villeneuve’s approach from Dune: Part One, which is that he is less interested in individual characters than in the world they inhabit. There is this dreadful feeling of inevitability to everything that happens, not because there are no meaningful choices or moments of real contingency, but because the intersection of vast political structures and the smallness of human nature funnel these people towards outcomes their free will can only work so hard against. Paul tries to claw against them a little bit in Part One, but by the end of that film, he’s already made the most important choice; from the very start of Part Two, he’s in the funnel, and the only question is how hard he’ll fight back on his way down. I continued to think Timotheé Chalamet was the one weak link of this production through much of Part Two, right up until the moment Paul chooses to stop resisting and embrace his role as a terrible conquering Messiah, and then it all clicks into the place; the way he suddenly lets all this rage and ego burst forth, unrecognizable except for the immediate sense this is the self he’s been holding back all this time, justifies every creative choice made by Chalamet and Villeneuve in this and the previous film.
After all, Frank Herbert’s Dune is to colonial white savior narratives what Alan Moore’s Watchmen is to superhero comics: if it’s adapted right, it should make the viewer queasy thinking about every story in this vein they’ve ever been fed, and how deeply, profoundly wrong-headed all of them are. What impresses me most about the film’s script is that it doesn’t just nail that aspect fully, but that it focuses so thoroughly on the systemic nature of what Paul is embroiled in, how he is a part of a power structure that has spent countless generations not only exploiting the darker-skinned people he has been sent to rule, but planting the seeds for their apparent liberation to just become further damnation and servitude. The tragedy of Paul Muad’Dib is that he sees this system in its totality, he understands and is properly afraid of it, and in the end chooses to vigorously uphold it. He unleashes so much sound and fury, and it feels big and mythic and epochal, but it is in the end just one white man dethroning another white man, both of whose power is foundationally built in systemic oppression of colonized peoples. The lie of religion, as this film sees it, is to frame such upheaval and violence as divine, ordained, and redemptive, when in fact it is just a changing of the guards. The world is shaken, and no one has been saved.
Dune: Part Two is currently streaming on Max, is available to buy and rent on digital retailers, and is also available on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD.
Read my full review of DUNE: PART TWO here.
6. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
Directed by Neo Sora
An old man plays a piano, for a little under two hours, in stark black-and-white. It makes for one of the most powerful, remarkable films I have ever seen.
Explaining what makes Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus so special is a little like trying to describe My Dinner With Andre to the uninitiated. The film is so very simple, and yet it is so infinitely complex. It consists solely of Sakamoto Ryuichi – celebrated composer for films like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor, and a pioneer of electronic music as both an independent artist and a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra – sitting at his Yamaha piano, in a studio, microphones and wires crisscrossing the image, playing through some of his greatest works. There are no introductions, no on-screen text, no voiceover, and no spoken words of any kind until about halfway through, when Sakamoto says two things quietly in quick succession to those filming him. The performance is all there is. Sometimes Sakamoto plays confidently and commandingly; more often he plays slowly and softly and feels his way through the music. Sometimes he makes mistakes, or tries things out a few different ways before being satisfied. There is so much emotion and humanity in all of it, and not only because Sakamoto was terminally ill while filming, and died before anyone saw the finished product. There is a lot of silence in the movie too; Sakamoto likes to pause between phrases, sometimes striking just a few brief notes before leaving a suggestive gap. The soundscape of the film inevitably intermingles with the soundscape of one’s viewing space; you will become aware of everyone else watching, no matter how quiet they try to be, and of whatever sound bleeds into the theater. It is all just as important as the sound of the piano, because Sakamoto plays in such a way that we are forced to ‘hear’ the silences.
Sakamoto’s playing is so gentle, and the film is as a whole so quiet, that Opus might well lull the viewer to sleep. I did not feel exhausted entering the theater, but even as the film moved me immensely, it also relaxed me, and I will admit to drifting away once or twice for a moment. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or even necessarily unintentional on the part of the filmmakers. Opus is a movie about things that are fleeting: notes of music; hands pressing keys and then lifting again; sounds in the auditorium that come and go; human lives that inevitably end, including the man on screen. If the viewer slips out of consciousness for a minute and comes back, they will appreciate the next few notes more; and they’ll realize it was okay to miss a few while they were gone. It’s all of a piece. These things pass into the world and then they go away. Opus is not a film with a plot, but is a film awash in tension: life and death, black and white, and most importantly, sound and silence. The core interplay in the film is between Sakamoto striking the keys and then leaving pauses. As the film goes on, we realize he is rehearsing mortality in real time. The notes are here, and then they’re gone.
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to buy and rent on digital retailers, and is also available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection via Janus Contemporaries.
Read my full review of RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS here.
5. Civil War
Directed by Alex Garland
The great surprise of Alex Garland’s Civil War is that it isn’t really about the speculative fiction underlying the film’s eponymous near-future conflict. It is instead a parable about the import of journalism amidst the extremis of a collapsing society – about why and how people who chronicle the present do what they do when the existence of a ‘tomorrow’ seems almost unthinkable; an ode to the people whose instincts tell them to snap a picture when confronted with the yawning chasm of the end times. Where this intersects with America is in how Garland taps into the feeling that this grand democratic experiment of ours feels more contingent today than it has in nearly two centuries; the literal landscape of bloodshed, bullets, and fire the film’s characters chronicle on their way to Washington D.C. feels, emotionally, a lot like the world we’re living in now – a country breaking apart at the seams, crumbling and rotting from within. It is not the photojournalist’s job to hold our hands and tell us how we got here, or where we’re going next; their job is to be in the thick of it so that they might impart a piece of that reality to the survivors and onlookers – a piece without which we can never actually understand how we got here, or why it matters, or where we go next.
Thank God that Garland has Kirsten Dunst to ground his film, to sell us on the reality of this person and her profession, and to make the awful intensity of this speculative future scenario feel so viscerally immediate. This is the latest in a long line of movies Dunst has starred in that simply would not work, at all, were it not for her presence. She carries into every role the weight of a full human being, which sounds simple until you watch an actor of her caliber work and realize how rare that feat really is. There is a fierce intelligence undergirding her performance here, but also a sense of wisdom and weariness, of pain we glimpse but never fully understand. Her character, Lee, keeps getting up in the morning and picking up the camera and taking the shots, and she believes in the importance of that work to her core, but it just keeps getting harder, the further she moves through a world that stubbornly refuses to feel the weight of these images as much as she does. Cailee Spaeny, fresh off her astonishing breakthrough in last year’s Priscilla, plays a young photographer, Jessie, who idolizes Lee, and wants to learn from her. At first, Jessie is far in over her head; gradually, she summons the courage, conviction, and touch of madness that also drives Lee, and there the film, and its characters, finds the answer. The work always mattered; here comes a young person inspired enough to lift the weight from the shoulder of those who have too long been burdened by it. The despondency was real, but so was the bequeathment.
The behavior of the characters in Civil War is extreme and sometimes off-putting, even alien to us in its inherent danger and the uncomfortable sense of deadly voyeurism, but nobody snaps pictures in the middle of gunfire just to get their rocks off. They do so because at any moment they might snatch from chaos the single image that shakes somebody, somewhere, out of apathy; the one that stops enough of the public in their tracks to change the course of the conflict, or, failing that, the one that contextualizes and immortalizes the moment for history. Even if we are lost, maybe the ones who come next will find their way. There is a faith inherent to that action that almost rises to the level of religious reverence, a belief in something we cannot see but want to make possible. At the outset of Civil War, these people almost seem disturbed, photographing devastation straight from the epicenter. By the end, there is no mistake: I felt absolute humility before their ethos, in the face of their faith. The world may indeed be crumbling, but here are the people who understand what that means deeply enough to chronicle it, to do something about it, to believe so strongly in the possibility of our capacity to be rocked by those moments that they risk their lives attesting to it. Garland has written and/or directed several truly wonderful films, but Civil War is the one that convinces me he is a capital-g Great filmmaker, a cinematic artist of immense and enduring substance.
Civil War is currently streaming on Max, is available to buy and rent on digital retailers, and is also available on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD.
Read my full review of CIVIL WAR here.
4. Anora
Directed by Sean Baker
The great contradiction of Sean Baker’s Anora is that while it is one of the most entertaining, intoxicating, and compulsively watchable films of 2024, it is also completely devastating, and at a certain point the ‘entertainment’ and ‘intoxication’ of it all evaporates, leaving us with stress and sadness and a growing awareness that none of this is going to end well. The eponymous Anora – or Ani, brought to life by Mikey Madison in the year’s most vivid and memorable performance – goes from laboring as a dancer and sex worker to believing she’s found a way to leave that labor behind by marrying Vanya, irresponsible son of a Russian oligarch; when Vanya disappears at the first sign of trouble, the act of labor returns in full force – in this case, the physical labor of searching, and the even greater emotional labor of making her voice and personality heard by people who want her to disappear. And as the film transitions from soaring fantasy depicted in kaleidoscopic montage to a single long night of gritty, street-level ‘work,’ slower and greyer and increasingly brittle and caustic, I found myself wondering which movie I had been watching; whether the thing I fell in love with in the first half was being failed by the second, or whether what I was watching was illusory all along.
That is, of course, the exact dilemma Ani herself is engaged in; like many great movies, Anora not only aligns the viewer with the protagonist’s subjectivity, but finds a way to make us feel what she does, using cinema’s potential as a “machine that generates empathy” to mirror her experience in the story with our experience of watching that story unfold. And the damning conclusion both Ani and the viewer must come to is this: Vanya isn’t real. He never even existed. The film ends with Ani in tears; they flow for many reasons, and one of them is this feeling of inescapability, of acknowledging the inherent tragedy that is living in a world where so much of our humanity is ultimately rendered transactional.
Baker’s film is constructed on big structural contrasts, ones that encapsulate the journey the film takes us on from exuberance to anguish. Anora starts with music, blasting Take That’s “Greatest Day” at full volume, and it ends with no music whatsoever, its entire final scene passing by with only diegetic sound, which continues through the closing credits. Anora opens with a flurry of editing, both in establishing Ani’s routine at the club and in taking us through her honeymoon phase(s) with Vanya, and it ends on a single unbroken shot that lasts for three minutes. Anora begins with vibrant, hyperbolic color – neon blues and reds dancing atop the bodies of Ani and her fellow dancers in the club – and it ends in cold, grey winter, snow blotting out the world as Igor’s windshield wipers fight a Sisyphean battle to let light inside this cheap cramped car. The colors say it all, the distance between the club’s artificial but intoxicating lights and the winter morning’s chilly monochromatism reflecting the harshness of lived reality versus the vibrancy of the fantasies we buy and sell – including the fantasy that we can ever escape the chains of capitalism and remove ourselves from the cycle of infinite transactions that fuel the myth we call the American Dream. The tears Anora sheds, and the hollow feeling of emotional exhaustion we in the audience sit with as the credits play out in silence, are rooted in letting that horrible, uncomfortable truth settle in.
Anora is currently playing in select theaters, and is available to buy on digital retailers.
Read my full review of ANORA here.
3. In Our Day
Directed by Hong Sangsoo
There are, by my count, 23 shots in Hong Sangsoo’s 84-minute In Our Day – low even by the South Korean auteur’s singularly patient sensibilities. Most of these shots are very long, but one of them, the 16th, is a very short zoom towards an adorable cat sleeping in a closet. It is delightful.
That one little moment speaks to the undercurrent of joy and playfulness pulsing throughout In Our Day. It blends the structural experimentation of Hong’s middle period with the (even) slower, looser, (even more) lo-fi qualities of his later period. It tells two stories, or more accurately, it tells the same story in two different incarnations. Both are about an older artist being approached by a younger aspiring actor for advice, with a third person in the room connected to one of the two people but not quite both. The film is broken into chapters which echo each other in part but never in whole, the echoes growing increasingly playful with time. The final chapter of the Kim Minhee-led story is about her friend losing her cat, and features a jump cut showing many hours of searching having passed to no avail. The final chapter of the Ki Joobong story is about his character finally giving in and having a few drinks after his doctor has told him to quit. He tells the young actor to go out and get one, maybe two bottles of soju; in a jump cut, the table now has four mostly empty bottles. I laughed very hard.
This is a lovely movie. So full of rich, warm humanism, sly and sometimes sardonic humor, and truly wise, thought-provoking musings on the nature of identity and the shortness and fragility of life on earth. It combines a little bit of everything I love about Hong in one movie, the casual ‘hang-out’ quality and the more rigorous, formally robust exploration of narrative and physical space (the shots are unassuming but exacting in their geometric composition, particularly when they reframe within the shot). The structure fills the movie mostly with mundanity and banality, much of it very funny and endearing (like the poet discovering the taste of nonalcoholic beer, or the young cousin trying hot pepper paste and immediately regretting it), but builds to real pearls of wisdom, moments of immense empathy and insight, like Kim Minhee’s monologue about the emotional demands of acting, or Ki Joobong waxing about the meaning of life (or lack thereof). Hong’s style of long takes means the actor’s full body is usually in frame, and we rarely get a good look at their faces; the upside is we get to study every performer’s body language in detail, seeing how they act with their full physical presence over long spans of time. Kim Minhee in particular is a master of building character through the way she holds herself, or the gestures she makes with her hands. Ki Joobong constructs so much of his performance around posture, the way he sits, and leans forward, and drinks. The final shot of the movie is a profound exemplar of this quality, and of so many other elements that make Hong special. I would call it my favorite final shot of 2024, except Hong’s previous film, In Water, also came to most American theaters this year, and as previously mentioned, its final shot is an all-timer. As always, Hong is singular.
There is something so clarifying and cleansing about In Our Day. I saw it twice in the week it played at Iowa City’s FilmScene theater, and those two viewings bookended an immensely stressful week of having family in town to help me move out of the condo I lived in for six years. Watching it the second time was the most peace I had felt since watching it the first; in that space, the film became a treasured favorite. There is something calming and reassuring and beautiful about Hong’s presentation of ‘daily’ life: a series of banal conversations and meals, sometimes punctuated by heartache, sometimes by stress, sometimes by pearls of wisdom that focus one’s attention. And to keep moving on, sometimes one simply has to build a space for themselves on the roof, where they can smoke and drink in silent contemplation, damn the advice of doctors.
I love this movie.
In Our Day is available to buy and rent on digital retailers, and will eventually be released on DVD and Blu-ray by Cinema Guild.
2. I Saw the TV Glow
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
I have not been brave enough to revisit this movie yet, and I’m not sure when I will. It’s harrowing, it’s challenging, and it’s profoundly confrontational, in ways that I have to believe are bound to shake anyone willing to engage with it. When I do make my way back to I Saw the TV Glow, it is entirely possible I might regret not putting it at the top spot, finding that I refused to fully internalize or grapple with it for fear of how much it reveals. For a movie that so powerfully articulates the terror, pain, and sadness of avoiding our deepest truths, perhaps that’s all too appropriate.
Between this and 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – a movie I added to my Intro to Film Theory syllabus as soon as I saw it, and which made for one of the best classroom discussions I had in my time at Iowa – Jane Schoenbrun has established one of the absolute most singular, unmistakable voices in cinema today. Their work is unlike anybody else’s, and it engages with contemporary questions of media, technology, and identity in ways nobody else is exploring in such visceral, deeply felt ways.
I Saw the TV Glow takes a bold leap forward in terms of ambition, dealing with multiple time jumps, a fake Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque TV series, and discussion of parallel universes. These are all pieces in service of a haunting fable about gender dysphoria, neurodivergence, and abuse, never literally naming any of these things in the text, but conveying the emotional realities of each with unmistakable clarity. It is also about television, storytelling, and our relationship with visual mass media, an experiential treatise on the way the screen becomes a mirror upon which we see and understand ourselves, and how that mirror, and our reflection, changes so much over time.
Nobody working in film today is as good with teen and young adult actors as Schoenbrun, evinced again here by the work they get out of Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine. The latter in particular is a revelation; I had seen Lundy-Paine once before – they played Ted’s daughter in the desperately underrated Bill & Ted Face the Music – and here they give an all-timer home run of a frayed-nerve performance, complete with a major monologue around the film’s middle that is one of the two or three most towering movie moments of 2024.
The film’s final stretch, and especially its ending, is more real and more harrowing than just about any horror film I’ve ever seen, unsettling me in ways few movies ever have. I Saw the TV Glow is a masterclass of subjective filmmaking, where very little in it can be read or understood on the level of a stable diegetic reality, but every second expresses something internal to the lived, perceptual reality of these characters. And in that last stretch, through a particular breaking point moment Smith’s character experiences, it hits on this feeling of bottling something up, living life in a drift or a haze, until the weight of the life not lived comes crashing down. It is devastating, and while there is no film I know of to which I Saw the TV Glow could accurately be compared, I would argue it does for queer identity and/or gender dysphoria what Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia did for clinical depression: Use the tools of cinema to make the sensations of those lived experiences palpable for anyone watching. That’s a miracle that only comes around once in a great long while.
I Saw the TV Glow is currently streaming on Max, can be bought and rented on digital retailers, and is also available on Blu-ray directly from A24.
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Directed by George Miller
I would never have thought that Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the few truly undisputed masterpieces of the 21stcentury, would ever come to feel in any way ‘incomplete;’ yet the grand achievement of Furiosa, George Miller’s long-awaited follow-up, is that it manages to retroactively make Fury Road feel like one half of a much larger, even more ambitious work than that which appeared in cinemas nine years ago. Narratively, thematically, emotionally, and formally, Furiosa boldly expands the horizons of Miller’s universe, less a conventional prequel to Fury Road than the earlier film’s other half, its shadow, a distorted reflection that complicates, extends, and enriches everything that came before. Furiosa is to Fury Road what Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels is to Chungking Express: two films that stand beautifully on their own, but are positively transcendent when combined. Like Wong’s duology, Furiosa and Fury Road are two journeys through the same world created by the same group of artists, but with mostly different bodies on screen and a very different affect to the entire presentation. Each is a major achievement in its own right; put together, they are not just dynamic complements, but two pieces of a whole unlocking something fundamental in the other.
Formally, Furiosa plays like a visual expression of epic poetry, like an adaptation of The Iliad or The Odyssey, but with Ancient Greece swapped for post-apocalyptic Australia. There are no literal Gods, but one senses a divine hand sweeping its way through this barren, brutal world all the same; Chris Hemsworth even drives around in a makeshift chariot, a would-be Achilles for the end times. Furiosa employs quite a bit more digital VFX than Fury Road, but with clear intent and to great effect, conjuring massive, ambitious, awe-inspiring images of places and feats that feel truly impossible, like the dreamscapes of the mind’s eye hearing a story passed down, embellished, and exaggerated through the ages. The film is a monumental feat of world-building, akin to the first great digitally-inflected blockbusters of the 21st century – namely Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars prequels – and adjacent to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune duology. But Miller’s world is even more mythical, heightened, and bizarre than those, a gonzo hellscape with a sly sense of humor.
It also shares more in common with silent films than any Hollywood spectacles made today, as has been true of most entries in the Mad Max saga. I love how repeated viewings reveal just how much of the film is ‘undercranked’ (images being played faster than they were shot), a technique basically nobody except George Miller now uses. The performance styles, especially for all the background parts like the War Boys, feel like they’re ripped straight out of Georges Méliès, all the grand theatrical gesticulations working together in visual cacophony. The makeup, production design, and sheer ambition of the imagery all feel like the kinds of fever dreams we got in the 1920s by the greatest, most uninhibited directors of the period, masters like Fritz Lang and Abel Gance, who imagined impossible things and bent the nascent language of cinema to their will. That’s the kind of attitude at work here, and it is why George Miller feels so unique amongst his contemporaries. He doesn’t seem like a director fluent in cinema as it has been spoken for a century, but one making up his own language and dialect as he goes.
Fury Road arrived in theaters nearly ten years ago, in what felt like a different lifetime. We were basking in the relative stability of the Obama presidency, with a strained but seemingly sane body politic and a still-intact Europe across the pond; Donald Trump still hadn’t come down the escalator. The world today looks a lot more like the original Mad Max – recognizable as a modern civilization, but quickly spiraling out of control – than it did in 2015. Yet watched today, Fury Road feels more prescient than ever, a movie about and for our times, about weak men in thrall to a pathetic strong man, about women fighting for basic bodily autonomy, about characters seeking salvation in the ‘Green Place’ only to learn the best they can do is make the most of the ecologically ravaged world they’ve inherited.
Furiosa is about all these things too, and feels immediately finger-on-the-pulse. It is a movie about characters moving through a world that is ending all around them, choosing where they will draw lines and where they must capitulate to survive – and what pieces of themselves they will cling to as the apocalypse rolls along. And it is, of course, about a young woman trying to extricate herself from a society where freedom has been snatched from her, caught between the individualistic goal of revenge and the higher calling of liberation.
The film’s final scene, the confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus, floors me harder every time I go back. It is this agonizing, painful, lacerating exchange, the emotions of the characters laid bare in a way we’re not used to in a Mad Max film, but still with the unique flourishes of language special to the characters of this series. And in the scene’s raw, startling vulnerability, Miller taps into a kind of fury I think we’re all living with today: this sense that things are irreparably broken, that lives we could have lived have been stolen from us, and that, as Dementus says, the only choice left to us is to decide how we’re going to mark the time between now and death – how we are going to let our rage manifest in the dregs of this falling world. Do we have it in us to make it epic?
The answer, the film gives us, is yes – but not in the way Dementus intends it. The ‘epic’ is the Epic of myth and story and legend, the possibility for tales to continue being passed down, because we have built a society that can, at the very least, continue to pass them. And we know that happens here because Fury Road exists, and is the next chapter to this story, and the one where Furiosa’s long journey is resolved by making peace with the world she’s been dealt and choosing to go back and redeem it, rather than running towards a destroyed and unattainable Eden. That is her Epic, and it is ours too.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is currently available to buy and rent on digital retailers, and is also available on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD.
Read my full review of FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA here.
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