Some thoughts & reflections on the best movies, and best movie moments, of 2024…
Because of the nature of my job, I often see movies before or after their release date, making it very hard to locate where and when I actually saw something. Here are some films “from 2024” that I enjoyed most this year.
- La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher
- Janet Planet, Annie Baker
- Last Summer, Catherine Breillat
- Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross
- Challengers, Luca Guadagnino
- Rap World, Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar
- Matt and Mara, Kazik Radwanski
- Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke
- Hard Truths, Mike Leigh
- The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar
- Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari
***
These are the movies I watched for the first time this year that I found most surprising. I’ve mixed 2024 releases with older movies and theatrical screenings with time on the couch at home; moviegoing doesn’t need to be limited to a time or place or format. I haven’t ranked these movies, either. I watched them scattered throughout my moviegoing year, and I wanted to reflect that experience here.
House of Usher (1960) — DVD
Maybe Vincent Price will manage to break the grip Boris Karloff has on my heart during October. I love watching tall men swan about elaborately spooky sets; even better when they’re going for broke in service of an outlandish story.
Challengers — DCP, AMC River East 21
The very definition of going for broke. I laughed out loud when the movie smashed to credits.
Maborosi (1995) — 35mm, Gene Siskel Film Center
Understated and lovely. There’s a reflection shot near the end of the film, smoke rising from a spit of land as its mirror image falls away into the water below it, that I find myself returning to in quiet moments.
Nickel Boys — DCP, AMC River East 21
A perfect adaptation. This movie aches with every shot, an astonishing feat to go along with its pitch-perfect first-person perspective. I can’t think about the shift in perspective that marks this movie’s turning point without dissolving into tears.
A History of Violence (2007) — streaming
Understated and deeply sad. The look on Viggo Mortensen’s face just before the movie cuts to credits might be some of my favorite work of his.
Rebel Ridge — streaming
Aaron Pierre deserves to be the biggest star there is. I love his character’s commitment to non lethal violence and Jeremy Saulnier’s commitment to tight stories edited gracefully. Semper fi.
Streets of Fire (1984) — 70mm, The Music Box
I want to live in the concert sequence that opens this movie.
Hundreds of Beavers —DCP, The Music Box
The spirit of Sam Raimi is alive and well in the wintry woods of Wisconsin, wearing a beaver suit and daring anyone else to come up with something so energetic and inventive.
The Quick and the Dead (1995) — streaming
Movies were invented so we could watch Sharon Stone and Russell Crowe weigh their commitment to a just cause against the cost of taking a person’s life, all in the middle of a gunslinging competition shot with the verve of a Looney Tunes cartoon.
The Vourdalak — streaming
Horror movies were invented so we could watch a six-foot-tall French vampire puppet drink the blood of everyone he knows and loves.
***
With the usual caveat that I haven’t seen nearly as many 2024 films as I’d hoped to yet—including some which will no doubt end up making this list—here are my favorite five films of 2024 so far (and, since I’m a nerd, I’ll update this to a top 10 list here in about a month):
1. His Three Daughters
I’m an easy mark for movies like this, but only if they get it right, and this one gets so many things right. A definite candidate for the cinematherapy canon, for one simple reason: it never forgets how impossible and necessary other people are. Also, Carrie Coon, my goodness. And Natasha Lyonne, thank god. But Elisabeth Olsen steals the show at times?
2. Janet Planet
I loved so much about so much of Annie Baker’s first feature film—the drifting pace and reflective pauses, the faces, the feelings, the small moments, the music (finding a way to use both a Schumann piano quintet and Firehouse’s “Love of a Lifetime” effectively in the same movie is quite a feat), and the casual way it captured the early 90s in so many small and subtle and absolutely accurate ways without ever capitalizing on it or winking at it. Truly hoping Annie Baker makes many more movies.
3. Perfect Days
So patient and generous, so full of simple, wonderful moments. I loved being in the space Wim Wenders created and living there for a couple of hours, which felt as deep, graceful, nourishing, and grounding as the best kind of meditation. Attention as a form of love; now is now.
4. La Chimera
When Fran and Frank both agree a movie is the best, you certainly better make time in your life to watch it. And I’m so glad I did. Alice Rohrwacher’s movies often feel like dreams to me, in a way I can’t quite put a finger on, but they certainly don’t not remind me of what I love best about Fellini.
5. Challengers
So much damn fun, so propulsive and addictive, so wonderful and sexy and silly—and definitely the first movie I’ve ever seen that made me feel even remotely cool (fleeting) for playing varsity tennis in high school many moons ago. Loved watching my non-sports friends getting into tennis for a week or two last year when this came out, and very much hoping Guadagnino does basketball next.
***
Favorite Film of 2024—Part One: Babygirl
“Something has to be at stake.”
A lusty labyrinth of desire, shame, and ecstasy that resurrects the female-driven erotic thriller for the 21st century, Babygirl is the best film of 2024. A movie that understands the sensuous eroticism of annihilation, Babygirl portraits the need—not the want, but the need—of Nicole Kidman’s icily efficient tech CEO Romy to press herself against the serrated pleasures that feed her even as they cut her (and her life) wide open. After 19 years of not orgasming with her husband (Antonio Banderas), Romy obsessively embraces an affair with an intern (Harris Dickinson) and succumbs to kinks both minor (pretty light bottoming) and major (putting her entire family at stake not just to finally come; rather, the act of putting everything at stake is what makes her come), all as director Halina Reijn reinvents an entire genre as a modern sexual odyssey of staggering nuance, empathy, and fuckstruck power.
Favorite Scene in a Film I Liked: “Cosplay,” Red Rooms
While I’d have preferred that Red Rooms—Pascal Plante’s chilly, postmodernist trash compaction of the cyber-thriller with the courtroom procedural (call it The Girl With The Baudrillard Tattoo)—trended towards dissolution rather than resolution in its somewhat tidy third act, the film remains a sleek and haunted/haunting portrait of the online-junkied rooms that hold our nightmares, the rooms that imprison us, and the thin pixelated line that barely separates the two. And nowhere is that line-blurring made more manifest within the film than in the moment (which, to avoid spoilers, will not be over-described here) that the film’s protagonist, the model-turned-internet-sleuth Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), reveals the twisted depth of her true-crime obsession to a horrified courtroom.
Favorite Scene in a Film I Disliked: “Consent Conversation,” Strange Darling
Amidst its borrowing of structural elements from infinitely better, smarter, and more entertaining films (the opening crawl from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; the chronologically disordered chapters of Pulp Fiction), the emptily showy cinematography courtesy of actor Giovanni Ribisi (who behind the camera channels the intrusive, overcaffinated juvenilia of his photog character from Lost In Translation), and sexual politics so fucking clumsily deployed they seem thoughtless at best and a supernova of misogyny at worst, there is a single scene of incisive quietude. A woman (Willa Fitzgerald) and the man (Kyle Gallner) who just met her at a bar now sit in his pickup truck beneath the cerulean haze of a motel’s neon sign, sipping booze and discussing the risks faced by women who enjoy and pursue casual sex, as well as the negotiations between the two for the consensual non-consent fuckplay she’ll want from him if they get a room. For a few moments, Ribisi’s needlessly adolescent camerawork settles down, the film abandons its empty-calorie plot zigzags, and two human beings strive for understanding, connection, and gratification.
Favorite Popcorn Film of 2024—Part One: Rebel Ridge
While a film that indicts America’s systemic racism, the militarization of police, and civil asset forfeiture (in which law enforcement may seize assets of any citizen deemed “suspect”)—all of which was written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, the man behind such surgically goregasmic cinecarnage as Blue Ruin and Green Room—may not sound like typical popcorn movie fare, well, welcome to the smoldering nightmare that was 2024.
Rebel Ridge in many ways feels like Saulnier’s First Blood and his last stand against content-slop: a film that stretches the canvas of the first Rambo film, in which a military vet explodes in a private war against a small-town police department, atop 2024 America’s hydra-necked social inequities. Along the way, Saulnier discovers an incandescent movie star in lead Aaron Pierre and reminds audiences that populist fare can balance thrilling action/violence, character work, and cultural critique (if anything, Ridge might hew far closer to Robocop in that regard than Rambo). Also: Don fucking Johnson. The fact that Saulnier does it all on Netflix’s dime (as was the case with his almost perversely ambiguous and existential 2018 Netflix joint, Hold the Dark), is just the butter on top of the popcorn.
Favorite Popcorn Film of 2024—Part Two: Furiosa
Wholly unable to match visceral drive and oil-inked, blood-spattered majesty of George Miller’s apex Max film, Fury Road (what could?), Furiosa instead leans into the Weird: a stop-start-stop series of vignettes that follow the early life of its titular character while also tracing the arcs of the forces that will marshal against her later on the Road. And while it’s Anna Taylor-Joy who toplines this hyperreal monument to the anti-real, it’s Chris Hemsworth’s performance as the nipple-ripped Dementus who steals the show (his final monologue about the nature of pain, and his willingness to endure it, may be the most ugly-beautiful expression of pure humanity in any of Miller’s—or 2024’s—films). A standalone, a spinoff, a sequel, a prequel (with this film, future is epilogue, past is prologue), whatever you wish to call the aching apocalyptia of Furiosa, it remains a fabulous thing.
Favorite Film of 2024—Part Two: Anora
Anora has caught a number of comparisons to Scorsese’ s After Hours thanks to the long screwball night in NYC that makes up the film’s midsection, but if you’re looking to judge Sean Baker’s latest against earlier works, Anora is pure, peak Jonathan Demme, dusted with just a bit of Fellini and some high-grade ketamine. It’s a vivid, vibrant explosion of characters major and minor, catching in its epic sweep the titular Brighton Beach stripper/sex worker, a family of billionaire Russian oligarchs, and all the dissolute denizens of Brooklyn’s nightworld that fall between them. Amidst all that flash and humanity, though, is the woman at the film’s center, made all the more magnetic by Mikey Madison’s livewire and empathetic performance. Anora is an almost cosmically humanist character sketch in which character is defined via action and inaction (as opposed to spoonfed moralizing), one that builds to an ending that has to be felt to be believed.
Favorite Long-Awaited Return by an Old Master With a Film That Is Almost Wholly Indigestible by the Modern American Cinematic Standards in 2024—Part One: Last Summer
After a decade-long absence, French auteur Catherine Breillat returned (technically in 2023 elsewhere, but 2024 in the States) with Last Summer, a shocking, at-times shattering, yet somehow still breezy vision of how the fusion of eroticism and trauma can both shape and break the traumatizers and the traumatized alike, and how one can beget the other. All of this is woven into a plot (horny stepmother, wayward stepson) one could easily find on a thousand porn sites, but Breillat, per usual, elevates it to a freakishly penetrating interrogation of power and female desire.
Favorite Long-Awaited Return by an Old Master With a Film That Is Almost Wholly Indigestible by the Modern American Cinematic Standards in 2024—Part Two: Megalopolis
Is it good? Is it bad? Is it (intentionally) (or unintentionally) funny? Is it (unintentionally) (or intentionally) boring? Is it prophetic? Is it pretentious? Is it a movie? Is it a vanity project?
Whatever your answers to any of the above may be, the fact that one of the most daring forces in American cinema returned after 13 years to give us one last vision, one so strange and unique that it will force audiences and scholars and obsessives to wrestle with these questions for as long as the medium remains, is a gift. In an era in which most entertainment is crafted to be easily-ignored background static for doomscrolling, Francis Ford Coppola came back, at the apocalypse of Now, to craft a content-resistant summation to his entire career as a cinematic gambler and storyteller. We were, and are, so very lucky to have been his audience, one last time.
Favorite Film That Was Also on My 2023 List but Didn’t Receive an American Release Until 2024: Femme
An astonishing—absolutely astonishing—queer erotic thriller suffused with a nervebursting audacity, unpredictability, and humanity, Femme is a film both gorgeous to look at and horrifying to watch as it follows a drag queen, Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, giving one of the two best performances of the year), as he launches a revenge plot to seduce and then out the in-the-closet thug (George MacKay, ditto) who once brutally assaulted him. What begins as a revenge thriller soon evolves into something else entirely as each man’s feelings for the other become increasingly complex, and Femme transforms, all jewelshimmered and jagged, into a work of eroticism and horror that’s as brutal as it is understanding, a synchronously prismatic and merciless neon-noir knotting of identity, vengeance, sex, and toxicity.
Favorite Film of 2023—Part Three: Love Lies Bleeding
The kind of noir-pumped and desert-pulped art trash we don’t get anymore, with lost souls who go fuck mad and blood simple in a world that’s wild at heart and weird on top, Love Lies Bleeding intercourses the wonky, disturbing neo-noir of the early Coen Brothers’ films with dangerously addictive sex of the erotic thriller genre in its heyday. And in that coupling, the film locates a deeply queer, deeply strange, deeply adventurous vision of love, fucking, and addiction, and how one can endlessly ouroboros into the other, in any order. In short, a film about bodies, and the wondrous, horrifying, surreal extremes that they contain, and that which they can attain.
“I wanna stretch you. I wanna see how far you can go.”
***
Top 10 Moments I said (or thought) “she’s so me”* quietly to myself in the theater this year, in no particular order:
The very first lines of Janet Planet: Twelve-year-old Lacy, anxious and shy and homesick but possessing a bookish knack for quiet dramatics, sneaks away from her camp bunk in the middle of the night to call her mom—collect! those who remember remember!—and says, plainly, “I said I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t come get me.”
The entire “You know that I think that movies are a conspiracy?” monologue from Minnie and Moskowitz: After Gena Rowlands died in August, the Roxy Cinema in New York programmed a career retrospective, which I used to fill in my Cassavetes blindspots—the pictures that were either hard to find or I was saving for “the right mood” or “the right setting”—and Minnie and Moskowitz was perhaps one of my most favorite first time watches. It’s so funny to see Cassavetes’ spin on a screwball romantic comedy, but even funnier to see him write a scene—played so devastatingly perfect by Rowlands—about how movies cloud our vision of reality that predates Nora Ephron’s infamous “you don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.”
Julianne Moore trying to skirt out of a very intimate request in The Room Next Door by saying she has a fear of death: Look, who among us hasn’t been there?
Adam Driver fucked up at the cluuuub in Megalopolis saying “What I like are those little hot dogs wrapped in the pastry…really the Nobel Prize should be for the person who invented those.”: Is there much to be lauded in Francis Ford Coppola’s (maybe) swan song? Yes. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and likely will ever see in my lifetime, and that should be commended. Is there much to unintentionally laugh at? Also yes. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Absolutely not.
When all three sisters get into a screaming fight in a doorway in His Three Daughters: Even if I weren’t one of three sisters, I’d still probably be obsessed with why and how three sisters works so well as a dramatic device. His Three Daughters captures the dynamic—and the roles we fall into when we’re all together—so well, but none better than its petty, shouting, slapping-at-nothing fight.
Maddie Ziegler asking “What if one of us gets too high and says something fucked up and it changes the fabric of our friendship forever?” in My Old Ass: We all have that friend: The anxious girly, the killjoy, the Cautious Cathy, the Nervous Nelly. I have always been and always will be that friend. Tied with: Aubrey Plaza—also in My Old Ass—insisting that she is not middle aged, thank you, but actually, “a very young adult” which is a defensive line I quite often have to use with anyone more than five years younger than I am.
June Squibb basically being like ACAB in Thelma: I loved everything about Thelma, but most of all that it’s June Squibb’s moment and we’re all just lucky to be living in it. What an outright shame that her name isn’t in higher circulation for Oscar front-runners.
The small smile and grimace—though insisting she likes it—from Winona Ryder as she sets down a cup of espresso offered to her by Gabriel Byrne in Little Women (1994): Since Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film, I found that I hadn’t revisited Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation in seriousness in some time. A holiday screening at Nitehawk reminded me how transcendent Ryder is as Jo March—truly, a once-in-a-lifetime performance where it’s difficult to tell where the character ends and the actor begins—and how deeply relatable Jo March will always be to so many little women.
The entirety of Koyaanisqatsi: Saw it Big And Loud at the Paris Theater after drinking a weed bevvy that was perhaps a little too strong for me, so of course I reacted “wowwww…..she’s so me” to the most chaotic, unsettling images of metropolis in chaotic boom and decrepit bust.
The end of Margaret: Who wouldn’t cry in a theater sitting merely an aisle away from Kenneth Lonergan and Anna Paquin while watching Anna Paquin cry at the opera? Are you kidding?????
***
Sometimes I write a sentence like “With Movie Y, Director X brilliantly authors a clear statement on the power of bodies in space and the intersection of art and humanity, etc. etc.” Then I think, “Wait, has Director X actually done anything here?” Well yes. But as Francis Ford Coppola demurs in his commentary for The Godfather (1972), half-joke and half-confession, a lot of a director’s brilliance is working with brilliant people.
2024 gave us films from some of our most compelling directors of the moving image. Annie Baker, M. Night Shyamalan, Clint Eastwood, Catherine Breillat, Mike Leigh, Alice Rohrwacher, RaMell Ross, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Robert Zemeckis, Jane Schoenbrun all made new films, a number of which are the brightest dreams I’ve seen in a dark room in years. And hands fully on heart for these sterling artists, this list is for all the people who made the films with them. A film, like labor and love, depends upon multitudes.
In La Chimera—the best film of the year—Hélène Louvart’s cinematography is as twitterpated over Josh O’Connor’s face as it is achy for how Italy’s past and present meet in the uncomfortable rubble of art and commodified bodies. I dream of one red thread.
There was no film more curious about how red splashes, streams, or dribbles than Conclave, a startling enactment of belief in a godless world and production designed by Suzie Davies to show that a lack of faith does not indicate a lack of grace.
Before shooting began on Janet Planet, Sound Designer Paul Hsu recorded two weeks worth of ambient nature noise in Western Massachusetts, an act that forms the sonic spine of the most exquisitely-tuned American film in recent memory. It listens to little things hearing a world, all the buzzes and brushes of growing up.
Like a spider’s dream, Evil Does Not Exist would not be without Eiko Ishibashi’s score. This is partly literal: the sounds began when Ishibashi collaborated with Ryusuke Hamaguchi on a visual component for a separate live performance she was working on. Their ensuing conversations about the natural and the human worlds enmeshing (or not) led to both Evil and the most elliptically-edited finale of the year.
The four bars of the film frame are as liberatory as they are an insistence on containment. For Trap, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography touches these two worlds together, sharp and sweet.
Acting is the performance of truth under invented circumstances. It is a freedom leaned upon structures. The frisson it generates often strikes our eyes and hearts as joy. No film ensemble in 2024 composed cinema with as rigorous a focus on free style than Rap World’s.
Speaking of acting, the best performance of the year was Dale Smith as Dale Smith in Christopher Jason Bell and Mitch Blummer’s Failed State. Doing away with hem-hawing over truth in fiction or fantasy in documentary, Smith wrangles acting into an act of witnessing, that most essential verb for the future.
The most moving text of a film in 2024 was written and spoken by McKenzie Wark in Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s Life Story. Excerpted from her “future epitaph”, and essential: “My idols are dead, and my enemies are in power. Domination co-opts language, making it almost unusable, other than by machines. We are to be ruled without even the semblance of style. I speak instead of what I have loved: writing, the city. In the end, after many diversions, this body, this world—and you.”
This publication (and this writer) hold extra affection for the pure cinema of John DeMarsico and his collaborators in-booth and in-truck. A MLB season where one of the heroes they have to myth-make with is Juan Soto? We’re born again—there’s new grass on the field.
The structure of cinema—a contingency of truth twenty four times a second—exists to be shattered. Rules need warping. And so the final entry here must be Coppola himself, who put his whole pumping, attacking, bleeding heart through the image machine only to come up with that most unlikely contingent truth: a belief that a future is not only possible but mandatory for all of us.