Top 10 Favorite Films of 2024
Cheers to (wickedly) talented artists.
As much as I’ve used this blog for personal reflection maybe more than legit criticism, it’s only right to reflect a bit. This year has been full of change. The main one being starting film school — which all but stole my appetite for being legitimately critical about any film. It’s hard to be negative about art that I’m aspiring to make. That’s not to say that I’m done with the film criticism stuff. My trip back to the Cannes Film Festival (this time with Emma and Megan) and joining the African American Film Critics Association round out my 2024 updates with both granting me awesome opportunities to watch (and write) about some great art.
This year’s list directly reflects my reaction to the many social, political, and cultural events of the last 12 months. In some cases, I’ve turned to escapism — to curiously explore another country (or planet) different than my own. In others, it’s been reaching towards art that rigorously interrogates its themes in societies that hit close to home. And then, there are a few here that do a bit of both.
2024 was a robust movie year which resulted in a few films that are worth shouting out despite not making my list. I couldn’t be more happy that a film like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist exists in our current independent film landscape and yet I found myself struggling against what the film wanted to say vs. what it achieved in saying. Conclave was our post-Thanksgiving dinner family film which was some of the most fun I’ve had with a movie this year thanks to a full house of opinionated Trinidadians. Babygirl (with one of my favorite soundtracks this year) and the documentary Daughters (with one of my favorite shots of the year) were also two films that fell just short of this list.
10. Anora
If we were to bestow a point to Anora, it is not to create some explicit, verité investigation of sex work, but rather to use Ani’s occupation as an entry-way into examining how people are hit with the brief luxuries and sobering realities of differing class structures. This includes lengthened PTA-style set-pieces leaning slightly into farce and seducing us blind with our base ideas of entertainment. That is, Sean Baker never breaks his cardinal rule of showing sex, comical physical violence, or someone yelling “fuck!” every five minutes. It’s the best of Baker (stronger than the connective tissue found in Red Rocket), an accolade that could be praised or admonished depending on your affinity towards him.
9. My Old Ass
Considering my apathy for coming-of-age films, perhaps My Old Ass is not a coming-of-age film at all (or, that is, entirely). It’s inspired weaving of science-fiction is digestible enough to not ask too many questions about Aubrey Plaza’s 40-year old Eliott’s bending of time and space. What would you do if you knew the future? Win the lottery? Delay death? It’s a thrillingly prospect and yet, there is immense power in the unknown and living life regardless of its good or bad chapters. As teenage Eliott learns, change is inevitable and love is enduring (even from high school to college). With a young ensemble cast that gives one of the most charming performances of the year, My Old Ass is the height of its own blended genre, all the while remaining unabashedly Canadian: berries, Bieber, and all.
8. Nickel Boys
There is no such thing as a boring shot in RaMell Ross’ debut feature film, Nickel Boys, an adaption of Colson Whitehead’s New York Times bestseller. An extension of Ross’ past work with photography and documentary set in the American South, we follow two African-American boys who navigate their way to survival at a reform school in Jim Crow Florida. This straight-played drama is complicated by Ross’ choice to shoot the film entirely in first-person point-of-view. The result is disorienting in the short-term and brilliantly profound in the long — their story feels like something that we shouldn’t be seeing (or have never had the opportunity to see). All the better we are here.
7. Civil War
Alex Garland’s newest speculative fiction is ripe for charged holiday dinnertime conversation, if not indulgent blog posts. Decidedly not just an American story, Civil War posits that the fall into fascism can be spurred from any ideology. Garland doesn’t grant us the satisfaction of depicting political divides that are reflective of our own. The result is a great horror in the banality of amoral violence. On that, a chilling Jesse Plemmons cameo was the most terrified that I’ve been at the movies this year (pour one out for Longlegs). Garland displays the best of his directorial powers on his largest project yet — it’s quite a feat that he has avoided Kevin Feige’s Marvel clutches for so long.
6. Challengers
Luca Guadagnino has his heart spilt between his two 2024 releases. Both are ambitious and inherently Luca-fied — sexy, indulgent, musically idiosyncratic — but whereas Queer couldn’t find levity if it hit them in the face, Challengers is fun in abundance. There’s a textual hyper-realism to Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ world of professional tennis — Aston Martin campaigns and AG1 smoothies hang in the background of Tashi and Art’s marital spats as if to confirm that they are living in our own reality. All the while, a bumping Reznor-Ross techno score drops in and out of the film almost to the point of comical absurdity. It’s a frenzied combo and, even so, Josh O’Connor as Patrick, a disheveled, impish, natural tennis talent, is the film’s most electrifying part.
5. Evil Does Not Exist
It was the buzz surrounding the final 10 minutes of Evil Does Not Exist that lured me back to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s work — a filmmaker who’s previous film, Drive My Car, was an impossible attempt at visually adapting Haruki Murakami’s work and landing as beautiful but laborious. Evil Does Not Exist, an eco-thriller turned thriller-thriller about a “glamping” company that plans to open in a village outside Tokyo, is almost too smart for its audience’s good. The surgically constructed poetics of shifting perspectives and ancient philosophies of (human) nature serve to question the innate moralities of the world and whether to place blame on the beings that inhabit it.
4. Dune: Part Two
Consistency was the name of the game after Denis Villeneuve’s massive first installment of the Dune franchise. A film that rests on the great foundations of cinema — the melding of sound and image — while packaged as an IP, star-driven film that puts butts in IMAX seats. This coveted alchemy mastered by Villeneuve (only touched by Nolan) strikes again in the follow up. It’s no coincidence that most times I can recall a non-film friend gushing over “cinematography” was in the context of Dune: Part Two. There is an instinctual recognition of a “beautiful shot” in the Dune duo that has long evaded big-budget theatrical experiences. And yet, the film’s visual composition perfectly aligns with the philosophy of these worlds — a flawless blend of formidable scale and quiet intimacy, commercialism and artistic vision.
3. The Beast (La Bête)
While we fawned over The Brutalist’s shockingly low $10 million budget, Bertrand Bonello released a hundred year-spanning epic for a fraction of the cost. The Beast, an adaptation of Henry James’ ineffable novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” opens like a Ruben Östlund film (with all the pageantry of the modern entertainment/art industry) before quickly transforming into an extraordinary three-part melodrama set in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles, and near-futuristic 2044 Paris. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) find each other across each timeline only to be confronted by an inevitable catastrophe. The film is a breakthrough in form as well as content (including a technical glitch working as a feature rather than a bug). Bonello always wants you to know that you are watching a movie and, from that, recognize the power that it has over you.
2. All We Imagine as Light
It’s the film’s small moments that nestle into you. A lonely woman hugging a rice cooker. A couple that never was (and never will be) sitting on swings. A bartender replying “We can be open as long as you like” to a sole patron. Payal Kapadia’s first feature film is a slow and silent hit to the heart. Happiness is different for everyone and yet the yearning for it feels the same. The desires of the three central women feel suffocating in the bustling streets of Mumbai and yet, All We Imagine as Light holds a surprising relation to previous Cannes darling, Joyland, both leaving the city behind and finding peace (or whatever their desires are) by the sea.
1. La Chimera
It’s a happy coincidence that All We Imagine as Light and La Chimera land next to each other at the top of this list. Payal Kapadia is not shy about her praise for Alice Rohrwacher whether through thematic homage or explicit compliments — she recently cited Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro as “the best film of this century.” You can draw a red string between Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera, both with central characters who contain an indescribable, quiet magic shadowed by an air of melancholia — for Rohrwacher, realism and fantasy exist in the same realm. The likes of Fellini and Godard aren’t far away from her as she playfully breaks all of the rules of cinema while remaining incredibly humanist (if only from the sheer number of supporting characters that fill the frame at once). Arthur (Josh O’Connor, again) is searching for something alongside his motley crew of Italian grave-robbers. His instinctual connection to buried Etruscan art can be seen as the most heavenly embodiment of what he loved and has now lost. It’s a proudly Italian narrative, all while encompassing every human emotion that I yearn for at the movies. La Chimera is a film that you want to hold onto (evident by its historic 25-week long residency at the West Village IFC Center) and never let go.
An addition: No Other Land
I debated adding this film. It felt foolish to “rank” it (not to mention, I saw it after finishing this list); however, excluding it felt antithetical to the whole reason why I write this. No Other Land, directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers (most notably, Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham who serve as the main participants of the film) documents the forceful demolition of Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. This includes Basel’s home village which is depicted through any and every lens: cinema cameras, camcorders, iPhones… (and, even so, the film spares no cinematic beauty). There are much larger films that have documented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; however, No Other Land’s power comes in its intimacy. Basel and Yuval, who begin as mere colleagues, grow to share their lives with each other — professional and personal — even while living under two different structures of law. It’s a triumph of film as a tool to not only unify its users but, ultimately, its audience.
Despite being officially shortlisted for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary, No Other Land still has no U.S. distributor. Without one, the film remains difficult to see — it will not appear in any major theater, streaming service, or video platform. It’s in circumstances like these where audiences should feel empowered to advocate for the stories that they are curious to see (instead of simply accepting what has been given). If you have any desire to watch it, let me know.
Until then, friends, see you in 2025.
