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My Favorite Movies of 2024
I’m not going to go through all the same arguments from the long essay that opened last year’s list, but its general observations are still up to date, I’m afraid that especially the more negative ones. The film business is still doing great in 2024 (and with it the feeling that cinema is becoming more and more distant from the world) and being a film critic, or simply a more active cinephile, means that this constant questioning is inevitable. To what extent your gaze is only captured and serving it is a constant question/crisis. And exercises like this list are both a personal playful effort and something that you’ll never be able to completely separate from it. In a way, dealing with cinema today is this constant effort to remember that your cinephilia isn’t your social media, that film history isn’t the Criterion Collection, that so-called auteur cinema isn’t there to serve the Fremauxs and MUBIs. All these things are mediations that are difficult to avoid, but relating to cinema always goes beyond that. I like lists partly because I enjoy the process of putting them together and also because sharing movies is always a pleasure.
The criteria for this one are the same as always: movies I’ve seen in 2024, longer than 45 minutes and that were shown for the first time in the last three years. As I always like to reiterate, the order is quite random, especially when the movies are at the bottom of it. I know I liked the 21st more than the 45th and this one more than the 80th, but I don’t know if even today I prefer them to the movies that are just before or after them. I’d also like to mention Socialist Realism, which Raul Ruiz filmed in 1973 and Valeria Sarmiento finished last year. I never know how to include these films suspended in time, especially this one that was originally interrupted by Pinochet’s coup.
My favorite new movies under 45 minutes seen in 2024 were Bouquets 31-40 (Rose Lowder) and Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (Jean-Luc Godard); I was also very fond of Trabalho de Amor Perdido (Vinicius Romero), Où sont tous mes amants? (Jean Claude-Rousseau), I Thought the World of You (Kurt Walker), Duna Atacama (Romero) and Last Screening (Darezhan Omirbayev).
99) Suspended Time/Hors du Temps (Olivier Assayas) and The Volunteers: To the War (Chen Kaige)
I’m starting with a tie, and maybe I should put something like Black Dog (Guan Hu) at this place instead. I’m not even sure Suspended Time qualifies as a good movie; that it is kind of a non-movie is part of why it is even here. What I do know is I liked watching them, and I might’ve liked thinking about them even more. They are the work of filmmakers who were once celebrated, but almost nobody likes Suspended Time and I suspect only people very into mainstream Chinese cinema even knows To The War exists (by the way it is the first of a trilogy). I suspect what they have to say would mostly annoy people, Suspended Time is pure navel-gazing from a very successful man who sometimes seems more and sometimes less at peace with his own position. Does French cinema gentility about how the big family home means something become better by some meta movements? To The War is patriotic kitsch, pure flag waving about sacrificing yourself for China, it is called To the War and doesn’t do a thing to question that. It is also very impressive when its in the trenches with the soldiers. I like Suspended Time because Assayas looks in a mirror sees that he become cinema du papa and gives a half troubled, half defeated shrug. I like To The War because Chen Kaige was always a decorative filmmaker who was good at coming up with an image and the ones in it aren’t much worse than Farewell My Concubine; they are just outside the tastes of programmers and critics who liked him three decades ago. Those are auteurist cinema near the end movies and because I have some relationship with not only the artists, but their surroundings I find those last rites of some genuine interest.
97) Cidade; Campo (Juliana Rojas) and Power Alley (Lillah Halla)
Two features by Brazilian female filmmakers, one more established (Rojas) and the other just starting out (Halla), both about women moving through spaces and situations where violence is always close. These are movies that are a little more formatted than I would prefer, but they have a lot of strength when they look at their protagonists and are better when they approach the supernatural that hangs over them rather than when they indulge in naturalism.
96) One Second Ahead, One Second Behind (Nobuhiro Yamashita)
Nobuhiro Yamashita is a personal favorite of mine, this one is him working very much as hired gun from the Japanese film industry and remaking a Taiwanese high concept romance. Young people going through their lives while ab artificial movie-like construction affects them is very much the Yamashita touch. The main concept of time did make me think of my own relationship to Yamashita movies as given that people in the west do not care enough about him to program or release his movies, I’m always depending on those big heroes of current cinephilia (amateur subtitlers) and so I’m always late to him (he has at least two movies since this one).
95) Bursting Point (Dante Lam, Tong Wai-Hon)
Dante Lam goes back to Hong Kong after many years making big movies in China (the biggest one co-directed by Chen Kaige) and it is a self-conscious return to the kind of movie that he started with some of the muscle from his Chinese work. In a weak year for Hong Kong movies, it is good to see an old master in a familiar territory.
94) Terminal Young (Lucía Seles)
Argentine filmmaker Lucia Seles has found a very specific place for herself. This new movie is a natural extension of the 3 2022 movies I included last year. We like our artists to move forward without changing too much, Seles seems to prefer to ignore that. What counts is the pleasure and precision of her movie’s construction and they have a grace apart from most of the ones around them.
93) Abiding Nowhere (Tsai Ming-liang)
Speaking of trusting what you do, Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng will keep making movies about a monk who moves very slowly and I will keep finding easy to get into their rhythms.
92) Carnage for Christmas (Alice Maio Mackay)
Despite the title this Christmas slasher is less bloody than aimed at giving teenage trans girls a good horror movie to watch with their friends and it is a great time. Mackay is very good at marrying a larger concept into its genre pleasures and rougher low budget style.
91) Black Storm (Qin Pengfei)
Fast, cheap and completely dedicated to what Chinese choreographers and stuntmen are capable of extracting from a masochistic exercise in non-stop action.
90) Joker: Folie à Deux (Todd Phillips)
More of a conceptual triumph whose big gestures outstrips its execution, but every bit as fascinated a failed big budget strange object as Megalopolis. And as a depiction of moving around in depressive numbness while fictionally disassociating, it can be surprisingly moving.
89) Ricky Stanicky (Peter Farrelly)
While people were watching Christopher Nolan win 100 Oscars, I was watching Peter Farrelly doing a Peter Farrelly movie for the first time in ages, and happy for that choice. It would be worth it for John Cena’s very funny performance, but this has a balance between humor and pathos out of guys who are very afraid they will come out embarrassed by not being quite who they want to project that the Farrellys at their best have always been good at.
87) Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (Kevin Costner) and In the Land of Saints and Sinners (Robert Lorenz)
Two westerns about how their respective countries (US and Ireland) are trapped in their cycles of violence. Both combine a classicist temper with a very current surface, for better or worse. Costner’s movie is too grandiloquent, but it has wonderful moments in which it just installs itself in the lives of its settlers and a collection of striking faces. Lorenz, who was Clint Eastwood’s right-hand man for a long time, doesn’t deny the influence and draws some beautiful moments from it and makes great use of his cast of great Irish actors.
86) Paixão Sinistra (João Pedro Faro)
Rio’s lost youth dream musically of a past in Brazilian cinema that they can’t quite get back.
85) The Animal Kingdom/Le Règne animal (Thomas Cailley)
I prefer Cailley’s first movie Love at First Fight (which has essentially the same principle of maturing and opening up to the world through an attraction) because in general I prefer a good actor (in that case, Adele Haenel) to a metaphor, but this one uses technology and the woods that serve as its main location extremely well.
83) Life After Fighting (Bren Foster) and One More Shot (James Nunn)
The two best English language DTV action movies of the year. Like Nunn and Adkins’ previous One Shot, One More Shot is a long take gimmick movie that makes a lot of creative choices inside its high concept and single location because it’s more about finding ways of moving around a continuous space than selling the take. If I’m honest, every dramatic scene of Life After Fighting, a vehicle for its impressive star/director Bren Foster is not good at all, but thankfully they become rarer as the movie is get taking over of his very impressive fighting skills. As a form of narcissism through punishment and expression of repressed rage the second half is very impressive. They would make for a curious double bill of current right-wing paranoid fantasies, but they are mostly tribute for intelligent low budget staging.
82) Orlando, My Political Biography/Orlando, ma biographie politique (Paul B. Preciado)
Preciado is a public intellectual experimenting with movies, in this case with an essay film that brings Virginia Wolff’s novel closer to contemporary trans experience, and what strikes me as remarkable here is how he understands that his articulation can only find strength in the power of the various faces he invites to collaborate and mix their lives with his film.
81) Dahomey (Mati Diop)
Whatever one do, getting untangled from the colonial weight remains hard to negotiate. Clear and often very expressive. Speaking of ways current cinema status quo has a distant and overconceptual relationship to the world, I saw Diop’s film, a powerful anti-colonial essay that won this year’s Berlin, in a double bill with Miguel Gomes overrated Grand Tour, a colonial phantasmagoria with ironic detachment, in an event promoted by its mutual distributor Mubi and that is what movies often become now: different flavors to be filled under easy to sell umbrellas. It doesn’t diminish Diop’s achievment, her movie seriousness and focus becomes more clear next to Gomes.
80) Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
Is Megalopolis good or just endlessly fascinating? It is a movie impossible to separate from its context, pro and con. A large artistic happening. As a movie of ideas, it is pretty bad, but as an expression of how Coppola can keep distracting us from that with multiple fireworks, it shows he is still having a lot of his Hollywood skills even under a lateral move like this. Coppola was always a Hollywood guy who dreamed of being his own Irving Thalberg, and he gets to play with that very expensively. It is a tribute to artistic expression in a technocratic world drained of it, but to what end? I was talking with a friend last week, and he mentioned to me that he never saw a film so devoid of tension in its making, which I found a good way to describe the experience. What can we do with an artist who can purchase everything?
79) Obscure Night – Goodbye Here, Anywhere/Nuit Obscure – Au Revoir Ici, N’Importe Où (Sylvain George)
Resilient existences at the margins of the ruins of the European colonial project.
78) The Goldman Case/Le Procès Goldman (Cédric Kahn)
Film process and court room procedural tied in a liturgy of identity, politics and how they are performed, perceived and consumed.
77) Death Will Come/La Mort viendra (Christoph Hochhäusler)
A successful late capitalism thriller similar to something like Assayas’ Boarding Gate only with better gunplay.
76) This Life of Mine/Ma vie ma gueule (Sophie Fillières)
A touching if uneven movie that is impossible to swet apart from knowing that Fillieres passed away days after completing its shooting. The openness and display of emotional fragility end up being haunting.
75) The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)
I’m not against this annual presence of an American indie influenced by Hong Sang-soo on this list, among other things because it’s a fictional tension that takes their naturalism to a much more interesting place.
74) So Long/Ce n’est qu’un au revoir (Guillaume Brac)
Brac finding the fiction and a world, which is to say cinema, into the everyday lives and hopes of some real French teenagers.
73) The Invention of the Other/A Invenção do Outro (Bruno Jorge)
A movie of an encounter, but above all a movie in which the weight of the camera, of the place of cinema in these relationships, is revealed with great force.
72) The Order (Justin Kurzel)
A macho contest between a cop and a neo-Nazi, whose strong and different ideological relationships to the idea of order are there to justify their self-images. A movie very dedicated to a lot of older ideas of film craft and personal expression, but Kurzel, whose taste for realism I’ve never cared for, does find an ideal venue in the work of Jude Law and Nicholas Hault. Two remarkable performances that make the movie.
70) El juicio (Ulises de la Orden) and Mário (Billy Woodberry)
Two political documentaries based on archive footage. One about affirming Argentine democracy through images of the trial of the military junta, the other a crisis about the limitations and concessions of the global South’s anti-colonial project through the trajectory of Angolan Marxist intellectual Mario de Andrade. Both are movies of today, powerful essays on the echoes of the 20th century that reach us.
69) Pavements (Alex Ross Perry)
What does this essay about how any art, however intentionally dissonant, ends up being packaged by capital, especially in the ways in which this dissonance is celebrated, tell us? There’s a wonderful scene of the opening of an exhibition about the band and all these artists offering versions of their songs and at some point it gets obvious that someone has decided to invite only women and it becomes impossible to separate the curatorial cynicism from the fact that I genuinely enjoy listening to Soccer Mommy covering them? And we’re back in the eternal loop. Perry makes a movie about Pavement, someone else could make a movie about. let’s say, John Waters just as well, except of course Pavements know it’s a souvenir that only interests those like me who have a relationship with them.
68) Anyone But You (Will Gluck)
A very good pop confection made by people who understand that the main thing something like this is just setting the right positive mood for performers and audience alike. I watch a lot of current romantic comedy, most of it is not good and almost all of it has late genre anxiety desperate trying to justify why the filmmakers are still returning to the old well, this one does that too by overplaying its Much Ado About Nothing echoes, but it gets that the main justification is adding a lot of actual jokes around good looking stars.
67) Malaikottai Vaaliban (Lijo Jose Pellissery)
Expert myth-making, so sensuous and gripping. Another example of populist cinema done right. Why waste time with some late, bloated mess by Ridley Scott when a movie like Malaikottai Vaaliban is right there?
66) Caixa Preta (Bernardo Oliveira, Saskia)
A radical musical in the movement from sound to concrete written in the film form in the most abrasive way possible.
65) Good One (India Donaldson)
A movie of place, of observing how three bodies transform as they cut through it, how the awareness of relating to the world is gradually changed. It’s reminds me of Kelly Reichardt, sometimes a little reiterative, but well, River of Grass also had its limitations and this is a very talented debut, especially in terms of environment and performances. Director India Donaldson is Roger Donaldson’s daughter, and it’s easy to think of this movie as a kind of dialogue with his best film Smash Palace, both of which are movies about daughters who go into the woods in the company of their divorced and resentful dad with an emphasis on how the locations reflect the moods of the characters who dominate their gaze, that one was an expression of male rage, this one about having to deal with it.
64) Raayan (Dhanush)
A delirious narcisist exercise from Indian star Dhanush.
63) Look Back (Kiyotaka Oshiyama)
About creating and sharing it with those who matter, but also a beautiful look at its own process and all the force of the images that Oshiyama manages to pull out of the original work.
62) The Room Next Door/La habitación de al lado (Pedro Almodóvar)
Like all late Almodovar, it’s very conscious of its position as brand cinema, but it’s a movie that finds in its displacement the strength to interrupt the stodginess. It’s about how Julianne Moore is one of the best actresses in the world and how to find the ideal space to allow melodrama to resonate.
61) El auge del humano 3 (Eduardo Williams)
A constant presence of the world that the digital image is always on the verge of dissolving. What does cinema, as an art that is constantly engaged in this presence, achieve in the face of this being in the world of uncertain concreteness.
60) Fire of Wind/Fogo do Vento (Marta Mateus)
A very studied Straubian-Hiulletian movie, one might say academic, but the best possible version of a certain current formalism. What stayed with me was the greens and brown of its natural locations.
59) Adagio (Stefano Sollima)
Like The Order, this is a return to an old masculine local cinema, harsh cop procedural there, male weepies about tragical and violent bonds here. It is meaty, portentous, and so very serious, but every emotion is treated head on and allowed to expand and take over Rome itself. Call it silly or passé, but it is too skillfully made by Sollima to not register strongly.
58) The Bodyguard (Qin Pengfei)
Qin Pengfei is a very busy man, 4 movies this year (the three I saw quite good), as Chinese streamers always needs fast-paced action movies and he does them very well. This is the best of the ones I’ve seen probably because it’s less punishing, but concerned with finding solutions to keep moving and stopping just long enough to allow the stuntmen some impactful scenes. There are few current movies as unelevated as Qin Pengfei’s, what you get out of them is just the pleasure of their making.
57) Serpent’s Path (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A variation on a variation. Kurosawa’s very busy year was often taking with looking back. This French remake of one his duo of low budget hostage thrillers from 1998, an international co-production expansion of a small movie aimed at the local video market has a lot of small pleasures, but is also very much about the distance its filmmaker career has covered while remaining himself since then.
56) A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari)
An archival movie made from material recovered from a Palestinian image center in Lebanon that had been taken by the Israeli army in 1982. A rescue, but above all an investigation into the materiality of the film image and how to intervene in it to highlight its political weight.
55) Kottukkaali (P. S. Vinothraj)
A movie of constant movement and a lot of muted violence that is negotiated silently but accumulates in an inevitable manner. Very well controlled by Vinothraj.
54) She Is Conann/Conann (Bertrand Mandico)
A carnival of queer images about an identity that multiplies in a violent landscape, a world of barbaric fiction that can nevertheless be constantly adapted by Mandico’s gaze.
53) The Practice/La práctica (Martín Rejtman)
Harsh frustrating everyday slowly taken by the wonder of filmmaking fiction. Give it to Rejtman to repeat a gag of a guy suddenly falling into a hole and make it funnier.
52) Last Things (Deborah Stratman)
Time moves, geology stays. Film material meets a cosmic dimension.
51) The People’s Joker (Vera Drew)
It’s a pleasure to watch someone take all the debris of superhero movie fanyasies of the past few years and appropriate them into something handmade and very personal, always quite inventive as it negotiates the artificial surfaces and very real wounds. It would make for a nice double bill with Tavinho Teixeira’s Batguano.
50) Visiting Hours/La prisonnière de Bordeaux (Patricia Mazuy)
It’s great to see that the very talented Mazuy has been getting financing more regularly the last few years; in this one she reunites with Isabelle Huppert, so hopefully more people will notice. It is a social almost thriller (more than one friend pointed out that Mazuy seems to be deliberately echoing Chabrol’s La Cerimonie), but what stands out is how careful it plays around Huppert’s self-delusions. Huppert and Hafsia Herzi also starred this year in Techine political movie built around their unlikely friendship, and that one was as mediocre as this one is lively. It reminds us that taking the care to get details right matters as much as having good intentions.
49) Dear Kaita Ablaze (Hisayasu Satô)
Western moviegoers who are familiar with Hisayasu Satô’s movies associate him with unpleasant depictions of various forms of sexual obsession and violence, with a strong emphasis on the place of cinema and its audience. Satô makes dirty movies in a very literal way. The characters in Dear Kaita Ablaze are not overwhelmed by desire, but with the impact of the work of a Taisho period painter called Keita Murayama, but the violent images, the rough and uncomfortable surface, this constant duel between a physical dimension and the image that captures it remain very recognizable.
48) The Adventures of Gigi the Law/Gigi la legge (Alessandro Comodin)
A Kiarostami-lite work about moving around performing the law and the fictions movies can locate in it. Powerful because of how it manages to allow meaning to arrive without trying to frame the character and actions into it.
47) No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor)
The land, how one connects with it and the violence done because of it. Images of power, how it is abused. A first-person cinema whose closeness to the account of violence never offers any distance. In which the only information is the weight of this experience of living on occupied land.
46) Incompatible with Life/Incompatível com a Vida (Eliza Capai)
Another political movie based on a first-person account. In the filmmaker’s case, she was forced by Brazilian law to carry out a pregnancy with a fetus that had no chance of survival. Capai shoots her own experience and talks to couples who have been through the same situation. There is something very strong there in how each one presents themselves in front of the camera and in Capai’s own images, about power and the lack of it, about women’s bodies and the ways in which they are denied by society.
45) Heard She Got Murdered (Charles Roxburgh)
I like these movies that Roxburgh and Matt Farley make at their production company Mottern Media very much because of the freedom they often suggest and because they are both celebrations of this collaborative filmmaking and aware of the various processes of power around them. This is one of two sequels they’ve made recently that return to the crime scene in a very scathing way. Art can’t escape violence, almost its opposite, a murder musical.
44) All You Need Is Death (Paul Duane)
In the rush for meaningful horror, the genre lost contact with the images this Irish movie can generate, nasty and taken by something evil, a general malaise that is rendered in painful but very clear moments.
43) Malu (Pedro Freire)
Pedro Freire made this movie inspired by his mother, actress Malu Rocha. It’s a beautiful but very harsh movie, a return to a certain hysterical fiction that Brazilian cinema has always done well, exacerbated feelings painted by everyday but excessive images, and which has almost disappeared in recent decades in which realism and restraint have been highly valued. Malu is more concerned with getting to the heart of this relationship between three generations than with sounding tasteful, fortunately. And the three actresses, Juliana Carneiro da Cunha as the grandmother, Carol Castro as the daughter and, above all, Yara de Novaes as the mother, are superb.
42) Wild Seas/La Passagère (Héloïse Pelloquet)
A dance of seduction about power, a romance very aware that every decision has weight and consequences and that they are not the same for each of the three parties involved. A very carefully observed and modulated movie.
41) Vaazhai (Mari Selvaraj)
A childhood memory made overwhelming by being rendered as large film spectacle. About class, labor, the pleasures of moving outside the power structures and the constant reminder that there is always a limited to that. Selvaraj is very good at combining his young stand-in perspective with constant dread just around the frame.
40) Stress Positions (Theda Hammel)
A screwball roundabout of queer desire made funnier and more desperate because every character in it has been rendered hornier and neurotic by being stuck in quarantine. It is very nicely anchored in its setting, so funny and rooted in character. Among the few good pandemic movies, this one has the smallest human scale while multiplying the perspectives, which makes it easier to relate.
39) Here (Robert Zemeckis)
Half sentimental, half bitter account of how American official ideology can only be acceptable under a lot of self-delusions. It is power comes from how it acknowledges and remains inseparable from it as Zemeckis himself is unable to find any distance. It is a movie packed with big concepts (the single set single frame, the casting of his Forest Gump leads, the ugly plastic images under heavy CGI makeup) that over determine it, but its failure and sadness are hard to shake. That what happens inside the frame always remains a digital sketched concept of lived-in experience, a literal imitation of life pitched as a historic panorama, is consistent compelling.
38) And the Party Goes On/Et la fête continue! (Robert Guédiguian)
Robert Guédiguian has been a resistant artist for over 40 years, filming the same things that matter to him: his city of Marseille, his wife Ariane Ascaride, his friends and a politics based on generosity towards the community. And the Party Goes On combines a series of observations about the passage of time and generations with an episode from local politics. It’s not an urgent film or one based on its moment, but it’s very honest about how Guédiguian feels about it. That’s why it never loses its luster.
37) Eephus (Carson Lund)
Trying to keep the lights going in a world that disappears. Funny melancholia about an American life its local indie movies have to dream of.
36) Kubi (Takeshi Kitano)
One of the noteworthy things about Takeshi Kitano is that he is a popular artist and one of the world’s most peculiar filmmakers. Enter this samurai epic, his big return to the genre since Zatoichi, perhaps his last film to travel well around the world, which turns out to be a bitter comedy about a bunch of guys desperate to conquer each other, preferably by decapitation. To like Kubi you have to agree with Kitano that men losing their heads is a very funny thing.
35) Junkyard Dog/Chien de la casse (Jean-Baptiste Durand)
Another desperate comedy based in a lot of well-placed detail and some good observation of male behavior. Director Durand was great as the victim in Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia and Junkyard Dog plays very close to his cinema,
34) I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
There’s something that gets lost when Schoenbrun moves from the almost handmade bedroom movie to this larger structure with very slick images, multiple Lynchian references and Phoebe Bridgers’ cameo, but at the same time it seems to me that there’s a very strong feeeling that they are cartographing here. As it’s a movie very much given to long think pieces and social media texts, I sometimes notices the need to treat it as something to be read or intentionally obscure, when it seems to me the opposite – a very direct and heartfelt movie. It’s not one of those art-horror movies, but a film that relies on a constant malaise and not exactly an allegory about finding yourself trans, because the way the movie deals with dysphoria and dissociation, someone who replaces their non-living life with this constant escape into pop culture, is pure text and drama (although it’s a scenario that’s also recognizable for some forms of depression in cis people). It seems to me above all to be a deeply felt movie, of enormous sadness, but it also finds in it something very vigorous that allows it not to end there.
33) Greice (Leonardo Mouramateus)
Leonardo Mouramateus has lived in Portugal for years, which gives him his own perspective on the anguish of Brazilian auteur cinema, lost between here and its dreams of Europe. All his feature films are farces based on dualities and dislocations. He has been working towards Greice for some time and, together with Amandyra as the title character, here he makes a beautiful tribute to the power of fiction and of inventing something new. A cinema of adventure, in which Greice’s mischief always finds a way of twisting situations and finding a new freshness in them.
31) Kyrie (Shunji Iwai) and Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke)
Iwai and Jia have been two of the best Asian filmmakers for most of the last 30 years and they seem to have set out to rethink a lot of strands from their early work. Caught by the Tides does this very directly by reframing footage from some of his earlier movies towards a new story while Kyrie revisits many familiar motifs from Iwai’s work. Neither feels like a tired retreaf, but the opposite large gestures toward today and moving ones. Movies of a curiosity and at the same time a very strong emotion, Caught by the Tides is a beautiful find of a title that describes both well in this constant movement between the private and the world.
30) All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
A film so precise in its depiction of the structures surrounding its two main characters, both those that limit them and the multiple fractures in the various spaces they inhabit that allow them to escape, and above all a movie that makes this dance between the individual and the world progressively impassioned. I think that this first fiction feature by Kapadia (who made a good epistolary essay called A Night of Knowing Nothing a few years ago) must be the closest thing to unanimity in movie circles this year, and I’m pleased that it’s such a good film.
29) T Blockers (Alice Maio Mackay)
So ingenuously conceptually and good at making its horror plot, desire for filming and observations on trans youth lives go together. Very old school. The cast chemistry is so good, I’m almost disappointed when the movie has to deal with its zombie bigots. That Alice Maio Mackay was 19 when she released this does makes a lot of its good eye and ear make sense and I hope she does keep getting better budgets and enough freedom, being a horror fan has been a bit of a bummer this past few years and the genre can use more filmmakers like her.
28) Blackout (Larry Fessenden)
Speaking of which, Fessenden is probably the closest thing to a heir that a certain section of American horror cinema of the 1970s, that of Romero and Hooper, has today, as this tale of lycanthropy as an entry point for a caustic look at a general impotence of American liberalism, rightly points out, especially because he knows how to move between the symbolic and the visceral.
27) Crisis Negotiators (Herman Yau)
Yau has been shifting between the occasional small project and big action movies for years now, this one is a remake of an American movie (F Gary Gray’s The Negotiator) that most sticks to its plot, but it feels apart from most of the recent crop of Hong Kong action movies much because of Yau one large change it, making the other negotiator a former cop who turned his back to that world, gives it a different perspective. The thing that sets Yau’s action movies apart from pretty much everyone else is that he actually cares for the collateral damage in them, so this plays as a movie about Herman Yau philosophy of action cinema. Of course, it has its share of well executed action, Yau prefers chase scenes and it is fun to watch him find ways to include a couple in this, and it works great as a vehicle for Lau Ching-wan and Francis Ng.
26) A Spoiling Rain (Haruhiko Arai)
The starting point is reminiscent of a Hong Sang-soo film from about twenty years ago: two guys who work in the Japanese erotic film industry drink and mourn the death of an ex they met there (of course, it takes forever for them to realize they’re talking about the same woman). Arai is a filmmaker and critic who worked as a screenwriter in the 1970s for the best filmmakers to come out of the pinkus (Wakamatsu, Kumashiro) and there is a specificity here that films of this kind rarely find. It’s a lament about the last gasps of the milieu, with no big nostalgia beyond beyond an observation of a dissolution.
25) Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A 45 minute concentrated display of most of the formally accomplished things Kurosawa’s work is all about. One of the most unnerving feel bad movies from the past few years. It is pure auteurist affirmation, but the unease is never just for show.
24) Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
One of the dangers of falling into alluring fiction is that trusting into it too much can turn you into a sociopath. Hit Man is a great variation into one fictions oldest hits “you are who you pretend you are”, it is both aware of some of its more complicated implications and too charmed by itself to care which paradoxically does give it a more chilling core. It offers Linklater and Glen Powell ample opportunity to play along playful scenarios, it is one of the easiest movies to like to come out this year, which makes its shortcomings (the too generic New Orleans setting, its refusal to even nod towards the troubling aspects of the real-life sting operation that inspired it) more disappointing. When it does get to make its multiple fictions work it does function of reminder that when mainstream American cinema is great it can be this simultaneous wonderful and evil thing.
23) The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)
Images of death and life.
22) Local Legends: Bloodbath! (Matt Farley)
Farley did the first Local Legends around a decade ago and it is more earnest than the other Mottern movies, a celebration of the pleasure in art work with enough digs on himself to undercut the narcissism. Since then, he has developed enough of a following to become something of a cult artist and this very funny sequel is a very perceptive movie about the economy of art today and the hell of the term “content”.
21) Favoriten (Ruth Beckermann)
The politics of school. Beckermann followed a school class for three years, one for whom German was not the first language, and she gets so much out of the interplay between the children’s natural behavior, the very genuine efforts of their teacher and the stiffer aspects of school itself. A moving film about how some very young people go through negotiating an ideological space than don’t fully understand.
20) What We Wanted to Be/Lo que quisimos ser (Alejandro Agresti)
A middle-aged couple meet outside a movie theater and for years maintain the same ritual of seeing each other without revealing who they are, creating personas that they gradually adapt. Agresti suspends the world around them and slowly lets some of the edges slip in. A very beautiful movie about fiction and cinema made up of two actors meeting in a couple of restaurants.
19) Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (Johan Grimonprez)
Grimonprez bases his movie on the fact that American foreign policy sent some of its best black musicians to Africa as cultural ambassadors while working to sabotage any progressive element in local independence movements. Using jazz and the trajectory of Patrice Lumumba as organizing principles for a very strong essay on the colonial principles behind much of American policy towards the global south during the Cold War.
18) Three Friends/Trois amies (Emmanuel Mouret)
Mouret continues to apply his very careful formalist eye to a series of romantic encounters. Cinema as a way of mediating desires. There isn’t a shot that isn’t thought out with precision and the cast is wonderful.
17) REFORM! (Jon Bois)
Bois applies his interest in losers not for sports as usual, but politics. In this case, the rise and fall of the American Reform Party through the 90s. A very funny and horrifying look at the limitations of US addiction to politics as spectacle and its two-party system and itt has such a wonderful cast of characters.
16) Meiyazhagan (C. Prem Kumar)
A sentimental bridge to the past. It gets so much out of this idea of rebuilding a connection with a place and personal bonds and the work of the two central actors is beautiful. It was the best of the Indian films I’ve seen this year, even though it exists well outside what Western cinephilia has come to value in them.
15) Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Online economy is hell. The world proposed by Cloud is so flat, so lacking in emotion or perspective, a post-apocalyptic movie about today. Of course, we could’ve said the same about Pulse in 2001, this just add a few new online horrors.
14) Same Old West/Oeste Outra Vez (Erico Rassi)
A Brazilian neowestern about some sadsack dudes running and shooting each other while crying about women they absolute do not understand.That it is a western makes sense as it is pretty much about imagine yourself as part of mythic tradirion to make up for how your life is all used up. Very very funny and very very sad. Brazilian movie of the year.
13) Scorched Earth (Thomas Arslan)
Crime as just another form of labor. Even more so than In the Shadows, which Arslan made more than a decade ago, a heist movie stripped of any romantic notion associated with the genre, even the celebration of the protagonist’s professionalism is hollowed out. The city, the relationships, the multiple twists all point towards this same steady alienation. That Arslan makes this package so exciting is his greatest achievement.
12) A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sang-soo)
There’s a recent Isabelle Huppert interview in which she mentions that Hong came out with this movie on the spot when they talked about working together again. A lot of what is lovely about A Traveler’s Needs, and Hong recent work in general, comes from this, the simplicity and spontaneity, the joy of putting something together, the relationship between filmmakers and his actors. This is very much a movie about Huppert in Korea, there is so little to it, but it also feels like so much.
11) The Plough/Le Grand Chariot (Philippe Garrel)
Garrel is 76, his father Maurice passed away in 2011, and all his films since then have been shaped by the idea of fatherhood, about being the father and not the son, and the responsibility involved. And Garrel, unlike most veteran filmmakers, is obsessed with youth. Like his previous film The Salt of Tears, it’s a movie about what does or doesn’t get passed on to later generations, about the son who takes on his father’s responsibilities and the better and worse ways they absorbed that wisdom. The images in scope are a reminder that Renato Berta is one of the greatest cinematographers.
10) Don’t You Let Me Go/Agarrame fuerte (Leticia Jorge, Ana Guevara)
The complicities that a group of women form in death and life. A movie based on modulating its drama and the way it allows its actresses, who are all excellent, to establish themselves in that place that belongs to them alone.
9) Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
Shyamalan doing his De Palma movie. He gets to twist around some of the things he always put trust on when it comes to stories and families and maybe the fascinating thing about Trap is that by going very negative on what he usually holds dear, Shyamalan got to make his most purely enjoyable movie. It is great to watch Hartnett moving around all this oppressive film apparatus, a movie is very much contained in its title, and a lot of it involves how it equates the police work with the filmmakers, two apparatuses of control that tighten their grip on its psychotic killer, whose gifts for projecting an affable image of normalcy can only allow him to go so far. Some great cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom as well.
8) Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Soi Cheang)
Kowloon Walled City was the most densely populated area in the world in the 80s. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In reconstructs it in the most impressive film set of the year. A place that transports you to a past, of the city and also of its cinema, a disputed space that has been lost, which the film celebrates and mourns. The most exciting of requiems. Hong Kong cinema is something that has always meant a lot to me and today it is a dying zombie, a bit like the city’s own increasingly tenuous independence. Cheang’s exciting camera moving through that space, the vitality of his actors, veterans and young ones, all its careful craftsmanship suspends that for two hours.
7) Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath)
The ways Hollywood and American ideology intersect mostly during the Hays Code days in a thoughtful film essay that uses Fonda’s image as a guide. A remarkable work of film criticism smart and very careful assembled by Horwath, himself a terrific critic/historian/programmer. By coincidence, I kept getting commissioned writing on Fonda movies this year (Young Mr Lincoln, The Wrong Man, Madigan), so I also did got to think of him a lot, which makes me even more impressed by Horwath work. We don’t get this kind of serious inquiry not only on film history but our past itself that often.
6) Last summer/L’été dernier (Catherine Breillat)
Morality and the ways it is twisted for its own ends. Desire as this element that often doesn’t fit into it. Breillat films everything in such a frank and frontal way, no subterfuge or justification, all the observations are up to the spectator. Curiously, this is a remake of a Danish film that I haven’t seen, which according to friends is much worse without Breillat’s version changing too much. Producer Said Ben Said, saw it and decided that it would make a good Breillat film and offered it to her, considering the calcified state of much contemporary auteur cinema, perhaps more of them should take on a commission like this.
5) The Other Way Around/Volveréis (Jonás Trueba)
Much like The Girls Are All Right which Trueba’s partner Itsaso Arana, who stars and co-writes here, made last year, this is a delightful fiction of discovery. A play on remarriage comedies (philosopher Stanley Clavell’s book on the genre even features in it) with multiple options that develop from the initial scenario, various possible ways of extending affection when intimacy becomes greater than passion. I think what makes these films by Los Ilusos Film especially captivating is that they suggest an adventure for both filmmakers and audience.
4) Misericordia/Miséricorde (Alain Guiraudie)
Guiraudie best known film Stranger by the Lake was a Hitchcokian riff on a erotic thriller, this Misericordia is a Hitchcockian comedy on guilty. It has a wonderful bucolic setting, a small village where everyone knows so much the police has the keys to every house and it seems like they all pass the days drinking and thinking of sleep with each other. It manages to be very funny while increasingly tying the knot around its main character actions. Plus, the priest in love is the best character in any movie this year.
3) Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
Eastwood’s movie would plat well with both Guiraudie and Breilat’s ones; it is predicted in guilty and morality, but it does so in a very American self-image, about the desire of claiming you are good. What is justice when everything is a matter to uphold an image and, that good life that you have the right to, can be used to wash their decisions. This keeps getting described as a throwback because Eastwood is supposed to be a classicist, and it is the rare mainstream movie that is aimed at adults, but most courtroom dramas do very little of what it does so well. Juror #2 is not concerned about what happens in it as much as in the larger implications those actions set in motion. Everyone in the cast does amazing work (particular Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collete in the leads and Cedric Yarbrough), and the movie last 45 minutes or so do mounts a rare power as it increases its inquire. If this ends up really being Eastwood’s last movie, he is 94 after all, that final scene is a great curtain call.
2) The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)
On the relationship between our bodies and the virtual. About a widower who unhealthily clings to the reproduction of his dead wife’s bones while desperately searching for a new intimacy. It’s a movie informed by the filmmaker’s grief, but one that seems to me to have a lot to say about our world today, perhaps more than any other released in recent years. The film is filled with anguish at this disconnection from the world that the constant mediation of the web produces. It made me think a lot about a less violent and more melancholic Videodrome. I know there are few things that have touched me more this year than Cassel trying to put on the shroud of the original title to feel what his dead bodies feel or his first meeting with Sandrine Holt. A lament about the emotional and moral consequences of the end of physicality when you don’t perceive the other, what’s left?
1) By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo)
As I mentioned earlier Hong’s movies of the past few years have been informed by intimate hastiness, not so much By the Stream which seems far more deliberated and careful mapped out without losing this spontaneous closeness. Everyone in it is exactly what they seem and impossible to pin down. It is a movie very pleased in just following the many encounters it set in motion. Except for the womanizing fired director whose actions set the plot in motion the movie holds everyone so dearly (that character doers gets to star in two of Hong’s greatest comedy of embarrassment scenes). The post performance dinner is ine of the more magical scenes in one of his movies, so funny and so tender. And isn’t that key to Hong’s whole cinema? Getting frunk while being haunted by all the great and messy things one have done. That and of course, Kim Min-hee smile in the last scene.
