2024 felt like a year of rebuilding. Where the previous year had a heap of significant events that severely limited the industry, it felt like audiences were finally subjected to the consequences of those incidents. It would be disingenuous to call this another year of missed potential when nothing seemed to gleam among the sea of darkness. That being said, the items featured on this list deserve their placement not for their inherent mastery but for their ability to make something out of what would have otherwise been a standard year of releases. This list will highlight ten of them, in order of their U.S. (theatrical or limited) release dates with a few honorable mentions below.
Honorable Mentions:
- “Hundreds of Beavers” (Mike Cheslik)
- “Kinds of Kindness” (Yorgos Lanthimos)
- “Memoir of a Snail” (Adam Elliot)
- “By the Stream” (Hong Sang-soo)
- “Phantosmia” (Lav Diaz)
“About Dry Grasses” (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
February 23, 2024
Do you think it’s a sign of immaturity when one constantly seeks external validation? Either way, it seems that co-dependent minds thus influence the world and its inhabitants the most, yet they always personally feel as if they’ve impacted it the least more so than those who actually have. Like it or not, the outspoken are the most attractive of our species no matter how disagreeable or insatiable they can be. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” is one of the greatest character pieces of this decade so far, following a children’s teacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) who leans too far into this character flaw.
In every forced act of submission against his peers, the deeply insecure Samet seems to dread never achieving the impossible in seeing himself through others’ minds, since real-life affirmation is his only known coping mechanism for discerning his own identity. This is something that should’ve been sorted out long before he grew old enough to have social authority. Now, it may be too late for him to take responsibility for such failure. Now, others will suffer. Generations even.
Here lies a valuable message about how nobody can fill the void from unknowing but oneself. Nobody can stop themselves from caring but themselves. The sooner they learn that the sooner they stop becoming the spitting image of an individual like Samet: a pathetic little man who feeds off of the weak just so he can agree with his mind’s consensus on his inflated self-worth. If I had to pick, this is my favorite movie of 2024. It’s essentially just a huge PSA advising its viewers that at some point in their life, they should just accept their losses contently instead of taking revenge on the world or else they might just end up becoming as filthy of a swine as this film’s lead character.
“Dune: Part Two” (Denis Villeneuve)
March 1, 2024
What more can I say about “Dune: Part Two” that hasn’t already plagued the internet for most of this year? It’s a simplistic political space opera with arguably perfect special effects like its predecessor. The worms are fun. The religious metaphors are still weighty. That ending one-on-one fight made me and I’m sure most of its viewers unlock a primal urge they didn’t know they had for good old-fashioned, lawful combat. Denis Villeneuve don’t miss!
“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (Rada Jude)
March 22, 2024
With his latest feature-length, director Rada June provides the most composed critique you could make on the modern world as the imminent death of humanity. Here’s a filmmaker who understands that our species’ failure (if true) deserves to be epitomized by the chaos that it is like the amusing impact of a fart joke suddenly colliding with the gloominess of a serious self-insert. This makes for a seriously one-of-a-kind, and more importantly, hilarious, “doomer” piece. All I’m saying is, I don’t think June is expecting our demise to be quite like “The Day of the Lord.”
“The Beast” (Bertrand Bonello)
April 5, 2024
Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is kinda this year’s “Blade Runner 2049” but alternatively led by a lonely female character (Léa Seydoux) this time to clash with its enigmatic male counterpart (George MacKay). This movie harkens back to the science-fiction of directors like Lynn Hershman Leeson but with a hint of Lynchian horror and Kaufmanesque romantics to boot. Here, the past is depicted as Shakespearian, the present polluted with vain incels and wannabee superstars, and the AI-administered future is quite literally futile nothingness to combat this history of such intense emotions conceived from our species’ evolving segregation. What a frankly tragic time-jumping odyssey that owns the saying, “as if things couldn’t get any worse…”
If there’s such a thing as the most “important” or “relevant” movie for people to watch this year, then “The Beast” is certainly that. It features a telling message about how love dies once you make the world revolve around only you. It’s as if the film is urging its viewers to kill this modern paranoia, but perhaps not completely to the point of killing one’s self i.e. killing one’s human experience.
“Challengers” (Luca Guadagnino)
April 26, 2024
Picture a hodgepodge of “Y Tu Mamá También,” “Whiplash” and Luca Guadagnino’s usual YA romantic degeneracy and you essentially get “Challengers.” Which dares to ask the question: is it gay to be a bad boy or a nice guy? Well, if you’re still hellbent on playing with just your balls and haven’t evolved past either of these common male archetypes, especially if you’ve hit your 30s, then yes, you might be a little. If not for these underlying messages on farce masculinity, I’m sure its witty, exaggerated script, sharp visual technicalities, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s musical score of the year will make it worth the watch alone.
“I Saw the TV Glow” (Jane Schoenbrun)
May 17, 2024
If you ask me, “I Saw the TV Glow” is Jane Schoenbrun’s homage to David Lynch’s nostalgic mini-series “Twin Peaks: The Return.” This is a movie that mercilessly embodies an intense existential crisis regarding if fictional media consumption as a child — particularly those spotlighting biblical prophets that viewers can arrogantly mirror themselves in — provokes the gloomy mental illnesses, barriers between self-actualizing, and antisocial behavior people deal with while aging in the real world (i.e. the humbler world), which begins to look more and more like a sadistic prison ever since the mass production of such transcendent entertainment. More notably though, it’s a movie that warns the audience to never let a goth girl put you into her weird hobbies. Now that’s priceless advice.
Read more about “I Saw the TV Glow” here.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (George Miller)
May 24, 2024
Arguably, one could boil “Furiosa” down to simply being an elongated fan service for people who worship the world of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Luckily, it’s so much more than that. George Miller ambitiously borrows from the tone of his previous film “Three Thousand Years of Longing” even more so than his beloved “Mad Max” predecessor to create an episodic revenge fable unlike anything you’d expect from a $150-million blockbuster. Chris Hemsworth as a post-apocalyptic communist leader also marks this franchise’s most well-realized antagonist to date. Go figure.
“In a Violent Nature” (Chris Nash)
May 31, 2024
On paper, the “arthouseification” of “Friday the 13th” does sound obnoxious, and there’s a tacked-on monologue towards the end here that proves said theory a little. Yet, for the most part, this is evidently made by someone who gets the charm of classic B-rated horror. The kills, however, are way more grueling to sit through than anything from the franchise it’s inspired by, even when they’re absurdly imaginative regarding the slasher genre. This gives them a level of authentic uneasiness that is rare to find when it comes to modern horror movies today. Not to mention, it’s shot gorgeously like a refrained wild animal documentary and also features some enticing attempts at humanizing the slasher villain without completely revealing a clear backstory, unlike say, Jason Voorhees, which is consistent with the movie’s gimmick of having a limited observer’s perspective throughout most of its runtime. “In a Violent Nature” received mostly polarizing reactions this year, but personally, I deduce, “Why the hell not?”
“Anora” (Sean Baker)
October 18, 2024
Sean Baker’s latest and arguably most critically acclaimed feature-length has one of my favorite endings of the year. Though I’m not entirely sure it was built up too perfectly, it still leaves the kind of impact on its audience the same way Old Hollywood melodramas akin to that of Billy Wilder or Elia Kazan used to leave on us. It’s a surreal feeling witnessing this nostalgic kind of intention in an indie narrative of all genres, one especially anchored by the fact that it very blatantly takes place in the modern age despite having an old-school tragicness to it. Needless to say, that’s sort of what makes “Anora” special: it is a marriage between a dying style of insistent plotting and Baker’s typical neorealism which ironically gives the movie a grounded sense of urgency and unpredictability.
“The Brutalist” (Bradey Corbet)
December 20, 2024
No, “The Brutalist” is not quite awe-inspiring enough to be, say, this generation’s “Lawrence of Arabia” or “There Will Be Blood.” However, it is quite awe-inspiring in context with the modern age of filmmaking, where studios often reject making sweeping historical epics like they used to when more fantastical large-scale productions are a safer bet. Just like in his previous feature-length “Vox Lux,” Bradey Corbet doesn’t fear getting extra dark and controversial to depict the tragic subjugation of his characters, who in this case, are inspired by the very real xenophobia occurring in a post-WWII America. He shoots the absolute hell out of this movie, perhaps more than any other filmmaker this year, and Daniel Blumberg’s accompanying musical score is nothing short of ethereal.
You can read last year’s list here.
Turn off the Bright Lights 