“Sit down and play pretend for an hour – then you can go back to your life.” That invitation, extended by Dolly de Leon's omnipresent actress Rita to Keith Kupferer's depressed and mentally retarded architect Dan Ghostlight, it stayed in my mind throughout this challenging year. As does Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson's moving, funny, and surprisingly entertaining film, one of the few this year (along with Greg Kwedar. Agree Agree and Aaron Schimberg A Different Man) about the redemptive power of performing arts.
In contrast GhostlightDan, who was dealing with trauma he had no desire to deal with, I knew very well how much I needed a break from a world that seemed to keep tilting as the year drew to a close. Granted, finding shelter from the storms of 2024 in movies of the year usually required twice the time suggested by Rita. (Courtesy, Brady Corbett The Brutalist – running time, 215 minutes – also introduces moviegoers during the break.)
But this year's top films didn't offer the kind of escape from the spectacle that has dominated filmmaking over the past decade. Instead, we found something much more important and much needed. This year's biggest cinema successes have given dramatic changes in their outlook, both in terms of themselves and in terms of who will be the hero of the story. Whether they challenge our addiction to neat and digestible narratives or force us to reframe our shared and personal histories, the best films of 2024 have given us a new way forward by giving us new ways to look at the past.
A new frame of reference and a new way of seeing were vividly and dramatically expressed in RaMell Ross' triumphant tone poem. The Nickel Boys. No film does more with the visual, and emotional power of editing, than the Hale County Today Morning, Evening director's fiction film. By focusing our ongoing reckoning with systemic racism on those who directly experience it, Ross and his collaborators are doing something far more important than winning an argument; they create art out of memory, freeing hope from the teeth of despair.
With Real Pain, writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg has shown us that sometimes the most powerful way to deal with our daily woes is to dive into the belly of our deepest historical and generational traumas. As is the case with Elwood and Turner, two characters who endure the school of reforming racism. The Nickel Boys – created by Colson Whitehead in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography – Real PainCousins David and Benji, who honor their late grandmother and their Jewish heritage by visiting a Polish concentration camp, feel like their founder is split in two.
As the sad heart brought to life by Eisenberg and the terrifying Kieran Culkin, these two feel like the rest of us, as many of us also navigate through both quotidian and existential pain with the help of humor and medicine. But for me, it was hard to connect with any of this year's characters more deeply than Chris, a young Taiwanese American from Fremont, California who had the misfortune of dropping out of middle school at Sean Wang's social media startup. Didi.
To watch Izaac Wang's incredible performance as Chris (aka Wanger, aka Didi), as he negotiates his way from MySpace to Facebook is to not only see ourselves as we were, but also as we are now, creating and creating our true and original selves. flying. But the film is about the people who shape us, especially Chris's mother, played with emotional depth by Joan Chen, in what was one of the most welcome reviews of the year.
Although Sean Wang spends his first film in an attempt to understand and perhaps apologize to his mother, he remains powerful and rightly so without reaching his full powers of understanding here. The films that moved me the most this year echoed this idea, reminding us how great and unknown our parents are all these many years after our childhood ends.
Annie Baker's name Janet Planet, A playwright and first-time filmmaker singing of quasi-hippie Western Massachusetts's '90s childhood, it hit me over the head like a cigarette box full of pictures falling from the top shelf of a closet. Played by long-time TV and movie unsung MVP Julianne Nicholson, single mom Janet is at once authoritative and always demanding, vulnerable but negotiating.
In in summer, and another first attempt (it is encouraging how many of the best films of this year have been made by greenhorns), Alessandra Lacorazza has never reached the end of Vicente, a father whose two sisters only know each other through an extended summer visit. It's not that he's that complicated (René Pérez, the Grammy-winning rapper known as Resident makes his first foray into acting, he understands the toxic mix of alcohol and the actor's machismo), it's that finding what makes him laugh requires understanding ourselves first, a task made more challenging by being known of Lacorazza representing Violeta, played by three different characters as the story changes over time.
Despite the powerful and visible revival of the lost summer that these three films were able to meet, the cinematic beach season I experienced this year was balmy, by the sea December/January of 1970/71 Rio, opened with a certain tender by the Brazilian. director Walter Salles to I'm still here. Filled with soufflés and long-playing LPs and helmed by the wickedly talented Fernanda Torres, the film recreates what would have been the time to keep Rubens Paiva's turbulent family intact, as their activist bishop “disappears” the far-right military dictatorship.
As tyranny flourished both internally and externally, films that confronted and depicted state and military violence—whether subtle, overt, or somewhere in between—were directly affecting both the thrillers and my favorite literary works of the year.
The fourth highest-grossing Korean film of all time and South Korea's entry for this year's Oscars, veteran filmmaker Kim Sung-su. 12.12: Day turns the largely forgotten military uprising that took place in Seoul on December 12, 1979, into a heart-pounding, tick-tick.
Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez offers us a new way to understand and connect with decolonization as a process, a source of hope and a threat to established world powers. Anthem of the Coup d'etat. Jazz is a natural force in the film; Not only does it encourage the film's twisted structure, but the music also supports both themes of protest – when musicians Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln storm the UN to protest the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba – and unconscious obedience, as the African journey of democracy Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie provided a smoke screen for Lumumba's assassination.
A completely different kind of music produced a sound, the sound of Luca Guadagnino's horns. Opponents, a film that made sex, sweat, and hand-wringing an integral part of our cinematic year. Although Trent Reznor's pulsing techno and Atticus Ross's pulsing techno score are reminiscent of the Euro rave scene of the 1990's, the film itself is not contemporary, as it explores fluid sexuality and the search for authenticity under muted lowlights. -stakes suburban tennis competition.
Not all of the best movies of the year required the amps to be turned up to 11.
Director Tim Mielants adapts Claire Keegan's novel Little Things Like These it won't be quiet or silent as it revisits the systematic brutality of a Magdalene laundry operating in small town Ireland in the mid 80's. As a man slowly awakening to his own humanity and agency, Cillian Murphy gives the best performance of his already storied career (which is very unusual considering he won an Oscar last year), and Emily Watson as Mother Superior could deliver a Tony. The Soprano stands out, earning the title as the scariest villain of the year.
Or that award may go to another evil penguin – Featherless and felonious Feathers McGraw in Wallace & Gromit: Revenge of the Many Birds. There was something very comforting about the return of Nick Park's comic duo and their chicken adversaries 35 years after we first met them. The Wrong Pants. The stop-motion animation feature has lovingly sent up not only recent action films, but in the year we started giving computers the job of composing our poems and thank-you notes, it provided the perfect metaphor for our times with the Pat-IO-Matic, a robot contraption designed to rub heads this is your dog.
“Do you think the film can bring a miracle? Give me a break,” intones Max, a brilliant old editor-turned-composer late in the Spanish film. Close Your Eyes. “Miracles haven't been in the movies since Dreyer's death!”
The first fantasy film from great director Víctor Erice in 40 years, Close Your Eyes is one of many films this year that prove that Max is, if not completely wrong, at least hopeless. Erice's film, about the director's search for an old friend and actor who went missing from a movie production decades earlier, is about memory loss, family and the mysterious power of cinema to heal and connect us.
It's a wonder why Erice's interesting and mysterious interactions got to me so deeply— as do all those movies about weird parents. My mother died of Alzheimer's disease this year. None of these movies eased the pain of that loss, but several helped me process it and other tragedies that weren't personal to me—and helped bring out the empathy needed to face the new hell that lay ahead.
Movies may not always work wonders, Max, but their continued ability to keep us going every day is pretty amazing.
