It's that time again...
Every January, I post this list of my favorite films from the previous year. I make no claims that these films are indisputably the finest and most artistically successful films released in 2024. For starters, these are my favorite films, chosen based on my preferences, tastes and limitations as a viewer. (I've written many times previously about my own sensory issues which tend to make loud or frenetically edited movies difficult for me. One highly acclaimed 2024 film will be conspicuously absent from the list, due to a pivotal scene that was so overwhelming for me, it made me want to flee the theater.)
I pass this list on every year to readers in the hopes that they, too, will find joy in - and be pleasantly challenged by - the films I've loved. And, if not, well...chacun à son goùt as the French say.
As the title of this blog clearly indicates, I am a part-time cinephile, not a professional critic. This means I see around half (or slightly less) films in a year than would a professional critic. This year's total was 102 - not bad, but not quite my all-time high. So here's an overview of this films you won't see here - and the reasons why:
Limited or missed opportunities:
These are the ones I just didn't get around to. Maybe they had a short run in the theater while I was busy or preoccupied and haven't yet arrived on streaming. Or, in a few cases, I just had no real interest in seeing them. They include: A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, Blitz, Dune: Part Two, Flow; Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Outrun, Queer, Sing Sing, The Wild Robot.
The Ones I Couldn't Finish:
Sometimes I start a film on streaming, but I don't get to the end of it. It might be because I'm distracted and have too many other things on my mind to give the film my full attention. Other times, it's because the movie itself just doesn't pique my interest. Sometimes I revisit those movies (as I did with a certain film that is ranked highly on the list below). Sometimes, I never come back to them. This year's false starts include: Between the Temples, Bird, Close Your Eyes, Kinds of Kindness, La Chimera
The Ones I Couldn't See Till 2025:
A standard qualification for this list is that the film must have been in general release in Chicago for the first time during the calendar year being discussed. Some of the films in this year's list are considered to be 2023 films, but they weren't available to watch where I live till 2024. (That is, apart from film festival screenings, which don't count as general release.)
Conversely, there are several 2024 films which have only just opened in the Chicago area - or will open soon - which will be considered for my 2025 list. These include: All We Imagine as Light, The Brutalist, The Girl with the Needle, Hard Truths, The Last Showgirl, Nickel Boys, The Room Next Door, Vermiglio.
The good news here is movies were fantastic in 2024! So fantastic, in fact, that I expanded my list from the usual 10 films to honor an even dozen. Plus, I came up with a hefty list of honorable mentions.
The bad news (for people who don't like to read subtitles, anyway) is that my list is unusually heavy on international films this year, and quite light on mainstream and/or American films. Be assured, that's not calculated snobbery on my part, just the way it all shook out.
In reverse order of preference:
12. Chicken for Linda! (Directed by Chiara Malta and Sebastien Laudenbach)
Where to stream: Chicken for Linda!
Conclave makes spiky, suspenseful drama out of the machinations behind the election of a new pope. Impeccably acted (particularly by Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini) and expertly edited, it ratchets the tension up by degrees as new revelations about each papal candidate come to light and ballot after ballot fails to produce a successor. This film has been dubbed as 'pulpy' and compared to 'a good airport novel' by more than one reviewer, and they aren't wrong. But its final, startling plot twist is a sly nod towards the call for greater inclusion and tolerance in the church, and it accords Conclave a greater seriousness than we might have expected.
11.Conclave (directed by Edward Berger)
Where to stream: Conclave
This is reported to be the final film for Ken Loach, the now 88-year-old British filmmaker who has consistently demonstrated a heart for people struggling on the margins of society. (See Kes, I Daniel Blake, and Sorry We Missed You, among others.) Here a pub owner in an economically depressed neighborhood befriends and helps a family of Syrian refugees over the pointed objections of his rather less tolerant customers. Loach accords compassion and forgiveness to all his characters; ultimately no one is entirely saintly or villainous, even when some behave far better than others. The penultimate sequence brings everyone together in a show of compassion that may well move you to tears.
10. The Old Oak (directed by Ken Loach)
Where to stream: The Old Oak
Francis Ford Coppola's long promised epic is kind of a mess. But it's a glorious (and gloriously nutty) mess, overflowing with imagination, ambition, and a breathtaking visual beauty. And any filmmaker who can pull all that off at the age of 85 deserves some kind of accolades.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus gives a stunning - and too little appreciated - dramatic performance as the mother of terminally ill teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew). Writer-director Daina Pusic presents their story as a magical realist allegory, with Death embodied in an enormous talking bird whom the daughter befriends and welcomes. Louis-Dreyfus, by contrast, is in denial and despair. Tuesday is not an easy film. It requires leaps of faith and a willingness to embrace unconventional modes of storytelling, but it more than rewards the effort.
9. Megalopolis (directed by Francis Ford Coppola)
Francis Ford Coppola's long promised epic is kind of a mess. But it's a glorious (and gloriously nutty) mess, overflowing with imagination, ambition, and a breathtaking visual beauty. And any filmmaker who can pull all that off at the age of 85 deserves some kind of accolades.
Megalopolis is set in the near future in New Rome, a city that strongly resembles New York. It sets up a battle for the soul of the city between an innovative, forward-thinking architect, Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) and Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who envisions the city transformed into something tawdry, commercial and Vegas-eque. Things get complicated when Catiline falls in love with the mayor's daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel) while his own former lover, a television reporter named Wow Platinum (played with deadpan relish by Aubrey Plaza) marries a very rich older man (Jon Voight). There are allusions to events from ancient Roman history throughout, as well as glancing references to The Fountainhead.
But keeping track of the plot is more of a distraction than a necessity. Better to lose yourself in the grandiosity of Coppola’s vision. There are flourishes of magical realism (Catalina can freeze time just by shouting “Time, stop!”) and set pieces whose sheer elephantine grandeur is marvelous to behold (the event celebrating the marriage of Plaza and Voight being a particular highlight). It’s a movie best experienced rather than analyzed.
Where to stream: Megalopolis
8. Tuesday (directed by Daina O. Pusic)
Julia Louis-Dreyfus gives a stunning - and too little appreciated - dramatic performance as the mother of terminally ill teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew). Writer-director Daina Pusic presents their story as a magical realist allegory, with Death embodied in an enormous talking bird whom the daughter befriends and welcomes. Louis-Dreyfus, by contrast, is in denial and despair. Tuesday is not an easy film. It requires leaps of faith and a willingness to embrace unconventional modes of storytelling, but it more than rewards the effort.
Where to stream: Tuesday
Glazer's very loose adaptation of a Martin Amis novel is considerably better and more powerful than its source material. It trains a cool, detached eye on the daily life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hess and his family, living in domestic bliss just outside the notorious concentration camp. Muted screams, gunshots and other signals of distress and horror are just barely perceptible in the background while the Hess family continues to fuss over their garden and their vacation plans. Frau Hess and her friends casually pick through fur coats and jewelry seized from the camp residents and gush over their appropriated treasures. Only once in the film is the Hess family bothered (or more accurately, inconvenienced) by the genocide taking place almost literally in their backyard; while swimming with his children in the nearby river, Hess is annoyed to find ashes from the crematorium polluting the water.
Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude makes films with long, unwieldly titles (in English translation, anyway - recent ones have included I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn). His films themselves, are less unwieldy than their titles - rambling, shaggy-dog stories of life in contemporary Romania - and often very funny after a dark, absurdist fashion.
The Beast starts out as a romance set in Belle Epoque Paris between two people who are fatally drawn to one another at an upper-class soiree (Lea Seydoux and George McKay). But it evolves into a twisty, disorienting sci-fi epic over three different time periods in which the would-be lovers are reincarnated into entirely different versions of themselves. In a 2010 version of Los Angeles, Seydoux becomes a struggling actress while McKay is a vitriolic incel with a rabid internet following. Later the couple returns to Paris in the year 2044, now as estranged former lovers.
This, by the way, is the film I had to start watching three times before I finally got engaged enough to finish it. I bailed on it twice because I just couldn't buy McKay as the kind of dashing, romantic figure who could make Lea Seydoux leave her husband. But as the film progresses to the other time periods, his casting makes complete sense.
Delicate, sensual and gorgeously photographed, The Taste of Things is a celebration of food, cooking, beauty and romance all at once. Juliette Binoche plays a cook working for a celebrated French gourmand (Benoit Magimel) who is also her lover. The opening scene alone is a wonder - thirty-plus minutes in which the camera glides around a busy kitchen as the main characters prepare a huge, elaborate meal. Vegetables are cleaned and chopped, meat is seared, butter sizzles in a pan, various dishes are ecstatically sampled - and every delightful minute of it commands our rapt attention. There's a swoony sensuality to the proceedings which permeates the entire film, particularly as the romance between Binoche and Magimel grows more serious. It's a love story between two people who court one another with exquisite tastes and flavors, and a celebration of the goodness in a simple meal prepared with patience and care.
7. A Real Pain (directed by Jesse Eisenberg)
You could not more perfectly cast the leads in this film than has director Jesse Eisenberg. His first stroke of brilliance was casting himself as David Kaplan, a stammering, neurotic, intensely serious man, always looking to avoid making a misstep or calling attention to himself. Opposite him, as his cousin Benji, Kieran Culkin is a joyous, open-hearted extrovert… until he isn’t. His occasional shifts into anger or despondency suggest a possible bi-polar disorder, hinted at but never expressly called out.
The cousins unite on a trip to Poland, part of a tour group made up largely from descendants of Holocaust survivors. Once close, their lives have drifted in different directions; David is the sober, responsible one with a family and a corporate job, while Benji has never really settled down. David comes to the trip with hopes of the two becoming close again, but the film is ultimately more realistic about the difficulties of recreating that bond.
A Real Pain is both serious and comic, sometimes in the same moment, and Eisenberg’s direction skillfully sustains that very delicate balance. He is particularly masterful at handling the sequence in which the group visits the Majdanek concentration camp, bringing those moments a hushed horror that puts everything and everyone else in the story into proper perspective.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out Culkin’s especially brilliant performance as Benji. He is the beating heart of the film, and I’ll be very surprised if he doesn’t get an Oscar.
Where to stream: A Real Pain
6. The Substance (directed by Coralie Fargeat)
Bring a strong stomach to this one, and prepare for some over-the-top body horror, none of which is gratuitous. Coralie Fargeat’s audacious sci-fi thriller explores the complex relationships that women have with their bodies as they age, and the judgments passed on them by society in general and men in particular.
Demi Moore plays a washed-up film star named Elizabeth Sparkle, reduced to hosting a cheesy television exercise program from which she is fired on her 50th birthday. Her boss (an over-the-top Dennis Quaid, shot in purposely grotesque close-ups) makes no bones about the fact that her age is the reason for her termination. When she learns about a black market serum called The Substance which can reverse aging, it doesn’t take her long to sign up. But the dirty secret of The Substance is that it doesn’t de-age you, but rather allows your body to produce a second, younger and more beautiful version of yourself. Elizabeth’s alter ego is an impossibly shapely and gorgeous twenty-something who dubs herself Sue (Margaret Qualley) and gets herself hired as the new host of Elizabeth’s old show.
The catch here is that each version of you can only exist for seven days at a time. The horror begins when Sue gets greedy for more youth and more men, and uses up part of Elizabeth’s share of The Substance, only to see Elizabeth aging at a far more accelerated pace.c From that point, the grossness of the situation only gets grosser.
The Substance scores points for feminism - and has launched a welcome career renaissance for Moore - but it won’t be most viewers’ cup of tea, due to the exaggeratedly cartoonish tone and the aforementioned grossness. But it has a fire and anger that many women strongly relate to. Consider yourselves warned.
Where to stream: The Substance
5. The Zone of Interest (directed by Jonathan Glazer)
To borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, this is a film about the banality of evil. It manages to be properly horrifying without ever depicting the atrocities taking place just out of camera range. Glazer has come to be one of my favorite directors. He’s made just four films in 24 years, all very different from each other, but each one original in concept and astonishingly good.
4. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (directed by Radu Jude)
Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude makes films with long, unwieldly titles (in English translation, anyway - recent ones have included I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn). His films themselves, are less unwieldy than their titles - rambling, shaggy-dog stories of life in contemporary Romania - and often very funny after a dark, absurdist fashion.
Here we spend a very long day with Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she drives all over Bucharest interviewing injured workers for a corporate 'safety at work' video, with the various interviewees taking full responsibility for their on-the-job injuries, even when it's obvious their employers and shoddy working conditions are more to blame. In between interviews, she records vitriolic, misogynist rants on TikTok using the persona of Andrew Tate, ostensibly as a twisted kind of stress relief. Scenes from a 1981 film Bucharest, about a female taxi driver, are intercut into the current-day story which give us some sense of how dramatically life in Romania has changed over the last 40-some years.
Do Not Expect… is freewheeling and funny, while at the same time vividly capturing the anxiety of a life spent struggling in the gig economy. Manolache's droll performance never wears thin, and if the references are occasionally a bit too parochial for American audiences, it hardly matters. The scenes breeze by so fast, you'll be on to something more accessible in mere minutes.
Where to stream: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
3. The Beast (directed by Bertrand Bonello)
The Beast starts out as a romance set in Belle Epoque Paris between two people who are fatally drawn to one another at an upper-class soiree (Lea Seydoux and George McKay). But it evolves into a twisty, disorienting sci-fi epic over three different time periods in which the would-be lovers are reincarnated into entirely different versions of themselves. In a 2010 version of Los Angeles, Seydoux becomes a struggling actress while McKay is a vitriolic incel with a rabid internet following. Later the couple returns to Paris in the year 2044, now as estranged former lovers.
In the The Beast’s imagined future, AI has evolved to the point where a simple medical procedure can eliminate all of a person's inconvenient emotions; Seydoux's struggle over whether to submit to this induced emotional amnesia provides the running thread of tension throughout. On paper, this all sounds a little nuts, but in actual execution, The Beast is mind-bendingly seductive and adept at transitioning coherently among the various time periods.
This, by the way, is the film I had to start watching three times before I finally got engaged enough to finish it. I bailed on it twice because I just couldn't buy McKay as the kind of dashing, romantic figure who could make Lea Seydoux leave her husband. But as the film progresses to the other time periods, his casting makes complete sense.
Where to stream: The Beast
2. The Taste of Things (directed by Ahn Hung Tran)
Where to stream: The Taste of Things
1. Evil Does Not Exist (directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films have a quiet, graceful quality to which it is virtually impossible to do full justice in a review composed of mere words. There is a patience in his approach to a story, a willingness to take time for quiet observation without rushing to make a point or form a judgment. He has an uncanny ability to appreciate a particular moment on its own terms rather than appropriate it for symbolic purposes. Many early scenes here are unspectacular at first glance (a father walking his daughter home from school, two men filling large jugs with water from a stream), but they are unhurried and mysteriously engrossing.
There is a story here, but it doesn't follow a predictable narrative arc. A corporate developer approaches an isolated, rural community with a proposal to build a "glamping" site. The company’s representatives who present their plan to the locals are shockingly unprepared to respond to their (very politely expressed) concerns about how the project will impact their land, safety, and water supply. Rather than take these concerns seriously, however, their bosses send them back to get the support of one local man. Takumi, the man chosen for them to engage, is the father of a young girl and a steady, taciturn presence in the community. He does not scold them or argue with these corporate emissaries, but quietly and patiently takes them along with him on a typical day.
This is not a cliched "everybody learns and grows" story. One young corporate flunky may learn how to properly chop wood under Takumi's patient instruction. But he will fail to grasp a more important lesson: the natural world is not merely bucolic, nor is it to be packaged as a commodity. It can also be brutal, requiring caution and respect.
If you intuit a tragic ending from that statement, well... you're onto something. But be assured, this is no way a horror or revenge film. It's far too gentle and humane for that. Yet it does have a haunting quality, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head. I've watched it twice in the last three months, and after writing all this, I feel like watching it yet another time. It really does have that kind of power.
Where to stream: Evil Does Not Exist
A few more accolades:
Honorable Mention: A Different Man, Anora, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, The End, Ghostlight, Green Border, His Three Daughters, Hit Man, Strange Darling, Woman of the Hour.
2024 Nominees to the Academy of the Overrated: Challengers, Emilia Perez, Juror #2
Best Older Films I Saw for the First Time in 2024: The Breaking Point, Lair of the White Worm, The Long Good Friday, Missing, Sexy Beast, The Straight Story
