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  1. #1
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    Best Movies of 2024


    AUSTIN BUTLER IN THE BIKERIDERS

    C H R I S__K N I P P'S__2 0 2 4__M O V I E__B E S T__L I S T S

    FEATURE FILMS
    About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
    All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
    Anora (Sean Baker)
    Babygirl (Halina Reijn)
    Beast, The (Bertrand Bonello)
    Bikeriders, The (Jeff Nichols)
    Complete Unknown, A (James Mangold)
    Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
    Close Your Eyes/Cerrar los ojos (Victor Erice)
    Conclave (Edward Berger)
    Real Pain, A (Jesse Eisenberg)
    Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

    RUNNERS UP
    Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)
    Blitz (Steve McQueen)
    The Damned (Roberto Minvervini)
    Goldman Case, The/Le Procès Goldman (Cédric Kahn)
    Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
    Last Summer/L'Été dernier (Catherine Breillat)
    Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
    Seed of the Sacred Fig, The/دانه انجیر معابد (Mohammad Rasoulof)

    BEST DOCUMENTARIES
    Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (David Hinton)
    Merchant Ivory (Stephen Soucy)
    New Kind of Wilderness, A (Silje Evensmo Jacobsen)
    No Other Land (Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham)
    Suburban Fury (Robinson Devor)
    Sugarcane (Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat)

    UNRELEASED FAVORITES
    Afternoons of Solitude/Tardes de soledad (Albert Serra)
    Caught by the Tides/ 风流一代 (Jia Zhang-ke)
    Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)
    Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quýf) Coming release in early 2025

    NOT SEEN YET
    ̶C̶o̶m̶p̶l̶e̶t̶e̶ ̶U̶n̶k̶n̶o̶w̶n̶,̶ ̶A̶ ̶(̶J̶a̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶M̶a̶n̶g̶o̶l̶d̶)̶ ̶D̶e̶c̶.̶ ̶2̶5̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶
    B̶a̶b̶y̶g̶i̶r̶l̶ ̶(̶H̶a̶l̶i̶n̶a̶ ̶R̶e̶i̶j̶n̶)̶ ̶D̶e̶c̶.̶ ̶2̶5̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶
    A̶ ̶D̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶M̶a̶n̶ ̶(̶A̶a̶r̶o̶n̶ ̶S̶c̶h̶i̶m̶b̶e̶r̶g̶)̶
    J̶u̶r̶o̶r̶ ̶#̶2̶ ̶(̶C̶l̶i̶n̶t̶ ̶E̶a̶s̶t̶w̶o̶o̶d̶)̶
    Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie) (also unreleased; NYFF)
    ̶N̶i̶c̶k̶e̶l̶ ̶B̶o̶y̶s̶ ̶(̶R̶a̶M̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶R̶o̶s̶s̶)̶ ̶D̶e̶c̶.̶ ̶1̶3̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶(̶N̶Y̶F̶F̶)̶
    ̶N̶o̶s̶f̶e̶r̶a̶t̶u̶ ̶(̶R̶o̶b̶e̶r̶t̶ ̶E̶g̶g̶e̶r̶s̶)̶ ̶D̶e̶c̶.̶ ̶2̶5̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶

    LESS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THESE THAN SOME ARE
    Brutalist, The (Brady Corbet)
    Civil War (Alex Garland)
    Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
    La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
    Janet Planet (Annie Baker)
    Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
    Queer (Luca Guadagnino 2024)
    Room Next Door, The (Almodóvar)
    Substance, The (Coralie Fargeat)
    Wicked (Jon M. Chu)
    ____________________________

    COMMENTS (Dec. 1, 2024)

    Just a first draft; a work in progress. (Alphabetical, for now.) But I can guarantee that "Best Features" is a list only of new movies I have watched this year with a lot of pleasure and admiration and think you would enjoy. I'll be working on it. I tend to forget things, and there are late arrivals. I also may make it numerical but for now it's alphabetical. I'm expecting a lot of Babygirl, and as always there are buzz-worthy 2024 films I have not yet seen, notably Nickel Boys. I strive to focus on movies available to everyone to watch, but that's less a problem now that there are so many eventual releases on platforms. As for the "Less Enthusiastic" list, I recommend that you watch them too, because people are talking about them - a lot, especially The Brutalist, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez. And then there's Megalopolis. Whether or not they are as great, or for that matter as awful, as some people are claiming, they will be talked about during awards season. Big franchise films are omitted usually here, though Dune II and Joker : Folie à Deux might be worth discussing.

    Enjoy - and try to get out to see all you can in a movie theater!

    And I practice what I preach, as is indicated by the fact that all the current "best" Feature Films list above with the sole exception of The Goldman Case I watched on the big screen, in a movie theater.

    Some films will be added on later. This has been a year with many good ones (if few or no greeat ones). Just realized Ceylan's About Dry Grasses (NYFF 2023) came out in the US in February of this year. It fell through the cracks because it came out early and because I saw it last year (in the NYFF), but it's a great film by a great director. I'm researching films off ogher people's best lists.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 01-09-2025 at 12:00 AM.

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    New York Times best lists

    Manohla Dargis

    1. ‘All We Imagine as Light’ (Payal Kapadia)
    2. ‘Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic’
    3. ‘A Real Pain’ (Jesse Eisenberg)
    4. ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ (Radu Jude)
    5. ‘Dahomey’ (Mati Diop)
    6. ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
    7. ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ (George Miller)(Stream it on Max)
    8. ‘Megalopolis’ (Francis Ford Coppola) (Available for rent on most major platforms)
    9. ‘Green Border’ (Agnieszka Holland) (Stream it on Kino Film)
    10.‘Here’ (Bas Devos) (Stream it on the Criterion Channel)


    Also recommended: “Anora,” “Between the Temples,” “Bird,” “The Brutalist,” “La Chimera,” “Challengers,” “Civil War,” “Eno,” “Evil Does Not Exist,” “Flow,” “The Goldman Case,” “Io Capitano,” “Hard Truths,” “His Three Daughters,” “Intercepted,” “Juror #2,” “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” “Last Summer,” “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” “Nickel Boys,” “Nocturnes,” “The Promised Land,” “The Room Next Door,” “The Settlers,” “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État,” “Sugarcane,” “Tótem,” “Will & Harper,” “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming).” I would have put Leos Carax’s “It’s Not Me” on my top 10, but in full disclosure, his mother is a dear friend. So, all I’ll say is psst, it opens soon in New York and Los Angeles, and will stream on the Criterion Channel.

    Alissa Wilkinson

    1. ‘Nickel Boys’ (RaMell Ross) (Opens in theaters on Dec. 13)
    2. ‘Eno’ (Gary Hustwit)
    3. ‘Anora’ (Sean Baker)
    4. ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ (Johan Grimonprez) (In theaters)
    5. ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi) (Stream it on the Criterion Channel)
    6. ‘Janet Planet’ (Annie Baker) (Available for rent on most major platforms)
    7. ‘Green Border’ (Agnieszka Holland) (Stream it on Kino Film)
    8. ‘Good One’ (India Donaldson (In theaters)
    9. ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ (Benjamin Ree) (Stream it on Netflix)
    10. ‘Union’ (Brett Story and Stephen Maing) (Stream it on Gathr)
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-04-2024 at 04:54 PM.

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    And now for something completely different. . . But go to Vulture and read all his comments and reasons for listing these - then you'll uinderstand why inn Waters' distinctive vision they become "movies John Waters would like."
    [
    From Vulture
    The Best Movies of 2024, According to John Waters. An enthusiastic recollection of the outré offerings you should have seen this year.
    By John Waters

    "The movie business as I knew it is now over. Except in New York City, where feel-bad, risk-taking, ratings-defying art flicks still play and I pay to see them in theaters. Thank you, distributors, from the bottom of my damaged little cinematic heart, for getting these films out there to the perverted public, who still demand to be startled and soothed by troublemaking directors from all over the world. Here they are — my ten best. See them and suffer … joyously." - John Waters.

    1. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
    2. Queer (Luca Guadagnino)
    3. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
    4. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
    5. Messy (Alexi Wasser)
    6. Joker: Folie à Deux (Todd Phillips)
    7. Femme (Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping)
    8. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
    9. Babygirl (Halina Reijn)
    10. Viet and Nam (Truong Minh Quy)
    Five of these have been reviewed on Filmleaf - but not LOVE LIES BLEEDING, MESSY, JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, FEMME, or the coming Dec. 25 BABYGIRL, which will be covered here at its release time. I have recently seen LOVE LIES BLEEDING - a very worthy choice for an "alternative" Best List, and so definitely is VIET AND NAM, one of my favorites from this year's NYFF. The other titles are hot as outré as Waters sometimes is i his choices. Many admire THE BRUTALIST and EMILIA PEREZ - though not Mike D'Angelo, who has just proclaimed Audiard's sex-change musical virtually a remake of MRS. DOUBTFIRE (but with music he liked ("these are some damn catchy melodies").
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-17-2024 at 10:06 AM.

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    Richard Brody's list from The New Yorker

    Omitting Brody's lengthy opening discussion of the current situation for independent cinema, etc. Omitting also his interesting comments on each film. You will find it all in The New Yorker. I liked that he ihcluded CHRISTMAS EVE AT MILLLER'S POIHNT and JUROR #2, and some of the more obscure titles may be interesting. Including 21 "top" films, however, rather dilutes the effect of an annual list.

    1. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
    2. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (Tyler Taormina)
    3. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
    4. My First Film (Zia Anger)
    5. Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)
    6. Blitz (Steve McQueen)
    7. Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)
    8. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)
    9. Juror #2 Clint Eeastwood)
    10. It’s Not Me (Leos Carax)
    11. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
    12. The Featherweight (Robert Kolodny)
    13. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
    14. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
    15. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
    16. The People’s Joker (Vera Drew)
    17. Dahomey (Mati Diop)
    18. No Other Land [Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor]
    19. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)
    20. Sasquatch Sunset (David and Nathan Zellner)
    21. Winner (Susanna Fogel)
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-17-2024 at 10:08 AM.

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    [B]Film Comment's ten best of 2024

    This is the result of a poll of film critics, as is IndieWire's. 115 writers contributed. Each film gets a comment from a different writer. There is a podcast about this list.

    1. All We Imagine as Light
    Payal Kapadia, India/France/Netherlands/Luxembourg


    Awash in shades of blue and drenched by monsoon rains, Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner—a first for an Indian filmmaker—is a sensual immersion in the transience and yearning of urban life. Extending the lineage of Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda, Kapadia crafts a contemporary portrait of independent South Asian women in the city, navigating work, loneliness, and desire. The three protagonists, from different generations and classes, all work at a Mumbai hospital. Their stories are fluidly told through mundane details that blossom into everyday poetry, and illuminate the strains of migration, gentrification, and Hindu-Muslim tensions, along with the conflicting pulls of tradition and modernity. As it moves from bustling street markets and commuter trains to the peaceful beaches and painted caves of Ratnagiri, All We Imagine as Light weaves a tender and expansive vision of female friendship and solidarity. —Imogen Sara Smith


    2. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
    Radu Jude, Romania


    Radu Jude’s latest provocation, at once high-spirited and devastating in its meditation on the making of images, rides shotgun beside stressed-out gig-worker Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she navigates chaotic Bucharest, interviewing the victims of on-the-job injuries for a promo film on worker safety. Her mission is interwoven with her raucous TikTok parodies of Andrew Tate–type misogynists, and with excerpts from a 1981 Romanian feature (another urban travelogue, this one with a woman cabdriver also named Angela). Crosscutting and cross-referencing are Jude’s organizing principles. Having juggled three distinct “movies” in the course of about two hours, he ends with a single 35-minute shot from a fixed camera, in which a chosen injured worker, partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair, is rehearsed, filmed, and refilmed until his injury is mitigated, any suggestions of hazardous working conditions are dispelled, and the blame is shifted from the employer to the victim. As a filmmaker and socialist satirist, Jude is the heir to Dušan Makavejev and more. —J. Hoberman


    3. Dahomey
    Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Benin



    There’s something physics-defying about the films of Mati Diop—like monuments made of dust, they conjure visions redolent with history, desire, and political imaginaries out of simple, even slight narratives. Of course, that alchemy is itself something of an anti-imperial gesture, a protest against the industrial-cinematic fetish of size and capital. Take Dahomey, this year’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner. Running all of 68 minutes, it comprises just three strands: the imagined musings of a centuries-old statue—rendered both spectral and futuristic through voice distortion—being transported from France to Benin as part of a repatriation project; documentary scenes of the presidential-palace exhibit where these returned artifacts are displayed in Benin; and glimpses of a town-hall meeting in which Beninese university students debate the politics of repatriation. In the ingenious juxtaposition of three modes—nostalgia-laced fantasy, decorous spectatorship, and critical debate—Diop gets to the dialectical heart of questions of colonial return: there is no recovering the past; we can only make it and remake it in our present. —Devika Girish


    4. No Other Land
    Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, Palestine/Norway



    Can documentaries change the world? No Other Land puts this question to the test in three different ways. The first involves the friendship between Palestinian journalist Basel Adra and his Israeli comrade, Yuval Abraham: in between harrowing scenes of Israeli soldiers demolishing the West Bank hamlet of Masafer Yatta, co-director/DP Rachel Szor films Adra, Abraham, and Hamdan Ballal (the fourth co-director) as they rebuild homes and come to an uneasy acceptance of Abraham’s allyship. The second is the challenge of making the film without Israeli state support, which the directors managed to do with their powerful merging of archival and verité footage. The third comes at the film’s close, when we see Israeli settlers escalating their violence in October 2023. How to keep making political art even when it doesn’t have any discernible effect on a deteriorating reality? Here, too, the filmmakers anticipate our despair: when Abraham is disappointed by the low readership of his articles, Adra chides him for acting like he can “solve everything in 10 days and go back home.” It requires patience, he says. “Get used to failing.” —Abby Sun


    5. The Beast
    Bertrand Bonello, France


    Rarely has a green screen appeared more menacing than in Bertrand Bonello’s slippery, tripartite epic. The Beast begins with Léa Seydoux being directed to fend off an imaginary foe in front of a chroma-key backdrop, before shifting to the stories of three pairs of doomed lovers in three different eras, each played by Seydoux and George MacKay. There’s a lot to swallow in the French director’s take on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, including an Elliot Rodger–quoting incel and an underwater Paris; a yearning android (Guslagie Malanda) and a gooey black bath that unearths past lives; and the tension between the illusion of infinite possibilities offered by new technologies and the sense that our lives are scripted by greater forces. An uncanny cocktail of horror, humor, and sensuality, The Beast anchors its time-skipping structure in Seydoux’s passionate persona, her perpetually tear-stained visage telegraphing the tragedy of a world in which we are condemned to passivity and endless imitation—a world in which desire must die to make living bearable. —Beatrice Loayza


    6. Evil Does Not Exist
    Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan


    The first sign of waywardness is the camera, which seems possessed of both a mysterious consciousness, as in the ethereal traveling shots that bookend the film, and an uncanny capacity to inhabit beyond-human perspectives, like that of a wild wasabi plant sprouting from the winter ground. From the start-stop interventions of Eiko Ishibashi’s sinuous music to the sly mindfuck of the title, Evil Does Not Exist is a feat of misdirection. What begins as an eco-parable, setting up a clash between the residents of a bucolic community and the urbanites behind a misbegotten glamping project, evolves into an unanswerable, darkly philosophical riddle on what it means to live on this planet. In Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s work, the everyday realm is always charged with possibility; here, with the natural world as setting, subject, and ambiguous guiding force, the unpredictability is total and inviolable. The film’s fearsome irrationality opens onto the sublime. —Dennis Lim


    7. La chimera
    Alice Rohrwacher, Italy


    A movie with one foot planted firmly on the ground and the other shuffling through the dreamscape of a broken heart, this rollicking, melancholy fable of Italian tomb raiders feels both deeply lived-in and out of this world. Much of La chimera’s bewitchment comes from how Alice Rohrwacher situates its narrative and emotional realm at the margins—of landscape, of making a living, of kinship networks, of memory—and allows detail and meaning to accumulate at their own pace. The overarching metaphor of lost love as lost treasure might be too on-the-nose if the movie weren’t so confident in its rhythms, so idiosyncratic in tone, and so marvelously acted. As the sad-sack expat leading a goofball band of thieves, Josh O’Connor is wholly credible and extremely filthy: here’s the second great movie this year where you can smell him through the screen. —Nathan Lee


    8. Last Summer
    Catherine Breillat, France


    As Anne, the middle-aged mother who gives herself over to a passionate affair with her wayward teenage stepson in Catherine Breillat’s latest, actress Léa Drucker’s alert, vaguely feral physicality makes legible the unwieldy carnal appetites that drive her character. Yet a nagging question lingers throughout the film: to what extent is Anne’s lust for 17-year-old Théo (Samuel Kircher) merely the high-stakes currency in a game whose only real object is the dissipation of her boredom? As in her earlier excavations of female desire, Breillat’s muscular yet precise command of cinematic language articulates what her characters can’t or won’t say, while raising timeless questions about the nature of power and agency within the bourgeois family unit. —Madeline Whittle


    9. Janet Planet
    Annie Baker, U.S.


    Playwright Annie Baker’s debut film is a deceptively placid period piece about the dramaturgy of family life. The Janet of the title is a single mother (Julianne Nicholson), a middle-aged acupuncturist raising a precociously depressive 11-year-old named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). Baker patiently and lovingly depicts the push and pull of mother and daughter over the course of a summer, in 1991, as Janet and Lacy traverse comically grim romantic and platonic relationships with the granola-tinged residents of their western-Massachusetts enclave. Janet Planet is a rare thing, at once allusive in its delineations of parent-child dynamics and hilariously specific in its skewering of post-hippie boomer types (Elias Koteas’s performance as the chilled-out leader of a trippy local theater troupe is particularly on point). By the film’s baffling and poetic ending, the worldviews of mother and daughter have become artfully blended: just as Janet stage-manages her romantic life, Lacy does so with the toys in her room, her face as serious as a film director’s. —Clinton Krute


    10. Anora
    Sean Baker, U.S.


    Sean Baker’s furiously volatile screwball comedy is a breathtaking balancing act that shifts back and forth between the hilarious and the scary, the scary and the absurd, and the romantic and the profane—and sometimes it contains all at once. Anchoring the chaos are two brilliant performances, by the extraordinary Mikey Madison as the titular stripper heroine and Mark Eydelshteyn as her irresistibly childlike client, then boyfriend, and soon husband. Baker’s deeply humane treatment of sex workers reaches a glorious apotheosis in the character of Ani, a gutsy, resourceful, but messed-up dame whose street smarts are no match for Vanya’s oligarch parents and their menacing emissaries. Amid all the mayhem, one of the hit men (Yura Borisov) sees and admires Ani in a way no one else does, least of all herself. Not yet, anyway. A Hollywood ending? Okay, but Anora is a comedy of remarriage! —Molly Haskell

    Read the full lists
    The Best Films of 2024
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-18-2024 at 12:52 AM.

  6. #6
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    ADRIEN BRODY IN THE BRUTLIST

    RogerEbert.com: The Best Films of 2024
    SOURCE

    Still a famous name, even now that he's gone and it's a collective. I SAW THE TV GLOW, which I recently watched, is as compulsive, intense a portrait of obsessive fandom as you're ever likely to see and a leap beyond the director's similar 2021 debut WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR, which I did review. Unusual top ten list in including two docs, NO OTHER LAND and GREEN BORDER, but they're everybody's faves for the year.

    1. The Brutalist Brady Corbet
    2. Nickel Boys RaMell Ross
    3. I Saw the TV Glow Jane Schoenbrun
    4. No Other Land Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor
    5. Anora Sean Baker
    6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga George Miller
    7. Hard Truths Mike Leigh
    8. All We Imagine as Light Payal Kapadia
    9. The Beast Bertrand Bonello
    10.Green Border Agnieszka Holland

    Runner-Ups
    Challengers Luca Guadagnino
    Conclave Edward Berger
    Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World Radu Jude
    Flow Gints Zilbalodis
    Hundreds of Beavers Mike Cheslik
    The Monk and the Gun Pawo Choyning Dorji
    The Room Next Door Pedro Almodóvar
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig Mohammad Rasoulof
    Sing Sing Greg Kwedar
    Universal Language Matthew Rankin
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-16-2024 at 12:44 AM.

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