Chris Duncan
There are treasure troves of great films that release every single year, but the powers that be want you to think otherwise. Film Obsessive’s 24 Best Films of 2024 lists out our critics’ most-appreciated films of the year, from ambitious science fiction to auteur-driven madness and smart, tightly-packed drama. Films like Anora and The Brutalist dominated the fall and will all contend for awards recognition. Films like Megalopolis and Furiosa saw established auteurs take big swings to controversial but no less awe-inspiring effect. Conversely, young emerging voices made themselves heard with staggering films like I Saw The TV Glow and Love Lies Bleeding. Meanwhile, blockbusters like Dune: Part Two and biopics like A Complete Unknown drew audiences to the theaters. Ultimately, 2024 brought a diverse mix of films worth celebrating from all genres and all corners of the Earth. As in every year, there were so many movies and so little time to see them all, and too many of our favorites have gone overlooked and underseen.
Why is that? Beneath the success stories of 2024, the popular film industry in the west continues to degrade its respect for the art and craft of filmmaking. Among the most notable examples this year is the massively disrespectful rollout of Juror #2, Clint Eastwood’s morally reflective courtroom drama. The film was unceremoniously dumped in less than fifty theaters nationwide, with Warner Bros. seemingly resigned to its failure after the massive bomb that was Joker: Folie à Deux. What a shame, because beyond being a compelling piece of character drama led by Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette, Juror #2 also presented a number of bold questions about our role in society, our duty towards our neighbors and fellow strangers, and the twisted individualism of the American family. More recently, Pixar’s erasure of trans characters in its streaming show and downplaying of environmental themes in an upcoming film show that studio executives are not content with simply burying films they don’t like, but seem increasingly fearful of attaching their names to any kind of boldness or complexity, snuffing it out where they can. Hollywood has always meddled with its creative voices, but today we also live in an age of increasing technological complexity, where so-called artificial intelligence can be prompted to “create” images and videos that really amount to a kind of plagiarism in aggregate. When the phenomena of technological advancement and studio executive short-sightedness finally meet, the results will undoubtedly be heinous. We have already seen generative “A.I.” make its way into notable films like this year’s Late Night With The Devil. We must be wary of these tools and the role they will undoubtedly play in sidelining real cinematic voices.
Now, as ever, it is important to not only appreciate the great films that come out at your local cinema, but to also seek out films that miss that wide release. With thousands of films coming out every year from all over the world, only one thing is for certain: whatever you’re watching, you’re probably missing out on something. Predictably, there are plenty of films we missed, and plenty of films we’d have liked to write about, perhaps even include on this list, that we simply did not get the chance to see before year’s end. We hope you’ll forgive us.
Please enjoy this list of the overlooked and underseen films of 2024.
Dìdi 弟弟
I’m a year older than Dìdi ’s main character, Chris (Izaac Wang). We grew up in the sweet spot when technology was beginning to take a massive role in our lives, but we also spent summers running around the neighborhood. Dìdi 弟弟 takes place over the course of a month as Chris prepares himself for his freshman year of high school. He spends the summer desperately trying to flirt with the cute girl from school (Mahaela Park) through AIM, an impossible task I remember all too well.
Some of the specifics of Chris’s life don’t match mine. I was never a teenage boy and I’m not the child of a Taiwanese immigrant mother (Joan Chen), but I did grow up bickering endlessly with an older sister (Shirley Chen). I did try to learn to skateboard because I thought it was the answer to all of my insecurities. I spent hours tinkering with basic video editing software in the hopes of impressing a new group of friends to little avail. Dìdi 弟弟 gave me the sensation that I was seeing a version of my life that was not my own, but also was in its own way. To me, that feeling is why we all watch movies. To see ourselves in the life of someone else and be able to appreciate it this time. When I was younger, I didn’t understand the sacrifices and the work my parents put in so that I could have this life. In watching Dìdi 弟弟, it’s like I get a second chance. I see a kid who reminds me of myself and I see a parent who reminds me of my own. I can watch this kid mess up, be kind, and exist in the messy way all teenagers do, but this time, I can understand what I couldn’t when I was that age. I can understand that parents aren’t perfect, but they deserve far more grace than their children usually give them. Even if I didn’t know that then, I’m glad I know it now. — Tina Kakadelis
Ghostlight
I’ve been gushing about Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s Ghostlight since I first saw it at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The Chicago-set drama looks at a construction worker (Keith Kupferer) who secretly joins a local theater’s production of Romeo & Juliet, which unexpectedly helps him cope with a recent family tragedy. Ghostlight is a deeply emotional, occasionally funny look at the importance of theater and the arts, coping with emotion, and putting yourself out there when others least expect it. Kupferer is sublime as the quiet matriarch of his family who doesn’t know how to express his emotions in the wake of a recent tragedy and finds solace with the theater company. It’s a powerful, raw, authentic performance in a film that will have your heart soaring and tears streaming down your face. — Kevin Wozniak
Oddity
With Oddity, and 2020’s similarly excellent Caveat, Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy has cemented his quiet, mysterious, and slow-burn style as a piece of modern horror cinema that should not be ignored. His films play with time and memory, looping back on themselves and shrouding the stories in mystery, using the power of implication for both horror and narrative tricks. In Oddity, we are left in suspense as to what happened on the night protagonist Darcy’s twin sister Dani (both played brilliantly by Carolyn Bracken) is killed. Darcy herself is blind, clairvoyant, and a dealer in the macabre and mystical. She spends the night in the house where Dani was killed, hoping to find out the truth about her sister’s death, much to the chagrin of Dani’s former husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new wife Yana (Caroline Menton). Coming to Darcy’s aid is her mysterious wooden mannequin that appears to move all on its own.
The appeal of Oddity on its surface is the horror, but its central mystery, and its method of revealing itself, are what make the film shine. As the film goes along, it doubles back on itself, revising the sequence of events, revealing extra information, and filling in gaps it left open on purpose. It misdirects us as much as it can, complimented by a quiet, eerie veneer. It all services a story that is ultimately very sweet, and provides a great sense of karmic justice. Oddity is available on Shudder and to rent or buy on all the typical digital platforms. — Chris Duncan
Champions of the Golden Valley
To see Champions of the Golden Valley, you’ll likely need to attend a festival or arrange a screening of your own, but the effort will be rewarded. In the unlikeliest of places and at the most precarious of times comes a thrilling sports documentary that offers inspiration and contemplation in equal measure. The film began on a visit by director Ben Sturgulewski to the peaks of Afghanistan in 2019, where he met young athletes from rival villages desperate for sport. They worked—darned hard—to build makeshift wooden skis, a jerry-rigged rope lift, and a downhill course for a mountain race. It’s one that turns out to unite the community in a moment of peace and triumph. And then, just as Sturgulewski completed his short film, Afghanistan fell, and everything he thought he knew about his project changed.
In the years since, Sturgulewski and his team rethought and reworked the film to incorporate the tragedy of their subject’s country’s collapse, and the result is a fascinating amalgam of genres. One one hand, it’s a cheeky, charming, sports film, cheerily lifting tropes from The Wild World of Sports and X-Games style cinematography and lending to to the most DIY amateur competition imaginable. (That’s not to say the contestants are without talent: they are not Olympians, but some, under other circumstances, could be.) Yet Champions of the Golden Valley, shot with stunning, expert cinematography, is also a heartfelt portrait of a community finding hope—through sport—when their world is upended. It’s a lovely, sweet, and uplifting look at Afghan people determined to find joy in their lives. — J Paul Johnson
Guy Friends
Thanks to Anyone But You and No Hard Feelings, the year of 2023 got a great deal of credit as the moment where romantic comedies got their comeback. To call something a full comeback require a few consecutive years worth of great entries. This past year did its part to come after with Fly Me to the Moon, A Family Affair, and even some rom-com genre-bending with Your Monster and Lisa Frankenstein. For me, the best rom-com of the year was among the smallest and also turned out to be one of the finest films of the year, regardless of genre. Compared to its studio-backed brethren, Guy Friends did more with less.
Starring first-time actress Kavita Jariwala, Guy Friends follows a NYC woman named Jaime Sharma. As the title suggests, she is the type of woman who has seemed to have collected more close male friends than female ones. That becomes readily apparent when, after Jaime goes public with a breakup, suitors come out of the woodwork on queue as if they were waiting for years. Hilariously, over a half-dozen acquaintances, from neighbors to old classmates, step-forward in their own moments of truth to declare their long-held love for her. Overwhelmed and out of her wayward romantic element, Jaime comes to find strong advice and a different perspective from the visiting Sandy (Katie Muldowney), granting her a true sounding board and a rare friend of the same gender.
This catalyst alone in Guy Friends of the multiplied calamity from thrust-upon serendipity was hilarious in its own right. Director and co-writer Jonathan Smith created casual introductions in Jaime’s everyday life that slyly twisted them with the right courage and pressure into a tailspin of reflection and reassessment for the leading lady. Best of all, Guy Friends championed an honest perspective that put female connection first and never catered to the typical rom-com expectations and endings. The energetic dialogue shapes the caprice of it all intos something splendid to watch. Give Guy Friends a date-night-on-the-country try currently on Tubi and for rent on other platforms. — Don Shanahan
Cuckoo
2024 has been a great year for film across the board, but especially for horror. Granted some of the year’s biggest horror movies stunk (I won’t say which ones so you can all feel equally validated), but after the lackluster year for horror that was 2023, 2024 was a strong bounce back—albeit not to 2022 levels, which was one of the best years for horror since the genre peaked between ’79 and ’84. One of my favorite horror movies though was for a time one of the year’s more anticipated releases but seemed to divide and underwhelm audiences and never gathered the momentum that Heretic or Late Night with the Devil did. That was Cuckoo, the bizarre oddball horror from director Tilman Singer, a film deeply embedded in the genre roots of Giallo and yet so left field and oddly accented that it put me more in mind of the most classic of Hammer deep cuts. Films like Taste of Fear or The Damned, films that start off as one thing and then morph into another, flitting between genres and keeping the viewer on the edge of their seats with one shocking twist after another. One of the best things a movie can be is unpredictable and that goes doubly for a horror movie, and by the end Cuckoo had me beaming with its eccentric tension and seasick transitions between action comedy and emotional intensity. The only way it could’ve pleased me more is if it had turned out to be a stealth Alien prequel, which was not impossible given the plot when you think about it. The humanoid monster is a bit of a letdown but that’s my only real gripe with the whole film.
2024 was also a massive year for alumnae of the show Euphoria, with established star Zendaya starring in two of the year’s biggest and best movies while Sydney Sweeney’s star continued to rise with her own horror passion project Immaculate (in my opinion, the better of the two “American novice transfers to a creepy European convent and discovers a covert plot to make her the surrogate mother to the Antichrist” movies released this year). However, the best work of the bunch came from Hunter Schafer whose performance in Cuckoo is in my opinion one of the best performances of the whole year. Her unlikely heroine Gretchen is grief stricken, angry, hostile, jittery, callous, funny, insecure, indifferent, vulnerable, formidable, beaten down and broken. She’s no wilting American flower in strange European soil, she’s a bratty, wounded lesbian teenager with a butterfly knife in her pocket, a bass guitar on her back and a desperate need for love and understanding. She’s a magnificently unique creation and Schafer embodies her with the rawness of an ingenue and the style of a great theatrical veteran, and paired up with a hysterical Dan Stevens at his creepy best, she makes Cuckoo one the best acting showcases of the year. — Hal Kitchen
The Line
In the last few years, movies about the horrors of Greek life are few and far between — a more notable one being 2016’s Goat, directed by Andrew Neel. Ethan Berger’s directorial debut, The Line (which premiered at Tribeca in 2023) is a chilling mirror into the dark inner life of a Southern college’s fraternity practices. With a powerhouse cast led by the fantastic Alex Wolff as Tom, Berger’s film shows the sinister side of hazing and the dangers of conformity while adhering to age-old traditions steeped in toxic masculinity. The Line is a raw, emotional, and often brutal snapshot of the lengths young men will go to find a sense of belonging, even if that means compromising their morals. Certainly, Berger puts forth intriguing concepts and conversations that shouldn’t be pushed under the rug. — Lilli Keeve
Adam The First
When it comes to movies making an lasting impression, many folks commonly like to say that it’s not how a movie starts, but how it ends. I subscribe to that, but I found a little movie named Adam the First this past year that rocked me at the end AND at the beginning. It did it, not with crowd-jolting visuals or a massive act of heroism, but with the simpleness of familial connection. Often, that personal touch of relatable intimacy gets us every time.
The Adam of the film’s title is a teenager played by Oakes Fegley (Pete’s Dragon) living in a homely trailer among the cypress forests of Mississippi’s swamps with James and Mary (co-headliner David Duchovny and TV vet Kim Jackson Davis). James has pulled the young man aside and given him the shattering truth that he is not his father. It’s a hell of a thing to hear to start a narrative. Though broken laws are involved and more follow, James gives Adam the first clues that set him on his way to find his birth parents. By the time Adam finishes his hardscrabble odyssey, Adam the First goes from a gut punch to an unforgettable heart punch with the best final reel of any movie I was privileged to see this year, including those much shinier which are set to be showered with trophies this awards season.
Written, directed, co-produced, and co-composed by Irving Franco in only his second feature, Adam the First blossoms a very commendable and unique coming-of-age tale built on hard conversations more than tomfoolery. These matters are difficult and serious, yet the tightly-composed 100-minute film, led by an excellent performance by Oakes Fegley, has a way of threading light through its tarnished settings and broken people without sacrificing honesty. It’s a worthwhile journey for mature teens and adults alike that left me and others, out of nowhere, in teary shambles. Adam the First is available on Hoopla Digital with many local library cards and for rental on the usual streaming storefronts. — Don Shanahan
La Chimera
Josh O’Connor’s breakout year saw him complement his star-making performance in Challengers with his sobering turn in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. O’Connor plays Arthur, a down-on-his-luck British archeologist who reunites with his old crew after getting out of jail to resume his life of grave robbing, for which he seems to have an almost supernatural gift. His crew rolls through life raiding old Etruscan tombs in the Italian countryside and selling what they find, mostly to the mysterious client known as Spartaco. But, of course, there is far more below the surface. Arthur is haunted by his lost love Beniamina, as is Beniamina’s mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini), while the radiant Italia (Carol Duarte) shakes up Arthur’s life. La Chimera is haunting, silly, tender, and heartbreaking all at once, and O’Connor carries the film on his shoulders embodying all of these traits. — Chris Duncan
It’s What’s Inside
Greg Jardin’s It’s What’s Inside is a wild, twisted, darkly funny film about a group of friends who gather for a pre-wedding party that descends into a nightmare when an estranged friend arrives with a mysterious game that awakens long-hidden secrets, desires and grudges. Jardin’s screenplay is layered and full of shocking twists and interesting themes about identity and toxic relationships. The ensemble is one of the best of the year and full of young talent I can’t wait to see more of. Unfortunately, It’s What’s Inside did not get the love or recognition it deserved. The worst thing to happen to this movie was that it was bought by Netflix. I’m happy everyone on the It’s What’s Inside team got paid, but this is a movie that was made for a large crowd to experience together so they could experience the twists, turns, and surprises with other unknowing patrons. It’s a real shame audiences had this taken away from them because it went to streaming and got lost in the algorithm. — Kevin Wozniak
Hundreds of Beavers
Hundreds of Beavers is a psychedelic romp through the frigid plains of the Midwest and the strange genius of its creators, first-time full-length feature director Mike Cheslik and his co-writer and lead actor Ryland Brickson Cole Tews of the prior indie hit Lake Michigan Monster. And it is simply a hoot, a real victory for the DIY indie filmmaking ethos and an astonishing, nightmare-fueling, side-splitting work of unique cinematic expression.
Who knew in 2024 a silent, black-and-white film mixing animation with live action pastiche could make so much sense? Its influences are all over them map, from Buster Keaton and Max Fleisher, to Rube Goldberg, Wile E. Coyote, and Dudley Do Right and Lotte Reinenger, Guy Maddin, and Mel Brooks, with a video-game style narrative and plenty of fun action and chase scenes.
Tews plays Jean Kayak, an oft-besotten applejack who clumsily burns his own orchard and thus must (trust me) kill enough beavers to earn back his livelihood and, incidentally, the love of a fair maiden. But never mind the plot: it’s only there to engage Jean in mortal combat against hundreds of beavers—and not a few rabbits—in increasingly absurd Looney Tunes-style set pieces, each a little more inventive than the last. Shot in a beautifully grainy black and white over the film’s four years of production, Hundreds of Beavers‘ aesthetic is borrowed from the silent era, with no dialogue, just a few title cards, and a lively musical score. A film like this will never earn the big box office of a Dune sequel or Apes franchise film, but it’s going to please everyone who sees it with its pure manic joy. — J Paul Johnson
Union
It is extremely rare for me to see anything these days that I would call “guerrilla filmmaking,” but however vague that term may be, Union is it. This film saw a documentary crew embed themselves within the Amazon Labor Union during their drive at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island back in 2020. We see the drive from its humble beginnings as the main cadre of organizers accumulates, then clashes, and ultimately succeeds in the face of rampant propaganda and captive audience meetings from the management at the facility and Amazon more broadly. Using concealed cameras, the workers and filmmakers even take us into the facility itself, and we witness the ways propaganda lines the halls that the workers walk through every day, and how captive audience meetings are used to brainwash workers into voting against their own interests. We’re also witness to the internal strife that plagued the JFK8 union drive, and the polarizing figure of Chris Smalls, a key figure in the film and in the ALU. Union ultimately stands as a testament to the messy righteousness of the labor movement, a movement that is no stranger to squabbles, disagreements, and trouble. Of all the films released in 2024, Union is the one I feel speaks the most, and perhaps the best, to our current times. — Chris Duncan
Daughters
I’ll be very frank because this movie got a big emotional reaction out of me. I haven’t cried at a film like this, possibly ever, but at the very least not since my last annual rewatch of It’s a Wonderful Life. Daughters is an emotional journey like no other. The documentary follows the travails of the “Date with Dad” organization, a non-profit dedicated to giving young girls and their incarcerated fathers a rare chance to bond. With many of the United States’s prisons no longer offering those in their custody the right to in person visitation, some girls may go their whole childhoods without seeing their fathers, and vice versa. “Date with Dad” organizes an afternoon ball where father and daughter are provided suits and dresses and given an all too brief window of time to share without phones or chains or bars or glass separating them. For father’s its a rare chance to get to know their daughters and make a good impression, for daughters its an opportunity to see their dads as men and not as inmates.
Building up to this day are ten week personal development courses with both parent and child to prepare them and help them make the most of this opportunity. Daughters, co-directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, the founder of Date with Dad, follows one cohort of fathers and their daughters throughout this process, giving the audience the chance to understand the unique dynamics each family possesses. For some this will be a tearful reunion of a loving family torn apart by the justice system, or one young man’s foolish actions. For others it will be a tense reopening of wounds, scarred over but not fully healed. These men may not have chosen to abandon their daughters, but they are separated and that will be hard for any young girl to understand. It’s already a tough emotional journey these families are on and it’s impossible not to get swept up in it.
And then the big day arrives and I can tell you, the minute those girls walked out in their dresses to meet their anxiously waiting fathers, I started sobbing uncontrollably and didn’t stop for twenty minutes. And when the one dad whose daughter didn’t show up made a speech about how inspiring it was seeing his new friends get time with their daughters…my chest began heaving and I had to take a break. Luckily I was watching at home and not only could I pause it to collect myself but I avoided making an exhibition of myself in public. And bear in mind, I don’t have any personal connection to this story, I am not a parent, nor did I have to endure long periods of separation from my parents as a child. This wasn’t painful memories or trauma being dredged up, this was pure empathy. I cannot imagine watching this film as someone who has been through something like this, never mind what its like for the families actually going through it themselves. No there’s absolutely no doubt that Daughters is the most moving film I’ve seen this decade at least. — Hal Kitchen
Bird
Swooping, sometimes wildly, between the neo-real and the sublime, the mundane and magical, the sweet and the scarifying, Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age tale Bird is a familiar tale with a wild twist. Whether that works or not is likely to divide viewers, but there’s no doubting Arnold’s daring, nor is there any question that a pair of fine performances anchor her film in the real while letting it later take flight in the clouds.
Bird is the story of loners who connect in part for a love of birds. Twelve-year-old Bailey (an impressive Nykiya Adams in her film debut) is a smart young kid who loves nothing better than shooting expressionistic footage with her phone—much of it quite good, and more than a little of it of birds in flight. Bird (Franz Rogowski) lives alone, apparently homeless, pining for a home and family he once had but not having a clue how he might go about recovering it. With his receding hairline, faerie-like demeanor (given to the odd sprightly jig), and elaborately woven sweaters and kilt, it’s hard to know what to make of the man. But Bailey senses a kindred spirit of sorts and dedicates her time and effort to helping him.
A tatted-up-and-down Barry Keoghan plays Bug, Bailey’s dad who clearly loves her but is too much a mess to raise her. Keoghan’s ascension to film stardom makes his Bug practically a threat to consume the film when he is onscreen, so magnetic is Keoghan as an actor and so outrageous is Bug as a character. Thankfully, Arnold limits Keoghan’s screen time and allows Bug the kind of character arc that gives his eccentricities some purpose. In the end, Bird rests on the performance of young Adams, who seems, physically and emotionally, to mature, if ever so slightly and slowly, before our eyes on screen. Hers—with the distractions of the much more effusive, elaborate performances from Keoghan and Rogowski as Bug and Bird as contrasts—is the character and performance that ultimately matters and that in the end, gives the film its emotional weight. — J Paul Johnson
Dandelion
Looking past the big full-blown blockbusters and highly touted awards contenders of Wicked, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King, A Complete Unknown, and Emilia Perez, I have seen many stellar musically-inclined non-musical films this year that deserve their own audiences. 2024 gave us The Greatest Hits, Kneecap, Your Monster, Exhibiting Forgiveness, The Brink Of, and more. Any of them deserve a spot on this underseen/underrated list for Film Obsessive, but I’ll use this spot to highlight Nicole Riegel’s Dandelion.
Starring If Beale Street Could Talk ingenue KiKi Layne, Dandelion sheds light and shadow on the well-worn struggle of “starving artists.” Layne plays the title character, a Cincinnati-dwelling singer/songwriter hoping to be discovered, where her only steady gig is a single night hotel lounge hour where no one really listens or cares. At the end of her patience with waiting and sinking her money into medical care her own mother refuses, Dandelion bolts town for a “battle of the bands” competition at a bike rally in South Dakota. After flopping on stage, she crosses smitten paths with Thomas Doherty’s Casey, a more-established frontman of a traveling folk act.
There, nestled in the picturesque Black Hills, Dandelion and Casey connect as fellow soulful artists. Together, they swoon through quality shared time and collaborate beautiful songs together—with one standout duet that may rise to be theor discovery hit—until external pushes become shoves, so to speak. Like any good musically-inclined film, Dandelion succeeds thanks to the extra levels of performance capabilities on display from the selected actors. I sure didn’t know KiKi Layne had this side to her, and she’s wonderful strumming her acoustic guitar and crooning her ballads. She was already a screen presence you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Now, you can’t cover your ears around her either, without missing extraordinary talent. Dandelion is currently available to stream on AMC+ and the ALLBLK hub on AppleTV and Amazon. — Don Shanahan
His Three Daughters
Also worthy of that title is a very different kind of film, His Three Daughters, which boasts three acting masterclasses of a very different kind. His Three Daughters opens with three separate monologues by each of the three title characters that introduce them and give them each their broad character “types”: Katy (Carrie Coon) is stern, abrupt and uptight, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is compassionate, new age and diplomatic, and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is taciturn, terse and constantly high. Rachel has been living with her step-father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) for many years, getting high and watching ball games while Vincent’s daughters by his first wife, Katy and Christina have been off raising families of their own and since Vincent was diagnosed with terminal cancer she has been his irreverent stoner rock while Katy and Christina have been dropping in when their schedules permitted. Now the end is near though and all three women have assembled under one roof to see their father off as peacefully as possible. They’ve each had plenty of time to acclimate to the idea their father will soon be gone and their heads are just full of the minute mechanics of that really happening, which gives them plenty of time and cause to grate on one another. Seemingly none of them have anything in common beyond their investment in the affairs of a dying man, and a rarely acknowledged past that does more to stand between them than to unite them. The title accurately characterizes them as daughters but explicitly not as sisters. Controlling Katy and laid-back Rachel are polar opposites and Christina is reduced to peacekeeper. The stage seems set for a by the numbers family drama where the chalk and cheese siblings struggle to fit their big personalities under one roof until they reach a breakthrough and reconcile just in time for their dad to pass, yes?
Well, yes that, except…absolutely fantastic in every way.
These are characters at a very emotional point in their life, and yet this point stretches on for days, leaving them at once lucid and forgetful about the whole thing. They have time to obsess over things and get distracted, but also to talk, directly and rationally, trying to navigate the choppy waters between them. Despite their differences, Katy, Christina and Rachel are totally believable as siblings, or rather half-siblings and it’s not just because the three actresses share uncannily similar bone structures. They bridle, they project and they insinuate at one another, until eventually the lines of communication begin to disentangle and clarity enters their claustrophobic world.
There’s a lot of DNA from similar New York set indie comic drama royals like Ira Sachs and Noah Baumbach. The film was indeed shot by Sam Levy, Baumbach’s regular cinematographer, and it might well be his best work, bringing an evocative potency to the blocking and lighting of the apartment stage; cold in the day, warm at night. However, the reflective, theatrical and poetic tone that this film’s writer-director Azazel Jacobs achieves put me more in mind of Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers than that of any of his modern contemporaries. The dialogue, often aggressively verbose and declarative often falls into the uncanny valley between theatrical and just…real life. This creates a sense of grandeur and poetry that explodes beyond the confines of their shared apartment, and the minute camera moves at key moments are inspired additions, punctuating the scene like a camera shutter and creating moments of exquisite tenderness. It’s a deeply theatrical piece and yet magnificently demonstrates the advantages a suitably subtle cinema has as a means to accentuate and mediate theatrical stories. — Hal Kitchen
Exhibiting Forgiveness
Among many possible superlatives, two particular qualities that stand out about Exhibiting Forgiveness both have to do with the creative source behind it. First off, writer-director Titus Kaphar is completely a first-time filmmaker. He is, first and foremost, an accomplished painter with canvases featured in museums around the world. While we’ve seen rookies, so to speak, from other mediums like television, radio, digital, or theater come into cinema as new voices and eyes, it’s extremely rare to see a painter make this transition. Normally, Kaphar’s type of skillset does not always translate beyond the storyboarding step. Yet, here he is making a poignant family drama as well-paced and as polished as any veteran could have done above him.
Secondly, it’s not just that Exhibiting Forgiveness looks great and features Kaphar’s own large canvases. It’s the story he tells through his selected art. In Exhibiting Forgiveness, Moonlight and High Flying Bird star Andre Holland plays a married artist and father coming back to his childhood home to move out his weakening mother (potential Nickel Boys Oscar nominee Aunjunae Ellis-Taylor). In doing so, painful memories from his abusive youth resurface, especially with the reemergence of this now-sober father (Tony Award-nominated stage actor John Earl Jelks).
Unlike strolling through a museum to stare at and ponder a single piece, Kaphar weaves a powerful story that extends beyond their painted edges. There’s not a bad performance in the ensemble, with Jelks searing the screen. Of all the films I saw in 2024, none was as immersive as this successful merger of art and storytelling. The impact was tender and unforgettable. — Don Shanahan
