The 24 Best Films of 2024!

At the end of each year the opportunity arises to look back on the last twelve months and weigh each year up against its recent fellows to determine how it shapes up. A good many of the films on this end of year list are the same as those on Film Obsessive’s mid-year list, especially when we get to the top half. Maybe 2024 hasn’t been an especially good or bad year for film, but it did have an uncommonly good first six months and perhaps a slightly lackluster back half when it came to releases. It was, in retrospect, a great year for drama and horror, an average year for comedies, a terrible year for superheroes, a fantastic year for sci-fi, and a weird-as-all-hell year for musicals.

24. September 5 

The historical docudrama September 5 presents an honorable authenticity of history with one of the best journalism films of recent memory. Director Tim Fehlbaum recreated the frenzied workplace machinations of pre-digital television production to follow the ABC Sports studio team bearing witness and bringing reporting involvement in the fateful hostage tragedy of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Playing like a taut bottle movie in predominately a single setting, September 5 follows the programming and news decisions made of a sports department stepping up in an emergency. John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, and Peter Saarsgard each excellently play the on-the-clock producers and design-makers navigating their cameras, reporters, and crew through a crisis no one could prepare for. 

Watching these folks work with period-era equipment is treat unto itself, but the real impact is the miniature heroism involved of those who took on their journalistic commitment to bring important happenings to the public. Nine hundred million people would end up watching that day, and they were responsible for it. September 5 finds suspense and gravity that honors the history without overtly putting tragedy on-screen. We find ourselves as viewers wrapped up with the same suspense of that tragic day, even if we know the ending. Pulling that effect off is always impressive. — Don Shanahan

23. Strange Darling 

JT Mollner’s directorial debut certainly garnered lots of buzz (both positive and controversial) this year. Shot on 35mm, Strange Darling is an exhilarating cat-and-mouse thriller effortlessly carried by its chameleonic leads Willa Fitzgerald (The Lady) and Kyle Gallner (The Demon). Mollner and actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi crafted a visually compelling and intriguing story about a one-night stand that turns into a harrowing chase, all the way until the brutal (and bloody) end.

One of the film’s notable and attention-grabbing elements is its subversive representation of the stereotypical final girl trope, including its fair share of gratifying twists. More importantly, the electric performance from Fitzgerald is truly a standout and remains one of the boldest, unnerving, and unsettling displays of acting this year. — Lilli Keeve

22. Mean Girls

If you’d asked me at the beginning of the year which Broadway-to-silver screen adaptation I’d like more, Wicked or Mean Girls (2024), I would’ve said Wicked without a moment’s hesitation. Well, hindsight is 20-20 and Mean Girls (2024) is the musical of the year, no doubt about it. There’s a theater kid in my soul, and despite the fact that I know most of the words to the Wicked soundtrack, it was Mean Girls (2024) that captured the thrill of a live-theater production for me. There was a vibrancy to the choreography, a liveliness that was infectious. Mean Girls (2024) is an adaptation of a Broadway show that was adapted from the teen classic movie from 2004, but Mean Girls (2024) is so self-assured in its something different that it never once feels like an unnecessary cash grab. Directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. put together the most immersive musical numbers of any film this year. The few callbacks to the original movie are presented without much fanfare, merely there to check a box, which is the best version of what a remake/reimagining should be. Mean Girls (2024) doesn’t rest on its laurels and it’s all the more better for that. You go, Glen Coco. — Tina Kakadelis

21. Late Night with the Devil

Found footage films live and die by what footage has been ‘found’ and whether it should have been left in the writer and director’s imaginations. Late Night with the Devil, however, is well worth finding. A nervy tale of a competitive chat show host turning to an extreme solution to grab ratings at Halloween, only to find they have tragically let themselves in for more than they bargained for, Late Night with The Devil is a stylish, engrossing update of the Faust myth for the television generations. The film intelligently has you guessing as to whether the supernatural elements being presented on the show are genuine or just a cheap ploy, a carny’s illusion. It does so until there’s turning back from the truth, and by that point the film has already had you on the edge of your seat with tension, so when all hell finally breaks loose, you’re more than ready for the release.

The period details from the ’70s seem accurate enough, and certainly the attempt to make the film appear as if it is being screened from tape filmed in the ’70s is very effective, giving a strange comfort and disconcerting otherness to the visuals, before you even get to the supernatural. The past is an uncanny country and Late Night with the Devil explores the terrain well with its found footage form. Strange, gripping and unnerving in equal measure, Late Night with the Devil is a treat of a film and was one of the highlights, horror or otherwise, for me in 2024. — Chris Flackett

20. Hit Man

Glen Powell gives the best performance of his young and promising career in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. He plays a quiet college professor who gets a job moonlighting as a hitman for his local police department to entrap those who wish to harm others. When he forms a relationship with a woman (Adria Arjana) who enlists his services, it sends them down a path of danger and deception.

Hit Man is the best movie of its kind since Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. It’s a slick, tricky, funny, sexy crime-thriller with a superb ensemble and top-notch direction from Linklater. Powell and Arjana’s chemistry is effortless and sizzles on screen. The cell phone interrogation scene is one of the year’s best scenes and as exciting as any action set piece you’ll see in 2024. Hit Man is Richard Linklater’s best film in nearly a decade and one of the year’s most entertaining movies. —Kevin Wozniak

19. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

With the dragged-out lawsuit between Kennedy Miller Mitchell and Warner Bros., plenty of folks (myself included) could be forgiven for thinking Furiosa was doomed to never get made as few as a couple of years ago, with George Miller getting older and his relationship with the Mad Max studio souring. So, in a way, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga just existing feels almost like a miracle. That it’s one of the best movies of the year is a blessing.

It feels unfair, but Miller’s prequel to Fury Road is nearly impossible to understand unless in conversation with it. That’s a particularly hard act to follow up for Miller and co., but there’s plenty of tricks and ideas up Furiosa’s sleeve. The prequel, despite its titular protagonist’s near-silence for most of its runtime, is far more talkative and melodramatic than its predecessor, in essence exchanging efficiency for scope. It is split into five chapters, jumping through the years of Furiosa’s life as opposed to Fury Road’s propulsive tautness. It also, with the replacement of Fury Road DP John Seale with Simon Duggan (300: Rise of an Empire, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby) presents a different look and texture, one a bit more artificial, or perhaps one might call it cartoonish—certainly strange, but never truly ugly, and never close to boring. All of this is to say that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, despite being irreparably linked to the highly superior film which it follows up, stands on its own, still shaped by a boundless energy and creativity. — Chris Duncan

18. Trap 

Watching Trap, the latest from director M. Night Shyamalan, you can feel how much fun Shyamalan is having behind the camera. He is in complete control of the audience and pulls them in whatever direction he wants, all wish a devilish grin and gleam in his eye. The film follows Cooper (Josh Hartnett) a seemingly normal father who takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert of a global pop star only to realize the concert is a set up to catch a notorious serial killer, who happens to be Cooper.

-This first half of the film is a thrilling chamber piece as we watch Cooper try and escape the concert and not be caught by the police while also trying to be a great father to his daughter. The second half is a fascinating look at a monster coming to life and watching his perfect plan fall apart. And at the center of it all is a spectacular performance from Josh Hartnett, who seamlessly transitions from a loving, dorky suburban dad to a terrifying, calculated killer. It’s one of the great unsung performances of the year and one of the best ever in a Shyamalan movie. —  Kevin Wozniak

17. The Substance 

I somehow completely missed all the hype for The Substance when it came out, so you can imagine my sheer delighted surprise as the film unfolded on the screen before me. It’s not often you see Demi Moore as an amorphous blob of bloody flesh, bodily organs and several faces, trying to give a speech to a terrified theatre of people. Maybe her last Christmas party, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy…

The Substance is a body horror with emphasis on the body—namely the female body, and how the unreasonable and often cruel social and cultural expectations and judgments made of the female form, in this instance by white hetero-normative men in positions of power, can provide women with enough anxiety and lack of self-worth that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to meet society’s ideal of feminine beauty. Hence the titular ‘substance’ and some unexpected consequences…

Director Coralie Fargeat does an excellent job of letting the film methodically and patiently develop, and the whole has a wonderfully Kubrickian feel—if only old Stanley had attempted a body horror! There’s enough sense to allow the body horror elements, although never small per se, to graduate incrementally so that by the end, when all hell breaks loose, the horror feels very much earned, however crazed it might seem.

The Substance has a message and it has fun relaying it. You should have fun receiving it in all its gory glory. The most unnerving body horror to emerge in years? Quite possibly. — Chris Flackett

16. Exhuma

South Korean filmmaker Jang Jae-hyun has swiftly established a name for himself as one of the country’s most forefront “occult” directors—the genre term Korean audiences use for religious horror—having released The Priests, a South Korean riff on The Exorcist, as well as Svaha: The Sixth Finger, an overwrought hodgepodge of faiths that charts the threatening rise of a fictional new religion. Exhuma, however, ranks as the most streamlined and conceptually enthralling among Jang’s films, primarily because of the angle it takes—one intent on confronting the horrors of South Korea’s centuries-long occupation under Japan through the most intriguing corners of both countries’ folklores. It’s proven to be a smashing success on several counts; not only is it one of the highest-grossing South Korean films ever made, but it’s handily one of the greatest horror films to have been released in 2024, employing folkloric ingenuity with a sharply refined sense of dread, anti-colonialist rage, and some of the most awe-inspiring horror tropes I’ve personally seen this side of Jordan Peele’s Nope.

The film’s protagonists are a ragtag group of postmortem specialists—two shamans, Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun), as well as funeral-home mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin) and feng shui master Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik, of Oldboy and I Saw the Devil fame), who face an interesting proposition regarding a wealthy real estate family dynasty. Their newborn son has just been afflicted with a disease beyond scientific recognition, something that Hwa-rim swiftly identifies to be an ancestor’s curse, laid upon him with vengeful intentions from the spiritual realm. When the team approaches the ancestor’s grave, located on an isolated mountain close to the North Korean border, something is immediately off; Sang-duk senses a profoundly threatening energy emanating from the gravesite, and just as the excavation barely manages to finish with the shamans’ ritualistic help, one of the diggers decapitates a strange woman-headed snake burrowing through the dirt. That trigger becomes the first in a series of horrific events that the postmortem crew have to stave off with increasingly demanding modes of ritualistic and religious commitment, all while the truths buried in the dirt unfurl in increasingly threatening and truly astonishing fashion the various ghosts of Japanese colonialism, and the scars they continue to leave behind on the collective Korean consciousness.

From the most visceral depictions of Korean shaman rituals since Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, the most literate narrative deployments of East Asian folklore to be seen in a mainstream South Korean horror film, and all the way down to a deeply impressive set of performances from a well-reputed ensemble cast of veteran Korean actors, Exhuma works its thrills like a well-oiled machine, signaling the rise of a horror director whose continued improvement and ambition throughout his career is not one to miss. Functioning not just as a deeply thrilling and at points shockingly innovative horror film, but also a potent statement on the changing faces of Korean resistance, Exhuma delivers horrifying scares alongside potent historical commentary—an abnormally strong gem in an oversaturated modern horror scene that’s not one to be missed. — James Y. Lee

15. A Complete Unknown

As a film subgenre, rock-music biopics tend to gravitate towards a common, even clichéd formula—leaving home, meeting mentors, honing one’s art, early brush with fame, the temptations of addictions, and a triumphant comeback of sorts. At their best, they get a singular, even career-defining (or, sadly, career-delimiting) performance from a lead; more often than not, they become little more than a rote exercise in mimicry. It’s a bit of a magic act that in A Complete Unknown, James Mangold toes the line and largely avoids any temptation to radically rework the formula—and yet, in focusing on the first few years of Bob Dylan’s recording and performing career, tells an important story with crackle and verve.

Sure, the timeline gets compressed, characters composited, history re-jiggered, but for those of you who need the full facts in chronological order, there are dozens of biographies to read and Dylan’s entire discography to explore. A film biopic regards these as source material to explore and shape. And so A Complete Unknown builds a full head of steam towards a riotous, electric performance at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival that stands in for a key moment of generational conflict and that would give birth to entirely new genres of music. 

All the way through, the performances are great. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan is charming, aloof, exasperating, ambitious, and uniquely talented. Props to the actor for taking the Covid timeout to learn to play and sing in a credible approximation of Dylan’s signature idiosyncratic style. Ellie Fanning’s Sylvie (a stand-in for Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo) and Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez both figure considerably in shaping Dylan’s social conscience and competing interests. Ed Norton gives it his all as Pete Seeger, desperately trying to hang on to the momentum folk music has gained even as he sees it about to crash. All of the music, performed by Chalamet, Norton, Barbaro, and even Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, is spot-on. And all of that equals a fine film, one worthy of its subject, one of music’s few absolutely indispensable artists. — J Paul Johnson

14. Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass’s sophomore feature film is jacked-up cinema: a tour de force of sapphic romance, ‘roid-rage, cretinous small-town crime kingpins, the scent of barbells and bullets. Every frame teems with style and sensory stimuli, pulsing with a vein-throbbing soundtrack (Throbbing Gristle, Martin Rev), while Glass concocts a lurid visual cocktail of gross-out nastiness and overcharged lust. From steamy cunnilingus to sticky quagmires (literally, the opening shot is a close-up of Lou (Kristin Stewart) unclogging a feces-clogged toilet by hand), Love Lies Bleeding revels in the eroticism and repugnance of corpulence and flesh—covered in slimy bugs, defaced jawlines, decaying physiognomies, blown-out brains, chunky puke, intravenous testosterone, moist mulch, gelatinous egg yolks, and rotting teeth.

Sexy and sordid in equal parts, Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska’s screenplay unflinchingly stares into the abyss of human nastiness and ecstasy. Love Lies Bleeding is a work of conflated binaries, lewdly ogling at glistening muscles and fetid muck with proportionately morbid curiosity. Playing a non-binary, chain-smoking, butch lesbian named Lou who works at a New Mexico bodybuilding venue, Stewart completely ensconces herself in her character’s skin, inhabiting the quiet fortitude, feistiness, and vulnerability of a small-town gym rat. Soon after Lou falls for a bisexual drifter named Jackie (Katy O’Brian), she finds herself in a messy imbroglio—dealing with familial abuse, retaliatory murder, and the nosy FBI. Amid the high-stakes drama that ensues, the film daringly detours into unexpected terrains with hallucinatory flourishes, fugue sequences, and eye-popping incidents of phantasmagorical violence.

For anyone seeking a darkly funny, uninhibitedly ambitious neo-noir in 2024 filled with unhinged magical realism flourishes & a bloody love for sweaty sex, bloody deaths, protein shakes, brawny biceps, and dysfunctional family depravity, this hit all the right beats. Love Lies Bleeding exudes creative vitality and vivacity throughout. It serves as a perfectly spunky follow-up to Saint Maude, Rose Glass’s debut feature about an obsessive, psychologically compromised Roman Catholic caretaker. Catapulted by the cult success of that A24 release, Glass finds herself working with bigger Hollywood stars (Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco) and a bigger budget. The new cinematic ecosystem has little effect on her directorial bravado.

Uninhibited, unrestrained, and unafraid of taking risks, Love Lies Bleeding goes the jugular with seditious She-Hulk energy, leaving a visible trail of gutsy filmmaking, gooey viscera, bursting veins, and mangled corpses onscreen. Whether it is the best of the year will vary by genre considerations and stomach constitutions, but it undoubtedly riled up a certain breed of rabid moviegoers with the pitch-perfect surge of outsized energy and endorphins. — Paul Keelan

13. The Zone of Interest 

It’s fair to say the critical response to The Zone of Interest—technically a 2023 release, but we’ll make room for it here—has been divisive, and maybe that’s to be expected when a filmmaker deals so singularly with a particular aspect of holocaust history. What isn’t shown becomes a concern, and, at worst, is interpreted as a crucial failure of the film. What isn’t shown—or, more accurately, what is primarily only heard—in The Zone of Interest is Auschwitz, and the focus of the film contains itself rigorously to the family living on just the other side of the wall: Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the longest serving commandant of the concentration camp, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their young sons and daughters, Hedwig’s mother Linna (Imogen Kogge), and the family dog. These historical characters are adapted loosely from the characters of Paul and Hannah Doll in Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, but the specificity of naming the Höss family, coupled with the succinct and brilliant choice Glazer makes in how to visually engage with Auschwitz in the final sequence, seems essential to the impact of this truly important film. 

And here’s where I should note that my least favorite type of film is one that critics and audience have deemed “important.” But The Zone of Interest transcends the usual trappings of those films by virtue of it’s sheer artistry and timeliness. It’s not simply important—it’s essential art for our times. Again, some critics have dismissed the entire affair as “self-aggrandizing” from an artistic perspective and dismissive of the holocaust in it’s preoccupations, with one critic crudely dubbing it “Holokitsch.” One common take is that the film makes it’s point within the first ten minutes and has nothing else to add. All of this leaves me wondering if I was seeing the same film, which in my experience was nothing less than a perfectly orchestrated and designed piece of theater with filmic ambitions that nearly set a new bar for film language (I would say the same for a favorite from last year that shares some similar visual technique, Albert Serra’s Pacification). The Zone of Interest was the very first film I saw in 2024, and my immediate thought as it ended was that I’d be really lucky to see even one or two movies as good in the remaining year. I’m not sure I saw a better film, but the year was strong enough to deliver multiple films I thought were as great or interesting, even as vital. 

I’ll admit to being in love with all of Glazer’s previous films—a slow-but-steady output of new millennium gems including Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), and Under the Skin (2013). While Under the Skin hinted at some of the “hidden camera” shooting techniques that are elaborated on to impressive effect in the multi-camera placements of The Zone of Interest, perhaps the key transitional film of Glazer’s in relation to his interest in fascist violence is the short Fall (2019), which was screened prior to many showings of the Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse; in retrospect, the perfect pairing of two directors fascinated by unique cinematic experiences when it comes to sonics. The score in The Zone of Interest is a collaboration with none other than Mica Levi (Under the Skin, Fall), and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else manifesting the highly particular aural confrontation Glazer’s attempting here, particularly in the piece that plays in darkness as the finale to the film—piercing, unheard, and perfectly unsettling. 

Putting my own brand of fan-boy obsession with the director’s previous work aside, The Zone of Interest is a stand-alone, towering masterpiece. To dismiss it as pointless or plotless or hollow is to dismiss the unique ability of filmmakers like Glazer to meditate on the most important questions of our time—a time of growing fascist sentiment that is, perhaps, different in one significant way from the Nazi regime in that it has no interest in art at all. The Zone of Interest allows is a rare evocation of how fascism breeds in our families and bureaucracies, and to dismiss it as some kind of pretentious slog exhibits a blindness that would live comfortably inside the confines of the Höss household. — Jason J. Hedrick

12. Challengers 

As a fan of the sport of tennis and a fan of smart, savvy adult cinema (the kind where characters have both libidos and brain cells), the sly, sexy sports movie Challengers is a pleasure. It may not be great cinema, but it makes for great fun at the cinema, taking risks and hitting the lines far more than it misses them. Challengers pits three motivated, plausible characters against and with each other in a high-stakes arena, then gives each of them just cause to both love and betray each other. 

Zendaya’s Tashi is the object of two young men’s attention ever since they were doubles partners and opponents in tennis’s cutthroat junior competition. And she exploits their mutual passion with the expertise of a puppeteer, even when her own career is halted by injury. Mike Faist’s Art is the winner, at least up until the action of Challengers takes place, both in love and on court, having claimed multiple Grand Slam titles and married Tashi, who is now his coach; Josh O’Connor’s Patrick is the loser, down on his luck and his game, but who gets one surprising last chance at glory—and at Tashi—in a “Challengers” event, the sport’s minor league. There, on court and off, the threesome’s passions explode once again.

Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) is unafraid to dive deep into the (surprisingly good) script’s inherent melodrama, especially as its climax reaches a wild, weather-torn crescendo, and the tennis, so often rendered ineptly on film, is good enough to please even many die-hard tennis fans who’ve longed to see their sport succeed on screen. The film’s final moments may enter the realm of the absurd, but Guadagnino and Zendaya got people talking about a tennis film in ways none other had. — J Paul Johnson

11. Sing Sing

The strength of Sing Sing rests in the genuineness of its performers. Taking a look inside the long-time theater program of the titular prison, hearing the incarcerated individuals, one after another, converse as artists instead of convicts with conviction and care is a moving experience. The actors sell their sentiments perfectly and for good reason. Outside of Sound of Metal Academy Award nominee Paul Raci and Rustin Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo as the lead, every man seen in Sing Sing’s ensemble is playing themselves. Each, including current awards favorite Clarence Maclin, are alums of Sing Sing. Long ago, they sat in those same positions and occupied that same ramshackle sand with distant reflections and aspirations. 

When viewers can see and realize that performative quality of Sing Sing, they will understand the high power of the genuineness possible. Sing Sing speaks to how all people, regardless of their station or place in life, deserve artistic expression. The actual Rehabilitation Through the Arts program seen in director Greg Kwedar’s uplifting film provides direction and a setting for men to reach new goals beyond their criminal sentences. Art is restorative peace and empowered dignity in safe spaces such as this. Showcasing the stirring traits of camaraderie and dedication to new ventures with authentic representatives, Sing Sing is one of the best prison films in cinema history and one of the year’s best. — Don Shanahan

10. Anora 

What more is there to say about Sean Baker’s wonderful Anora at this point? It’s the biggest-scale production of Baker’s career. It’s taken Mikey Madison from being a peripheral yet noticeable film and TV actor to full-on, center-stage stardom. It’s won numerous awards already, including the Palm d’Or at Cannes. And nothing makes me more suspect of a film than when it wins a top prize award, but (not unlike Justine Treit’s Anatomy of a Fall before it) Anora is a film that feels worthy of being put on that often-impossible pedestal. 

Now that Anora has moved through wide release and into streaming it will be interesting to see how it plays to a wider audience over time. I suspect the reasons some respond to the film so strongly will be the same reasons others will be left a bit cold by it. For one, Anora is the longest film of Baker’s career, and while it may stretch the attention span of some, the film earns that runtime in how it uses duration to transition through various tones, which is a huge part of the overall appeal and subtlety of the picture. Baker plays to an audience whose attention is all in for movies, and it might be getting increasingly difficult for viewers to be all in when streaming services treat movies like every other bit of content, none of it seemingly any more important than anything else, and all delivered in a manner that encourages distracted viewing. Anora is designed for audiences who can follow a complete visual rhyme across 2 hours and 19 minutes, from the first shot to the last. Baker is very aware that he’s making a movie that operates at a pace more suited to a pre-streaming era, and Anora feels akin to those great urban character films of the 60’s and 70’s—from Midnight Cowboy to Klute–without sacrificing any of its currency.

I should note that my experience of Anora as one of the best films of the year was not immediate. I initially received it as a very good movie, but not significantly better than his previous films Red Rocket, The Florida Project, or Tangerine (all movies I adore, all remarkably of a piece thematically with Anora), nor did it strike me as significantly better than Janizca Bravo’s twitter-adapted tale of sex workers on the road in the greatly underrated Zola from a few years back. But, as I discussed the movie afterward with my partner and we sifted through our reaction to the film moment-by-moment, as we talked through the humor and pain of that beautiful ending scene, the overall impact of the film gained steam, as it has been in the weeks since I first saw it. Anora refreshingly refuses to index what it’s about in any immediate or didactic way, but ultimately reveals itself as one of the most trenchant movies about the larger context beyond the seeming Cinderella/revisionist Pretty Woman scenarios within: sex work, exploitation, class disparity, and the cold, absurd realms of affluence. Baker places enough trust in us and what he’s orchestrated—and it’s beautifully, meticulously designed and orchestrated—that he can let the considerable larger implications of it all ride. Calling something a “slow burn” seems played out at this point—and it’s not that, because the film is immediately enjoyable and engaging throughout. The impact of Anora roils, perhaps; builds to something that would be impossible to feel if it’s not entirely given over to, slipped into like a warm winter coat. It’s a film that deserves all the attention. — Jason J. Hedrick

9. Nickel Boys

Portraying humanity and adapting great novels have been two challenges over the course of film history. Quite simply, how are we supposed to do it? RaMell Ross, known previously for his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, comes from an entirely different point of view on how to answer that question. Namely, he radically uses a first person point of view to help us understand the true boundaries of this medium that we love. Nickel Boys, based on the Colson Whitehead novel of the same name, is entirely from the perspectives of Elwood (Ethan Henrisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they survive an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida. Don’t get me wrong, it can be quite jarring to watch a film like this at first. Initially, the first-person perspective feels a tad gimmicky, especially when all of the action just so happens to surround a young Elwood.

As the plot progresses and Turner enters the picture, however, Ross really displays a mastery of the camera as he invents a cinematic language in real time. Once the camera cuts from Elwood’s view to Turner’s, it’s as if there is a whole new world we weren’t aware of. Whitehead’s novel is in third person, revealing the major plot twist until the end. But Ross’ decision to flip between Elwood and Turner’s eyes leads to exciting cinematic possibilities, especially when it comes to revealing information, the inherent act in any shot of any film. Nickel Boys creates its own form of empathy as we not only get to experience what it’s like in very specific shoes, but we get different views of that inside that world.

Part of the power that comes from Ross’ first feature film is in how it uses time. Films like 12 Years A Slave and Selma are fixed in the moment that they take place—the 1840s and 1960s, respectively. But Nickel Boys, employing a nonlinear narrative, clearly shows that the abuses of Elwood, Turner and many others (Nickel Academy is based on the Dozier School For Boys) are far more recent than anyone wants to admit. Any form of cognitive dissonance that the viewer subconsciously wants to make becomes impossible when we see an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) reviewing the abuses that happened at Nickel. It may sound hyperbolic, but possibly the most earth-shattering moment in the film is when Diggs shrugs and sighs in pain as he views the abuse on a computer. Nickel Boys engenders a whole spectrum of emotions when it comes to the United States—melancholy, boiling anger and hope. And yet, the film has time to show how cinema can portray human thoughts and feelings in a way that reminds us of the bonds we make and the conditions we are all under, but only understand subtlety. Ross has made something that will last a lifetime and has very little precedent. This film will undoubtedly live within our nation’s subconscious for years to come. — Henry O’Brien

8. Megalopolis 

Megalopolis is quite possibly the most leftist, optimistic film I’ve seen this century. Writer-director Francis Ford Coppola has a clear thesis in mind, and it’s one of hope, even if that hope is rooted in fantasy, ultimately making the film bittersweet.

I’m clearly in the minority when I say that this film was not the least bit confusing, and I could see every detail line up with what Coppola is saying. If we just do the right thing, we can change society for the better. It’s as simple as that. Except, of course, it isn’t that simple, and the film grapples with that reality. Adam Driver’s Cesar Catalina and Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia Cicero ultimately understand this, and I believe it’s smart that Coppola doesn’t make them idealistic. They are not perfect people, and they accept that. More importantly, though, he has them understand the way the world works, specifically New Rome.

Given the film’s subtitle is A Fable, it stands to reason that Megalopolis should not be taken either too seriously as well as not at face value, in the sense that logic and reasoning as we know it don’t apply to the happenings in the narrative. The point isn’t that there’s an A, B, C plot. It’s what the characters and choices in the film represent. There are a lot of stand-ins in the movie. To no one’s surprise, New Rome is a stand-in for New York City-and by extension the United States. At times, a single character is meant to represent a whole group, such as Giancarlo Esposito’s Franklin Cicero, who represents conservativism and is a direct foil to Cesar Catalina. Other times, we have, say, Shia LeBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher representing how someone can use the reasonable frustrations of a society to gain power, the way a certain-and very real-politician has done so over the past decade. There’s also Jon Voight’s Hamilton Crassus III, who is a stand-in for the wealthy who could do something to help society with their money and each day reaffirm their decision not to. Even at the end, when he gives his money away, he wants it on the record that he wanted to do that all along, which we know is not true.

Coppola doesn’t let anyone get away scot-free. Whether it’s the media in Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum, celebrity and false morality with Grace VanderWaal’s Vesta Sweetwater, or simply how we treat family in the modern world, Coppola isn’t above pointing fingers at what’s wrong in the world. Most storytellers offer vague, general answers to the problems addressed in their narratives. However, Coppola is bold enough to show what is possible. The main issue I have, though, is that his solution involves a made-up building material called Megalon, which Cesar Catalina wants to use to build a new world literally on top of the old; hence, “Megalopolis”, which is what he will call this new land. Cesar Catalina is an artist, and he needs the ability to create. His art will help save the world, as long as the world gets in line.

Does Coppola ultimately believe that art will save us? Is the Artist the most important individual we have? I can’t say with certainty that this is what the film is saying, regardless of what Coppola and others have said regarding Megalopolis. To me, this is a film about strength in community. It’s a film that demands that society stop with the nonsense and build a better future. The media is too busy holding the hand of the politician who will ask for the votes of the people in exchange for absolute power. The extremely wealthy care only about staying wealthy, until it looks better to appear charitable. People will look up to celebrities as role models, until the truth is revealed. And the family unit will stay weakened if we continue to treat our loved ones with contempt.

Francis Ford Coppola’s fable is a film that has stayed with me since I saw it several months ago and I see no future when it falls out of favor with me. It’s one of Coppola’s best, and if I’m in the minority in that, it’s okay. Seldom do we all agree on anything. Still, I see the film as this: the Artist is the visionary, the one who shows us the way, but the Artist cannot do this alone; none of us can. The future can be Megalopolis, if we literally choose it to be.— Michael Suarez

7. Emilia Perez

I’ve felt very out of touch with the mainstream reception of films this year. Everyone loved Wicked, Smile 2, Kinds of Kindness, Rebel Ridge, Cabrini and Deadpool & Wolverine, and I hated them. Everyone hated Trap, Civil War, Alien: Romulus, A Quiet Place: Day One, The End, Joker: Folie a Deux and Megalopolis, and I loved them. However, my most uncool opinion came when I first saw Emilia Perez back at the London Film Festival in October. Coming out of that screening I had two major thoughts in my head. Firstly, that I had just watched one of the most exciting, left-field, bravura pieces of melodramatic brilliance that I’d ever had the privilege of experiencing and secondly that the discourse surrounding this film was about to be absolutely insufferable. I was vindicated on both counts.

I was coy in my initial review because I think almost any film is best experienced mostly blind, and this film’s unpredictability is one of its strongest assets, but now that it’s the end of the year and it’s been out for a while, yes, that is the plot of Emilia Perez. Emilia Perez is the story of Rita (Zoe Saldana), a lawyer hired by a trans lesbian cartel leader (Karla Sofia Gascon) to arrange her sex reassignment and thereafter reunite her with her children and fiance (Selena Gomez) and set up a charitable foundation to help assuage her guilt over the crimes committed in her service. Also it’s a musical.

Now if you think that sounds like a demented unwatchable unholy mess, then I guess it’s a free country and no one is forcing you to watch or to like Emilia Perez. However, for the grown ups in the room who think that sounds straight up awesome, Emilia Perez is the film for you. Seriously though, if you are trans or have been touched by cartel violence yourself and have seen this film yourself and have less than positive thoughts about how it represented those subjects, I have no beef with you. I have just yet to see one remotely convincing argument against this film that isn’t founded on the shallowest reading of the text possible or a fundamental lack of empathy. Cultural studies readings of films can tend to lean on overly literal readings of films, where a film’s narrative is taken as synecdoche for the filmmaker’s interpretation of these issues in real life. This is a valid approach however I do think there’s a flaw in this rubric, as in any, if it is the only lens through which we view films. Stories about trans women do not exist purely to defuse transphobic rhetoric and not every trans character is a stand-in for trans people as a whole. This is a strangely constricting view of a film that is very unambiguously sympathetic to all its characters. It is a film about personal growth, emancipation and trying to self-actualize as a woman despite the violence and injustice of the world you inherited. 

Honestly though, that doesn’t mean I’m not as baffled as the people who hate this film are that this has received such mainstream attention and adulation. I’m delighted, but still very surprised. Overperforming at the Golden Globes was likely, they’re always kind to musicals and comedies since they have several categories devoted to them and always struggle to fill them, crowbarring in nominees from left and right—Heretic and The Substance comedies indeed!—but the sweep elsewhere is unexpected. I fear that underappreciated cult curio is a better look on Emilia Perez than awards season juggernaut, but whatever the optics I still think Emilia Perez is a real winner. Funny, unpredictable, poignant, thrilling, tender and bombastic, however tacky or crass you might find it, there’s no way I can’t see this film as a totally sincere passion project exploding with life, talent and creativity.

I was often apprehensive about the film’s representation of its trans protagonist but I don’t honestly see any reason to feel they did her wrong. Yes it’s messy but so is this situation, it is unbelievable, but the characters are all behaving in ways that feel true to who they are and what we know them to be. I hear arguments like “oh you seriously expect us to have compassion for a trans woman forced to participate in drug violence because they lacked the tools to understand who they were and their insecurity drove them to lean into a violent form of masculinity to exert control over their life” and…yes! Yes I expect that! If we can praise the moral complexity of Paul Atreides then we can do the same for Emilia Perez. She, Rita and Jessi are flawed women in whom strength and weakness are intermixed in equal measures. Being a good person is about courage and perspective as well as moral fiber, and they’re all capable of altruism, hypocrisy and selfishness, love and hate, as are all of we. And before we move on, can I just say how wonderful it is to not only see a trans woman winning some of the industry’s highest honors, but to see Zoe Saldana, who absolutely killed it in this, finally getting her flowers too. I hope they both win every award going and their calendars remain booked up for the rest of their days. — Hal Kitchen

6. Red Rooms

Content warning: This segment will be dealing with sensitive subjects, including child sexual abuse and the online dissemination of exploitative material. Reader discretion is advised.

Ever since my initial assessment of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, this disquietingly terrifying film—whose pervasive sense of real-world dread is unlike anything else that’s released this year—has only latched on to my memory in increasingly obsessive forms. How do we continue to reckon with the horrific imagery that defines our online consciousness, that pervades our social media feeds and leaps at us to truly traumatic effect in unexpected places? How do we reckon with the fact that such horrifically graphic images of death, anguish, and despair are provided for the edification of the sickened souls desensitized and perversely voyeuristic enough to seek them out? How do we, then, live with the fact that those souls may stand beside us, may be our neighbors, may even lie dormant within us? Plante has no answers in his work, only the dread-inducing realization that we will never fully comprehend the darker workings of the internet, but we can find ourselves lost in the ways those workings have materialized, and how we ourselves can be participants in that grim, brutalizing voyeurism.

At the center of Red Rooms is the nauseating intrigue surrounding Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe Lokos), a serial killer who sexually abused and tortured to death three barely teenage girls for the satisfaction of the audiences in “red rooms”—restricted-access livestreams broadcast only to the dark web, the subsection of the internet where every user who enters it is anonymous by default. Two prominent faces prove themselves to gradually obsess over the deep morbidity of the case; one of them is Clementine, a young woman so romantically obsessed with Chevalier under the whims of hybristophilia that she’ll shout it from the tallest tower in Québec if she so pleases. The other, more impenetrable face is Kelly-Anne, an otherwise benign-seeming fashion model whose attractive appearance hides a darker self—one who has uninhibited access to all of the nauseating livestreams that Chevalier recorded, and whose internet prowess in the deepest corners of the dark web is unmatched to what eventually unfolds into an absolutely terrifying degree. As the two of them cross paths, and the nature of the case becomes even more grim and complex, Red Rooms barrels with an uneasy degree of confidence down the profoundly disturbing extents they’ll go to prove their devotion to Chevalier and the case that surrounds him—as well as where it is they’re willing to draw the line, if at all.

It’s difficult to describe Red Rooms further without plunging into the specifics of its characters’ hybristophilic obsessions, but I’ll leave this segment off with a passage from my prior review: “Whether it be the visceral sounds of agonizing death, the gazes that hide morbid obsessions, or the search for evidence that could point one either towards justice or further depravity, Red Rooms‘ most obvious source of horror is the way it knows how readily accessible all of this darkness has become online. It is brilliantly, sharply aware—perhaps far too sharply—just how much that darkness is no longer a subject of disgust, but of a perverse, voyeuristic, and widely
propagated fascination.” — James Y. Lee

5. The Brutalist

From the moment we see the Statue of Liberty upside down along with some big brass from Daniel Blumberg’s score, it’s clear that director Brady Corbet has aspirations for capital G greatness. His films always aspire to tackle the massive powers of our society, as shown by his 2018 film Vox Lux, which aims to look at pop stardom and tragedies such as school shootings. With The Brutalist, co-written by Corbet and his wife Mona Fastvold, takes on the immigrant experience and post-World War II era in the United States of America. With obvious allusions and gestures toward Paul Thomas Anderson and Francis Ford Coppola, the film easily could have been a work of hollow pastiche. With a 215-minute runtime, intermission and chapters titled “The Enigma of Arrival” and “The Hard Core of Beauty,” there’s plenty of opportunity for such high-minded ambitions to fall laughably short.

But the payoff feels immense as The Brutalist stays relevant to our time and ultimately shows the divide between the artist and capitalism. Aside from clear acts of violence between brutalist architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and billionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), Corbet displays how styles of art and architecture can be clutched by the powers that be and used to perpetuate ways of life that only look to infect people with greed. The film, in both its main plot and subplots, works in cycles, like how the persecution of Tóth and fellow survivors of the Holocaust leads to Zionism. The Brutalist truly depicts a system where nothing about the quotidian routines or moments of humanity matters, only some form of a bottom line. This is perfectly encapsulated in the closing lines from Tóth’s niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

The performances from the star-studded lineup hint at the rottenness of the journey. Brody, bringing a similar gravity from his Best Actor-winning role in The Pianist, possesses a potent anger and selfishness that appears in spurts but adds a haunted tone to the whole production. Felicity Jones, playing the role of Tóth’s wife Erzsébet, appears in the film’s second half and reveals the nastiness behind their family. Jones’ role may initially seem underserved as the protagonist’s housewife. But Erzsébet serves the plot by revealing how ugly Tóth can get, whether it comes to his relationship with Van Buren or his heroin addiction. Furthermore, the successor to the Van Buren fortune, Harry (Joe Alwyn), builds upon a level of abuse within this system by continually playing second fiddle to Tóth in the eyes of Harrison. In the final moments of the film, Alwyn communicates how families like the Van Buren’s, beneficiaries of capitalism, can harbor such dark and controlling tendencies. The final look he gives on screen as he runs to search for his father, made my heart sink. The Brutalist features plenty of these moments where your heart will go through an emotional rollercoaster, and it will make you question what on earth any of us can do in the face of systems like these. — Henry O’Brien

4. Civil War 

Watching Alex Garland’s masterpiece, Civil War, for the second time, when it arrived on 4K a few months ago, I was struck by how much more I cared about the characters than I did the first time. Originally, I was struck by the film’s themes and ideas, how they meshed and clashed with each other in the cinematic equivalent of white-water rapids. It felt dangerous to see a fairly big-budgeted film that featured the assassination of a fictional, though certainly modern, American President in its climax. What exactly was Garland getting at? Given that it takes work to see the film’s politics to derive some semblance of meaning in what that killing amounts to, such critical thinking was at the forefront of my thoughts when I watched the film in theaters earlier this year.

Alas, the second time was much different. Gone were the questions of theme, given that I’d already figured things out for myself, whether anyone’s ideas including Garland’s aligned with my own. I believe the film is a warning about where a fascist leader could take the United States. But that’s not the important stuff. Garland spends a lot of time with the four leads, specifically the relationship between Kirsten Dunst’s Lee Smith and Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie, and I believe it’s because he’s curious as to why people put themselves in harm’s way for a story.

Civil War is as much about journalists as it is about, well, war. In fact, I’d say the film is a lot less concerned with the war part of its title than the civil part. What does it mean to be civil? Simply put, it’s about the citizens of a country and their relationships with one another, as well as the government. Garland has chosen four very different people to follow in this regard, even though they are all related in their profession, which has become a part of who they are. Lee, Jessie, Joel, and Sammy have chosen to cover the so-called final days of the United States, before the Western Forces storm Washington, D.C. and kill the President. What are their politics? Do they have any? Does it make a journalist more responsible and ethical to not have any? Is it possible for anyone to genuinely not have any?

In the film’s final sequence, it’s clear that journalists care about one thing: the story. They can certainly feel the adrenaline that comes from being in a warzone, with explosions and bullets flying by their heads, and they can feel fear when things get very real, but there is a disconnect present throughout the entire film that reaches its climax when Jessie takes that picture of Lee. Minutes later, as the credits roll and Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” (used to flawless effect, in my opinion), we see just how happy Joel is with his story. It’s ugly, but it’s very honest.

I care about the main characters, but I’m not sure I like them, aside from Lee and Sammy who get the most pathos, because they have managed to hold onto their humanity. The former feels guilt for having lived through some horrific events, only to become famous for taking pictures of said horrific events, and Dunst’s face says it all as the film progresses. The one shot near the end says it all: she’s free. As for Sammy, he’s the oldest and seems to be the most ethical of the bunch. As much as the group should listen to him, they don’t, and Garland seems to want to complicate that. Is Sammy always right? I don’t believe so, but at the same time, I do believe his mind and his heart are in the right place with everything he says and does. I can’t say the same with the other characters.

As Civil War draws to a close, we’re left with two journalists: a writer and a photographer. Will they tell the story of what went down the night the United States fell, and the President was killed by the Western Forces? Of course they will. They will probably win awards and prestige, and they will most likely continue doing what they love. But is that enough? Is it enough to simply get the story and tell it? No. It isn’t. It should be responsibility of journalists, and by extension the media, to question everything. It cannot be enough to regurgitate observation or what someone has said. There is a very real reason why Garland never tells us explicitly which political party the President belongs to, even if we could conclude with some close reading of the film. He wants us to engage with the events of the film. More than anything, he doesn’t want us to be like Joel or Jessie. He wants us to ask the six questions.

I don’t watch the news much anymore. Too often am I simply told a bunch of information, most of it one-sided. How abysmal one’s citizenry’s critical thinking can become without all the information. I suppose if the media cannot do the thinking for us, we must do it for ourselves. Is a civil war coming to the United States in the immediate future? The honest answer is that I do not know, and that’s as bad as saying yes. It should be a no, but it isn’t. If the end comes, I want to hold out hope that I will understand how things got to where they got. I want to believe that Lee, Jessie, Joel, and Sammy don’t represent the media at large, that they are simply fanciful creations from writer-director Alex Garland. I want to believe that, but unfortunately, I’m not so sure. Civil War is the tragedy of the decade that might very well prove its point. I hope that I am wrong. — Michael Suarez

3. Dune Pt. 2

I did not like Dune Pt. One. I thought it straight up sucked. It was boring, grey and lifeless with generic characters and uninteresting world building, no third act and it only affirmed my opinion that Denis Villeneuve was a great director wasting his talents making these sci-fi spin-off and remakes when he could be making great original movies like Prisoners and Maelstrom.

Then Dune Pt. Two came out. 

I do not think I was wrong about Pt. One, I’ve rewatched it since and I still think it’s boring, but Dune Pt. Two is everything I wanted Dune Pt. One to be. They addressed everything. Everywhere that movie lacked this one excels. The characters and world are more fleshed out and three dimensional, it subverts the white savior narrative the first film spends its whole runtime ploddingly recreating and it has color! Somehow the entirely monochrome sequence in this movie feels more vibrant than anything in the full-color first film. It’s sociological high fantasy sci-fi melodrama with the maturity and atmosphere that the material deserves. It’s thinking bigger than almost any of its contemporaries. It takes all the bland simplicity of the first film’s conflict and starts adding layers of complexity and has the bravery to make a story that leaves the viewer feeling ambivalent about every character’s every action, with all the knotty social dilemmas and complex storytelling where the consequences of its characters actions are weighed in generations not minutes and heroism is indistinguishable from tyranny.

I can hardly believe that a film this cynical and grandiose made it, but I suppose that’s because it’s what we need. Films like Gladiator 2 tried to trade on that old fashioned “let’s all pull together and build a better version of what we already have” naivety and it felt so hollow and empty. This is the message we need in 2024. Society cannot move forward until we start thinking beyond the next election cycle, beyond the next hero of the moment. Dune Pt. Two is a tangled thought experiment that leaves the viewer awed, enthralled and confused, not about what happened in the film, but about what they think should have happened. Paul’s ascent as Lisan Al-Gaib is a moment analogous to Arthur’s ascent to Joker in 2019, a moment of perverse catharsis and triumphal ambivalence as our hero plunges themselves into abstraction, effacing individual morality to create a unifying image on behalf of a cause they’re not even really a part of, as Andor put it “burning [their] life for a sunrise [they’ll] never see”. Becoming wrath incarnate, becoming a monster, because only monsters get anything done, and as they do so, testing the viewer’s ability to resist cheering. — Hal Kitchen

2. Evil Does Not Exist 

In Evil Does Not Exist director Ryusuke Hamaguchi continues the deliberately paced style that made Drive My Car so resonant a few years ago, as well as the compassionate engagement across disparate characters found in the triptych structure of his equally excellent Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. But Evil Does Not Exist is a departure in how it announces its existential preoccupations from the title and ultimately explores them through a highly instinctual and formalist technique. Evil Does Not Exist is haunted by the ghosts of Godard, Bresson, and Stan Brakhage, all filmmakers whose formalist tendencies draw attention to the materials and construction of film, whether it be Godard’s erratic anti-continuity in
both sound and editing, Bresson’s anti-psychological acting approach, or Brakhage’s attention to the intersection of nature and the physicality of filming itself.

Hamaguchi is a student of cinema history, to be sure, but, like a good actor, he doesn’t bring his homework to the stage and the conversations at the heart of Evil Does Not Exist are primarily with the living, not the dead, and the extent to which they guide the film is a testament to the director’s unique capacity for collaboration. This is his second film with cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa since 2015’s Happy Hour, and his second film with composer Eiko Ishibashi after Drive My Car. Auteur traditions are steeped in examples of the director as authoritarian, but Hamaguchi’s process of building story and images seems increasingly steeped in the act of trusting the instincts of others, particularly in how he allowed Ishibashi’s music to be the starting point for the story and visual ideas in the film. As a result, you cannot think of Evil Does Not Exist apart from her score, creating an experience that truly seems something set apart from our modern experience of movies. The result is a film that seems to be finding its way forward scene by scene—that seems to be listening—allowing the viewer to indulge in every frame, to experience the natural settings that dominate the film while somehow allowing the smaller gestures of each performance to resonate within the frame.

The next essential element in this collaboration is Hamaguchi’s ensemble, particularly Hitoshi Omika and Ryô Nishikawa who portray Takumi and Hana, the father and daughter at the center of the film. Takumi and Hana’s rural existence is one connected to and reliant on the natural world, observant and respectful, but not over-sentimentalized. Before there is anything approaching a central conflict in the film, the film acclimates us—almost hypnotizes us—to the rhythm of their day-to-day, Ishibashi’s score underlying everything with an engrossing, indeterminable inevitability. Once the film introduces the characters who represent the corporate interests who want to construct a “glamping” site in Takumi and Hana’s neck of the woods, we might expect the characters to devolve and disappear into the dramatic escalation of the film, but instead of forcing the drama Hamaguchi develops those characters who, in most movies, would simply play out their “bad guy” roles—the wonderful Ayaka Shibutani and Ryuji Kosaka playing Mayazumi and Takashi, two beautifully drawn and unexpectedly sympathetic characters caught between failed careers in the entertainment industry and an unethical investment scheme.

I know a movie is for me if I want to go right back in, and Evil Does Not Exist definitely inspired that compulsion to turn right around and buy another ticket (and, as a bonus, Hamaguchi has made a 74-minute companion to Evil Does Not Exist called Gift, a silent revision of the film designed to be live-scored by Ishibashi herself, so I hope there’s a chance to see that sometime in the future, as well). In 2024 there’s been more than enough evidence of movies increasingly catering to low-frequency, multi-screen attention spans, so all the more reason to spotlight the work of those who demand and reward attention, not just fandom. Evil Does Not Exist is the kind of flower that blooms in times like these—a
film that actually feels like there’s something to go back for, that reminds us that new forms and philosophical conversations are still possible at the movies. I realize how anachronistic and square it is to talk about “art” at the movies these days, but there are some significant artists out there doing the work, Hamaguchi primary among them. — Jason J. Hedrick

1. I Saw the TV Glow 

Although trans narratives and experiences have been explored onscreen in the past through films like A Fantastic Woman or Tangerine, I do believe we are entering a new era when it comes to media made by and for trans viewers and horror filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is at the forefront of this trans avant-garde. The fact I can also champion it as a visionary masterpiece as well as one of the most groundbreaking films of our modern era is therefore extremely gratifying.

I Saw the TV Glow is everything you’ve heard it is and more. Brilliant, beautiful and terrifying, it is a movie that will define this generation of filmmaking more than anything else we saw in theaters this year. It is simultaneously a “they don’t make ’em like that anymore” movie—vibrant, essential, ambiguous and timeless—and a film that, owing to the nature of its subject matter, wouldn’t ever have been made before now. It’s closest touchstone is very definitely Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, unpacking the existential horror and latent evil of small town existence via tales of liminal planes and psychic connections, yet it is completely its own animal as well and I might even say, a more perfect construction than almost anything Lynch ever composed.

The film begins with Owen (Justice Smith) as a young boy who meets the older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who inducts Owen into her obsession with a late night TV show “The Pink Opaque”, about two teen girls using their psychic connection to foil a diabolical supernatural villain. In “The Pink Opaque”, through the affinity she feels with its characters, Owen finds not just a comfort show or a bonding experience with Maddy, but a persistent wake up call, a yearning of self-actualization and a mirror to her unacknowledged dormant self. It’s that same “splinter in the mind” that Neo experienced in The Matrix, that voice saying “this is not your reality”, “this is not who you are”. But where The Matrix colors itself in slick action sci-fi wish fulfillment, I Saw the TV Glow finds its expression in the existential terror of letting that phone ring, on and on. 

Schoenbrun displayed a tonne of potential with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow is a stunning fulfillment of that which marks them out as a true voice of a generation, doubling down on that films exploration of ambiguous parasocial relationships with media and tying it to the most poignant and urgent expression of trans experience ever put to screen, resulting in one of the most viscerally affecting and legitimately troubling experiences I’ve had at the cinema in years. Each of its two stars are a revelation, giving intense and fearful portraits of two characters in mortal fear of their lives throughout every mundane minute of them and each delivers some truly captivating monologues. Relieved of the shackles of a microbudget, Schoenbrun’s directing blossoms into a vivid and uncompromising style that creates bold and sincere images that are as beautiful as they are powerful and I can’t omit mention of the astonishing music both from Alex G who composes the film’s score and the pop artists who embarked on this adventure.

This film is a triumph of mood and these musicians played as vital a role in that as the cinematographer Eric K. Yue or the editor Sophi Marshall. I cannot stress how unlikely the lineup of collaborators Schoenbrun assembled here is, from producers Emma Stone and Bear McCreary to guest stars Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst, but I cannot thank these people enough for doing their bit to bring this devastating miracle of a film to fruition. Whatever Schoenbrun does next, a film like this would likely remain the defining statement of any artist’s career. — Hal Kitchen