MY FAVORITE FILMS OF 2024
The movies that got all the Maryellens last year
Anora, Neon
I can’t tell you if these are the best films that came out this year—that’s an utterly subjective proposition. These were the best for me. They run the gamut from a brutally honest documentary about the West Bank (No Other Land) to a gently touching story about three friends in Mumbai (All We Imagine as Light) to a comedic tour de force about a stripper (Anora).
The film calendar being a capricious animal, many critics are citing three films I raved about last year: Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, Green Book, and Janet Planet. I was fortunate enough to catch them at the 2023 New York Film Festival, but they went on to get U.S. releases in 2024. They’re all terrific movies—definitely seek them out!—and would be welcome on my list this year, too. If I could only figure out what to nudge off.
Of course, except for the occasional Bloomberg Pursuits outing, I don’t get to go to movies for a living, so there are a bunch of 2024 films I haven’t managed to see. I can’t tell you if the Latvian animated smash Flow or Spanish auteur Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes live up to the hype. I’m not sure anyone anywhere has actually seen Colman Domingo in the marvelous-sounding (and Oscar-hyped) Sing Sing. The movie I’m most excited to see, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, seems likely to be considered a 2025 film, so at least I have hope for that one. When and if I catch up on these titles, I’ll do my best to keep you posted.
Anyhoo. Drum roll, please!
Anora
Anora, a tragicomic sex farce following a stripper’s love affair with the zany son of a Russian oligarch, is that rare film that is both fun, sexy, and surprising and artistically and intellectually fulfilling. I got to review writer-director Sean Baker’s dazzling film after the New York Film Festival for Bloomberg Pursuits. Here’s an excerpt: “The genius of Anora, though, is that Baker wraps this comedy inside a taut, moving exposé: The film starts with a survey of sex work, a slice of life from the perspective of the exploited. We see Ani moving through her routines, not just the pole and lap dances, but also her exhausted off-hours, her struggles to pay the rent, her petty rivalries with the other women at the strip club. And after her love affair explodes and she goes to war with Vanya’s very rich and very angry parents, it resolves with a journey straight into her heart—and a resounding catharsis. Anora goes from social realism to farce to tragedy, yet remarkably, Baker takes us in these different directions without any awkward tone shifts. The heartache is hidden in hilarity and vice versa.
All We Imagine as Light, Janus Films
All We Imagine as Light
India’s decision not to submit this perfect little movie about two nurses and a cook who work at a Mumbai hospital for Best International Film at this year’s Oscars is perplexing indeed. All We Imagine as Light is a timeless, engrossing work of subtle beauty. From my review: “Payal Kapadia has made a mesmerizing film, aching with empathy, with a light touch that immediately reminded me of two of my all-time faves, the Italian Neorealist masterpieces Bicycle Thieves and Nights of Cabiria. Kapadia tells a big story by focusing on single faces and small moments. Through the eyes of these three struggling women, the director takes the measure of globalization itself.”
I’m Still Here
This was the film I most looked forward to at the NYFF, from the masterful Walter Salles, the Brazilian auteur who made The Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station (one of my very favorite films). And it did not disappoint. I’m Still Here is a sweeping story of a painful period in recent Brazilian history, centered on the struggle of one family in Rio de Janeiro. And Fernanda Torres, as civil rights leader Eunice Paiva, gives the best performance by anyone anywhere this year. From my review: “The movie’s first hour feels a lot like Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander or Fellini’s Amarcord—a leisurely journey into the richly detailed past to visit a big happy family. … After agents of the country’s right-wing dictatorship abduct [her husband], Eunice faces a series of impossible choices. What should she share with the children? Are they even safe? How is she going to pay the bills? These straightforward concerns—all of them nightmares—are soon supplanted by an even larger challenge. Eunice and her children go from playing volleyball on the beach to mobilizing for battle.”
Seed of the Sacred Fig
Seed of the Sacred Fig tells the story of the turbulent months after Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Iran, all through the lens of one family’s painful divide. From my review: “Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof filmed The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret in Tehran over 70 days beginning in December 2023, then smuggled the footage to editor Andrew Bird in Germany. This secrecy gives the film a suitably chilly, claustrophobic vibe. Everything important happens behind closed doors, most information is passed in whispers. … This one small family emerges as a stand-in for a whole country coming apart. And for Rasoulof, the story’s end is all but certain—when Seed was chosen for the Cannes Film Festival, he fled Iran on foot, beginning a 28-day journey to Germany to avoid flogging and eight years in prison. We often describe artists as courageous, for looking at characters on the margins of society, for making brave stylistic or dramaturgical choices. Rasoulof though is a true profile in courage. He and his crew risked their lives to make this brilliant, dangerous film.”
Viet and Nam, Cinema Inutile
Viet and Nam
For all I know, Viet and Nam will be a film from 2024 that critics are raving about in 2026. The first feature from documentarian Trương Minh Quý isn’t getting a U.S. release until later this spring. The movie was banned in Vietnam—though it won piles of prizes at film festivals this fall in Singapore, Bangkok, and the Philippines. According to the director, the regime in Hanoi was troubled not by the film’s queer content—it’s a gay love story—but by the generally dark portrayal of the country. It’s a pity. Viet and Nam, set in 2001, midway between the end of the war with America and Vietnam’s booming present, offers an honest, sensitive, and incredibly moving portrait of the country’s ongoing transition.
From my review: “Viet and Nam (we never learn which is which) are miners. When we first see them, they’re on a break, covered in dust, lying against a black wall of sparkling ore. They’ll return to these hidden places in the mine from time to time, sharing intimate moments that morph into pure abstraction—lying against their bed of shimmering coal, the men could be floating across a starry night. You forget how filthy and unhealthy the mine is; they are living in a dream. … Viet and Nam is a film about digging—digging for coal, digging for bones, digging for truth. In one scene, the men even dig into each others bodies, as if they could ingest each other’s mysterious essence. The movie uncovers the country’s soul: The lovers/twins/doubles at its heart are Vietnam’s two halves. They’re a family slowly, painfully knitting back together.”
Comme le feu (Who by Fire)
Who by Fire, written and directed by Philippe Lesage, is a coming-of-age story. Jeff (the terrific Noah Parker), a teenage film buff, spends a vacation with his best friend Max—and Max’s famous director father and sexually wiser sister—in a remote corner of the Quebec woods. As such, it follows the general outlines of all such tales: Jeff has to survive a few life-and-death challenges, including dangerous hunts and even more dangerous seductions; he has to confront some difficult truths about his idols; and he has to finally go for it, so to speak, to stake his claim in life. But if the terrain of the story is broadly familiar, Lesage’s route through it is wholly surprising.
Cinematographer Balthazar Lab, working with the marvelous cast on location, works miracles, beautifully capturing each seemingly improvised scene. Lesage places a real premium on putting us in the woods, on the water, in the mountain house, and especially around the big, argumentative dinner table. The movie’s three set-piece scenes all unfold over dinners, and each one is a tour de force. Who by Fire is a doctoral seminar in human behavior hidden inside a gorgeous, funny, and often shocking film. Alas, I can’t tell you when this is coming to theaters or the streamers, but don’t miss it when it does. Lesage has made a timeless classic.
Challengers
I gave Luca Guadagnino’s daring and supersexy sports flick 4 Maryellens, but the film, which stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist as a prickly menage a trois, keeps growing on me. From my review: “Guadagnino’s specialty is young love—especially young, obsessive love. But if he may seem like an odd choice to coach young stars in what is at least tangentially a sports movie, don’t fear. He quickly gets into the game. With cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (the director’s lensman on Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria) and editor Marco Costa (his cutter on Bones and All), he works to mimic the rhythms and strategies of the sport beautifully, turning every scene into a match. He cuts left, right, left, right—gone are the languorous long shots of his elegiac earlier films. The camera is the fourth player here, and like a really great pro it constantly mixes up the angles. We’re always on our toes, unsure if we should expect a forehand down the line, an overhead lob, or a devious drop shot.”
I also want to call out the movie’s brilliant techno score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which has received a lot of praise. Guadagnino leans hard into it to signify sudden shifts in mood and tension. It’s a revelatory use of music that I imagine filmmakers will study for years, like the zither score of The Third Man or “Yumeji’s Theme” from In the Mood for Love. Reznor and Ross already won a Golden Globe; in a just world, they’ll take home the Oscar, too.
Universal Language, Maison 4:3
Universal Language
No one knew before Universal Language how badly we needed a loving homage to modern Iranian cinema superimposed onto a gently comic portrait of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The experimental filmmaker Matthew Rankin directed this bizarre, hilarious, and surprisingly topical portrait of his hometown, which he co-wrote with Iranian-Canadian co-star Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi. The movie starts with this charming conceit: What if everyone in Canada (west of Quebec) spoke Farsi instead of English? The story that follows from this Monty Pythonesque absurdity slowly and beautifully progresses into stranger, sillier, and more wonderful territory as it goes. The less I tell you about this utterly unique movie, the better. But do not miss it—it opens in U.S. theaters at the end of January.
No Other Land
By far the most important film of the year—if not the easiest to watch—is No Other Land. Capturing the slow, grinding displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank, the documentary is a painful primer in modern colonialism. From my review: “The film zeroes in on Masafer Yatta, a small corner of the territories, where Israel’s courts ruled in 2022 that the military could raze a collection of centuries-old Palestinian villages to make way for a tank-training installation. Periodically a group of soldiers in armored vehicles rolls up the hill, leading a procession of bulldozers. They surround a single home and harangue the people inside to evacuate and drag their belongings outside. While the family frantically collects its possessions, corrals screaming children, and helps the elderly to safety, a crowd gathers to protest the demolition. Their outrage is moot: A bulldozer tears into the building, and soon it’s a pile of rubble. Once night falls, the villagers return to begin rebuilding their home in the dark.”
The film finds its heart in the fraught friendship that develops between Yuval Abraham, a freelance Israeli reporter, and the Palestinian activist Basel Adra, who decide to work together to document the decades-long atrocity. As they help each other survive a series of assaults and make several close escapes, we watch their intimacy slowly bridge the yawning gulf between them. Good news: At long last, No Other Land has found a U.S. distributor; it opens at Film Forum in Manhattan on January 31, then expands to other theaters.
Queer, A24
Tied for 10th
Luca Guadagnino followed Challengers this year with the even more daring Queer, adapted from William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novella about an alcoholic American expat (Daniel Craig) pursuing a much younger man (Drew Starkey) in 1950s Mexico City. The film suffers from the book’s shortcoming—a disjointed (but exquisitely shot) detour into the jungles of Ecuador for an ayahuasca trip—but I’d argue that Guadagnino sticks the landing: Queer begins as a moving character study and ends as a harrowing illustration of gay men’s tragic inheritance.
Azazel Jacobs basically performs open heart surgery with no anesthetic in His Three Daughters. The wise, devastating film features Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen as somewhat estranged sisters who’ve reunited in their father’s Lower East Side apartment to sit with him during his final days. I had issues with The Brutalist—I’ve got so many issues!—but I have to recommend it anyway for its sheer ambition and beauty, not to mention Adrien Brody’s searing portrayal of the film’s protean, doomed hero.
There were some excellent mainstream films this year, as well. Alex Garland’s Civil War, starring Kirsten Sunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Jesse Plemmons, deftly folds contemporary political commentary into a dystopian war movie. The taut thriller September 5 tells how CBS sportscasters basically reinvented modern broadcasting the cover the Munich Olympics hostage crisis. Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s standout cast features two of my favorite actors, John Magaro and Leonie Benesch. I also thoroughly enjoyed Edward Berger’s Conclave, a sort of papal procedural featuring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, and loads of Michelangelo. Timothée Chalamet perfectly channels Bob Dylan, the sainted asshole of American music, in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. (A full review is coming, I swear!) If you can’t get enough of Timmy, you’ll probably also love Dune Part 2. Nobody anywhere does slow-cinema sci-fi like Denis Villeneuve.
But as always, “international” cinema is more interesting. South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo drops Isabelle Huppert into A Traveler’s Needs, his latest delightful tale of conflicted Koreans getting drunk together; the iconic French star is right at home in his perverse universe. Tetsuo Shinohara’s Happiness served up a sort of Dazed and Confused update set in the dystopian Tokyo of the near future. It’s hard for me to even categorize Miséricorde, from Alain Guiraudie, the director who gave us Stranger by the Lake. Félix Kysyl plays a young man who comes home to his small town in the South of France for a funeral; the mushroom hunts, sexual assignations, and awkward meals that follow are creepy, hilarious, and perversely insightful. And you won’t want to miss Pedro Almodóvar’s first film in English, The Room Next Door, about a dying war correspondent (the luminous Tilda Swinton) who reaches out to her old best friend (an equally luminous Julianne Moore) to help her hasten the end.
To make the intriguing Dahomey, French-Senagalese director Mati Diop got permission to tag along as 26 royal treasures from the African Kingdom of Dahomey were returned to modern-day Benin from a Paris museum. Dahomey isn’t a documentary in the traditional mode; Diop gave the artworks voices, for instance, and she staged the electrifying discussion among Beninese students that finishes the movie. But it’s a fascinating film.
Lastly, if you are in the mood for a zany, shaggy lesbian road comedy—and who isn’t!?—you can catch that ride in Drive-Away Dolls, which my pal Tricia Cooke made with her husband Ethan Coen. Yes, I am biased. But it’s a hoot.
