Film of the Year 2024

In 2024, no one can hear you scream.

Not over the cacophony of noise. No one can hear you scream when everyone is screaming. Not over the social unrest. Not over the fracturing of a country. Not over the piling disillusionment and the weight of crushing apathy. No one can hear you when nobody is heard and everyone is talking.

Now the singular sanctity of The Movies become more essential. The arts are where, if we cannot be heard, we can at least hear. And maybe some of those voices will sound like ours. Maybe they will speak for us.

Maybe we can say what we mean in our art and find our hope in great works about empathy, identity, and social reform. There is still hope. Hold it tight and love each other. Our love is all we have.

Alien: Romulus

Every good element of past Alien movies is pulled into this one. This is an efficient horror movie that does not evade the genre’s trappings at all, but instead, doubles down on the fundamental and defining layers of good Slasher horror filmmaking. It’s an immaculate result. The rule is proven yet again: all Alien movies are good movies. And this is cohesively one of the best of those.

Evil Does Not Exist

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi directs from a place of reserved quietude and yet his movies are expansive, not restrictive, exploring humanist themes, and staying close to the heart of his character. So goes his follow-up to the brilliant Drive My Car (2021); once again, Hamaguchi channels creative partner Eiko Ishibashi’s deeply-feeling score, which seems to form the emotional direction of the film, especially provoking movement when the film will otherwise stay inside its poignant slowness. There is much to uncover here, a foreground and background procession of events, an environmentally-friendly recourse for a town challenged with a company’s plans for glamping facilities. This is essential, human work, operating along a high register of care and empathy.

Nosferatu

Evil Does Exist. Call it Nosferatu. Robert Eggers sharpens his teeth on his Dream Project. Eggers’ Nosferatu acknowledges the wide cinematic history that informs our ideas about the character while also creating out of classical components, a vitalized new horror movie that perfectly end-caps the year. Stylish in its grim darkness and cinematically reveling in all its vampiric energy. A wonderful addition to a classical canon that points to the past but also a renewed future in major monster movies from prominent directors.

The People’s Joker

What better movie to represent 2024 than The People’s Joker? Vera Drew’s masterclass satire makes a tremendous clown-show out of playing with fair use, in the funniest and most clever movie you can watch this year. Working within the framework of licenses and known IP, Drew twists the Joker mythos so that it gorgeously represents a trans coming-of-age story; one of the best ideas ever to come out of a use of intellectual property, and how brilliant that it’s within this essential outsider work that doubles as an absolutely terrific movie.

Anora

Sean Baker has become an expert at locating his movies. Locality personalizes a movie, sets it somewhere that feels like a place, projects the dimensions of the setting to the audience, saying places matter and are characters too. The American spaces Sean Baker’s cinema inhabits are specific, sensory, use color precisely, and are worlds unto themselves. We feel like we have visited a place after we have seen a Sean Baker movie — as he captures the soul and interiority of America, one moving picture at a time.

I Saw the TV Glow

Every part of I Saw the TV Glow is exactly in the right place. You cannot change anything without shifting the meaning. The movie is constructed out of a shared passion and empathy for how we connect to media. It understands that it might offer the same opportunity back to us. For many people, especially those interested in exploring their identities through the media they consume, this is a work to treasure and hold tight, because movies like this are rare. Jane Schoenbrun’s new movie is a generational signal of warmth and inclusion, utilizing the dark threads of horror storytelling to pull the audience in and make sure they know that they belong. The movie is doing for you exactly what the fictional space of The Pink Opaque is doing for its character. It’s asking you to join the program — if you ever cannot find yourself, come on in, the TV is glowing and tonight’s feature is just for you.

Conclave

Will the church hold the progressive line or regress into the past? That is the real conflict at the heart of Conclave, wherein the story richly expands so — while you can make political parallels — the specificity is the point. Imagine the feeling Catholic art stirs inside you: something commanding authority, perhaps respect or disdain, powerful and bold-faced, designed to captivate and inspire awe; that’s also how Conclave feels. This year, the contending awards hopefuls seem to be too commercial or not commercial enough, but Conclave is that sweet middle-ground, a film so rich and full of substance, it would make the perfect choice. When the Academy sequesters themselves and considers the year’s screeners, the name Conclave ought to be written across every single ballot. We cannot agree about who to elect but maybe we can agree that political processes invigorate us and inspire us to fight for the right cause. This year, Conclave is the right cause.

Flow

Not only a wonderful achievement in animation, the Latvian cat movie is also one of the year’s finest films. A dialogue-free adventure between animals. A wondrously expressive and deeply-feeling work of animation. An antidote to what plaques the big budget animations of the day. An exceptional example of what else movies can be. Flow will capture your heart and stay there.

Daughters

Every year deserves a movie so big-hearted and empathetic that it earns its placement on pure compassion. Daughters is one of the year’s best and most resonant films, a documentary about a father-daughter dance at a prison. It’s about reform, sure, but also what gets left behind in our Prison Industrial Complex, and a reminder that what goes with the person — their freedom, their love of family — also goes with their family. A stunning portrait of some imprisoned men and the rays of sunshine left in their life, the amazing and resilient kids that have been left behind but never forgotten.

Sing Sing

Greg Kwedar directs Sing Sing perfectly by allowing it to be about people and faces and the liminal space of this prison. This divide between freedom and imprisonment and life and death is so clearly defined, but on the stage, the actors can escape from these predefined roles, they can become more than who society tells them they now are. They can become themselves. As one of the characters puts it, “Brother, we’re here to become human again.”