By Juan-Carlos Selznick
In a way, the “movie year” here at the Stream & Dream Lounge sometimes extends into March of the following year and on up through the night of the Oscars. And here we are: Oscar night has passed and I’ve now seen a good many more of the best films of 2024 than I had at the turn of the New Year. As I write this, I’m once again inclined to steer clear of a simple Ten Best list and, instead, enumerate a range of high points and cinematic pleasures, surprises and trends, from a year that, for better or worse, was always interesting at the very least.
The success of Sean Baker’s Anora at the recent Oscars is one good sign of the year’s intriguing peculiarities. That film’s vigorous mixture of rough-edged social drama with noirish streaks of comedy and romance give it the the energy of the “Old” Hollywood as well as the “New”. No matter that I like it a little less than Nickel Boys and am guessing The Brutalist might have won in a slightly more “usual” year.
My one twinge of regret with the year’s Oscars has to do with Best Supporting Actor. I’m perfectly fine with Kieran Culkin’s win, but a little sad that all the performances I liked best — Culkin in A Real Pain, Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice, and Guy Pearce in The Brutalist — were all in the same category. One other Oscar winner I want to call special attention to is I’m Not a Robot, the newyorker.com production which quite deservedly won Best Live Action Short.
From where I sat, the diversity and abundance of the year’s most remarkable films is one of the best things about what was in many other respects, a very rough year. That’s reflected in part by the feeling that while there are at least two dozen films worthy of “Top Ten” consideration, none of them really stand out as the clear-cut #1. In any event, more should be said in praise of the following films in particular (director and country of origin in parentheses):
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, India)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, France)
Anora (Sean Baker, USA)
Black Dog (Guan Hu, China)
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, USA)
The Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/USA)
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice, Spain)
Do No Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude, Romania)
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, Australia)
Here (Bas Devos, Belgium)
His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, USA)
Hit Man (Richard Linklater, USA)
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Thien An Pham, Vietnam)
It’s Not Me (Leos Carax, France)
Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, USA/UK)
Limbo (Ivan Sen, Australia)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, USA)
Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader, Canada)
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, Japan)
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, USA/UK)
Queer (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/USA)
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, USA)
Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran)
Terrestrial Verses (Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami, Iran)
Praises while viewing the smaller screen
Once again, the past year of streaming and dreaming was considerably enhanced by some of the more distinctly cinematic television series. The best of 2024 includes Slow Horses, Bad Monkey, Fargo (season 5), The Tourist (Season 2), and several brilliantly realized “limited series” — Ripley, Monsieur Spade, Baby Reindeer, the UK-produced Billy the Kid, and The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin. Two smartly produced combinations of situation comedy and mystery tale — High Potential and Only Murders in the Building — are superb TV entertainment, but not something that really registers as “cinematic.”
It was a good year for smartly dramatic “genre pictures,” especially action movies and crime stories with a quirky sense of character. Black Dog from N.W. China and Limbo from Australia are stylish neo-noirs in spectacular desert settings. Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 and Richard Linklater’s Hit Man bring striking paradoxes of character to shrewdly generic stories. Dev Patel directs and stars in the lavishly stylized Monkey Man. Instigators has Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, Lake George has Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon, In the Land of Saints and Sinners has Liam Neeson , and Rebel Ridge, Last Stop in Yuma County, and Laroy, Texas all thrive on flavorsome rural noir.
There were only a few westerns of note, the best being The Settlers, from Chile, in which a rogue British officer, a racist American gunslinger, and a mestizo horseman attempt to do the bidding of an imperial land baron in 19th century Tierra del Fuego. Virgo Mortensen directs and stars in The Dead Don’t Hurt, a grand adventure in which his character’s wife (the exquisite Vicki Krieps) emerges as the story’s central figure. The Thicket has an interesting cast (including Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis), but devolves into meanness. Kevin Costner’s much-maligned Horizon — An American Saga, Chapter 1 is stuck in limbo awaiting the release (if any) of Chapter 2. Two mini-series — American Primeval and the UK Billy the Kid — get positive mention here as well.
The best of the documentaries I was able to see include Dahomey, Mati Diop’s surprisingly intricate account of the repatriation of African artifacts pilfered by European colonialists; Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s touchingly autobiographical portrait of the decaying movie palaces in the Brazilian city of Recife; Strange Victory, Leo Hurwitz’s classic 1948 documentary about racial bias and black vets in the aftermath of WWII; Leos Carax’s brief It’s Not Me, a free form “self-non-portrait” in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard.
Favored performances (in addition to the three Supporting Actor nominees mentioned above): Emma Stone in Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness; Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall; Daniel Craig, Queer; Glen Powell, Hit Man; Jesse Clemons, Kinds of Kindness; the ensemble (Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen), His Three Daughters.
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