ENTRIES IN PART 2:


José Cabrera Betancort

Programmer

400 Cassettes (Thelyia Petraki, 2024)
This new short film by Petraki is a heavenly sci-fi approach to teenage angst.

Por donde pasa el silencio (As Silence Passes By, Sandra Romero, 2024)
One of the most interesting first films this year, blending a real family with their characters.

Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang, 2024)
A brilliant story about love and loneliness, roots and migrations.

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)
The finest entertainment machinery of this season. Villeneuve creates an epic universe with a unique style.

Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
A new masterpiece by Gomes.

La historia se escribe de noche (History Is Written at Night, Alejandro Alonso Estrella, 2024)
Alonso Estrella brings a subtle, dark, and political fable taken from his Cuban surroundings.

Holy Electricity (Tato Kotetishvili, 2024)
The nicest surprise of Locarno, and a new Georgian voice to follow.

Mò Shì Lù (Stranger Eyes, Yeo Siew Hua, 2024)
His second feature confirms a new master in town.

Trong lòng dat (Việt and Nam, Trương Minh Quý, 2024)
We discover a complex and beautiful film, both political and personal, and with an undeniable talented auteur mark.

White Cloud (Emmanuel Van der Auwera, 2024)
The most accurate representation of AI as a tool for a film this year, it’s an attractive, mysterious, and reflective work on our brave new world.

Thomas Caldwell

Writer, broadcaster, film critic and film programmer based in Melbourne, Australia

These are the ten films given a full release in Australia in 2024, and therefore accessible to most audiences, which left the most lasting impression on me.

1. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

Win Wenders’s best narrative film in decades, it contains so many of his most effective trademarks: an amazing soundtrack, a reverence for the films of Yasujirô Ozu, and the joy and beauty to be found in everyday moments and observations. Rarely has a life of routine and contentment felt so appealing.

2. Kaibutsu (Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023)

One of my favourite Kore-eda films, this uses the idea of how the absence of small bits of information can completely change our understanding of events. Most effective is its tender and insightful exploration of the way careless actions of adults affect children.

3. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

I knew I was going to love a film by Andrew Haigh starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal anyway, but this surpassed expectations. I adore romance films layered with melancholy, and anything to do with parenthood, so this floored me. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are also incredible.

4. Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)

Adopts the aesthetics of war documentary footage to scrutinise the uneasy relationship journalists have to the atrocities they are recording and supposedly keeping an emotional and physical distance from. As with his previous films Alex Garland creates an atmosphere of bleak despair while still maintaining the humanity of the characters and delivers moments of spectacle that are enthralling and gut-churning. 

5. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

As he so often does, Sean Baker situates a narrative in the world of sex work without any romanticisation, moralising or sensationalism. Along with Kelly Reichardt he is one of the best living filmmakers when it comes to giving agency and depth to marginalised or ignored groups of people. Best of all is how Baker has the confidence and assuredness to never resort to obvious or easy plot points.

6. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

It’s been a long time since I’ve had such a visceral response to a film. It wears its cinematic influences in such a direct way, as both homage and critique, while still feeling like an audaciously singular vision to fuel a stylised, ultra-darkly-funny body horror satire about self-loathing and misogyny.

7. Zielona granica (Green Border, Agnieszka Holland, 2023)

This is possibly the best film I’ve seen about the current European refugee crisis, capturing the hypocrisy and cruelty inflicted on people when petty politics, racism and bureaucracy dictate asylum policy, and the results are kept out of sight. The way Agnieszka Holland uses multiple perspectives to express the various ways humanity and inhumanity wrestle for dominance is artful and suitably complex.

8. La bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

It’s been a long time since I’ve left a film so unsure about what exactly happened and what precise meaning I should draw from it, but I was overcome with a sensation of being extremely moved. Describing films as Lynchian is a cliché now and usually highly inaccurate, but this is one very rare case where the use of dream logic and the themes of identity and memory make for an apt comparison

9. The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024)

The science fiction trope of robots learning from and then inspiring humanity has been put to great use in family animations such as The Iron Giant (Brad Bird, 1999), WALL·E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014) and now The Wild Robot; a visually and thematically beautiful film about building families and communities through kindness and non-conformity.

10. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

Expressing the horrors of the Holocaust by keeping those horrors in the background and offscreen, to instead observe the everyday life of an Auschwitz commandant’s family as if filmed for reality television, is a bold experiment in dread, and it works.

The Substance

Nicolas Carrasco

Producer, film critic and programmer, Peru
  • The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
  • Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
  • Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)
  • Fogo do vento (Fire of Wind, Marta Mateus, 2024)
  • Kinra (Marco Panatonic, 2023)
  • The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
  • Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
  • All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

Kevin Cassidy

Cinephile, Melbourne

10 films 

5 NEW

1) Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2024)
2) Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2023)
3) Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
4) Coup de chance (Woody Allen, 2023)
5) My Darling in Stirling (Bill Mousoulis, 2023)

5 OLD

1) Saxophon-Susi (Suzy Saxophone, Karel Lamač, 1928)
2) Landscape Suicide (James Benning, 1986)
3) La Captive (The Captive, Chantal Akerman, 2000)
4) The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955)

And the film highlight of the year:

Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low, Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

Guilherme Cavalcanti

Cinephile, film critic; Brazil

In this group, instead of citing personal favorites, I chose films that had great power to illuminate aspects of human relationships and ecological reflections on living in this world, in order to better understand our place in it.

  1. Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka (The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)
  2. Black Tea (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2024)
  3. Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)
  4. A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky, Eryk Rocha, Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, 2024)
  5. Once Within a Time (Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane, 2022)
  6. Planet Earth III (Nick Easton, Will Ridgeon, Kiri Cashell, Charlotte Bostock, Sarah Whalley, Theo Webb, Fredi Devas, Steve Greenwood, Abigail Lees, 2023) – TV Mini Series
  7. Geographies of Solitude (Jacquelyn Mills, 2022)

Discoveries:

  1. Vredens dag (Day of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943)
  2. Hachigatsu no rapusodî (Rhapsody in August, Akira Kurosawa, 1991)

Short film:

Salaman Extensor (Matilde Miranda Mellado, 2024)

To one of the questions by Senses of Cinema‘s editors – “In a world super-speeding toward environmental cataclysm and ethnonationalist tyranny, why spend precious time rating and ranking film titles when one could instead be scheming, conspiring, and tacticising toward a future worth living?” – this excerpt from an interview with Nicole Brenez in Revista Cinética (Brazil) from ten years ago may provide some clues (please forgive any errors or distortions in this translation from the original in Portuguese).

‘February 10, 2014. Raul Arthuso, Victor Guimarães: How can a film historian make this archaeology of cinema treasures, considering that there are more images than there are people capable of seeing them?

Nicole Brenez: That’s the problem, but that’s also the responsibility. That’s why Henri Langlois used to say that “we have to preserve everything.” Even if we don’t always see it, because we don’t have enough time, even if it’s pure crap. In a way, that was easy to do with film. Jean Mitry could write a history of cinema on his own, but today all the living historians together couldn’t write such a contemporary history. The volume of production makes it impossible to write any global history, and we no longer have that horizon. But that’s why it’s all the more necessary to do so.

We have to see films that are totally outside the usual circuits – outside the industry, of course, but also outside festivals, experimental and underground circuits. There is a new sector of images, the Fourth Sector, perhaps images that are not intended to be seen, or that are made to be seen only by their own authors, and it is a necessity to see what is happening there. And even if there are only a few small glimpses and fragments of this history, it is more interesting to consider this new sector than to make an analysis of a well-known film that has already been commented on before. And we can’t analyze these images – for example, the images of the Arab revolutions – with the usual Western references. Just as there are “the usual suspects”, there is also “the usual analysis”. We need to understand that these people have their own philosophers, their own political thinkers. Even so, even if there are some methodological problems, we have to think about these images. And we’re always thinking about the relationship between cinema, collective history and present time, but there are also many new initiatives in terms of intimate, poetic films, of course. I suppose (perhaps it’s just a présupposé) that most of these films are made according to industrial models – narratives, forms of presentation coming from television – but I’m sure there are also many, many free artists. Not artists in the sense of profession or status, but free-thinking people who are producing extraordinary formal inventions. For me, the answer to “Que faire?” (Godard) is to consider this sector.’

Dārta Ceriņa

Film critic, curator (Riga International Film Festival), research assistant of film and performing arts (Latvian Academy of Culture), international programmer (Dailes Theatre)

Film which brought back hope. These works reminded us about the cinematic craft, passion, and that its decline in the era of over-consumption, streaming and never-ending content is a false alarm. Intimate travelogues for now and tomorrow – this might be the connective element of all these works, which truly encompass the meaning of artistic brilliance, daring choices and a care for film art. Somehow 2024 didn’t feel like marking a discursive status of crisis, but it gently reminded us about the smaller productions (with respective budgets) and the fact that moving images need to move not only the audience but also the medium. All of them were elevated by the festival circuit and like-minded audiences and professionals who felt connected with the screen, offering a bold year for independent cinema. 

Best films of this year (in alphabetical order):

  • Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
  • All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
  • Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)
  • Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude, 2024)
  • Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
  • Straume (Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) 
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here, Walter Salles, 2024)
  • The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)
  • Universal Language (Matthew Rankin, 2024)

Daryl Chin

Daryl Chin is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, USA

1) Aku wa sonzai shinai (Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
2) Zielona granica (Green Border, Agnieszka Holland, 2023)
3) Rapito (Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, Marco Bellocchio, 2023)
4) Bên trong vỏ kén vàng (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Phạm Thiên Ân, 2023)
5) Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2023)
6) Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024)
7) The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)
8) La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
9) All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
10) Challengers/Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

A difficult, challenging year, but so many films addressed the current upheavals, either directly or indirectly. Any list is provisional; another list of equal quality could have been made without any overlap. I chose to list both of Luca Guadagnino’s films from this year, because I found them to be complementary, with Queer being the more experimental work. Finally, this proved to be an exceptional year for acting in film, with Saoirse Ronan, Kate Winslet, Demi Moore, Colman Domingo, Timothée Chalamet, Kieran Culkin and Sebastian Stan among the many who gave noteworthy performances. In spite of everything, a year of great achievement in film.

Green Border

Kristen Marie Coleman

Artist & PhD Candidate in Screen and Media

Favourite new releases and first watches (features/shorts/documentary) in no particular order:

  • No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 2024)
  • La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
  • Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black, Derik Lynch, Matthew Thorne, 2022)
  • Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
  • Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
  • The Challenge (Yuri Ancarani, 2016)
  • The Order (Justin Kurzel, 2024)
  • Swaha (In the Name of Fire, Abhilash Sharma, 2024)
  • Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024)
  • Fat City (John Huston, 1972)

Kevin Cronin

Writer, cinephile from Prague, Czechia

Favorite new releases of 2024 (in order of viewing):

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)
Blockbuster formalism – sidesteps its ilk’s standard storytelling focus in favor of building narrative through visceral, sand-blasted propulsions of pure cinema. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)
The Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) blueprint pushed to fever pitch, not keen to repeat its predecessor’s statement but instead expand and intensify its balletic, kinetic urgency. Agonized and unhinged, this film’s void does not beckon its eventuality, but rather is the entire mode of existence; to survive in this world is merely clawing a few more seconds before the quicksand consumes you for good. However, this is also a film whose rage is wielded in an attempt to climb out of the pit entirely.

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)
In our era of ceaseless nostalgia-porn, it is endlessly refreshing to see a film that recognizes the comfort and even necessity of retreating into liminal spaces, but also sees that comfort fail as a solution and thus sees itself violated until it is no longer recognizable, leading us to wonder if we had imagined of it what we had needed at the time, as what we had attempted to suppress with it finally bursts out.

Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
Kurosawa’s Antonioni-styled horror pared down to its most essential, both through shorter length and meticulous weaponization of his environment’s suffocating sterility, rendering it as spectral a space (unnervingly captured by his dispassionate camera) as any of his peerless work in this field. Nigh-abstract and all the more uncanny for it. 

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
Fargeat ventures into well-worn thematic territory with oft-cited reference points, and yet her approach is so viscerally urgent it transcends homage and takes on its own vital character, thrusting shocking clarity on its subject matter while demonstrating just why it is so important; it cares none for any supposed simplicity or obviousness, and all for drowning the viewer in the dread of its experience, mocking the elements comprising its necessity with equal parts disgust and glee.

Favorite first-time watches of 2024:

El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice, 1973)
Darkness taints a golden-hour daydream, slipping into a twilight reverie of innocence lost. Open your eyes.

Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
Mizoguchi’s late style is so focused, so controlled, the melodrama takes on the grandeur of tragedy. The most complete, hypnotizing distillation of his career. 

Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)
With the possible exception of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fassbinder’s camera has never been more virtuosic – it relentlessly, elegantly glides through spaces and characters’ facades alike, contemptuously revealing and slicing them apart with its many distorted, glassy reflections.

À nos amours (To Our Loves, Maurice Pialat, 1983)
Emotional abuse of such brutality it corrodes as battery acid on exposed nerve endings… and frustrated aimlessness as a result. 

The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011)
Slow cinema not as transcendence, but as psychological devastation – knowing one can never go back once the rug has been pulled out to such a devastating end, and having to suffer one’s complete submersion in that fact in the languid pace of non-events that follow.

Jordan Cronk

Founder: Acropolis Cinema; Contributor: Artforum, Film Comment, Sight and Sound
  • C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, Leos Carax, 2024)
  • exergue – on documenta 14 (Dimitris Athiridis, 2024)
  • Feng liu yi dai (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke, 2024)
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath, 2024)
  • Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)
  • Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
  • Scènarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
  • The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)
  • Suyoocheon (By the Stream, Hong Sangsoo, 2024)

Adrian Danks

Associate Professor, School of Media & Communication, RMIT University; Co-curator and President of the Melbourne Cinematheque
  1. Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, 2023)
  2. Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023)
  3. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)
  4. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
  5. Kuru Otlar Üstüne (About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023)
  6. Zielona granica (Green Border, Agnieszka Holland, 2023)
  7. Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023)
  8. La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
  9. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
  10. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

La Chimera

Brian Darr

Cinephile forged in San Francisco, now living in Maine

My first World Poll contribution was in 2003, and though I haven’t submitted every single year since then, I’ve grown fond of the flexibility of the format here, where I feel encouraged to mention favourite cinematic experiences that don’t necessarily fit into the usual year-end format prizing feature-length films with commercial cinema releases; San Francisco has been a fruitful home base from which to experience them. 2024 being the first full year in which I lived and worked full-time in the more cinematically remote state of Maine, having completed the process of moving 3000 miles to another coast, my opportunities for public screening experiences have constricted somewhat, which makes the timing of the changes to the number of films allowed in this year’s poll feel opportune. I won’t repeat mention of any of the commercial cinema releases I mentioned in another year-end poll I was invited to submit to, but will instead describe ten of my favorite viewing experiences that don’t quite fit in a traditional “ten best”:

Best new film requiring a second viewing to truly appreciate: I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Best expanded cinema performance work: Music in the Air (Scott Stark, 2022); at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where I lucked into being in November, Stark used a rotating wheel like a giant projector shutter, seamlessly merging coordinated images being sent to the screen from twin Eiki projectors.

Most physically exhausting, but ultimately cathartic cinematic viewing: The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Best short film: Foot to Ground (Christopher Thompson, 2024)

Best non-commercially-distributed feature film viewed at a virtual festival: A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari, 2024) via Camden International Film Festival

Best non-commercially-distributed feature film viewed theatrically: Stand By for Failure: A Documentary About Negativland (Ryan Worsley, 2022) at the Luna Cinema in Lowell, MA

Best cinematic installation: Portland Museum of Art presentation of Scopophilia (Nan Goldin, 2010)

Best video essay: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel (Jenny Nicholson, 2024)

Best repertory cinema experience: David Byrne presenting True Stories (David Byrne, 1988) in 35mm at the Maine Film Center in Waterville, ME

Best 2023 film unavailable to view theatrically in Maine until 2024: Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023)

Dustin Dasig

Professor/Security Training Director/Writer-Editor/Law Student, Philippines

Interestingly, this year’s “most transfixing” movies – it’s 2025 in five days so let’s dispose of the “most misused and abused adjective” of all time: “best” – tackle in various levels of narrative, technical, and thematic innovation and technique a recurring problem in the world that can be resolved if everyone is serious about it: relationships.

Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
Relationships are built on trust, so what happens when it is gone? Watch this highly-acclaimed movie, and you will understand why trust issues are a recurring problem in the world.

Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger, 2023)
Robots as an impactful and life-affirming allegory for relationship issues? People should watch this film, stat!

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
With the current political landscape internationally somewhat reflecting the thematic core of Glazer’s surprisingly captivating and endlessly watchable movie, this is an altogether relationship-and-character study-driven story with unforgettable historical backbones everyone knows and should never forget.

Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024)
For someone who was a researcher for a noontime variety show in its earlier days, the movie captured the “first day-last day” environment we used to call “pilot episode blues”. Teamwork is the key.

Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024)
No matter what personality a person has, it is her/his relationships that are crucial to her/his understanding of herself/himself. This Australian movie captured the realities and complexities of introverts like me, you, and everyone can relate and sympathise.

Rukku bakku (Look Back, Kiyotaka Oshiyama, 2024)
Unexpectedly emotionally transcendent and relatable, this moving adaptation of prominent mangaka (Japanese term for “manga artists and creators”) Tatsuki Fujimoto examines how relationships evolve especially in quagmires and competitive environments.

Quand vient l’áutomne (When Fall Is Coming, François Ozon, 2024)
Autumn as both a backdrop for and the center of relationship dynamics was depicted with emotional dexterity and narrative ease in Ozon’s surprisingly touching drama.

Late Night with the Devil (Colin and Cameron Caines, 2023)
Textured characters with complicated histories and well-deserved fates set in a morally moot and periodically challenging era in the entertainment industry are just two of this immensely watchable and captivating movie’s assets, and more to acknowledge upon succeeding viewings.

Sugarcane (Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, 2024) and The Bibi Files (Alexis Bloom, 2024)
Relationships are and will always be political, especially how people navigate and manage them.

Kristian Day

Des Moines-based writer/producer/showrunner. Chiefsaholic on Amazon Prime. The Last American Gay Bar on OUTtv. Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth on HBO MAX

Films are in no specific order. I watched nearly 200 movies according to my Letterboxd diary.

Middonaito (Midnight, Takashi Miike, 2024)
This film covers a lot of ground from a kamikaze taxi ride to dream-like flashbacks/hallucinations. I haven’t watched a Takashi Miike film in years and this dude still rips. Ignore the fact that it was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro because it really doesn’t matter. This is just a 19-minute wild ride that Miike wants to take you on.

The Last Year of Darkness (Ben Mullinkosson, 2023)
I am just amazed that this was filmed in post-pandemic China and the filmmakers captured this world. There are some solid moments in cinema that happen here. My favourite is when the couple are having a deep conversation about psychology, philosophy and therapy, but there is something happening in the foreground. As the camera pulls back it reveals a twenty-something woman preparing to throw up in her empty solo cup. She eventually does. No cuts were made, and no fucks were given.

Thelma (Josh Margolin, 2024)
Watched without any previous knowledge at the Chicago Critics Film Festival. 75% of the cast were over the age of 85. Our lead, June Squibb, was 91 when she brought this character to life. She did the majority of her own stunts, and her comedic timing was spectacular. Richard Roundtree’s last performance is very self-effacing. Malcolm McDowell played an amazing villain. Bunny Levine, God bless you.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023)
The movie is the perfect American satire that Mark Twain would be proud of. It’s a reflection of the bullshit we have created in this world of “underrepresented” voices.

Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024)
The final scene should have gotten Sydney Sweeney an Oscar.

Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024)
Jason Reitman’s best film. Maybe second to Juno (2007). Watched on a low-resolution FYC screener and it still shined. Chaos reigns.

Qing chun gui (Youth (Homecoming), Wang Bing, 2024)
Saw in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center with director Wang Bing in person for Q&A after. A hard burn of a movie that left some scars. Chinese youth working in slum conditions only to return to a home that might even be worse.

Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid (Matt Tyrnauer, 2024)
All I can say is that I miss the old days of politics. We need another James Carville. We need another Mary Matalin. This is a film about two people who loved their country and each other. We all need to be citizens. Not spectators.

Witches (Elizabeth Sankey, 2024)
A very honest film. Elizabeth Sankey’s intimate portrait of motherhood. Beautifully shot by Chloë Thomson. I admit I didn’t read anything about it prior to watching and was at first confused that this was not something horror-adjacent, but it kept me locked in. This movie has so many layers that dive deep into the madness of being a mother, but then compares them to the portrayal of witches in modern society.

Modern Goose (Karsten Wall, 2023)
A stellar mix of nature and urban landscapes that tell the story of these geese in Winnipeg. So much is said in a film without any dialog. Screened as part of the 40th International Documentary Association’s short film award nominations.

Henri De Corinth

Film writer, author of Andrzej Żuławski: Abject Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2024)
  1. La bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
  2. L’été dernier (Last Summer, Catherine Breillat, 2023)
  3. Conann (She is Conann, Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
  4. Ripara (Emilija Skarnulytė, 2023)
  5. Le Vourdalak (The Vourdalak, Adrien Beau, 2023)
  6. Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
  7. And Her Sleeve Wet with Tears (Farzaneh Forouzesh, 2023)
  8. Jours avant la mort de Nicky (Days Before the Death of Nicky, Denis Côté, 2024)
  9. A Place without Fear (Suzanne Deeken, 2024)
  10. Pendant ce temps sur Terre (Meanwhile on Earth, Jérémy Clapin, 2024)

Maria Elena De Las Carreras

María Elena de las Carreras, a Fulbright scholar and film critic from Argentina, has a Ph.D. in film studies, and lectures on film history and esthetics at Cal State Northridge and UCLA

Documentary Gems of 2024

I have been reviewing documentary submissions for the Social Impact Media Awards for a few years. It is an annual competition run by the non-profit organization SIMA Studios that also curates documentaries and media projects through its online platform.

Here are five documentaries, richly deserving promotion and a worldwide audience.  

Black Snow (Alina Simone, 2024)
A profile of the Russian eco-activist Natalia Zubkova, begun in 2019. Black Snow more than meets the challenges of the observational mode about finding story form: it is constructed with bits and parts, including home movies, Zubkova’s own journalistic footage, archival materials and elegant animation. The two narrative blocks are skillfully integrated: first comes the work of a citizen journalist, recording the damage of the open-pit coal mines in her Siberian hometown in a successful blog. Then, the viral impact of her denunciations that leads to her exile in Georgia.

Black Snow is staged for the camera – Flaherty style – to make the key intellectual and dramatic points effectively, like its opening scene with Zubkova recording what she thinks may be her last blog, a chronicle of a death announced. It has many similarities with the remarkable Navalny (Daniel Roher, 2022), another political film aiming at the larger picture of Putin’s Russia from the testimony of one courageous individual.  

Emergent City (Kelly Anderson, Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, 2024)
Made over a decade by veteran filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, Emergent City is a triumph of observational documentary. It captures the conflict in the Sunset Park riverfront of Brooklyn between its traditional working-class community and the developers of the Industry City complex of decayed industrial buildings.

An X-ray of the centrifugal forces at play triggered by gentrification, the film assembles an extraordinarily detailed world of characters and situations, carefully edited to build a powerful narrative that never loses sight of what makes a neighborhood alive.

I Hope This Helps! (Daniel Freed, 2024)
I Hope This Helps! is a 50-minute clever gimmick disguised as a documentary, à la Exit Through the Giftshop (Banksy, 2010). Entertaining and sleek, the film demurely asks if A.I. is good or bad for humans. It does so with a fun story about its writer/director Daniel Freed “building” a relationship with the A.I. program Bard to make this documentary. The comedy springs from the stilted answers the program provides, rendered as a fuzzy screen creature with a British-accented female voice. This one-joke film is predicated on – but coyly avoiding – the non-sentient nature of artificial intelligence. It milks the gag cleverly, expanding on its absurd “reasoning” and structural incapacity to understand context and nuances.  

Rule of Two Walls (David Gutnik, 2024)
Combining a semi-experimental poetic format with interviews to show the devastation of war on the home front, like the German/Armenian Landschaft (Daniel Kötter, 2023), Rule of Two Walls is an intelligent documentary about the experience of war as lived and thought through by several artists in Kyiv and Lviv, shot between February and November of 2022, the first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It works remarkably well as a war record (images of corpses are particularly haunting, à la Night and Fog); a survey of ideas about national, cultural and religious identity, as culled from insights provided by the artists interviewed; a reflection on the art of documentary; and, ultimately, a celebration of the human spirit.

The self-reflexive aspect of Rule of Two Walls – the strategy to be used when being bombed – is particularly to guide a filmmaker in the craft of filming and editing situations of upheaval. It movingly records the grit and endurance of a proud people and their culture refusing to surrender to a neighbour’s imperial designs.

The Sixth (Andrea Nix Fine, Sean Fine, 2024)
The Sixth is a gripping record of January 6, 2021, the day a mob entered the Capitol building by violent means, disrupting the electoral certification process of president-elect Joe Biden. It weaves interviews with two policemen, their chief, a House representative, a photographer covering the scene, and an administrative employee. Eloquently and with emotional restraint, in polished interviews, these six witnesses meticulously recount the day in chronological order. The documentary deftly combines footage from bodycams, cell phones, security cameras and television news, strictly from the point of view of those defending the Capitol from the assault.

The documentary is a chronicle, not an explanation, of the fateful January 6. It interestingly eschews a voiceover narrator, thus providing an unmediated immersive experience. A few reenactments make it flow organically. A recurring diagram of the Capitol and its environs shows with dots where the interviewees were during specific incidents, so that the viewers can see in real time what the assault on the Bastille must have looked like in 1789.  

We Will Dance Again (Yariv Mozer, 2024)
We Will Dance Again is the Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1956) of our times. It provides a brutal account of October 7, 2023, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Chronicling the Hamas terrorist attack on the Nova Music Festival, it combines harrowing cellphone footage from young Israelis attending the concert with the terrorists’ bodycams and security cameras.

This remarkable documentary captures in real time, from multiple witnesses, what it was to find oneself in a split second on a journey through hell. The audience is literally made to share first the incomprehension, then the incredulity and finally the terror of the slaughter. 

Those interviewed become fully-fleshed characters in the documentary – with a background story illustrated by comments and photos of a happier time. It is a counterpoint to that day’s videos, the most haunting perhaps is the now well-known of the young man who kept throwing back to Hamas the grenades lobbed at his group in a shelter. Like Homer in the Iliad, writer/director Yariv Mozer gives each one individuality and the full measure of a life.

Nicholas De Villiers

Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film and programming director of Movies on the House (MOTH) at the University of North Florida (USA) and 2023–2024 Fulbright Scholar-Teacher at National Central University (Taiwan) working on his next book, Inter-Asia Network Films and Cosmopolitan Sex Workers

Favorite films of 2024

1. Problemista (Julio Torres, 2023)
A surrealist queer ode to difficult women (Tilda Swinton), the cruel optimism of art internships, and the Kafkaesque immigration system.

2. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
Sean Baker’s favorite topic of sex work researched with an attention to whore stigma and an important focus on labor in every scene.

3. Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
Wonderfully artificial set design — William S. Burroughs’ expat Mexico City on a Rome studio backlot — with a surprising role for Lesley Manville and a scene-stealing performance by Drew Droege.

4. Wú suǒ zhù (Abiding Nowhere, Tsai Ming-liang, 2024)
A surreal experience to see Tsai’s first film set in the United States — a “Walker” film set in Washington, DC commissioned by the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art — in the Taipei Film Festival while I was in Taiwan for a year on a U.S. Fulbright grant researching Tsai’s post-retirement films featuring Lee Kang-sheng and Tsai’s new male muse Anong Houngheuangsy (who also appears in this film with loving attention given to his preparation of instant noodles).

5. Xīníng guó zhái (Xining Public Housing, Tsai Ming-liang, 2024)
Commissioned as part of the sprawling “Walking in Wanhua” exhibition in Taipei, this documentary is set in the soon-to-be-demolished public housing complex where Tsai filmed his uncannily prescient disaster-musical Dong (The Hole, 1998), returning to specific locations but also paying bittersweet melancholy homage to this still-lively building and its inhabitants.

6. Straume (Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
This Latvian digital animated film about a cat learning to trust other animals during a catastrophic world flood reminded me of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Pedagogy of Buddhism.”

7. Cuckoo (Tilman Singer, 2024)
Hunter Schafer is so good as the “final girl” in this creepy and stylish horror film set in a resort in the German Alps where eugenic experiments are being conducted.

8. The First Omen (Arkasha Stevenson, 2024)
It was a boom year for religious horror, but I particularly liked the feminine inflection and aesthetic of this, which reminded me of the feminist paranoid classics Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977).

9. Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024)
I was skeptical going in, but this felt like a surprisingly good “cover version” of a song you know and love.

10. Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)
“Was will das Weib?” (“What does Woman want?”) Answer: Nosferatu. Eggers’ visually stunning tribute to F.W. Murnau’s original silent film Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, 1922) is a return to form for Eggers, adding historical context regarding nineteenth-century ideas about melancholy and female hysteria. The film being released on Christmas with a sarcophagus popcorn tin was brilliant marketing.

Emanuele Di Nicola

Film Critic, Journalist, Editor at Nocturno and Editor-In-Chief at Nocturno.It

New films (alphabetical order):

A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
Baby Invasion (Harmony Korine, 2024)
Hexham Heads (Chloë Delanghe, Mattijs Driesen, 2024)
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024)
Maldoror (Fabrice du Welz, 2024)
No Dogs Allowed (Steve Bache, 2024)
Des Teufels Bad (The Devil’s Bath, Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala, 2024)
Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Older film (just one masterpiece):

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
50th anniversary in 4K version

Wheeler Winston Dixon

Wheeler Winston Dixon is a writer and filmmaker

In no particular order:

  • Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)
  • The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
  • A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
  • Woodshock (Kate and Laura Mulleavy, 2017)
  • Lola (Andrew Legge, 2023)
  • Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)
  • Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)
  • The Kitchen (Daniel Kaluuya, Kibwe Tavares, 2023)
  • Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
  • Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

With the 2024 US elections out of the way, it’s clear we are headed for a very dark future, as both America and much of the rest of the world swing to the hard right. Civil War, which pretty much died on release here, is an all-too-accurate look at the current politics of polarization that dominate the American landscape. The Substance uses Kubrickian set-ups and Cronenbergian body horror visuals to demonstrate how sexist body attitudes continue to dominate both real life and media representations of the female body. A Different Man does much the same with social expectations of the male body, with a fearless performance by Adam Pearson, following up on his superb work in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin (2013) roughly a decade ago. Woodshock, released in 2017 but just now making the rounds in the US, offers a gently hand-made tale of a young woman using psychedelic drugs to ease the psychic pain of the death of her mother, using practical effects and in-camera superimpositions rather than CGI. Lola, which I’ve written about for Senses, is an overlooked but superb sci-fi film, in which two sisters during World War II invent a machine that can pick up radio and television broadcasts from the future, with disastrous results. Hard Truths finds Mike Leigh in top form as he deals once again with the brutalist results of class and race discrimination, while Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a stylishly dark period take on the 1922 Murnau original. 

The Kitchen is a stunning directorial debut by Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares, depicting a Dystopian future London in which all low-cost housing has been eliminated except for one last location, dubbed The Kitchen, while the ultra-rich contrive to crush even this last hope for humanity. Emilia Pérez is a gloriously operatic musical drama that continually stuns the senses with its visual inventiveness, as well as stellar performances from Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón, while Coppola’s Megalopolis is a fabulous, self-funded disaster that nevertheless represents one of the few mainstream films in recent memory to take a real chance with conventional narrative format. To this, I would add MoMA’s revival of Roberto Gavaldón’s En la Palma de Tu Mano (In the Palm of Your Hand, 1951), a wildly inventive noir that along with three other similar Mexican films of the 1950s has been making the rounds of art houses in the US this year. And if you want an accurate vision of the current corrosiveness of US society, please check out Chuck Lorre’s acidic sitcom Bookie, now in its second season on Max, which paints a convincingly bleak yet desperately funny portrait of criminality as the main thread of contemporary US society.

Emilia Pérez

José D’laura

I keep dreaming in twenty-four frames per second, living in Paradise, aka, Dominican Republic

It’s been an incredible year for movies. Some of them share the principle of surprising audiences. And that’s what cinema was created for.

It’s a great honor to share my list of the “Best Films of 2024”:

1. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
Winner of the Jury Prize and Best Actress (for the entire cast) at the Cannes Film Festival, this rare musical can change your perception of the world.

2. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
Palme d’Or at Cannes. A modern and tougher version of Snow White.

3. Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)
They risked their lives shooting this film in Iran. The people are asking for changes, the establishment represses any form of protest.

4. Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024)
Nicole Kidman at her best. An incredible and fearless performance.

5. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
One of the great surprises of the year. Fargeat creates a film that can annoy audiences, but no one will be indifferent.

6. Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)
The election of a new Pope could be a fight for power and almost everything happens.

7. The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
Golden Lion at Venice, the new film by Almodóvar talks about friendship, life and death.

8. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, 2024)
When you see this film, you also see Ingmar Bergman’s faces. When you see it, you also see Woody Allen’s atmosphere.

9. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Grand Prize at Cannes, this film shows the lives and the textures of Mumbai’s working class.

10. Straume (Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
A wondrous journey, through realms natural and mystical. A miracle of animation.

Flow

Dana Duma

Film Critic, Editor-In-Chief of Film Magazine and the Website Revistafilm.ro, Professor at the National University of Theatre and Film (UNATC), Bucharest
  1. The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
  2. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
  3. Straume (Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) 
  4. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
  5. Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024)
  6. Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2023)
  7. Anul Nou care n-a fost (The New Year that Never Came, Bogdan Mureşanu, 2024)
  8. Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Hernan Rosselli, 2024)
  9. Qingchun: Ku (Youth (Hard Times), Wang Bing, 2024)
  10. Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rassoulof, 2024)

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