ENTRIES IN PART 3:


William Edwards

Long time film fanatic, Sydney, Australia
  1. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
  2. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
  3. Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)
  4. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)
  5. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)
  6. Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024)
  7. Gouzhen (Black Dog, Guan Hu, 2024)
  8. La bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
  9. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
  10. Un silence (A Silence, Joachim Lafosse, 2023)

Cristóbal Escobar

Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, Film Programmer at FIDOCS

Inspired by the ‘poetic carousel’ of the Spanish theatrical tradition (Lope de Vega), I have selected ten films in which the action is not driven by the logic of a central conflict—an approach often associated with Anglo-Saxon theatre. Instead, these films adopt a structure that feels more spontaneous and arbitrary. In most cases, it is the setting that dominates the characters, rather than the other way around (Calderón de la Barca). It is through the interactions with and within these theatrical spaces that the narrative of the films begins to take shape.

  • Cuando las nubes esconden la sombra (When the Clouds Hide the Shadow, José Luis Torres Leiva, 2024)  
  • Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024) 
  • All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024) 
  • No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 2024)
  • Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
  • The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodovar, 2024)
  • Akiplėša (Toxic, Saulė Bliuvaitė, 2024)
  • Volveréis (The Other Way Around, Jonás Trueba, 2024)
  • Pepe (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias, 2024)

Grand Tour

Andre Ferreira

Johannesburg based mechanical engineer by day, cinephile by night
  1. Dekalog (Decalogue, Krzystof Kieslowski, 1988): Values, ethics and morals don’t exist in a vacuum – a powerful illustration that what we do to each has a massive impact on other people, and you can never only break ONE commandment. There are no simple morals, and the emotional journeys and unanswerable dilemmas we experience with these characters is matched by Kieslowski’s sheer mastery of colour, composition, editing and music – it really feels like that block exists beyond the screen, big or small. Speaking of apartments…
  2. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960): Wilder’s magical entertainment is one of those beautiful Hollywood constructs that has one foot in escapism, and another in harsh reality. Though constructed with the wasteless precision and skill of an aircraft, it lets the tang of real life and loneliness invade the Hollywood forms it dazzlingly combines – the corporate noir, the romantic comedy, the bedroom farce, the sentimental melodrama. It’s a splendid treat that will never date, not as long as people are lonely and trapped in dull jobs.
  3. La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, 1937): There is absolutely no reason any of these characters should be killing or hating each other. Why should nationality split de Boëldieu or Von Rauffenstein? Why should class divide the different ethical nobilities of de Boëldieu or his working class privates? Why should Marechal forego the Jewish Rosenthal in peacetime? I’ve never seen a film that more persuasively argues that all men are brothers. There’s not a trace of theatricality to the filming – it’s as if the camera merely happened to be on during real moments.
  4. The Setup (Robert Wise, 1949): Once upon a time, the studios used to make B-movies – factory product filler to get the bums on the seats between the big shows – that weren’t merely based on poems, but WERE visual poems. The loneliness of wandering the city, of waiting your turn for the big break that will never come, the grimy poetry of stark lighting on cheap sets, the sound, the unreal dialogue… once upon a time they let the factory workers make ART.
  5. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966): Speaking of art, what DOES an artist do in a world intent on sending itself to Hell? This is truly epic filmmaking that feels like it has everything, that lives in the glances and pauses between characters. This is a film where you see the moral arc from jealousy to regret to acceptance, that combines the little people with events they cannot control.
  6. Days of Heaven (Terence Malick, 1978): If sound had never existed, 99% of Days of Heaven would remain… but we would lose Manz. Nevertheless, each shot seems to recreate a time period that has now become a part of a 20th Century Bible – as human and strange as any Old Testament fable.
  7. Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1955): The kinescope picture quality is awful, the sets wobble, and the sound is terrible. None of that matters. If SETI decides to send aliens any evidence of the inherent dignity of man, this is the artwork to send. All the performers have earned their way to acting heaven.
  8. The Late Show (Robert Benton, 1977): There is a scene where a single composition turns what was a brilliant parody into a near horror movie…and then it enters the realms of melancholy before careening back. Two opposite souls meet, many genres collide, and this may have the GREATEST use of stylized, hardboiled dialogue in movie history.
  9. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) Billy Wilder must have watched this on a loop before making the apartment. Take one set, fill it to the brim with bric-à-brac to delight your dreams, add your characters, then watch with love as they seek fulfillment, find heartbreak but save each other. Lubitsch’s loving ensemble will never date.
  10. Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967): We all have fantasies, but we all fear the consequences. This is an enthralling, creepy, hilarious story of desire gone amok – the ending becomes more devastating the more I think about it.

Adalberto Fonkén

Lima-based social communicator and film writer for the Séptima Ilusión blog

Best films

  • All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024) 
  • Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych, 2024) + The Damned (Roberto Minervini, 2024)
    Both films reveal the concerns, uncertainties, reflections and hatreds of the soldiers in their dialogues or tours. Two ways of dealing with two distant and implicit wars without many skirmishes.
  • Simón de la montaña (Simon of the mountain, Federico Luis, 2024) 
  • El affaire Miu Miu (The Miu Miu Affair, Laura Citarella, 2024) 
  • Mixtape La Pampa (Andrés Di Tella, 2023) 

Re-discoveries

  • La vendedora de fósforos (The Little Match Girl, Alejo Mogillansky, 2017)
  • The Dark Half (George Romero, 1993)
  • The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) 
  • City Girl (Friedrich W. Murnau, 1930)

All We Imagine as Light

Giampiero Frasca

Italian Film Critic and Writer

An important year for exploring new forms and titles that connect with the world, enabling viewers to step out of their own little bubbles.

10. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
A surprising mix of contrasting tones and genres in a story that is traditionally told in just one way.

9. Magyarázat mindenre (Explanation for Everything, Gábor Reisz, 2023)
A youthful coming-of-age tale that evolves into a political critique of a malaise that is not only Hungarian but increasingly pan-European.

8. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
Form becomes substance in this metaphorical exploration of decaying bodies, striving to defy time. The body, however, serves as a mere metaphor for cinema itself — the ultimate shape-shifting monster.

7. Hit Man (Richard Linklater, 2023)
A brilliant example of sharp writing, serving a black comedy filled with countless, unpredictable twists and turns.

6. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
Gomes channels his cinematic obsessions and free-flowing style into an essay on the vast possibilities of storytelling, under the guise of a chase between two lovers.

5. No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, 2024)
A truthful, firsthand account of an unresolvable conflict of coexistence. Here, filming becomes a life-risking endeavor, and cinema turns into a testimony to the struggles of living within the bounds of History.

4. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
At 94, Eastwood crafts a courtroom drama that examines individual responsibility. A moral tale with a European sensibility, it might have been more bitter, but its conclusion sets certain things straight.

3. Kaibutsu (Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023)
The same story told through three distinct perspectives, with each shift reframing the narrative. A study in perception and a reflection on the communication gap between young people and adults.

2. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland, 2023)
Europe as the mirage of an unending nightmare. The suffocating, expressionist cinematography and the perpetually moving camera create an exhausting dynamism, reflecting the emotional weight demanded by the subject matter.

1. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
Following Son of Saul, the Shoah can only be approached indirectly, viewed with a necessary detachment. Glazer employs metonymy, focusing on the tranquil lives of neighbours, while sound design evokes the atrocities beyond the wall. Chilling and unforgettable.

Pablo Gamba

Director of Los Experimentos, a website devoted to Latin American cinema

¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! ¡Ya México no existirá más! (Mexico Will no Longer Exist!, Annalisa Quagliata, 2024)
Una sombra oscilante (An Oscillating Shadow, Celeste Rojas Mugica, 2024)
Monólogo colectivo (Collective Monologue, Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2024
Barrunto (Emilia Beatriz, 2024)
Potenciais à deriva (Adrift Potentials, Leonardo Pirondi, 2024)
Más cables que personas (More Cables Than People, Camila Dron, 2024)
Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya (Malena Szlam, 2024)
Todo documento de civilización (Every Document of Civilization, Tatiana Mazú González, 2024)
Tú me abrasas (You Burn Me, Matías Piñeiro, 2024)
La Laguna del Soldado (The Soldier’s Lagoon, Pablo Álvarez-Mesa, 2024)

Sachin Gandhi

Lead Programmer, India Film Festival of Alberta

Each year brings the usual “End of Cinema” headlines. Although, those headlines are a bit misleading as their main preoccupation is only with the financial returns of big budget Hollywood productions. These publications don’t factor in international cinema which still manages to produce engaging thoughtful works. However, the machinery to deliver worthy cinema to people has been broken for a while. Film festivals remain the de facto distribution system for international artistic cinema but unless one works for such film festivals or has the financial luxury to travel to such festivals, then one has to wait one to two years to legally see worthy films from a previous calendar year. This legal viewing could consist of streaming, an arthouse cinema (if one is lucky to live in a select city) or local film festival. I am thankful that many of these 2023 worthy films finally made their way to my side of the planet, which is why 80% of this 2024 list consists of 2023 films. To truly see worthy 2024 film festival selections, I will have to wait another year or two.

1. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
A warm shape shifting film that tugs at both the heart and mind.

2. Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Victor Erice, 2023)
Erice returns after a long spell to deliver pure cinema! A film that reminds of cinema’s power to evoke buried memories.

3. Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023)
A long awaited return by Alonso is an exciting work that blends his cinematic style with a sprinkling of the hyperconnected world of Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge.

4. La passion de Dodin Bouffant (The Taste of Things, Trần Anh Hùng, 2023)
A tender love story that takes us on a food journey from farm to table. The film also extends the statement “that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Because in this film, a man also cooks for a woman thereby making the kitchen an equal space for men and women to neatly perform their food dance.

5. Gojira Mainasu Wan (Godzilla Minus One, Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)
Shin Godzilla was about logistics and problem solving while Godzilla Minus One smartly follows that up and depicts how to use engineering to solve a very large Godzilla problem.

6. Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2023)
Seamlessly stitches socially relevant topics within the fabric of a humorous comedic framework.

7. La bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
Expands on themes from Bonello’s earlier films and film is also a nod to many other notable films including those by David Lynch and David Cronenberg.

8. Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
The film focuses on the specific return of 26 artifacts to Benin but opens up what should be a universal debate about the fate of looted property across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Highly relevant and essential viewing.

9. Zwigato (Nandita Das, 2022)
Uses an example of a food delivery worker to provide a smart commentary on the plight of workers in our current tech savvy app driven world.

10. How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker, 2023)
At first, this appears to be cut from the same cloth as Spring Breakers but the film digs deeper into how men can still circumvent consent in a post #MeToo world.

John Gianvito

John Gianvito is a filmmaker and a Professor at Emerson College in Massachusetts, USA
  • No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballai, Rachel Szor, 2024)
  • To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024)
  • Nuit obscure – Au revoir ici, n’importe où (Obscure Night Goodbye Here, Anywhere, Sylvain George, 2023)
  • Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried (Greg Mitchell, 2023)
  • Contractions (Lynne Sachs, 2024)
  • Secret Mall Apartment (Jeremy Workman, 2024)
  • Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)
  • Ariel Phenomenon (Randall Nickerson, 2022)
  • I Am Not the River Jhelum (Prabhash Chandra, 2022)
  • All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

No Other Land

Sean Gilman

Film Critic (thechinesecinema.com)

These are ten of the best movies that I watched for the first time in 2024.

  1. Heike Monogatari (The Heike Story, Yamada Naoko, 2021)
  2. Kubi (Kitano Takeshi, 2023)
    Two absolute masters reinventing famous episodes of Japanese history in wildly different, wholly personal, and yet strangely compatible ways.
  3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)
    As much a followup to Miller’s underrated 3000 Years of Longing as it is a prequel to Fury Road.
  4. Pekin no Suika (Beijing Watermelon, Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1989)
    2024 was the sixth time in the last seven years that one of the best movies I watched was by Obayashi Nobuhiko (the seventh year I didn’t watch any of his films).
  5. Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One (Kevin Costner, 2024)
    If it ever gets finished the way it’s intended, it could be the ultimate culmination of 130 years of Western genre cinema. As it is, it’s one of the finest classical American films of the last 25 years.
  6. Ohikkoshi (Moving, Sōmai Shinji, 1993)
    The Somai rediscovery (in the West), like the Obayashi one before it, is one of the more hopeful events of recent cinephile culture.
  7. Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024)
    “The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game – it’s a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
  8. Jiǔlóng zhài chéng zhī wéi (Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Soi Cheang, 2024)
    Cheang is one of the few directors out there keeping the flame of classic Hong Kong cinema alive, filtering elaborate political allegories through outlandish action cinema.
  9. Baby Walkure: Naisu Deizu (Baby Assassins: Nice Days, Sakamoto Yugo, 2024)
    Sakamoto’s Baby Assassins (Izawa Saori and Takaishi Akari) remain the most vital pop cultural creation of the 2020s. This year these slacker hitwomen even conquered television as well. There is no stopping them, they are inevitable.
  10. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2022)
    This most ingenious cult film of the year was co-produced by Seattle Seahawks legend (and upper midwest native) Nick Bellore. Homemade cinema at its finest.

Antony I. Ginnane

Melbourne born Antony I. Ginnane has produced or executive produced 72 feature films, MOW’s, miniseries and TV series over 52 years

Top 10 (Eligibility: 2024 films in theatrical, festival, premiere DVD or VOD or streaming first release in the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand) listed alphabetically by title:

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
Spawned from Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) and infused with Cronenbergian body horror, Fargeat presents a mischievous take on celebrity aging through a feminist lens with Dennis Quaid as the ultimate misogynist and Demi Moore as the star passing her media use by date and grappling with the consequences.

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Three women struggling to find their place in modern India. The second half of the film moves from Mumbai to the country recalling the pastoral moments of Jean Renoir. Kopadia weaves a colour tapestry of hopes and dreams as the women struggle to achieve their dreams.

Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024)
Rose Glass treads the neo-noir path with a dose of gay romance thrown into this stripped-down action thriller that echoes “True Romance” (Tony Scott, 1993) with its pop melodrama and intermittent violence.

Strange Darling (J.T. Molner, 2024)
J.T. Molner reveals his narrative a serial killer’s final criminal days in nonlinear fashion, but manages to retain an electrifying suspense. Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner’s toxic initial connection twists and turns in ways that are completely unsuspected.

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
Jacques Audiard presents a major crime based take in a new and vigorous way, overlaying it with music, song and dance. An extraordinary lead performance by Karla Sofia Gascon is matched by that of Zoe Saldana. A wonderful mix of musical and crime thriller. Quite unique in its genre blending.

Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
In his ever classic style, Eastwood turns his attention to issues of guilt, responsibility, ambition and family set against the background of the contemporary US legal system and the mechanics of jury process. Clean visuals with great performances.

Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)
A nail biting Iranian thriller which progressively ratchets up tension between an investigative judge and his family. Rasoulof, now on the run from Iran, focuses on the theocracy’s need for control clashing with demands for compromise and / or revolt.

September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum, 2024)
A different view of the Munich massacre exploring the practical and ethical dilemmas of sports reporters caught in a political hotspot. A fascinating reflection of the methodology of broadcast TV in the early 70s spliced with an initial American naivete.

Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)
Eggers is back in the horror genre focusing on that classical character first presented by Murnau in 1922. Layered in gothic mannerisms the obsession the vampire has for his angelic prey is presented through mists and darkness as expected but with a psychic bond that develops into an ultimately devastating finale.

Alien Romulus (Fede Alvarez, 2024)
Fede Alvarez recaptures the spirit, style, intensity and ferociousness of the first 2 films in this lauded sci-fi series. While the setup and narrative are now familiar, there are contemporary add-ons involving would-be immigrants, indentured workers etc. The interiors of the abandoned spaceship are as doom ridden as ever.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Andrew Goode

Head of Marketing and Theatrical, Hi Gloss Entertainment

The ten best films I saw in 2024 in alphabetical order of their English titles.

Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang-soo, 2024)

Hong Sang-soo’s first film of the year turned out to be the deliciously whimsical fish-out-of-water story starring Isabelle Huppert as an aloof yet alluring nomad in Seoul. Adding to an imperious filmography which is increasing seemingly every six months, A Traveler’s Needs is not only one of the best comedies of the year, but possibly Director’s Hong most universal film.

Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024) 

A dramatic account of the 26 (of 7000) royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern day Republic of Benin) being returned to Africa by a museum in Paris. Weaving interviews, panel discussions and a haunting voiceover monologue by a statue of King Ghézo, a King of Dahomey in the 1800s, who speaks about his time in storage in France, memories from his time as king and thoughts on his return to Africa. Diop’s 68-minute film has the potential to be a landmark title in documentary filmmaking.

Good One (India Donaldson, 2024)

I watched Good One in a tiny screening room in Cannes and was completely enamoured by India Donaldson’s debut feature. A quiet and contemplative film about a young woman, her dad and his inept best friend going for a hike in Upstate New York where not much happens until something does. The moment of horror in the film, albeit fleeing and conveyed in one or two lines, is scarier than anything you’ll see in a film this year.

Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024)

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s new film starring Caleb Landy Jones and Dudley from Harry Potter (Harry Melling) is a comic gothic-western set in England in the Middle Ages. Inherently a film about modernisation and made with a sentiment echoing Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, Alice Rohrwacher, 2018), Harvest is an enchanting and brutal slice of life film from a very different time.

Joker: Folie à Deux (Todd Phillips, 2024)

I watched this film in a multiplex on a very hot night in Taipei in October with a confidant of mine and about 25 Taiwanese strangers. What I saw was an attempt to right the wrongs of the first film, which became a calling card by some of the more undesirable communities found in the corners of the internet. I couldn’t help but admire Todd Phillip’s staunch rejection of fan service of any kind as he cinematically debunked many of the eponymous character’s claims that became so popular in Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019). Folie à Deux is a triumph of subtle protest cinema.

Kuraudo (Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

I was only able to watch one of the three films that Director Kurosawa made this year, the curiously lowkey Venice Out of Competition entry, Cloud. Which turned out to be a very welcome return to Kurosawa’s pulsating genre roots. The film is slightly rough around the edges and the plot, which revolves around an ‘online reseller’ whose tactics annoy his rivals, might be hard to follow for anyone over the age of 35. Kurosawa’s new film is a thrilling and at times brutal look at an online marketplace that has very real implications in the real world.

Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024)

Alain Guidarie’s countryside crime caper stars Félix Kysyl as Jérémie, a man returning to his hometown for a funeral only to accidentally kill the middle-aged son of the woman he’s staying with. With the aid of a yearning priest and a protective landlord, Jérémie’s attempts to conceal the crime from the very imaginative local gendarmerie and a fast-growing patch of mushrooms that cover the body result in two-hours of unserious perfection.

Mostel Destino (Karim Aïnouz, 2024)

A year on from his disappointing English-language debut, the revisionist historical drama Firebrand, Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s returned to the Cannes Competition with the neon-hued erotic ménage à trois thriller Motel Destino. A delightful mix of Verhoeven’s psychological erotic thrillers of the 90s and Harmony Korine’s seamy, neon-lit crime capers of the 2010s, move over Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024)—because Aïnouz’s sex-hotel set drama in North-Western Brazil is the year’s sexiest film. 

No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 2024)

A remarkably well-made documentary depicting the ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. I have seen the film a number of times now and the horrors that Basel and his family have had to endure at the hands of the IDF are utterly heartbreaking and honestly hard to truly even understand as someone who lives on the other side of the world. 

La habitación de al lado (The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)

Although I wasn’t able to watch some of the key Venice Competition titles this year, Almodóvar’s stylistic assisted-dying drama is beautiful as it is brisk and at least compared to previous winners this century, a more than worthy winner of the festival’s top prize.

Dahomey

Jared Gores

Documentary Producer and Film Podcaster in San Francisco

Favorite films of the year, loosely ranked:

  • Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
  • Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
  • La bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
  • All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
  • I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)
  • The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)
  • A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
  • Une langue universelle (Universal Language, Matthew Rankin, 2024)
  • Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)
  • Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

Michael Granados

Film Critic based in Los Angeles, Film Fest Report
  • Archéologie de la lumière (Sylvain L’Esperance, 2024)
  • Being John Smith (John Smith, 2024)
  • Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, 2024)
  • exergue – on documenta 14 (Dimitris Athyridis, 2024)
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Historia de pastores (Tale of Shepherds, Jaime Puertas Castillo, 2024)
  • Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
  • Pepe (Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, 2024)
  • Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
  • Tú me abrasas (You Burn Me, Matías Piñeiro, 2024)

Carmen Gray

Carmen Gray is a New Zealand-born, Berlin-based freelance journalist and critic, and a film programer for the Berlinale and Winterthur
  1. Tardes de Soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)
    A study on power, ego and danger as a spectacle that is utterly singular, enthralling and resistant to platitudes. Only Albert Serra could make a film like this.
  2. My Undesirable Friends: Part I Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev, 2024)
    This gripping documentary project on the foreign agents’ law and repression of independent media in Russia offers tremendous insight into the workings and human cost of such policies across the region.
  3. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)
    An epic and devastating portrayal of power and capital as parasitic forces that feed on the best of creative talent and endeavour, by way of an immigrant family’s American nightmare.
  4. A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari, 2024)
    The poetry of political resistance finds its form in this masterful act of reclamation and recontextualisation of looted historical images.
  5. Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024)
    A sense for the details of place and a humane sensitivity to the emotional textures of love and loss underpin this beautifully alive and politically trenchant portrait of community on the margins.
  6. Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zurcher, 2024)
    Elliptical, dark, and unsettling, this psychological horror transforms domestic space into an uncanny realm of suggestion, hallucinatory interlude and latent violence.
  7. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
    Sean Baker delivered another bold twist on his established strengths. A wild, comedic ride with bold swagger and an empathetic human heart.
  8. Si e verdhë e sëmurë (Like A Sick Yellow, Norika Sefa, 2024)
    As unnerving as it is poetic, the most stunning short of the year is a mesmeric vision of memory, and trauma as a site of fragmentary and repetitive return.
  9. La flor de mi secreto (Flower of My Secret, Pedro Almodovar, 1995)
    Actress Marisa Paredes was at Georgia’s Kutaisi International Short Film Festival in October for their focus on early Almodovar, which was a gift of defiant vision, irreverent joy and impeccable timing.
  10. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)
    Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s summertime screening of this beautiful madness reminded me why Gena Rowlands is everything.

Francesco Grieco

Member of the selection committee for the Venice International Film Critics’ Week (SIC) and for the Presente Italiano Festival

Films released in 2024:

  • Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
  • The Fall Guy (David Leitch, 2024)
  • Feng liu yi dai (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke, 2024)
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024)
  • Kiss Wagon (Midhun Murali, 2024)
  • Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Older films encountered for the first time this year:

  • Coup pour coup (Blow for Blow, Marin Karmitz, 1972)
  • Solo Trans (Hal Ashby, 1984)
  • Babel lettre à mes amis restés en Belgique (Babel, Boris Lehman, 1991)

In-person, online or hybrid events I attended:

Thanks to the Italian platform MYmovies ONE , I watched some interesting movies from the Trieste Film Festival (for example: MMXX, Cristi Puiu, 2023) and from the Pesaro Film Festival

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