World Poll 2024 – Part 4

ENTRIES IN PART 4:

Craig Harshaw

Craig Harshaw is a cultural critic, curator, educator and performance artist living in the United States

Ten Favorite Films that I watched in 2024:

La Bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
Bonello, freely adapting Henry James’ novella The Beast in The Jungle, has created the best and most fully realised film of his extraordinary career. The key to the success of the film is the presence of two extraordinary performers, Lea Seydoux and George MacKay, who ground Bonello’s film and thus allow us to literally follow the narrative as it leaps through space and time.

Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024)
An extraordinary work of magical realism that brings together all of Arnold’s obsessions. The film is lifted due to the star power of two extraordinary actors, Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, and the fresh presence of Nykia Adams, who plays the film’s protagonist Bailey. Arnold’s attenuation of the natural world and her incredible insights into adolescent resiliency are here in full force in a film every bit as powerful as her groundbreaking, Fish Tank (2009).

Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz, 2024)
A remarkable first feature and one of the best thrillers of the year. Kravitz manages to make a brilliant use of Channing Tatum’s star presence (in a role written specifically for him). Tatum stars as Slater King, an Elon Musk type billionaire who has gotten in some form of “me too” type trouble prior to the film’s narrative beginning, who invites two young women (Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat) away to his private Island for a special vacation. Things quickly get weird and frightening. 

Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
One of the few truly erotic and thought provoking romantic films released this year with a trio of exceptional performances from Zendaya, Josh O’Conner and Mike Faist. The film contains the most imaginative editing and sound design of any commercially released feature this year.

Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
Diop’s magical realist documentary about the reparation of 26 Benin artifacts to the Republic of Benin from the French museum they were held in. Diop manages to imbue the film with the complexity worthy of her subject bringing in the voices of university students from Benin, museum curators and preservationists from Europe and Africa and even in haunting voice over of one of the statues itself.  

Bên trong vỏ kén vàng (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Pham Thien An, 2023)
An almost inexplicably well-made masterpiece from Vietnam that manages to be precisely local while also globally resonant in ways that suggest the very best of world cinema, and may be an argument for why cinema is actually better at fulfilling the cosmopolitan dream of world literature first put forward by Goethe. This is a film that has literally stunned me after two re-viewings. I continue to see images and understand ideas that I missed in my previous viewings. The story itself is deceptively simple, involving a terrible car accident, a child left motherless, a man lost and wandering, devout religious followers, rain storms and combating roosters to mention just a few key scenes from the film. 

L’Été dernier (Last Summer, Catherine Breillat, 2023)
Breillat remakes Danish filmmaker May El-Toukhy’s powerful 2019 film, Queen of Hearts, and manages through an adapted screenplay she has written with Pascal Bonitzer to make a film that is drastically different than the original. The changes Breillat and Bonitzer have made include entirely re-imagining the ending of the film as well as updating the legal matters to fit the French rather than the Danish system. However, the biggest surprise for me was their reconception of Theo’s father into a much more emotional figure as incarnated in a breathtaking performance by Olivier Rabourdin. 

Augure (Omen, Baloji, 2023)
Directed by the Belgian hip-hop artist Baloji, who is of mixed Belgian and Congolese descent, Omen concerns a young man named Koffi (Marc Zinga) who returns to Congo from Europe with his Belgian wife to be (Lucie Debay) in order to hopefully reunite with his estranged family. Baloji constructs this central story of cultural conflict and decolonisation through an imaginative prism of Congolese culture that includes the perspectives of Koffi’s embittered mother (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) who gives a powerful performance, his sexually liberated sister (Eliane Umuhire) and a young boy who lives on the streets and leads a gang of gender non-conforming wrestlers who wear pink dresses and tutus. The film contains some of the most striking visuals of any narrative film I saw last year. 

Tótem (Totem, Lila Avilés, 2023)
The action spans a single day in the life of seven-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes) and her family as they prepare for a birthday party for her terminally ill father (played by the noted novelist and screenwriter, Mateo García Elizondo). It’s a heartbreaking, beautifully observed and ultimately life affirming film about loss, acceptance and mortality, all filtered primarily through the eyes of a young girl. 

Yan Jiao (White River, Ma Xue, 2023)
An extraordinary first feature produced in South Korea by the Chinese director Ma Xue. Perhaps the most controversially sexual film since Rada Jude’s Bad Luck Banging, or, Looney Porn, but rather more in a tradition of extraordinary women filmmakers in which I easily saw a robust dialogue with the work of Chantal Akerman, Clara Law, Lizzie Borden, and Yoko Ono. In some ways the film would be an interesting double feature with Challengers in that it is also about a love triangle centered upon the sexuality of a woman, this time a married woman entering middle-age who begins a sexual affair with a local waiter which is discovered by her husband who begins participating with the lovers. 

The most painful omissions for me from this list were Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023), Erica Trembly’s Fancy Dance (2023), Bas Devos’ Here (2023), Ariane Louis-Seize’s Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant (Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, 2023), Damian McCarthy’s Oddity (2024), Anna Hints’ Smoke, Sauna, Sisterhood (2023), Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023), Carolie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami’s Ayeh haye zamini (Terrestrial Verses, 2023).

Michael Heath

Screenwriter, Documentary and Independent Filmmaker and Cinephile. Raumati South, Aotearoa/New Zealand

10 memorable visions of 2024:

Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
Trong lòng đất (Viet and Nam, Trương Minh Quy, 2024)
Here (Bas Devos, 2023)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
Bên trong vỏ kén vàng (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Phạm Thiên Ân, 2023)
Aku wa Sonzai Shinai (Evil Does not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
Super Happy Forever (Kohei Igarashi, 2024)
Gou Zhen (Black Dog, Guan Hu, 2024)

Peter Henné

Freelance Film Writer, USA

These new restorations on blu-ray brought me to reconsider films I hadn’t had the opportunity to see in high quality before. Now one can reach further into their ideas and emotional shadings: getting a better fix on spatial relations can count tremendously for the nuance a film provides about characters’ bonds and the possibilities for them in their world. These four titles help revive pivotal films from inestimable directors and prompt me to think more about cinema’s creative splendour and speculative power.

Has Anybody Seen My Gal (Douglas Sirk, 1952)

This first installment in Sirk’s Americana trilogy implies several upcoming subversions for the director’s career. Its cautionary message for living it up – to curtail one’s extravagance – comes across somewhat patronising, and Sirk, newly handed Technicolor for the film and nonchalantly sprinkling velvety greens and candy pinks on his screen with it, negates his plot’s lesson rather ebulliently. The film reaches past its genre’s divided sympathies for teasing while yearning for better days, and ruffles expectations for moral engagement. Working out the primacy of style, the filmmaker has more production advantages at his disposal than ever before, such as means to craft a slyly evolving musical number and one well-appointed set after another.

Set in a cosy suburban ’20s, Gal is Sirk’s opening fusillade of colour which sets in motion his two following period pieces and establishes a commitment to expression by style in the expanding format options of the ’50s. His glorious ‘weepies’ to come add substantive content that the director negotiates by camerawork and editing. But here, delivering material with little melancholy and no melodrama, Sirk’s concern turns toward representation itself more than narrative plights, much like a character turning his attention to the one swatch of black-and-white in the whole eye-popping film, an oval portrait photo of his lost beloved.

The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1952)

It starts like this: We see a theatre curtain behind a credits scroll, and the scroll rolls over the image while we hear non-diegetic music. But since no events or characters come into our view, nothing can verify the music isn’t audible within the curtain’s space. The scroll names cast and crew, but also addresses viewers with prefaces. The curtain may be a physical partition or a special effect, of an indeterminate substance. A following shot shows what appears to be the exact same curtain now hoisted up to reveal a live-action scene. Here begins Renoir’s majestic drollery with art, actors, reality, and their intermediary spaces, and the interpenetrations, communications and mirroring between them.

A commedia dell’arte troupe lands at a New World port in the late 18th century. A viceroy’s fussy new golden coach symbolises one idea of art while the troupe’s hand-made, lavishly coloured clothing and props quite another. Jealousies ensue, plots are laid, ideals clash, and the physical and artistic overlap. Renoir gives perhaps the best line of all for expressing his art-meets-life layering to Anna Magnani, playing one of the troupe’s stars. Back stage in costume, she looks at a paltry coffer, throws up her hands, declares “Well, back to reality,” and stalks out of the side of the movie screen.

Man’s Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)

This blu-ray restoration brings back to life a film heavily censored by the Breen office, five years after its first run. Set at a Depression encampment beside a gloomy New York riverbank, Castle focuses on a downtrodden couple falling wearily but, unperceived by them at first, deeply in love. Made near the end of the pre-Code era, its trespasses aren’t indecorous so much as intrepid, put in the service of Borzage’s commitment to the unvarnished truth of struggling love. Its unworried candour corresponds to his late silents, and a female nude bathing scene complements a male one in 1929’s The River.

In tandem with Castle‘s upfront spirit, the director’s translucent style lends a sense of sifting through the outwardly given to find the heartbeat within. His loose-grain effect can make it seem as though reality is softened and his to see into. A similar diffusion turns up earlier in Street Angel (1928) and A Farewell to Arms (1932). Castle‘s ethereal appearance shows up finely and the remarkable detail and grading perhaps hint at what this shaded and sensitive film felt like 91 years ago.

L’amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

L’amour fou is the first instantiation of Rivette’s ground-level-up metaphysics, drawing upon what is close at hand, the proximate and the imaginary. The world constituted by language now over for the director, he starts afresh, examining close and simple things. I think one cannot help but be struck straightaway by the sharp variance in sound of the film, the notable prominence given to ruffling and banging, yet the lower levels heard in talk and recitation.

Rivette prompts viewers to weigh what is neglected or privileged, and what might be categorised as important or negligible, conceptually prior or following. A play is rehearsed for the sake of its sound. The theatre director and his wife Claire, both unfettered, rip down the wallpaper of their home, but the noise of shredding rises above their ecstasy. Footage from a 16mm doc crew seems to impress itself onto the film and potentially rival the 35mm fictional material for the ontological upper hand.

Yet still more secret rulers of this world could be the film’s many mirrors, seeming to undermine the presumed stability of people they reflect; or Claire’s apparently mystic touch with appliances, picking up portentous messages on her transistor radio, committing them to her tape recorder and strategically distributing them to her husband in person and by phone. The result: no diegesis. Rivette asks us to stay put on the ground, inspect, gaze.

Alain Hertay

Teaches cinema studies at the Haute Ecole de la Province de Liège, Belgium. Contributor to La Furia Umana, Culturopoing, POPNews and Flashback Magazine

10 favourite new release films from 2024:

1. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
2. Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
3. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
4. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, 2023)
5. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier, 2024)
6. La Plus Précieuse Des Marchandises (The Most Precious of Cargoes, Michel Hazanavicius, 2024)
7. L’Amour ouf (Beating Hearts, Gilles Lellouche, 2024)
8. Saint-Ex (Pablo Agüero, 2024)
9. Le Procès du chien (Dog on Trial, Laetitia Dosch, 2024)
10. En fanfare (The Marching Band, Emmanuel Courcol, 2024)

David Heslin

David Heslin is the Melbourne International Film Festival’s publications manager and a former editor of Metro, Screen Education and Senses of Cinema

Best new films of 2024:

1. Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023)
2. Us and the Night (Audrey Lam, 2024)
3. La Bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
4. Nu Aștepta Prea Mult de la Sfârșitul Lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude, 2023)
5. Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, 2023)
6. Janet Planet (Annie Baker, 2023)
7. Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka (The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)
8. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
9. Tú me abrasas (You Burn Me, Matías Piñeiro, 2024)
10. Los Hiperbóreos (The Hyperboreans, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña, 2024)

Lee Hill

Lee Hill is the author of A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

Top Ten (no order):

C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, Leos Carax, 2024)
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)
Yeohaengjaui Pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang Soo, 2024)
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Tie: Beatles ’64 (David Tedeschi, 2024) and One to One: John & Yoko (Kevin MacDonald & Sam Rice-Edwards, 2024)
2073 (Asif Kapadia, 2024)
Mon Inséparable (My Everything, Anne-Sophie Bailly, 2024)
Reissue tie: Let It Be (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1970) and The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Notes: Cinephilia is increasingly indulged via various bubbles – MUBI, letterboxd, academe or from the malthusian vantage of data-centric multi-nationals or NGOs with well-intended but often transactional CSR policies when the going gets tough. Movie theatres feel lonelier than an Edward Hopper pastiche or a fugitive’s last hiding place. Both pre and post-US election, I found the “visions” of far too many auteurs – J’Accuse Alex Garland, Andrea Arnold, Luca Guadagnino, Todd Phillips, Jacques Audiard, Mike Leigh, or Osgood Perkins, to name a few – depressingly beside the point; kept aloft by various generations of great actors, cinematography, production design, a music cue here and there or just the audience’s infinite patience and hunger for escape. 2024 felt all too often like The Designated Mourner Two: This Time Even The Sigh Has Died. 

Still it remains a good time for books on or related to various aspects of film culture: Greatest Hits and The Last Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison, Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen, Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda by Carrie Rickey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: A BFI Classic by Dana B. Polan, Amnesiac: A Memoir by Neil Jordan, A Few Words in Defence of Our Country: A Biography of Randy Newman by Robert Hilburn, and A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later – Still the Great American Contender by Stephen Rebello.

Kierran A. Horner

Film Scholar and Writer based in London

Five released this year:

Hoard (Luna Carmoon, 2023)

‘Bins, they hold memories in them’, Saura Lightfoot Leon’s Maria reveals to Joseph Quinn’s Michael in Carmoon’s sensuous debut feature. The line is a revelation of Maria’s core self, disclosed as part of the film’s analysis of the intersections of mental health and gender performance and of the ménage à trois of love, repulsion and lust. The generational legacy of mental illness, and its enduring impact, is expressed in Maria as desire and affection trigger festering trauma and the self-destructive habits that feed on it.

La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)

Remixing the quintessential compound of anarchic magic realism and defiant super-naturalism typical of her previous features – Corpo celeste (Heavenly Body, 2011) and Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, 2018) – Rohrwachers’s feature is a fantasy-comedy of loss. The ambling quest of ersatz-protagonist Arthur’s pining for a lost love and search for Italy’s lost past tell a history of its treasures that are relocated through greed. Self-consciously, Rohrwacher exhumes past Italian film royalty, with pinches of Pasolini woven into her distinct voice, especially in the irreverent scenes of the tipsy treasure-hunters at the riotous Epiphany celebrations. Yet, poignantly, the director reveals that unearthing treasures buried with the dead releases their spirits: Arthur’s absent love Beniamina haunts the film, neither dead or alive, a living death, a phantom personification of absence. 

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Fargeat’s brutal, Gothic satire holds a mirror up to the sexualising hetero cis-male gaze, à la her previous feature Revenge (2017) and her short film from which The Substance is spliced, Reality+ (2014). Then pokes a finger in its eyes. Then gouges them out. The last act ‘monster’ Elisasue is a tragi-comic embodiment of the psyche of individuals expected and attempting to meet the conflicting definitions of ‘female’ in a patriarchal, capitalist paradigm. The film which forms her is equally Calibanic, raging against constructed, constricting images of ‘beauty’, the contradictory compulsion to see oneself in them and the trauma caused when one cannot. 

Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024)

Two of the most significant actors of recent world cinema, Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, are apprenticed to Nykiya Adams’s revelatory performance as Bailey in Arnold’s return to the British council estate after her American sojourn. Constructed from the familiar elements of her earlier work – Dog (2001), Wasp (2003) and Fish Tank (2009) – disenfranchised youth in a bildungsroman of magical realism, or kitchen sink surrealism, the invisible constrictions of poverty and unsuspected mental illness are perforated by Bailey’s fantasies, which are equally chimeric instants of flight from reality and psychotic delusions. Like in Fish Tank, which offers dance as an escape from the mundanity of abuse and neglect (the estate a metonym for the State), these moments of release offer brittle hope.

Witches (Elizabeth Sankey, 2024)

An intimate essay-film imbricating the torments of postpartum depression and psychosis and the historical, gendered persecution of witches, represented through talking head interviews and cinematic clips. Sankey’s own postnatal experiences initiate the dissertation, through which she weaves the lived understanding of other misunderstood mothers and narratives of wise women, to denounce their ostracisation and condemnation as unnatural and unfeminine by brutish, patriarchal communities. 

Five Seen for the first time this year:

I Don’t Know (Penelope Spheeris, 1970)

A seemingly deliberately peripatetic record that resists delimiting its two leads Linda, who identifies as lesbian, and Jimmie, who is intergender, as it tracks their relationship in the early ‘70s L. A. Valley. Spheeris chronicles the pair in quotidian tasks – they bathe, ride, walk and talk – whilst discussing their defiance of attempts to define their difference within hetero-binary or even more conventional queer identities.

Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero: stamattina alle 10, in via dei Fiori, nella nota casa di tolleranza… (Love and Anarchy, Lina Wertmüller, 1973)

The original title reads as a newspaper headline, but (apart from the final scenes) the plot involving Giancarlo Giannini’s inexperienced, incidental assassin, simultaneously falling in love and preparing to dispatch a despot in a Milano brothel, disregards a reportage, forensic approach. Instead, it is a hectic, hyperreal-ised tale of the two titular incidents interweaving, inspiring and interposing with and on one another to the point of anticlimax. 

J’ai faim, j’ai froid (Chantal Akerman, 1984)

A little bit of a cheat as this short was made as part of the Parisian omnibus, Paris vu par… vingt ans après, which featured five other vignettes, but it’s Akerman. Maintaining the first-person intimacy of Saute ma Ville (1968) and Je tu il elle (1974) by filtering the narrative through her own experiences of Paris, the director portrays two Belgian, teenage women abandoning the hinterland for the temptations of Paris. The young pair – Maria de Medeiros and Pascale Salki – epitomise the arrogance of naïveté as they survive the sexual microaggressions of the city’s men. 

Cycles (Zeinabu Irene Davis, 1989)

The anxiety of awaiting a belated period is conveyed through Davis’s meticulous focus on the details of ritual – the ceremonial and the domestic – and soundtracked by a ticking clock in her experimental drama. As Stephanie Ingram’s Rasheeda Allen anticipates her menstrual cycle, she invokes Caribbean folklore through performing the purification of home and body, which Davis layers with African-American women’s voices and music of Africa.

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

Marrying a Markerian, anthropological conceit of international exploration with absurdist imagery, Tsangari’s titular Going contemplates socio-political and philosophical theses with a chair strapped to her back. The slapstick of ennui and inertia, repetition with superficial difference, pre-empt the ‘weird’ aesthetics and compositions of Attenberg (2010): resounding through both films are scenes of two women trampolining on a hotel bed and practice swimming on a table-top.

Christoph Huber

Curator, Austrian Film Museum

Analogue Pleasures

1. Greedy for Tweety (Friz Freleng, 1957)

The Looney Tunes cartoons remain the pinnacle of popular storytelling: both a condensation and a perfect parody of Hollywood filmmaking. At home I watched and (mostly) rewatched hundreds of masterpieces from Termite Terrace this year, a balm for the soul in terrible times also dominated by mostly terrible cinema. To encounter these gems in their original format has become a rarity today, so imagine my ecstasy discovering an hitherto unseen 35mm Technicolor print of supreme Sylvester genius in our collection.

2. Hallo Hallo! Hier spricht Berlin! / Allo Berlin ? Ici Paris! (Berlin Here, Julien Duvivier, 1932)

Rarely has a retrospective given me as much pleasure as our Julien Duvivier series, since it allowed me not just to rewatch favourites on film, but gave me the rare opportunity to discover more than half a dozen highlights on 35mm (even as others are sadly no longer loanable in analogue format despite good prints existing, a quickly escalating problem that remains mostly unaddressed in “film” circles.) Partly this is because Duvivier remains misunderstood – Chabrol put it nicely when he pointed out that people don’t know what they are talking about when they say someone is a great craftsman, and that French cinema had one, namely Duvivier, who also was a great auteur, despite Duvivier disputing auteurism. That fits the Dracula-black darkness of his worldview resonating through his work, but ambivalently. Cf. this truly bilingual comedy, showcasing Duvivier as one of the few who instantly mastered sound, frenziedly combining everything from screwball shenanigans to (post-)silent montage delirium into 90 minutes which feel like 45, most welcome in this era of hopelessly overlong “movies”. Other Duvivier highlights I could have chosen: Au royaume des cieux (In the Kingdom of Heaven, 1949), Marianne of My Youth (1955), Golgotha (1935) – perhaps still the best bible film ever made -, Sous le ciel de Paris (Under the Sky of Paris, 1951), Le mystère de la tour Eiffel (The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower, 1928), Boulevard (1960), or even The Great Waltz (1938), a work of idiotic greatness and great idiocy, Hollywood-style, explaining why the director left the so-called dream factory again to pursue his disconcerting vision all the while pretending to make popular entertainment.

3. The Emerald Forest (John Boorman, 1985)

My most moving screening this year was finally encountering John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) on 35mm, but our Boorman retrospective also allowed me to catch up with this magical reworking of Western tropes combining his “visionary” style and ecological themes. It was ahead of its time back then, now it plays like a warning that should have been heeded before it’s too late.

4. The Text of Light (Stan Brakhage, 1974)

All you need to make a film is a camera and an ashtray. Seeing this on a pristine 16mm print was a highlight among several classics of experimental cinema that I had procrastinated on because I wanted to encounter them in their original format, the only way they make sense, like Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971)

5. La condanna (The Conviction, Marco Bellocchio, 1991)

A prime example of the ever-increasing category of “films impossible to get financed today”, which often also turn out to be the only ones worth financing. Its content may seem outrageous, but it reflects a certain mindset with shocking clarity, whereas its dreamlike state is hypnotic. In short, seeing it on 35mm was a reminder why Bellocchio undoubtedly is the most important living Italian director; among other neglected examples I would like to mention La Cine è vicina (China Is Near, 1967) and La balia (The Nanny, 1999), with extra props to I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1970) by Liliana Cavani whom we honoured at the same time.

6. La fórmula secreta (The Secret Formula, Rubén Gámez, 1965)

For films from the Global South there is no guarantee that prints survive(d), a reminder of the luxurious privilege embedded in this list. (Obviously, I endorse digital consumption where there is no other possibility.) One of many film screenings this year intensified by the knowledge that the print – 35mm, still looking great – may be projected to an audience for the last time.

7. Parash Pathar (The Philosopher’s Stone, Satyajit Ray, 1958)

A reminder (on beautiful 35mm) that contrary to popular belief and canonical doctrine true greatness contains multitudes.

8. Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, Ralf Kirsten, Brigitte Kirsten, 1973)

Even better to not just finally see it, but also back-to-back with another 35mm print of the lesser, but still-fascinating Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, Manfred Purzer, 1976).

9. Naua Huni (Barbara Keifenheim, Patrick Deshayes, 1986)

Finally, in praise of rarity and discovery (which never ends, the surface of film history has barely been scratched even as so much of it is already lost): Ethnography turned on its head, surviving in Barabara Keifenheim’s own 16mm print.

10. Revolving Rounds (Johann Lurf, Christina Jauernik, 2024)

This is what 3D cinema could be like – truly mind-blowing – when you use film (and know how to do it). Sadly this one I only saw on a DCP (a pity that even so-called “cinephile heavens” like the Viennale film festival doesn’t care anymore for showing films on film and nobody complains), so since I’ve broken my own rule, let me close on offering a short list of good contemporary films: Polizeiruf 110: Jenseits des Rechts (Dominik Graf, 2024), Absolom Filipino (Lav Diaz, 2024) and his Kapag wala nang mga alon (When The Waves Are Gone, 2022), Des Teufels Bad (The Devil’s Bath, Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala, 2024), Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025), Jiu Long cheng zhai · Wei cheng (Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Soi Cheang, 2024), Tage (Days, Peter Schreiner, 2023), The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024), Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (Kevin Costner, 2024), Outlaw Johnny Black (Michael Jai White, 2023), Wankostättn (Karin Berger, 2023), Kubi (Takeshi Kitano, 2023), The King of Wuxia (Lin Jing-Jie, 2022).

Parviz Jahed

PhD in Modern Languages (University of Saint Andrews), film critic, film scholar and researcher and the editor-in-chief of Cine-Eye film journal

My top 10 best films viewed in 2024, organised alphabetically:

1. Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here, Walter Salles, 2024)
2. Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023)
3. Feng liu yi dai (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke, 2024) 
4. Gouzhen (Black Dog, Guan Hu, 2024)
5. Kuru Otlar Üstüne (About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023)
6.  Los delincuentes (The Delinquents, Rodrigo Moreno, 2023)
7.  No Other Land (Basel Adra, 2024)
8. Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023)
9. Small Things like These (Tim Mielants, 2024)
10. Snerting (Touch, Baltasar Kormákur, 2024)

Darik Janik

Filmmaker

1. The Last Showgirl (Gia Coppola, 2024)
2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)
3. Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
4. Feng liu yi dai (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke, 2024)
5. Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)
6. Opt ilustrate din lumea ideala (Eight Postcards from Utopia, Radu Jude, 2024)
7. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
8. Suyucheon (By the Stream, Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
9. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)
10. Kuraudo (Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Paul Jeffery

Paul Jeffery is an ex-actor, ex-filmmaker, and current PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, writing on the cinema of Perezhivanie and the importance of ex-actors as filmmakers

1. Comme le feu (Who By Fire, Philippe Lesage, 2024)
2. Sterben (Dying, Matthias Glasner, 2024)
3. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)
4. Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zurcher, 2024)
5. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)   
6. La passion de Dodin Bouffant (The Taste of Things, Tran Anh Hung, 2023)
7. Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Victor Erice, 2023)
8. Zielona granica (Green Border, Agnieszka Holland, 2023)
9. My Old Ass (Megan Park, 2024)
10. Blink Twice (Zoe Kravitz, 2024)

Lists tell us much more about the person making the list than they do about the films featured on the list. I’m surprised by how prominently aging and death – in various ways – feature in my choices this year. I’m less surprised by how much each film, in its own manner, foregrounds the glorious transience of the present moment, as embodied by the actors experiencing that moment in front of the camera.

Matthew Jordan

Writer, Producer & Director (The Firelight Pictures Co.)

1. Dying (Matthias Glasner, 2024)

One factor separated my first two places; the screening experience. Going into this screening I knew only two things; title and country of origin. And unlike Anora, where the marketing machine bombarded me with trailers, here I was blind, transported into an unknown world to go… who knows where? And in the hands of a filmmaker of this caliber, this journey was truly rewarding as he balanced a satirically absurdist tone with some hard-hitting emotional truth’s, creating a film where being with this troubled family in a world determined to test them at every turn felt more real than real from beginning to end. My best film of 2024 and the best viewing experience of recent memory.

2. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

If John Cassavetes was alive and making films in 2024, Anora is the film he would make. Richly humane and insanely chaotic, this is a rare example of a film that doesn’t just meet the post Palme D’or hype, but exceeds it. A truly contemporary film with an independent American ‘70s cinema spirit, Mikey Maddison announces her arrival with bombastic subtly (a not even slightly contradictory description) and Sean Baker reminds us that adult character driven dramas still have a significant place on our silver screens.

3. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Like others on my list, this film takes massive swings. What sets this apart is, it lands each swing with near perfection. From identical opening and closing shots, the contrasting meaning experienced is profoundly illuminated by all the blood-soaked grotesquery that passes before our unsuspecting eyes, creating one of this year’s truly remarkable achievements – and that isn’t even its greatest feat. That is creating a film with an important message that never preaches down from a lofty moral position. Instead it does what all great message driven cinema does, it threads its message into plot, character and theme enabling us to draw out meaning whilst being shamelessly entertained.

4. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

The sheer shamelessness of this film’s bold ambition has one standing in awe from its opening shot onwards. Clearly the love child of George Stevens American sagas and the modern American mythologies of Paul Thomas Anderson, with a healthy dose of The Fountainhead, this film also takes massive swings and when they land, oh how they land and when they fall short, well perhaps a second viewing may offer some clarity but until then my memory of this epic and haunting journey into one man’s quenchless ambition, told by a director with the same, felt honest and daring and richly deserving of all the accolades about to come its way.

5. Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024)

Experiencing this on opening night at MIFF I saw a uniquely funny film that, in amongst the excitement of MIFF’s launch, was something I would have labelled an enjoyable oddity. But taking my 12-year-old daughter a few weeks later for her birthday I saw the film anew. This strange, beautiful, complicated, dark, touching, absurd, hilarious and heart wrenching story of life, families and friendships and an unhealthy passion for snails is a true gem and a brilliant conversation starter for parents and kids about some of life’s tricky but important topics. Now beyond my adoration, its Oscar time for what is clearly the most important animated film of the year.

6. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)

In the absence of a Charlie Kaufman film this year, here we have the next best thing – a ‘Kaufmanesque’ exploration of inner and outer beauty and all the pain they bring into the most mundane of lives. With another Sebastian Stan performance at the forefront, this film sets up the classic ugly duckling story and subverts it, taking us down a far darker path. And whilst it lacks the poignancy of Kaufman’s third acts (the factor that makes him this sub-genre’s GOAT) this is a film of rare intelligence and laugh out loud absurdity that, had it been any other year, would be in my top three.

7. Dune 2 (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)

Of late we have all become far too familiar with watching films where scale of spectacle equals hollowness of content. However, here we experience the most massive of all cinematic canvases populated with characters and drama so rich that we are treated to images of awe along with dramatic moments equally capable of drawing out gasps of appreciation.

8. Joker: Follie a Deux (Todd Phillips, 2024)

Having enjoyed the first Joker’s clear homage to Taxi Driver, I came into this film expecting to once again be entertained.  Carrying none of the fanboys adherence to mythology or character I once again loved this return to Gotham for all the reasons they despised it. It was big, bold and had something to say. Love or hate the final shots implications, I feel one cannot deny the mainstream subversion being pulled off by Todd Phillips here and all I can do is tip my hat and say ‘Bravo, very bold sir!’

9. The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Whether for him or against him, no one wants to discuss the great orange leader for fear of being labeled. And therein lies the shame; as this is a film that dares to ask questions like – Where did he come from? And the answer is as simple as it is depressing – he was shaped in life by his worst inclinations, not his best. As mythical as it is factual, the technical achievement of the aesthetic progression of time and one of two astounding Sebastian Stan performances this year makes this a film of this time that will be more easily digested and respected with more time separating its observations from our reality.

10. Emelia Perez (Jacques Audiard, 2024) & Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Rounding out my list with a bit of a cheat, these two films represent the one factor that unites everything on my list – pushing boundaries. Whether they succeed or fail, here we have two of my favorite contemporary directors, both working in modes close to their hearts, daring to push things beyond their comfort zones. And in my opinion, both fall short of the greatness they dared to reach for, but I’ll watch Audiard and Lanthimos shoot for the moon and fail any day before I’ll watch most other directors simply hit a mediocre mark.