ENTRIES IN PART 8:


Dan Sallitt

Dan Sallitt is a filmmaker and film writer living in New York

My four favourite films that had a world premiere in 2024:

  • Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl, P. S. Vinothraj, 2024)
  • Early Riser (Abraham Callard, 2024)
  • Matt and Mara (Kazik Radwanski, 2024)
  • Lars Shrike Walks the Night (Gary Walkow, 2024)

And my six favourite older films that I saw for the first time in 2024:

  • Les ailes de la colombe (The Wings of the Dove, Benoît Jacquot, 1981)
  • Des journées entières dans les arbres (Entire Days in the Trees, Marguerite Duras, 1977)
  • Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood, Willi Forst, 1942)
  • Moskva v oktyabre (Moscow in October, Boris Barnet, 1927)
  • Uguisu (Nightingale, Shirô Toyoda, 1938)
  • Peau de pêche (Peach Skin, Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein, 1929)

Maria San Filippo

Associate Professor of Media Studies, Emerson College

Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023) – A Bergman-esque chamber piece for the climate crisis era, set in and around a holiday home on the Baltic Sea, where a luminous Paula Beer incrementally thaws a frustrated novelist’s self-absorbed shell as assuredly as an encroaching forest fire threatens bourgeois complacency. 

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023) – Like Aftersun, Petite Maman, and The Eternal Daughter, another reparative fantasy of child-parent reunion that is at once achingly melancholic and attuned to cinema’s magical capacity to conjure lost loved ones, if only for our own comfort.

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024) – That a film about unjustly compromised lives manages to be consoling is to the credit of its lulling rhythms and central trio, three generations of Mumbai women whose respective shows of perseverance, fortitude, and will amount to feminist potentiality personified. 

Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) – Another screwball comedy about sex work from Sean Baker is always a good thing, sweet even when it stings in its appraisal of the disintegrating American Dream.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite (Nicole Newnham, 2023) – An intriguing, invigorating contribution to revisionist feminist historiography befitting of its subject, the pioneering sexologist notorious in her time but as lamentably lost as she is urgently in need of rediscovery. 

Good One (India Donaldson, 2023) – Quietly devastating three-hander with a transfixing lead performance by newcomer Lily Collias. 

How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker, 2023) – Like Spring Breakers remade by the queer lovechild of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay. 

Janet Planet (Annie Baker, 2023) – Like last year’s Past Lives, an auspicious cinematic debut by an acclaimed playwright; in her long-overdue leading role, Julianne Nicholson’s radiance glows as gorgeously as the summertime setting in Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley.

L’été dernier (Last Summer, Catherine Breillat, 2023) – Breillat’s back. Buckle up.

A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) – Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are irresistible as cousins whose contrasting ways of coping with their shared legacy of suffering – personal, familial, historical, existential – come to a head on a group tour tracing their Jewish Polish roots. 

Last Summer

Blake Simons

Freelance Critic and Programmer; Lead Programmer of London International Fantastic Film Festival

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)
Screams from the soul.

Super Happy Forever (Kohei Igarashi, 2024)
Formalism is romantic.

Volveréis (The Other Way Around, Jonás Trueba, 2024)
As above.

Self-Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle (Gakuryu Ishii, 2023)
The richest art film of the year.

Matt and Mara (Kazik Radwanski, 2024)
Watching me watching you.

Challengers (Luca Guadanigno, 2024)
What a serve.

Black Box Diaries (Shiori Ito, 2024)
No one can tell our stories better than ourselves.

Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024)
Shin Typhoon Club.

Summer Solstice (Noah Schamus, 2024)
A confidently hesitant debut.

Gift (Eiko Ishibashi x Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
Ishibashi is a modern-day benshi.

James Slaymaker

Writer, Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin, author of Essay Cinema in the Digital Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Not exactly a ‘best of’ list, but a selection of new films that resonated most deeply with me. These films represent a wide range of styles and approaches – late-period works by established masters sit side by side with novel experiments from the younger generation – but they all seem to wrestle with the same questions: What is art for? How can cinema endure in an era when it increasingly seems to be pushed aside by rapid technological development, the harsh imperatives of the profit motive, and the relentless churn of the content mill? And does it have the right to? Steeped in film history yet eager to look to the future, optimistic about the possibility of cinema to effect positive social change while also willing to address the art form’s historical role in perpetuating mass-scale violence, and radical in terms of both form and content – these films fill me with hope.

  1. Scénarios + Exposé du Film Announce du Film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
  2. La Bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
  3. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
  4. Feng Liu Yi Dai (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke, 2024)
  5. C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, Leos Carax, 2024)
  6. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  7. Aku wa Sonzai Shinai (Evil Does Not Exist, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
  8. Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
  9. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)
  10. Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023)

Grand Tour

Valerie Soe

Writer and filmmaker, author of the blog beyondasiaphilia.com

My favourite films viewed in 2024, in no particular order.

Seoul-ui bom (12:12 The Day, Kim Sung-Soo, 2023)
I watched this on a plane flight a week before the November presidential election in the US and it was unfortunately prescient. The film chronicles the 1979 military coup that saw the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, the ruthless and corrupt dictator who ruled South Korea with an iron fist for many years. Gripping and dramatic in a highly South Korean commercial cinema style, even viewed on a tiny seatback screen the movie had me riveted.

Jiao má táng huì (A New Old Play, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2021)
I viewed this film as research for a seminar on Qiu Jiongjiong at the University of Hong Kong last March and I was delighted and entranced by Qiu’s cinematic style, especially appreciating his use of allegory to comment on past and current political situations in China. Qui’s film is cheeky, bold, and unapologetically theatrical.

Después del Terremoto (After the Earthquake, Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano, 1979)
Famed documentarian Lourdes Portillo’s debut film that she co-directed while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, this short narrative about the daily lives of Central American immigrants in San Francisco touched on topics that Portillo would later explore in her renowned documentaries including The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and The Devil Never Sleeps – the aftereffects of war, organising and activism in Latine communities, and women’s places in the struggle for justice. This screening at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District, where the film takes place, was especially bittersweet since Portillo was unable to attend due to illness, and she passed away a week later.

DiDi (Sean Wang, 2024)
Sean Wang’s feature debut perfectly captures a preteen gestalt, with all of its sexual awkwardness and social discomfort, while also reflecting the singular experience of second-generation Bay Area Taiwanese American kids. It’s great to witness a new Asian American voice as it emerges.

Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung), (TT Takemoto, 2021)
One of many of TT Takemoto’s lyrical experimental films, mixing up archival and found footage, a gorgeous sound design, and hand-processing, this experimental short continues Takemoto’s cinematic explorations from a notably sapphic sensibility.

A House Is Not a Disco, (Brian J. Smith, 2024)
Sweet and sentimental in the best way possible, this documentary looks at the history and significance of gay mecca Fire Island Pines. While capturing the resort town’s history, it also updates the story by looking at the struggles of people of colour in their efforts to join the community. 

Wings Of Desire, (1987, Wim Wenders)
I visited Berlin for the first time in May and so when San Francisco’s Roxie Theater programmed Wenders’ classic look at that city I was happy to re-watch it on the big screen. It holds up pretty well and captures a moment in time and place just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Single File, (Simon Liu (2024)
Liu’s frenetic, maximalist experimental short continues his excavation of Hong Kong’s past and present. The pulsing electronic soundtrack and kaleidoscopic images perfectly capture the anxiety of life in Hong Kong under China’s draconian National Security Law.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat, (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)
Grimonprez connects the dots, looking at the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba via an impressionistic mix of jazz, espionage, decolonisation, and the Cold War.

All We Imagine as Light, (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
A beautiful film looking at the lives of a group of women in Mumbai. The film’s third act, where it moves effortlessly from neorealism to magic realism, is especially impressive.

Mark Spratt

Independent film distributor, Australia & New Zealand
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
  • Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zurcher, 2024)
  • Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, 2023)
  • Straume (Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
  • The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
  • Vermiglio (Maura Delpero, 2024)
  • On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, 2024)
  • Cerrar Los Ojos (Close Your Eyes, Victor Erice, 2023)
  • Super Happy Forever (Kohei Igarashi, 2024)
  • An Unfinished Film (Ye Lou, 2024)

An impulsive world cinema Top Ten chosen on a particular day. In the spirit of this year’s poll I will not name runners-up.

However, possibly even greater pleasures were to be found in discovering many previously unseen treasures including the diptych La Vendedora de Fósforos and Un Andantino (Alejo Mouguillansky, 2017/2023), Ljin-tachi To No Natsu (The Discarnates, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1988), The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943), Historias Extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories, Mariano Llinas, 2008), Szurkuli (Twilight, Gyorgy Feher, 1990), Szenvedely (Passion, Gyorgy Feher, 1998) and several titles by Ann Hui: Tou Ze (A Simple Life, 2011), Tau Ban No Hoi (Boat People, 1982), Ke Tu qui hen (Song of the Exile, 1990)…

Among many others.

I Saw the TV Glow

Tyson Stewart

Writer, Indigenous Studies Professor at Nipissing University

Top Ten of 2024:

  1. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)
  2. Fancy Dance (Erica Tremblay, 2023)
  3. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier, 2024) 
  4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)
  5. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
  6. Geçiş (Crossing, Levan Akin, 2024)
  7. Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024)
  8. Good One (India Donaldson, 2024)
  9. Strange Darling (JT Mollner, 2023)
  10. Cold Road (Kelvin Redvers, 2023)

Iván Suárez

Writer and cinephile, Gijón

Best films from 2023 and 2024 seen this year listed alphabetically:

  • Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
  • La Bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
  • C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, Leos Carax, 2024)
  • Chime (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2024)
  • La estrella azul (The Blue Star, Javier Macipe, 2023)
  • The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin, 2023)
  • Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
  • Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)
  • Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
  • Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang-soo, 2024) 

I have not yet seen the new films by David Cronenberg, Payal Kapadia, Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes and Alain Guiraudie, among many others. One of my greatest pleasures of 2024 was my first trip to Paris, where I finally went to the legendary Cinémathèque Française and spent part of the time in some of the best art house cinemas and physical media stores (I will not say which ones but anyone can guess them). Revisiting Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or Possession (Andrej Zulawski, 1981) on the big screen were priceless experiences.

Also, I returned to Lisbon, for my money the best city of the world for many reasons too long to explain here, where I went to the always great Cinemateca Portuguesa to watch, among other things, a 35 mm copy of Non, ou a Va Glória de Mandar (No, or the Vain Glory of Command, Manoel de Oliveira, 1990). As I say half joking, the day the Cinemateca disappears, everything will be really over. Last, but not least, I will never forget in my particular list of great movie watching experiences of 2024, the privilege to see the last two Godards at the Gijón International Film Festival, the definitive proof that it is not the same watching his films (any film) in the big screen than by other means.

 These experiences certainly helped me to renew my enthusiasm for cinema when there were lots of mediocrities and horrors praised by audiences and critics, influencers and verified social media accounts who are more like advertisers and second-hand car dealers (and it seems that things will not change in this sense both in Spain and in the rest of the world), but again, maybe the fault is in me for failing to appreciate their merits. Let’s see what 2025 will bring us with new films by established filmmakers, singular voices or pleasant surprises. And remember that not all but some sorrows are, as Aki Kaurismäki would say, drifting clouds.

José Suing-Mendieta

Cinephile, Loja, Ecuador

This is a list of the best 10 films of 2024 that I had the opportunity to watch:

  • En vez de árboles (Instead of trees, Philipp Hartmann, 2024)
  • Xue shui xiao rong de ji jie (After the snowmelt, Lo Yi-shan, 2024)
  • Bienvenidos conquistadores interplanetarios y del espacio (Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors, Andrés Jurado, 2024)
  • A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari 2024)
  • La Laguna del Soldado (The Soldier’s Lagoon, Pablo Alvarez Mesa, 2024)
  • Los Hiperbóreos (The Hyperboreans, Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña, 2024)
  • Bestiari, erbari, lapidari (Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries, Massimo D’Anolfi, Martina Parenti, 2024)
  • Una sombra oscilante (An Oscillating Shadow, Celeste Rojas Mugica, 2024)
  • ¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! (¡Ya México no existirá más!) (Mexico Will No Longer Exist!, Annalisa D. Quagliata, 2024)
  • A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky, Eryk Rocha, Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, 2024)

The Hyperboreans

Paul Sylvester

Reference Librarian living and working in NYC

Portrait Mode: Vertical Depictions of Madness in 103 fever

Few films I’ve seen this year have moved me as much as 103 fever (Conner O’Malley, 2023). I’m going to begin by making it clear that I am going to completely avoid the argument on whether or not it can be considered a film, or if it’s eligible for this World Poll – I won’t hear it. Running just over 6 minutes, released in a direct-to-digital format with little to no pre-release advertising, nay – with no warning103 fever is the portrait of a chronically feverish man climbing out of his night sweats into a transcendentally delusional state of positivity; akin to a state which one usually would only expect in the sweet grip of death. 

103 fever, unjustly removed from Letterboxd at some point in the past few months, is the most distilled permutation of O’Malley’s recent character studies (like The Mask [2023], Stand Up Solutions [2024], and Rap World [2024]), focusing on the ways in which the internet has the power to both create and destroy great men (mostly men from the Midwest). O’Malley more literally defines this film as a cinematic portrait by filming it in the jarring aspect ratio of 9:16, colloquially known as portrait mode. O’Malley takes this literally and captures the essence of this man using every cinematic technique a person like his protagonist could learn from TikTok.

This film takes the viewer places I’ve only been to in serious, sprawling films like The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) and Dà Xiàng Xídì Érzuò (An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo, 2018); and it does it in six minutes – something I didn’t think possible cinematically. 

As our protagonist searches for the cause for his illness by extending prayers out to Drake via Instagram DM, he has a hallucinatory moment of nirvana in which Drake (and other world leaders [it should be noted that they are all male – in our protagonist’s universe, women are solely objects of sexual interest or caretakers (a wife or a mother, essentially)]) instructs him to create the Positivity Force, which “uses smiles like how [a soldier] use[s] bullets.” Drake (and the world leaders) are all, at least seemingly, depicted by AI voicebots – making this one of the only films willing to flirt with the controversial and ubiquitous technology. Does this mean simply that O’Malley wasn’t able to get the actors he wanted for the roles, or that he needed complete creative control, down to the performances? If the future of AI in cinema could tell us anything it is that single-vision, authoritarian cinema is now possible by the loner – the talentless do not have to work as hard to master each aspect of the craft. Drake AI says what O’Malley wants him to say, and he says it like O’Malley wants him to say it. The narrative is co-opted in favour of the man who currently has the most tabs open in PornHub – and who’s to say that’s not something we don’t want.

The way we interact with images has dramatically changed in the last 20 years, and it seems no filmmaker understands that more than O’Malley – he will be the guiding voice for the medium moving forward. He is the post-digital D.W. Griffith, and may be just as problematic.

Tyler Thier

Tyler Thier lives in NYC and teaches at Hofstra University

Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, Pascal Plante, 2023)

Missed this one during its limited run in New York City – big mistake. Juliette Gariépy is mesmerising (and increasingly off-putting) as a part-time model / full-time stalker who camps outside a courthouse every morning to be first in line to attend the next day’s proceedings of an alleged dark-web serial killer’s trial. Red Rooms isn’t afraid to let its shots linger uncomfortably long, enough so that you find yourself totally engrossed in the process, whether it’s the opening statements of Canadian lawyers while the accused sits unbothered in a glass chamber behind them, or Gariépy austerely viewing an illegal video file, which she won in a Bitcoin auction, of one of the pre-teen victims being tortured and mutilated in real time. Nothing gratuitous is ever depicted. Red Rooms is all about implied evil, and the infectious voyeurism it breeds.

The Mask (Conner O’Malley, 2023)

A deranged short that is at once firmly rooted in O’Malley’s comedic style and indistinguishable from the trove of unironic digital conspiracism that exists in the world. Is this not what satire does at its most masterful – chameolonically assume the characteristics of that very thing it’s critiquing? In this case, O’Malley cannibalises internet trolldom in the same way internet trolldom cannibalises pop culture. Add him to the canon. Study him. Laugh and wince in one uninterrupted breath. Catch it while it’s right on the pulse of things…

The Rage: Carrie 2 (Katt Shea, 1999)

I wasn’t aware of this Carrie sequel’s existence until one recently dreary night in October, aimlessly browsing streaming options. What a shockingly inspired piece of pulp; sure, it’s a rehash of everything its more iconic predecessor did, and it shamelessly cashes in on the ‘legacy’ plot (although it didn’t turn much of a profit at all). And yet, the camerawork is kinetic, the kills gnarly, and the pace breezy as hell. For 1999, its politics are also fairly laudable – The Rage expands the possibilities of its protagonist’s telekinesis by allowing its conclusion to get especially brutal, unleashing gory death on the outright chauvinistic and proudly complicit frat and sorority crowd at a house party. It’s a gleefully over-the-top and genuinely well-photographed finale. A rarity in the (still) oversaturated IP-verse: a cash grab that puts its money where its mouth is.

Josh Timmermann

Based in Vancouver, Canada, Timmermann teaches university courses on history and ancient and medieval studies –– and writes (occasionally) about movies and music at JLT/JLT, which he has operated since 2003

A solid-enough year for cinema; an annus horribilis in nearly every other respect, with little cause to expect that 2025 will be less awful. Yet the three films I have tied at first place offer – in different ways, to varying degrees – some modest impetus for hope. The two documentaries I have tied at fourth are sobering, devastating reminders of hope’s realistic limits. 

1a. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

1b. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) 

1c. One Life (James Hawes, 2023) 

4a. The Sixth (Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, 2024)

4b. We Will Dance Again (Yariv Mozer, 2024) 

6. Hit Man (Richard Linklater, 2023)

7. Sirocco et le Royaume des Courants d’Air (Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds, Benoît Chieux, 2023) 

8. Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)

9. Fly Me to the Moon (Greg Berlanti, 2024)

10. In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024)

Anora

Diana Vagas

Cinephile, Melbourne, Australia

Favourite new-release films (in alphabetical order):

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)
A haunting reflection on the intertwined nature of love, loneliness and loss. Retreating to the past brings comfort and solace whilst grieving, but simultaneously can be a painful exercise. Haigh highlights that despite this, the love for those long gone will never diminish, and can exist alongside grief. 

A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
A razor-sharp, thought-provoking black comedy on representation and who gets to tell stories, how we perceive ourselves, what self-fulfilment really means and how self-hatred can destroy ourselves from within. We being our own worst enemy is the bitter pill Sebastian Stan’s Edward must swallow – is it really his condition holding him back, or his insecurities and biases all along? Umberto Smerilli’s jazzy score and the charm of co-star Adam Pearson adds to the chaos and frenetic energy as Stan spirals in an obsessive search for identity and belonging. 

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)
Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti reunite for a depiction of the messy feelings associated with what can sometimes be an overly saccharine holiday season. Fantastic production design lends itself to creating a ‘70s time-capsule of a period of joy, discomfort and loneliness. A solid cast and script follow three characters as they try to seek their place in the world and the love they deserve amongst a festive-festering of melancholy against the harsh New England winter.

Janet Planet (Annie Baker, 2023)
A highlight of the Melbourne International Film Festival schedule, Annie Baker’s debut shines as a quiet, tender and observational look at the difficulty of letting go, and the distortions of the once-perfect image of those we idolise through the lens of a mother-daughter relationship across a Western Massachusetts summer. Baker’s characteristic script laden with pauses provides a space to breathe, and so much is said within those silences. Provides a reassuringly cathartic message that we’re all trying to figure things out, but life can still provide its gentle moments despite this. 

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
Loosely translated to “The Unrealisable Dream,” Rohrwacher’s enchanting tale illustrates the dreamlike state of someone lamenting on the past and wrestling with the inability to move forward. Josh O’Connor’s Arthur is on a quest to obtain treasures that are difficult to get. As such, he is stuck in the past on two fronts – as an archaeologist raiding ancient Etruscan tombs for their artefacts and refusing to look to a future without his beloved Beniamina (Yle Vianello). 

Favourite first-time watches in 2024 (in alphabetical order):

  • The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
  • The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
  • Shirkers (Sandi Tan, 2018)
  • They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969)
  • What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)

Eli Vannata

Writer and archivist

Five favourites released and watched in 2024, listed in no particular order:

  1. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024) 
  2. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024) 
  3. qīng chūn ku (Youth (Hard Times), Wang Bing, 2024) 
  4. Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024) 
  5. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Five favourite films encountered for the first time this year, listed in no particular order:

  1. Nattlek (Night Games, Mai Zetterling, 1966)
  2. Forbidden Letters (Arthur J. Bressan Jr., 1979) 
  3. Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti, 1971)
  4. Anita (Torgny Wickman, 1973)
  5. Spying (Joe Gibbons, 1978)

I am also very pleased to have published writing on Mai Zetterling for Senses of Cinema’s Great Directors column in Issue 111 this year.

Noel Vera

Author of Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema; regular contributor to Businessworld

Too much life going on, had an extremely limited viewing selection this year, more mainstream than I’d like. In ascending order, the best of what I saw:

  1. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) – A charmer about a stripper who marries a spoiled Russian rich kid. Not much here beyond the Eat (or F*ck) the Rich messaging, but Mikey Madison as the eponymous character is easy to fall in love with. 
  1. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) – hot take: didn’t think The Godfather films were all that great, so don’t think this latest is all that precipitous a quality drop. As ambitious as any of his later more eccentric more personal works, this whatever it is has the courage of its convictions and – alas – not much else. 
  1. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 2024) – in my book, the rare shameless cash grab that actually works: Winona Ryder bravely shows her age and exhaustion as our heroine wearing her trauma on her sleeve, and Michael Keaton after a hiatus of over 30 years plays The Ghost with the Most as if he’d just stepped out for a bathroom break and stepped back in to pick up exactly where he left off. Easily Burton’s liveliest most inventive work in years. 
  1. Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024) – is haunted by three ghosts: the eponymous serial killer (Nicholas Cage in an unnervingly unhinged performance, even by his outrageous standards), the director’s father Anthony Perkins, who portrayed perhaps the most famous serial killer in all of cinema; and Perkins Sr.’s director Alfred Hitchcock, from whom Perkins Jr. has learned a useful tip or two, even come up with a few clever tricks of his own. Does not stick the landing, but for a while there like nothing I’ve seen all year. 
  1. MaXXXine (Ti West, 2024) – Pearl was my favourite of the trilogy but as a conclusion to the eponymous character’s tortured character arc this is as satisfying a conclusion as any. Maxine (Mia Goth) during her adventures realises, in her relentless quest to achieve stardom, that one does not easily escape the shadow of one’s father, nor does one fail to learn from him accordingly. 
  1. The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024) – forget The Substance or Heretic or even the upcoming Nosferatu, out on Christmas Day: this is the most terrifying film of the year. That’s it, that’s the post.
  1. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024) – less an action epic than an origin fable, a myth made in the telling. Where Fury Road was a hurtling bristling juggernaut, Furiosa is the decades-long odyssey of a woman seeking revenge, home, finally herself. 
  1. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar, 2023) – Greg Kwedar’s film features lovely performances by Colman Domingo and Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin as convicts who join, and struggle to stay in, a prison-based drama group – but arguably the true stars are the real-life convicts, who lack the art or skill to present themselves or their material otherwise. They are themselves, and this is their story.
  1. Aku wa Sonzai Shinai (Evil Does Not Exist, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023) – film thrives on uneasy confrontations between cagy townsfolk and clueless urbanites but breathes in the scenes where nothing much happens, as when father and daughter study a nearby bush. But beware: some bushes hide a poisoned spine, some fairy tales a secret jolt of horror.
  1. Phantosmia (Lav Diaz, 2024) – Diaz’s latest turns on the simple conceit that a man carries his trauma for the rest of his life, sometimes in the form of a smell. Doesn’t have to be a real smell – the stink is in his mind, a manifestation of guilt for sins committed during the Marcos dictatorship. Master Sergeant Hilarion Zabala of the First Scout Ranger Regiment, who spends much of the film’s running time working out his psychological burden, may be the capstone of Ronnie Lazaro’s acting career – hard to tell, he’s done so much tremendous work – but the film is also a celebration of Batangueno and Cotabatuan cooking, ironic for a film featuring someone with an overwhelmed sense of smell. 

Evil Does Not Exist

Peter Verstraten

Assistant Professor Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands

The seven best recent films I watched in 2024 in order of preference:

  1. Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude, 2023)
  2. Los delincuentes (The Delinquents, Rodrigo Moreno, 2023)
  3. Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
  4. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)
  5. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024)
  6. Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024)
  7. El llanto (The Wailing, Pedro Martín-Calero, 2024)

The best movie theatre experience of the year

Ice Station Zebra (John Sturges, 1968), BUT Festival, Breda – the quality of this 35mm print was astonishing

Two of the best older films I saw for the first time in 2024

  1. Scream of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961)
  2. Tiger Bay (J. Lee Thompson, 1959)

Fiona Villella

Editor, Senses of Cinema

I can hardly say I saw all the ‘notable’ films that played at film festivals in 2024 or that got a release. I am still playing catch up on that front. However, the list below reflects my most memorable viewing experiences from 2024. I am grateful to non-commercial, independently run exhibitors such as Bill Mousoulis’ “Unknown Pleasures” for cinematic highlights.

In order of preference:

  • Karrabing Film Collective screening, ACMI, Melbourne (December 2024): Day in the Life (2020) and The Family & the Zombie (2021)
  • Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude, 2023)
  • No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, 2024) 
  • Flausfilm (Peter Tammer, 2009), “Unknown Pleasures” screening, Melbourne (April 2024)
  • My Heart Bled like Niagara Falls (Saidin Salkic, 2024), ACMI screening, Melbourne (December 2024) 
  • Perfect days (Wim Wenders, 2023)
  • Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
  • Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939), Cinema Reborn screening, Melbourne (May 2024) 
  • L’été dernier (Last Summer, Catherine Breillat, 2023)
  • Feng Liu Yi Dai (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke, 2024)
  • The New Boy (Warwick Thornton, 2023)
  • Farha (Darin J. Sallam, 2021) 
  • Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
  • The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Nicholas Vroman

Writer at Desistfilm and a page of madness, based in Olympia, Washington, USA

Aku wa sonzaishinai (Evil Does Not Exist, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
Hamaguchi-san slowly builds a moral tale that resolves in a singular act of violence, justified in its prerogative to bring some (natural) order back to a fragile world.

Cent’anni (Maja Doroteja Prelog, 2024)
An intense personal documentary of a breakup where contradictions of enablement, hurting and healing take the director, Maja Doroteja Prelog – and the viewer – on a powerful, ultimately unresolved journey.

Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak, 2023)
Ilker Çatak’s acid look at a schoolroom drama where no good nor bad deed goes unpunished. 

Electric Fields (Lisa Gertsch, 2024)
Fields of attraction and repulsion, unexplained phenomena and motivations, strange and wonderful explorations fill Lisa Gertsch’s thrillingly surreal and poignant vision.

El Rostro de la Medusa (The Face of the Jellyfish, Melisa Liebenthal, 2022)
Melisa Liebenthal’s exploration of identity goes from sitcom Kafka to science field trip to a sly meta-referentiality.

Kaibutsu (Monster, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2023)
Koreeda’s Rashomonic exploration of young lives reveals the monsters of our own making as to what they are – gentle beings doing their best to weather the storms of living.

Nights Gone By (Antier noche, Alberto Martín Menacho, 2023)
Village life in a town in Extremadura is captured in the routine work, the small town relationships and gossip, the dreams dying in stasis – and Galgos Españoles! 

Nothing Happens (Dimitri Venkov, 2023)
Russian expat Dimitri Venkov explores his current city, Istanbul, with a Benning-esque reflection on nothingness and being.

Ways to Traverse a Territory (Formas de atravesar un territorio, Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba, 2024)
A Miguel Littin-esqe exploration of place, history, memory, indigenous being in the modern landscape, ways of seeing and the filmmaker’s very place and relation to this world that Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba is documenting.

Which Colour? (Kayo kayo colour?, Shahrukhkhan Chavada, 2023)
Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s first feature limns the lives of a working-class Muslim family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. As they face economic ruin, the stultifying cultural assumptions of male/female relationships only reinforce their downward trajectory and tragedy.

Monster

Nadine Whitney

Film critic in Naarm, Australia, co-chair of the Australian Film Critics Association, a member of OFCS, GALECA, AWFJ, and a voter for The Golden Globes and The Independent Spirit awards

I attended many festivals this year both remotely and in person. I also saw some retrospective screenings mostly through Cinemaniacs in Melbourne and Cinema Reborn which had its first Melbourne leg this year. My list will mostly concentrate on current releases.

In no particular order:

The Fall (Tarsem Singh, 2006)

An astonishingly beautiful film about the power of storytelling and make believe, Tarsem’s film became somewhat lost after it was a box office failure. Now restored and soon to be available on physical media once more. The interplay between a young girl and a heartbroken suicidal stuntman (Catnica Untaro and Lee Pace) in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s is magical and transformative. 

Keyke mahboobe man (My Favourite Cake, Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, 2024)

Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) is a widow living in Tehran. Her children are grown and settled outside of Iran. Realising she has been alone for too long she takes the extraordinary step of seeking male companionship which puts her in danger of being discovered by the morality police. She meets taxi driver Faramaz (Esmaeil Mehrabi) and during the course of one night the two fall profoundly in love.

Part fantasy and a distinct criticism of Iran’s theocratic government, My Favourite Cake is warm, rebellious, and ultimately devastating. 

September Says (Ariane Labed, 2024)

September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia) are named after the months they were born. September is July’s senior by ten months and their mother treats them almost as twins. As they grow into young adulthood, September becomes dominant and dangerously rebellious – fiercely protecting July from bullying but also marking her out as a target. 

Ariane Labed crafts a haunting gothic tale about co-dependency and merged identities set in the imaginative space of girlhood and emerging sexual desire where violence, otherness, and shame infect the small family unit including the girls’ mother, Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar).

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024)

Not only a radical example of literary interpretation, RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel ushers in a new visual poetic by placing the camera directly as the point of view of the two main characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). 

The young men are sent to a Florida Reform School during the transition between Jim Crow racial politics and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray ensure the audience has no distance from what both young men suffer, making Nickel Boys an act of immersed empathy.

Nickel Boys

Birdeater (Jim Clark and Jack Weir, 2024)

Ex private school boys come together on a weekend Bucks party revealing their secrets and damaging masculine entitlement. 

It isn’t usual for the bride-to-be to accompany her fiancé to the male only space of the bachelor party, but Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez) aren’t a usual couple. She is suffering from anxiety and attachment issues, and he is feeding those issues to keep her close and controlled. 

The weekend away attended by Louie’s school friends Dylan (Ben Hunter), Charlie (Jack Bannister), Charlie’s fiancée, Grace (Clementine Anderson) and two others, soon spirals out of control as jealousy, paranoia, and dishonesty come to the fore in a drink and drug fuelled frenzy. Brutal and vital Australian cinema.

Hoard (Luna Carmoon, 2024).

Trauma, motherhood, sense memory, and filth swirl together in Carmoon’s debut feature. Marie lived with her mother Cynthia (Hayley Squires) in a teetering pile of ‘rubbish’ Cynthia compulsively collected and titled their catalogue of love. Cynthia is crushed by one of her collections and years later Marie (Sarah Lightfoot-Leon) is a teenager living in foster care.

An unexpected package arrives for Maria the same time ex-foster care child Michael (Joseph Quinn) turns up at her home. The combination sets Marie down a path of self-harm and animalistic behaviour aided by the much older Michael. A singular vision by Carmoon.

Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024)

A pulsating queer crime thriller set in New Mexico in the realm of sleazy bars, gun ranges, body building culture, and steroid fuelled excess. Love Lies Bleeding is a cosmic horror and queer pulp neo-noir.

Lou (Kristen Stewart) lives in a purgatorial town run by her crime lord father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). A ‘femme fatale’ amateur bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) stops in Albuquerque on her way to a competition in Las Vegas. Lou and Jackie become lovers. Jackie enacts bone-crunching violence on Lou’s brother-in-law leading to an intense and visceral showdown. Monstrous and magnificent.

Love Lies Bleeding is slick with blood and other bodily fluids. Tormented and tender, Rose Glass bends the world into impossible shapes and the result is monstrously magnificent.

Three other titles without notes:

  • The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
  • A Different Man (Adam Schimberg, 2024)
  • Stopmotion (Robert Morgan, 2024)

Alex Williams

PhD student in Screen & Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, co-coordinator of Screening Ideas, committee member of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, editor of CTEQ Annotations on Film in Senses of Cinema

New films:

  • Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, 2024)
  • Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
  • I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)
  • Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude, 2023)
  • Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)

Seen for the first time in 2024:

  • Measures of Distance (Mona Hatoum, 1988)
  • Tóngnián wǎngshì (The Time to Live and the Time to Die, Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985)
  • Le Cochon (The Pig, Jean Eustache and Jean-Michel Barjol, 1970) 
  • Yú Měirén (The Mermaid, Kao Li, 1965)
  • San Daikaijū Chikyū Saidai no Kessen (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Ishirō Honda, 1964)

Neil Young

Film-curator/director/presenter/programmer/critic/acter (Vienna)
  • Big Bang Big Boom (‘Blu,’ 2010)
  • Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)
  • La habitación de al lado (The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
  • Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
  • Joost Klein: Luchtballon (1999) (‘Lowpolyon,’ 2024)
  • Krahët e punëtorëve (Workers’ Wings, Ilir Hasanaj, 2024)
  • Looking for Mushrooms (Bruce Conner, 1968/1996)
  • Raining in the Mountain (kōngshān líng yǔ, King Hu, 1979)
  • Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
  • Trama (Christian Lebrat, 1980)

About The Author

Related Posts