My 10 best movies of 2024

  I’m not a fan of lists, but identifying the 10 best movies of any particular year seems an unavoidable critical obligation. Whatever the merits of the exercise, identifying my10 favorite movies of the year forces me to review 12 months worth of movies, to see what has lingered and what has faded away. 

 Recently, someone asked me why there weren’t more good movies? It's difficult to answer that question without pontificating about the woeful state of popular culture, the decline of good writing, Hollywood’s addiction to movies with series potential, and the ever-present pressures of a market that has become nearly unrecognizable from the market that existed when I started reviewing.

   Any list involves choices from the available movies and mine reflects a particularity that. like many other forms of expression, resemble calves of an iceberg, the shape of which long has been forgotten. 

   By that, I don't mean that there are no good movies. But it's increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- to talk about "the movies" as a unified field of cultural expression as opposed to a proliferating collection of targeted offerings that speak in a variety of voices, prompting fervor among some and indifference among others. 

   I no longer know where to begin when someone asks me what they should see. Do they see movies in theaters? Do they wait for them to become part of the streaming world? And what are their tastes and tolerances? 

   I know, for example, that many people will find a movie such as Nickel Boys off-putting, not because it deals with Jim Crow racism, but because it artfully evades the traps of straightforward narrative. In a way, the movie is about the validity of subjectivity in approaching a volatile subject. 

   We live in a time without either culture or counterculture. It's as if we're all at a convention where no one has been asked to give the keynote address. We're all trying to piece things together -- or we've abandoned the attempt entirely.

   I'll leave it with this: It's telling that Francis Ford Coppola, one of the greatest storytellers American film has ever produced, as well as the director of two of America's most enduring movies (Godfather and Godfather II), this year offered Megalopolis. Coppola's miasmic movie had brushes with brilliance but left many wondering what the director had in mind.

     Put another way, it was a strangely disorienting year in which individual movies struck like shrapnel from a bombardment launched from an undisclosed location. 

     Here, then, my favorites from the ceaseless barrage.

   

  1. Anora.

     

Deeply immersed in Russian and Armenian ethnicity as found in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, director Sean Baker's Anora tells the story of a sex worker who’s swept into the crazy world of the reckless son of a Russian oligarch. Sounds gritty and it is, but Anora boasts one the year’s funniest, farcical scenes and features fine performances, notably from Mikey Madison as Anora and Mark Eydelshteyn as Vanya, a spoiled rich kid whose carelessness reaches epic proportions. 

2.  Emilia Pérez

    A Mexican drug lord goes transgender in a musical? Outlandish and bold,  Emilia Perez marks a departure for director Jacques Audiard, who usually tells hard-hitting straightforward stories. (See 1990's A Prophet.) Audiard obtains fine performances from Zoe Saldana as a lawyer drawn into the world of a cartel boss (Karla Sofia Gascon) who abandons his macho self and becomes a woman. Fine performances, high spirits, and undisguised brashness give the movie a vividly memorable life.

3.  The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran to avoid being jailed. So did some of his cast, but Rasoulof's story of a family that faces extreme stress demonstrates that abusive power not only corrupts institutions but sullies ordinary life. When Dad (Missagh Zareh) is appointed as an interrogator for the repressive government, his wife (Soheila Golestani) and two daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) are threatened by Dad's murderous ambition. The result proves gripping.

4. Nickel Boys 

A brave and risky adaptation of author Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel from director RaMell Ross. Ross's subjective approach pays off. Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson give fine performances as young men confined to a Florida reform school that brutalizes and exploits them. Ross shifts the movie's viewpoint, alternately showing us only what each of his main characters sees. The approach takes some adjustment but RaMell and his cast create a movie full of haunting memories of pain and Jim Crow injustice.

5. All We Imagine as Light. 

  A revealing Indian movie set mostly in teeming Mumbai, a city dominated by alienation and estrangement but irresistible to those seeking employment. Director Payal Kapadia focuses her story on Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse whose husband has fled to Germany in search of work. Lonely but dedicated to her job, Prabha rooms with a younger woman (Divya Prabha) who's less bound by the shackles of tradition. All of this builds toward a conclusion that settles over audience and characters as gently as a sigh.

 6. The Substance

  Demi Moore stars in a movie about an aging TV personality whose expiration date approaches. Tongue-in-cheek sci-fi gives the movie its tone, and Margaret Qualley appears as a younger version of Moore's character who arrives thanks to the introduction of an unapologetically preposterous sci-fi twist. Moore and Qualey both excel, and director Coralie Fargeat delivers a boldly stylish movie that doesn't flinch when it comes to skewering a culture that worships at the altar of youth and beauty.

 7. Green Border

I don't know of a better film about the heartbreak of immigration than director Agnieszka Holland's Green Border. Holland takes a gripping look at Syrian refugees desperate to escape their war-torn country. They've gotten as far as Belarus before trying to cross into Poland. Harsh and sometimes difficult to watch, Green Border never gives up on the humanity of its characters, even in the face of so much heartbreak and cruelty.

 8. The Taste of Things

Technically a 2023 release,  The Taste of Things didn’t play in the US until early 2024 when I first saw it. Beautifully appointed and steeped in a French aesthetic, The Taste of Things features stellar performances by Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel, as a cook and master chef who have devoted their lives to a never ending quest to produce the most refined of tastes. Director Tran Anh Hung works without irony or sarcasm, leaving us to make our own judgments about the insular 19th Century world he revisits. 

9. The Brutalist

Few filmmakers know how to make films that live in worlds that feel separate from reality but also point us toward larger truths that are grounded in recognizable life. Director Brady Corbet's three-hour and 15-minute look at a Jewish Hungarian architect whose career was mangled by the Holocaust features a bravura performance by Adrien Brody. Brody plays a Brutalist architect who arrives in the US in 1947, and eventually finds a wealthy patron (a brilliant Guy Pearce). Felicity Jones portrays the wife who finally is able to join Brody’scharacter. I'm not sure the whole adds up, but the movie becomes a platform for major performances and its scenes can feel haunting, fresh, and artfully imagined.

 

 10. I'm Still Here

  

Director Walter Salles examines the consequences of the disappearance of Rubens Paiva, a one-time legislator who was arrested during Brazil's military dictatorship.The film begins in 1970 as Paiva’s family prepares for Chirstmas. Once Paiva is snatched, the story focuses on Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), the wife who tries to locate her husband and keep her family afloat. Salles fills out the story with Paiva's offspring and friends. Notable for Torres's performance and for the intimacy Salles brings to a heartbreaking story, I'm Still Here shows what happens  when ordinary life is trampled by goons and lackeys who make people fearful of hearing a knock at the door. 

 

Honorable mentions, Blitz, Hit Man, Love Lies Bleeding, and A Different Man