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Manohla Dargis
Dazzling in Plain Sight
Every year, as I start the herculean (and absurd!) task of winnowing down a year’s worth of movies into a top 10, I also sift through a lot of grim media coverage about the terrible, horrible, possibly salvageable state of the entertainment industry. In the movie world, things are always looking up (maybe) unless they’re catastrophically down, a cycle of boom and bust that has gripped the industry for much of its history and always convinces someone, somewhere, that the movies are dead. It’s a familiar charge with a changing cast of murder suspects: synchronized sound, television, cable, streaming and, of course, corporate idiocy.
Despite their continued decline, the big American-based studios still dominate the mainstream media coverage and what little attention an increasingly fragmented, distracted audience has remaining. To that end, nearly every week another megadollar production comes hurdling toward us, gobbles up all the media interest, rakes in fortunes or becomes just another tax write-down or write-off. Some of these movies are OK, others are bilge; a scant few are memorable. Yet as my hardworking colleagues and I eagerly share in our reviews for The New York Times, the movie world is much vaster than what these companies offer, and good, great and miraculous work often flies under the radar. Here’s a sampling of the bounty.
1. ‘All We Imagine as Light’ (Payal Kapadia)
This delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy is an example of the same, and centers on two female nurses and a cook, friends who work at the same hospital in Mumbai. Over the course of the movie, Kapadia shifts between these caregivers who together and separately experience ordinary pleasures, face painful difficulties and find comfort, support and companionship in one another. Every so often, Kapadia, who has also made documentaries, incorporates images of everyday people milling through the city, images that connect her characters to a sea of humanity and, by extension, to those of us watching. (In theaters)
2. ‘Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic’
Some of the most transporting movies that I watched this year were in a retrospective of Gehr’s work in March at the Museum of Modern Art. Generally short and now shot in digital, these moving images have no scripted dialogue and nothing resembling a plot. Liberated from the stranglehold of story, Gehr’s movies instead present and re-present outwardly ordinary places, objects and moving bodies — white clouds drifting across a stretch of blue city sky, people walking in front of a windowed storefront — that Gehr turns into heady studies of energy, chance, light, surface and space. Your perception of the world change when filmmakers like Gehr show it to you through their liberated lenses and frames. These are movies that expand and, at times, gloriously blow your mind.
3. ‘A Real Pain’ (Jesse Eisenberg)
There is a lot to love about this tender, melancholic comic-drama about the enduring generational aftershocks of the Holocaust. Written and directed by Eisenberg, it stars him and Kieran Culkin as American cousins who were once close and now, following the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, find themselves fumbling toward each other during a so-called heritage tour in Poland. Their trip is deeply touching, at times laugh-out-loud funny and altogether unexpected, partly because Eisenberg understands that life isn’t a tidy life lesson and that some things remain essentially unknowable, including other people. (In theaters)
4. ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ (Radu Jude)
An exhilarating, vulgarly funny, sometimes exasperating jolt, Jude’s latest tracks Angela — a charismatic Ilinca Manolache — as she motors through Bucharest. For much of the movie, she is behind the wheel of her jalopy, a home away from home, or interviewing badly injured people as potential cautionary tales for a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational corporation. As she racks up miles, traversing a world where capitalism and the ghosts of communism converge, the movie touches on Romania’s past and present, the East and the West, high culture and exceedingly low. It’s a wild ride! (Stream it on Mubi)
5. ‘Dahomey’ (Mati Diop)
As formally inventive as it is politically and philosophically rich, this documentary opens in Paris on some replicas of the Eiffel Tower laid out on a vendor’s sidewalk display. They’re the kind of familiar souvenirs that African street vendors sell not far from the city’s imposing Quai Branly Museum, which is where workers are packing up crates and Diop’s movie begins taking shape. Inside those crates are 26 treasures that were looted by French troops in 1892 and that France returned to Benin in 2019, an event that Diop turns — with the help of some students and one of those treasures, a statue that speaks in voice-over — into a precise, lucid exploration of cultural and artistic patrimony in the wake of colonialism. (In theaters)
6. ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Much of this poignant, formally lively and intellectually bracing documentary from Mendonça Filho, a Brazilian film critic turned filmmaker, takes place in and around the apartment he lived in as a kid in the coastal city of Recife. Art-house regulars might recognize this flat from his earlier films, including “Aquarius” (2016), in which Sônia Braga plays a woman fighting eviction. Here, Mendonça Filho uses the apartment as an axis point for an inquiry that radiates out in different directions — into his past and his mother’s, onto old movie sets and through abandoned cinemas — yet always returns home. (Stream it on the Criterion Channel)
7. ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ (George Miller)
That’s entertainment, baby — and pure cinema. (Stream it on Max)
8. ‘Megalopolis’ (Francis Ford Coppola)
By the time that Coppola’s long-gestating epic — an art film that he had talked about making for decades — opened, it was predictably doomed. The movie focuses on a utopian architect (Adam Driver) with a world-changing plan that bursts with ideas and beauty, giving the story a poignant self-referential undercurrent. The movie was never going to be for everyone; art rarely is. Even so, it was disheartening how eagerly some media types, including critics, dismissed it. After its release, the industry journalist Richard Rushfield shot back at the glibber criticisms, writing in the Substack publication The Ankler, that “‘Megalopolis’ exists because one of the greatest directors in film history, at the end of a long career, decided to spend his own money on a film he wanted to make.” As Rushfield put it, “Truly, if you have a problem with that, you need to consider maybe you just don’t like film.” Co-sign. (Available for rent on most major platforms)
9. ‘Green Border’ (Agnieszka Holland)
The rage that boils through Holland’s drama about the European migrant crisis is startling and fully earned. Largely set along the border between Poland and Belarus, it toggles among an assortment of characters, including a Syrian family struggling to enter the European Union, activists providing aid to migrants and guards tasked with violently upholding national interests. A fiction drawn from fact, the movie builds to a shattering coda that lays bare the prejudices that countries try to hide in the name of patriotism. (Stream it on Kino Film)
10. ‘Here’ (Bas Devos)
Partway through this quiet, revelatory Belgian movie, its two main characters — a male construction worker and a female botanist — happen across each other in a park. There, under a canopy of green vegetation, she invites him to look at some of the plants that she’s studying and he settles alongside her. Moss, she explains, was here before we humans and will probably be here after we’re gone. Such is the way of life in a movie about immanence and transcendence, and about being alive to a world in which we are all, finally, passers-by. “You blink,” as another character says, “and everything’s gone.” (Stream it on the Criterion Channel)
Also recommended: “Anora,” “Between the Temples,” “Bird,” “The Brutalist,” “La Chimera,” “Challengers,” “Civil War,” “Eno,” “Evil Does Not Exist,” “Flow,” “The Goldman Case,” “Io Capitano,” “Hard Truths,” “His Three Daughters,” “Intercepted,” “Juror #2,” “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” “Last Summer,” “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” “Nickel Boys,” “Nocturnes,” “The Promised Land,” “The Room Next Door,” “The Settlers,” “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État,” “Sugarcane,” “Tótem,” “Will & Harper,” “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming).” I would have put Leos Carax’s “It’s Not Me” on my top 10, but in full disclosure, his mother is a dear friend. So, all I’ll say is psst, it opens soon in New York and Los Angeles, and will stream on the Criterion Channel.
alissa wilkinson
The Algorithm Breakers
There are years when it’s obvious which movies will top everyone’s year-end lists, and years when the gems are scattered — the picks more broad and idiosyncratic. This year is the unpredictable kind. I could make a list of great 2024 films that’s five times as long as this one, but those that bubbled to the top for me had something in common: They’re what I call algorithm breakers. They elude easy categorization, keeping us off balance.
Looking at my list, I realized most of my favorites this year came from artists who worked across disciplines — playwrights directing movies, documentarians taking on fiction — or who zig when you’re expecting a zag, counting on the audience to lean in and pay attention. While giant corporations were spending billions to better predict your taste, 2024’s best movies ask you to keep the algorithm-keepers on their toes.
1. ‘Nickel Boys’ (RaMell Ross)
Ross cut his teeth in documentary filmmaking — his formally daring “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” was nominated for an Oscar in 2019 — but with “Nickel Boys,” he turns to fiction. Sort of. His adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is boldly radical, transforming the text into a mostly first-person film that captures the spirit of the source material — a meditation on how trauma shapes a person’s sense of self — by harnessing the visual and aural tools that cinema provides. He grafts archival nonfiction footage onto the movie and frequently challenges the ways we’ve been trained to think a story like this should be told, with results that are both straightforward and extraordinary. I’m amazed this movie exists. I’m so glad it does. (Opens in theaters on Dec. 13)
2. ‘Eno’ (Gary Hustwit)
When I say that I every time I saw this documentary about the groundbreaking artist Brian Eno it was different, I’m not speaking metaphorically. It was literally different, because there are 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie, which Hustwit and his collaborators designed as a work of ever-evolving art, running on an algorithm to select and generate a new version each time it’s shown. That’s impressive enough, but what’s more amazing is that every version I saw was a terrific reflection on some aspect of creativity: art and identity, the messiness of creation. I could, quite literally, watch it a billion times more.
3. ‘Anora’ (Sean Baker)
Baker’s propulsive, sure-handed movie, about a Brooklyn sex worker who marries the chaotic son of a Russian mogul, pays homage to several Hollywood genres — but it’s something all its own. The film mixes romp and romance and tragedy, and features a blazing star-making turn by Mikey Madison as the heroine. But the real crux of the tale is in what goes unsaid, what happens just behind Madison’s eyes. The theme of all of Baker’s films is the make-believe reality of the American dream; the variation “Anora” plays has to do with fairy tales, fantasies and finally seeing the world straight on. (In theaters)
4. ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ (Johan Grimonprez)
Essayistic in form, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a furious, brilliant documentary about, well, everything, really. At its center are the events leading up to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said to have been orchestrated by the C.I.A. mere months after his election in May 1960. Grimonprez comes at it from every direction, exploring the ways truth can be exposed and ignored and shoved underground, all set to the driving rhythm of the Black jazz musicians who both protested and were, at times, unwittingly used by covert American government operations. It’s both a multimedia dissertation and a dizzying accomplishment. (In theaters)
5. ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
I first saw this drama during its festival run, well over a year ago, and yet I think of it all the time. It’s Hamaguchi’s follow-up to “Drive My Car,” and it’s similarly intent on plumbing the meaning of human connection in an individualistic world. In the film, a rural community is concerned about a company that wishes to build a “glamping” site nearby, which will have devastating environmental consequences. What we do upstream, the movie says both literally and metaphorically, affects those who live downstream — a fact we must face, or risk becoming inhuman. (Stream it on Prime Video)
6. ‘Janet Planet’ (Annie Baker)
Baker’s first film, set in western Massachusetts, is about being a misfit kid during the summertime, lonely and preoccupied by one’s mother. The titular Janet, played by Julianne Nicholson, is that mother, and she is going through a series of small crises of her own, mostly linked to lousy men and burgeoning self-realization. “Janet Planet” is small, and funny, and also revelatory in its own gentle way, with an attention to period detail — it’s set in the 1990s — that makes it clear how much Baker, an acclaimed playwright, loves her characters and their world. (Available for rent on most major platforms)
7. ‘Green Border’ (Agnieszka Holland)
Holland got into hot water in her native Poland for this drama about refugees from Syria and Afghanistan trying to cross the border from Belarus into Poland, and thus into the European Union. The film centers on the families and individuals caught in limbo while trying to travel through an “exclusion zone” around the border, as well as the activist volunteers trying to help them. It is heart-pounding and gut-wrenching, upending any easy stories we tell ourselves about borders in order to turn a blind eye. (Stream it on Kino Film)
8. ‘Good One’ (India Donaldson)
This coming-of-age drama’s revelation is its star, Lily Collias, who plays a teenager on a camping trip with her father and his best friend. On the surface very little happens, but the expressions rippling across Collias’s face tell us everything we need to know about the revelations she’s having while listening to the men talk. It’s also a debut feature for Donaldson, whose ear for dialogue and eye for detail open a whole world out on that mountain trail. (In theaters)
9. ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ (Benjamin Ree)
I struggle to explain “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” to people. On the one hand, it’s a documentary about a Norwegian gamer named Mats Steen who died of a rare disease. On the other, it’s a startling exploration of how we affect one another’s lives, even when we don’t know it. To tell the tale, Ree uses interviews, diaries, transcripts, blog posts and a hefty helping of animated recreations of Steen’s life inside the video game World of Warcraft, which makes the film’s simplicity all the more remarkable. It’s a story about what is real in an unreal age, and the places we allow ourselves to be human. (Stream it on Netflix)
10. ‘Union’ (Brett Story and Stephen Maing)
It is hard to capture, on film, the often exhausting work of organizing workplace labor, mostly because it takes years to form a union, and the fight is often a slog. But “Union” does it. Story and Maing spent years with Amazon workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island as they tried to form the first union at the company. The story they tell has moments of triumph and exhilaration, but also extreme frustration, heated disputes, disappointment. (It’s worth noting that despite a lauded festival run, “Union” couldn’t secure a major distribution deal, eventually opting to self-distribute.) (Stream it on Gathr)
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