The Last Scene in a Film
‘Challengers’
Real tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.
Season Premiere
‘The Bear’
Season 3 of “The Bear” turned out to be a disappointing holding action. But its first episode — a fraught, often wordless montage of Carmy’s tweezer-cuisine education, obsessive discipline and damaged personal life — was set to a wall-to-wall score, an extended version of “Together” from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Nine Inch Nails), that pulsed quietly and captured every bit of tense, determined perfectionism within just four chords.
Death in Vienna
‘La Traviata’
I’m not a big opera guy, but I saw “La Traviata” in Vienna this summer, and the ending featured one of the greatest onstage deaths I’ve seen. Simon Stone’s hyper-contemporary production is staged alongside a revolving cube; in the closing moments, as tuberculosis vanquishes Violetta, that cube cracks open, and she falls backward out of the playing area, swallowed by a swirling mist, knowing she has simultaneously found her love and lost her life.
Rom-Coms
‘Nobody Wants This’
Little did I know that a show with a witty Kristen Bell and ever charming Adam Brody at the helm was the feel-good TV I was missing in my life. The story follows Joanne (Bell), a podcast host, and Noah (Brody), a hot rabbi, who meet and fall in love despite their differing faiths, kooky families and some self-sabotaging tendencies. The scene of their first kiss gave me butterflies in a way that I hadn’t felt since watching my favorite romantic comedies of the early 2000s.
she’s everywhere
‘I’m So Julia’ in ’360’
The earworm that stuck in me this year was an insouciant, playground-sing-song line from “360,” the first track on Charli XCX’s summer blockbuster “Brat.” Even knowing that “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia” refers to the it-girl model and actress Julia Fox, Charli’s friend, doesn’t make the surreal expression any less sweetly enigmatic, as her name is lingered over for eight delicious, karaoke-ready syllables.
Podcast Episodes
‘Katt Williams Unleashed’ on ‘Club Shay Shay’
This nearly three-hour interview with the comedian Katt Williams, hosted by the former N.F.L. player Shannon Sharpe, has more than 84 million views. It resonated with audiences because of Williams’s unfiltered criticism of the entertainment industry, and it helped perch Sharpe’s podcast into a go-to destination for Black celebrities on the interview circuit.
Breakout Stars
Chappell Roan
At my local public library branch, I lurked while two youngish women librarians in the children’s section gabbed at length about Chappell Roan — did you see this video, that video, that Instagram post, and OMG how fun was that Chappell Roan costume party. That told me more about what a pervasive phenomenon Roan was this year than any streaming figures or chart positions ever could.
Dance
‘Still/Here’
When Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here” opened in 1994, it was overshadowed by a cultural uproar — the formidable New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce had called it, sight unseen, “victim art,” a provocation that launched 1,000 hot takes. Returning to BAM 30 years later with that critical cloud lifted (what was everyone on about?), “Still/Here” looked like its time (the ’90s) in the best way and also like an American classic: sophisticated and plain-spoken, with a clear-eyed, unsolemn take on life, shadowed by death and dying.
Live Music
Out of This World — the Missy Elliott Experience
Talk about eras. For her first headlining tour (hard to believe for an artist three decades in), Missy Elliott played every last one of her hits and called back to her most iconic looks — rhinestone helmets, fuzzy bucket hats and one black gargantuan inflatable suit (don’t call it a trash bag!). In an interview with The Times, she said she wanted “to go back to that innocent time.” She succeeded: The night my sisters, my childhood friend and I saw her onstage, everyone in the audience was 16 again.
‘Horror’ Movies
‘Problemista’
“Problemista” is a film that I think about every few weeks. Julio Torres’s performance as Alejandro, a put-upon assistant trapped in visa hell, is one of the best visual depictions I’ve seen of being caught in the frustrating and labyrinthine immigration process, and the toxic relationship between assistants and “creatives” [shudders in FileMaker Pro] brought back nightmare memories of my first jobs in Manhattan.
Stage to Screen
‘Wicked’
“The best way to bring folks together,” the Wizard of Oz tells Elphaba in “Wicked,” “is to give them a really good enemy.” The Broadway show is more than 20 years old now, but when I saw the movie remake at the end of November, that line hit different.
film
‘Grand Tour’
My whole life I have been indifferent to home, cursed by wanderlust, at peace only when in motion — and Miguel Gomes’s capriccio of two Portuguese-speaking Brits careening across both colonial and contemporary Asia is my kind of road movie. A rare film that feels proper to the Covid era (Gomes collaborated via Zoom with Asian cinematographers for lockdown location shoots, and shot the rest in exquisite black-and-white on a Lisbon soundstage), this thrillingly rickety odyssey is a valentine to the restless, one part Brecht and one part “The Amazing Race.”
Documentary
‘Leonardo da Vinci’
So nice to see Ken Burns venture outside America to create a PBS documentary, “Leonardo da Vinci,” that views all of da Vinci’s many dimensions. As wonderful as Walter Isaacson’s biography of the artist is, I found the film more appealing because it so easily presents the brilliance of the painting and the precision of the sketching.
German New Objectivity
‘Splendor and Misery’
On something of a whim during a quick stopover through Vienna in May, I saw the “Splendor and Misery” exhibition at the Leopold Museum, which showcased German New Objectivity work from the 1920s. The artists sought to starkly and visually describe the world as they saw it in a moment where the ground was beginning to shake, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since then.
Cover Bands
Joe Russo’s Almost Dead
I’m entering, or have already entered, middle age, a time when some youthful experimentation ought to be replaced by familiar comforts, so watching the fantastic Grateful Dead cover band known as JRAD put its virtuosic sonic twists on some of my old favorites — “Rubin and Cherise,” “Jack Straw,” mind-blowingly Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” — did not just represent a fantastically fun September evening, but an immaculately agreeable one. The cherry on top was my first visit to the Rooftop at Pier 17, with the Brooklyn Bridge framing the back of the band and a merciful 10 p.m. curfew taking me home at a reasonable hour.
Tear-jerkers
‘All of Us Strangers’
I cried through most of this movie, starting when Andrew Scott’s character, though still an adult, found himself in his childhood pajamas, in bed between his parents as they were when he was small. To be safe in the world again!
Site-Specific Art
The Heidelberg Project
During a sun-washed afternoon in Detroit, we marveled at the well-used dolls, squashed shoes, carousel animals, shopping carts, disembodied car doors and rusty ovens that are among the media Tyree Guyton cleverly juxtaposes in the found-object commentary of the Heidelberg Project. For more than 30 years, persisting through a series of arsons and some city administrations that freely wielded wrecking balls, he has made a canvas of his neighborhood, painting polka dots on houses, developing community programs and filling the blocks with the sculptures he makes on-site where he can share his tales (some extremely amusing but N.S.F.W.) with visitors.
Hip-Hop
‘GNX’
I literally screamed when Kendrick Lamar surprise-dropped “GNX” at noon on a random Friday. It is by far my favorite album of 2024 with no skips and the cherry on top of an amazing year of him showing exactly why he is the greatest rapper and not to be messed with. I still can’t stop yelling “Mustard!” and don’t know when I’ll ever stop.
Film
‘Good One’
The plot’s simple: Sam (the excellent Lily Collias) tags along on a camping trip with her dad and his longtime friend. So much is unfolding in her 17-year-old eyes as she takes in two grown men at their most ridiculous. It’s an emotional landscape told in silences and quietly revealing moments.
Art
‘Caillebotte: Painting Men’
This once-in-a-generation exhibition is heading to the United States next year — to the Getty in Los Angeles and then the Art Institute of Chicago — but I was lucky enough to catch it at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the city that is the real star of the show. When Caillebotte was painting there in the 19th century, everything was in flux. He takes us onto the streets, and into the salons and bedrooms, where Parisians were working out how to live in a new world.
Film
‘Trap’
M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” which sees a suburban father’s attempts to hide his serial-killer nature unravel when he takes his daughter to a concert intended to catch him, is a comedy thriller that clicked into place for me as “A Man Escaped” by way of Bugs Bunny at a Taylor Swift concert. But it’s the surprising thematic heft that has stayed with me since, particularly when it comes to the moral permission granted by society to someone coded as a “family man.”
Film
‘Strange Darling’
Hold close the friends who know your movie tastes well enough to text: “See this immediately. Do not read anything about it.” Although such a command inevitably raises expectations, “Strange Darling” — a structurally inventive and taut thriller (96 minutes!) — was still delightfully subversive.
Albums
‘Diamond Jubilee’
Cindy Lee’s underground epic feels less like a favorite LP and more like a world I can go live in for two hours and two minutes at a time. I was disappointed when the tour for this album was canceled before it reached Brooklyn, but maybe it’s better just to have Cindy Lee playing under the spotlight in the roadhouse of my imagination, singing falsetto and sounding like the Velvet Underground covering the Ronettes — untouched by our side of the portal.
Body Horror
‘The Substance’
The twisted, grotesque, oh-my-gosh-can’t-believe-my-eyes audacity of “The Substance” has stuck with me like so much goo. And Demi Moore’s fearless performance holds all that goo together.
More Body Horror
‘The Substance’
Subtlety is growing obsolete these days, replaced by unflinching, even obnoxious, articulation — a shift that often feels disastrous but can be cathartic, even validating. And for me, no work of art this year made its point like Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” about the futile, maddening pursuit of perfection and the self-loathing that fuels it; it should upset us, disgust us and turn our stomachs inside out. And as a movie monster obsessive, the one that takes center stage in the film’s unhinged climax is queen, and I may never shake her image … or her message.
Songs
‘My Golden Years’
Everybody loves a good Song of the Summer, but winter is when I really need a musical warm-up. Since “My Golden Years” by the Lemon Twigs dropped last January, it’s been the soundtrack of my year — a jangly, richly harmonized jewel that sounds simultaneously like the second coming of Big Star and a hopeful voice of its own.
Broadway
‘The Hills of California’
There’s no more thrilling entrance this year than Laura Donnelly’s jaded singer Joan strutting into her childhood home in flared jeans and an Afghan coat, to the sound of “Gimme Shelter,” in the final act of Jez Butterworth’s epic family drama, “The Hills of California.” Until this dramatic moment, teased from the start of this nearly three-hour play, Donnelly had played Veronica, the mother of Joan, but the two compassionately imagined and fully realized characters are so distinct and coherent — physically, vocally, emotionally — that it took me a few minutes to realize the same actor embodied both.
Art
‘Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega’
I keep loving “Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega” at the Museum of the City of New York (through Jan. 6), a sizzling, pocket-size visual sampler from the career of one of our fabulous public artists, whose exuberant mosaic depictions of life in El Barrio adorn the subway stops at 110th Street and Lexington Avenue. In the 1980s, Vega began traveling to Brazil, where he was initiated into Candomblé, an Afro-Atlantic religion fusing West African Yoruba and Roman Catholic beliefs, with the result that conventional distinctions between “high art,” “popular art” and “spiritual art” have never made sense to him. That explains the title of his show: “Byzantine” suggesting intricate formal polish, and “Bembé” evoking drum-driven religious worship that is also a street party.
Film
‘Tuesday’
The death of my loving and beloved grandfather this year is one of the two most intimate losses I’ve experienced at this point in my life. “Tuesday,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, has been a most profound teacher and comfort in understanding, accepting and even finding joy in my grandfather’s transition.
Street Art
‘Banksy & Street Art: The Early Years’
On a trip to Copenhagen, I was struck by the “Banksy & Street Art: The Early Years” exhibit at the MACA Museum just up the road from the Nyhavn waterfront. Bringing together works by Banksy, Andy Warhol, TAKI 183, Stay High 149, Basquiat and others, the exhibit captures the subversive beauty and enduring power of street art.
Opera
‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’
For sheer grandeur, bittersweet poignancy, joy and unfathomable mysteries, there’s not much that can match Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.” It’s all too rarely performed, and no wonder: It calls for five Wagnerian singers and a massive orchestra, it is almost impossible to stage as written (earthquake followed by flood, anyone?) and its story can be difficult to grasp and jarring to modern sensibilities. So the Metropolitan Opera’s revival this fall, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and led by a top-flight cast including Elza van den Heever and Michael Volle, and the orchestral earthquakes and floods of operatic dopamine it unleashed, will stay with me for a long time.
Broadway
‘Stereophonic’
I didn’t walk out of “Stereophonic,” a Broadway show about a fictional band making an album, as much as I stumbled out of it. The way you would if you’d sat in on back-to-back recording sessions, the herbal cigarette smoke still clinging to your hair and the euphoria of creation knocking you slightly off balance. It is an ode to inspiration masquerading as a play.
Live Music
Cyndi Lauper at Madison Square Garden
From the moment Cyndi Lauper opened her Madison Square Garden show with a paean to the slogan atop the nearby post office (“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”), it was clear that this concert tour, her farewell, was about endurance. At 71, Lauper is still lastingly — thrillingly — a renegade; her performance had minimal arena theatrics but delivered a lot of emotion: glee and tears, from pink-wigged fans and me.
TV
‘Hacks’
Jean Smart as the seen-it-all comic Deborah Vance is a revelation — both devastating and devastated. And for a show that traffics in the perfect timing of a cutting barb, the pauses that go on just an uncomfortable beat too long are the real masterstrokes.
Film
‘Twisters’ in 4DX
It seemed like everyone on Twitter also discovered the jostling fun of 4DX via this year’s “Twisters” release, but it was more entertaining than I could have ever imagined. The movie itself was gripping, the chemistry was there, everyone in the theater was hooting and hollering, my lap was full of popcorn — what more could you ask for?
Outside
‘Hanging Stones’
This fall, I went on a six-mile hike in English moorland, stopping at old farmhouses that the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy had filled with new work. In one, he’d put a huge rock that appeared to be floating. That, given the project’s title “Hanging Stones,” I had kind of anticipated. The rest I couldn’t see coming, or how moved I’d be by it all. At one point, I fell down a hill and got covered in mud, and it only added to the atmosphere.
Theater
‘Our Town’
I first read this Thornton Wilder play in high school as an assignment, and that’s all it was. Now, decades later, with children of my own, the third act is a gut punch — a searing reminder to “really look at” loved ones and savor the beauty in everyday life.
The post 36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024 appeared first on New York Times.
