“Sit down and play pretend for an hour — and then you can go back to your life.” That invitation, extended by Dolly de Leon’s seen-it-all community theater actor Rita to Keith Kupferer’s forlorn and spiritually adrift construction worker Dan in Ghostlight, lingered in my mind throughout this challenging year. As did Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s moving, funny, and remarkably acted movie, one of several this year (along with Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing and Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man) about the redemptive power of the performing arts.
Unlike Ghostlight’s Dan, who was processing a trauma he had no ability or desire to confront, I was all too aware of how desperately I needed respite from a world that seemed to tilt more and more out of balance as the year crawled to a close. Admittedly, finding shelter from the storms of 2024 in the years’ movies generally required well more than twice Rita’s suggested time commitment. (Mercifully, Brady Corbett’s The Brutalist — runtime, 215 minutes — reintroduced moviegoers to the intermission.)
But this year’s best films did not provide the kind of escape into outsized spectacle that has dominated filmgoing for the last decade. Instead, we got something far more valuable and necessary. This year’s greatest cinematic achievements offered dramatic changes in perspective, both ascetically and in terms of who gets to be the hero of the story. Whether they challenged our addiction to tidy and easily-digested narratives or forced us to reframe both our shared and personal histories, the most outstanding films of 2024 provided us a new way forward by giving us innovative ways of looking at the past.
A fresh frame of reference and a new way of seeing was most radically and jarringly on display in RaMell Ross’s triumphant visual tone poem The Nickel Boys. No film did more with visuals, and the associative and emotional power of editing, than the Hale County This Morning, This Evening director’s fiction film debut. By centering our ongoing reckoning with systemic racism on those who experienced it directly, Ross and his collaborators did something so much more essential than win an argument; they created art out of memory, rescuing hope from the teeth of despair.
With A Real Pain, writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg showed us that sometimes the most salient way to deal with our everyday misery is by diving in the belly of our most profound historical and generational traumas. As is the case with Elwood and Turner, the two protagonists enduring a racist reform school in Nickel Boys — created by Colson Whitehead in his Pulitzer Prize winning historical novel — A Real Pain’s cousins David and Benji, who honor their late grandmother and their Jewish heritage by touring a Polish concentration camp, feel like their inventor split in two.
As heart-wrenchingly brought to life by Eisenberg and the awe-inducing Kieran Culkin, the two feel like the rest of us too, as many of us also navigate pain both quotidian and existential with the aid of humor and pharmaceuticals. But for me, it was hard to connect with any of this year’s characters more profoundly than Chris, the wonderfully awkward Taiwanese American Fremont, California teenager who has the misfortune of transitioning out of middle school during the dawn of social media in Sean Wang’s Didi.
Watching Izaac Wang’s extraordinary performance as Chris (aka Wanger, aka Didi), as he negotiates the transition from MySpace to Facebook is to see ourselves not only as we once were, but also as we currently are, constructing and deconstructing our virtual and actual selves on the fly. But the film is as much about the people who shape us, most notably Chris’s mother, played with vast emotional profundity by Joan Chen, in what was one of the most welcome comebacks of the year.
While Sean Wang used his film debut in an attempt to understand and perhaps apologize to his mother, she remains powerfully and fittingly out of reach of his ability to completely comprehend here. The movies that resonated most with me this year echoed this idea, reminding us about how vast and unknowable our parents remain all these many years after our childhood’s end.
Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, the playwright and first-time filmmaker’s lassoing of her quasi-hippie Western Massachusetts ‘90s childhood, hit me in the head like a cigar box full of photographs falling off the top shelf of a closet. As played by longtime TV and movie unsung MVP Julianne Nicholson, single mother Janet is at once in-command and always searching, vulnerable yet conniving.
In In The Summers, yet another first-time effort (it’s inspiring how many of this year’s best movies were made by greenhorns), Alessandra Lacorazza never really gets to the bottom of Vicente, the father two sisters only get to know over extended summer visits. It’s not that he’s that complicated (René Pérez, the Grammy winning rapper known as Residente making his first foray into acting, intuitively understands the character’s toxic mix of alcoholism and machismo), it is that finding out what makes him tick requires understanding ourselves first, a feat made all the more challenging by the burgeoning queer identity of Lacorazza’s stand-in Violeta, who is played by three different actors as the story shifts in time.
Despite the redolent and tangible evocations of lost youthful summers these three films were able to conjure, the most haunting cinematic beach season I encountered this year was the balmy, seaside December/January of 1970/71 Rio, brought to life with tender specificity by Brazilian director Walter Salles in I’m Still Here. Filled with soufflés and long-playing LPs and fronted by the ferociously talented Fernanda Torres, the film recreates what would be the last time the boisterous Rubens Paiva family would be intact, as their activist patriarch is “disappeared” by a far right military dictatorship.
With despotism surging both domestically and abroad, films that confronted and exposed state and military violence— be it covert, overt or somewhere in between— resonated pointedly and with a power both frightening and prescient in both my favorite thriller and documentary of this year.
The fourth highest-grossing Korean film of all time and the South Korean entry for this year’s Oscars, veteran filmmaker Kim Sung-su’s 12.12: The Day turns the largely forgotten military mutiny that occurred in Seoul on December 12, 1979, into a pulse-quickening, emotionally involving tick-tock.
Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez gives us a whole new way of understanding and connecting with decolonization as a process, a source of hope and a threat to established world powers with Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat. Jazz is a force of nature in the film; not only does it inspire the film’s twisty structure, but the music also underpins both themes of remonstration — with musicians Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln crashing the UN to protest the murder of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba — and unwitting compliance, as African goodwill tours by Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie provide a smokescreen for Lumumba’s assassination.
Music of an entirely different sort brought to the fore the nervy, horny throb of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, the movie that made sex, sweat, and smashing forehands an essential part of our cinematic year. While Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing techno score called to mind the Euro rave scene of the 1990’s, the film itself couldn’t be more of the moment, as it explores fluid sexuality and the quest for authenticity under the muted spotlight of a low-stakes suburban tennis competition.
Not all of the year’s best movies required that the amps be turned all the way up to 11.
Director Tim Mielants’ adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These could hardly be more quiet or still as it revisits the systemic cruelty of a Magdalene laundry operating in a small Irish town in the mid-80’s. As a man slowly waking up to his own humanity and agency, Cillian Murphy gives the finest performance of his already storied career (all the more extraordinary considering he won an Oscar just last year), while Emily Watson as a Mother Superior who could give Tony Soprano pause, gets the title as the year’s most fear-inducing villain.
Or that award might go to another sinister penguin — the flightless and felonious Feathers McGraw in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. There was something profoundly comforting about the return of Nick Park’s low-fi comedy duo and their chicken-impersonating nemesis some 35 years after we first met them in The Wrong Trousers. The stop-motion animation feature not only lovingly sent up action films of the recent past, but in a year where we began tasking computers to craft our poems and thank-you notes, it gave us the perfect metaphor of our times with the Pat-O-Matic, a robot contraption designed to rub your dog’s head.
“You think a movie can bring about a miracle? Give me a break,” intones Max, a cranky old editor turned projectionist toward the end of the Spanish film Close Your Eyes. “Miracles haven’t existed in movies since Dreyer died!”
The first fiction film from master director Víctor Erice in 40 years, Close Your Eyes is one of many films this year to prove Max if not entirely wrong then at least a tad pessimistic. Erice’s film, about a director’s search for an old friend and actor who wandered off a movie production decades earlier, tackles memory loss, family and the almost mystical power of cinema to heal and connect us.
It is little wonder why Erice’s enchanting and keenly mysterious return engagement resonated with me so deeply— as did all those movies about enigmatic parents. My mother died of Alzheimer’s disease this year. None of these movies lessened the pain of that loss, but several of them helped me process it and other tragedies far less personal to me— and also helped engender the empathy needed to face the fresh hell that lies ahead.
Movies may not always cause miracles, Max, but their continuing ability to keep us going every day is every bit as astounding.
