Facing the Bitter Truth: The Best Films of 2024

This is my 17th end-of-year list. And, like every year, perhaps the most daunting thing about it is the introduction. As it turns out, it's very hard to run out of things to say about good movies – as there are always plenty of those to go around, including in 2024 – but I find myself increasingly at a loss as to how to frame my countdown of my favourite ones of the year.

I don't spend much time looking for themes and through-lines in my selections. I rarely take pains to find major parallels between the films I choose to highlight at the end of the year and the life I have lived in the preceding 365 – or, as is the case in 2024, 366 – days, having long since learned that, in my end-of-year write-ups, I tend to be more invested in how films engage with a cultural and political moment rather than how they might resonate with my own biography.

Of course, this is not to suggest that I am pretending my choice of titles is entirely divorced from personal biases and histories – criticism being a deeply subjective endeavour that necessarily intersects with one's own experience of the world, after all. But, looking back, I find most of my lists to be less than faithful reflections of my life at those respective points in time.

Hence, even though I will say that 2024 was a challenging year for me personally, for a variety of reasons I don't need to elaborate on here, I don't know that this fact was all that much of a factor in my selection process. Cinema certainly was a significant force in helping me cope with the year's challenges, but, in retrospect, it was primarily film history that served as a provider of consolation and catharsis – in forms as varied as Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea (2014), Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up (2022), Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Robert Bresson's The Devil Probably (1977), Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century (1934), Hong Sang-soo's The Woman Who Ran (2020), David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), and Ingmar Bergman's staggering five-hour cut of Fanny and Alexander (1984).

As for the twenty films listed below, these are, in my opinion, a cross section of the finest the medium had to offer in the past year, drawn from all the titles that premiered in the German-speaking part of Switzerland between 1 January and 31 December 2024, both theatrically (not including festival exclusives) and on VOD and streaming platforms.

Additional shoutouts go to Sean Baker's Anora, Robert Zemeckis' Here, Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, and Annie Baker's Janet Planet, which all missed the final cut by a hair's breadth. To all those disappointed by their favourites of the year not having been included, I recommend a visit to my Letterboxd profile, which contains nutshell reviews for everything I watched this year.

And just like that, we've reached the end of another end-of-year list introduction, editorial housekeeping and personal reflections included. So here's to 2024 – a year of mixed blessings, to put it mildly, yet a year in which cinema, once again, demonstrated its vitality as an art form and its ability to serve as a mirror of the world we too often take for granted. It was a joy to watch and think about these twenty films, which are all dear to my heart for different reasons, and to write about why, if anyone were to ask me for a curated 2024 watchlist, these would be the ones I'd recommend they start with.

The Top Twenty

20
I Saw the TV Glow
directed by Jane Schoenbrun
(United States, 2024)

A lot of ink was spilled this year about the David Cronenberg-imbued body horror extravaganza that was Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. Yet for all the blood and gore that mediocre film sprayed its characters with, it was Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow that offered the most exciting, most productive, most thematically unsettling take on the subgenre Cronenberg helped popularise among the cinephile set. Revolving around small-town introvert Owen (Justice Smith) and his fraught relationship to both troubled Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and the 1990s young-adult TV show she loves, Schoenbrun's third feature frequently plays like a gaudily neon-coloured Millennial variation on Cronenberg's media-body horror masterpiece Videodrome (1983), linking the nostalgia for dying forms of popular entertainment – especially broadcast TV and VHS tapes – and the disconcerting fact that one's perspective on certain pieces of media can radically change over time to questions of false identity, gender dysphoria, and the uncanny euphoria of seemingly illicit change. Where, Schoenbrun seems to ask, do we draw the line between our "true" selves and the things we watch, consume, let ourselves be shaped by? And, perhaps even more crucially, is it absolutely necessary to draw that distinction? Why not accept that five seasons of television might have the same kind of lasting effect on our psyches as a friend we thought we had in middle school? It may not behave like a traditional horror movie, but I Saw the TV Glow, by virtue of its provocative ideas, its gorgeously surreal imagery, and its rigorously controlled lo-fi atmosphere, manages to worm its way into the subconscious regardless, proving as haunting as the half-remembered late-night mystery series from yesteryear it so lovingly pays homage to. I Saw the TV Glow is available on Apple TV, blue TV, Microsoft Store, and Sky.

19
Last Summer
directed by Catherine Breillat
(L'Été dernier, France, 2023)

Known for her predilection for taboo subjects and her often controversial approaches to them – and, since August 2024, accused of having engaged in sexual misconduct on the set of her 1999 film Romance – French auteur Catherine Breillat does not exactly go against type in her first directorial effort in a decade. A remake of May el-Toukhy's 2019 film Queen of Hearts, Last Summer is a profoundly uncomfortable drama about fortysomething lawyer Anne (Léa Drucker in a performance of steely excellence) embarking on a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson Théo (Samuel Kircher). Where a more simplistically provocative film might have sought to blur the lines between rape and consent, Breillat's film never seriously challenges the idea that Anne sleeping with Théo constitutes anything other than abuse, opting instead for a slow-burning deconstruction – and, eventually, a caustically cynical re-establishment – of the lies Anne tells herself and the world in order to save face. Permeated by a consistent feeling of wrongness, partially conveyed through a number of small but unmistakably jarring staging flourishes, Last Summer's confrontational exploration of sex and desire as embodied power games paints a pitch-black portrait of well-to-do bourgeois respectability, its weaponisation of established social hierarchies, and its feigned performances of ignorance that keep the social order afloat. It's a remarkable film that's destined – nay, designed – to rub viewers the wrong way, but it does so with a definite sense of purpose and a lot of artistic rigour, never succumbing, like so many of its deliberately seedy peers, to self-righteous "anti-woke" posturing. Last Summer is available on Cinefile, Filmingo, DVD, and Blu-ray.

18
May December
directed by Todd Haynes
(United States, 2023)

Loosely based on the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher who raped and later married one of her pupils, Todd Haynes' May December is a film that carries a lot of discursive baggage – particularly about questions of artistic ethics and exploitation – and which is arguably made even better, even richer by the unease this creates. Centred around a disturbing, often dryly hilarious double act of self-reflexively self-serving performances – Julianne Moore as Letourneau stand-in Gracie and Natalie Portman as TV actor Elizabeth hoping to finally break through in Hollywood by playing Gracie – the I'm Not There (2007) and Carol (2015) director's acerbic melodrama revels in peeling back the layers of delusion, moral rot, and repressed familial dysfunction that greet Elizabeth when she arrives in Gracie's idyllic Georgia home. Yet Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik's deviously sharp script accounts for the parasitic nature of Elizabeth's quest as well, leaving plenty of space for audiences to peer beyond the veneers of due actorly diligence and promises of "wanting to tell the story right" and see not just the entertainment industry's proximity to the obsessions of tabloid media but the psychosexual depths of the acting profession itself. With its constant bids for ambiguity, its persistent refusal to take an authoritative stance on its characters, and its own exploitative tendencies – as evidenced by the protests voiced by Letourneau's widower Vili Fualaau (whose movie incarnation is played by the fantastic Charles Melton) – May December is not an easy film to parse. But it is precisely that slipperiness, that unwillingness to spoonfeed its viewers easy answers and moral absolution that render it memorably troubling and vigorously engaging cinema. May December is available on Apple TV, blue TV, Cinefile, Cinu, Myfilm, Sky, Sunrise TV, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Listen to our podcast discussion.)

17
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
directed by George Miller
(Australia/United States, 2024)

After Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), his late coda to the series of vehicular mayhem movies with which he made his name in the 1980s, became a global box office success, won six Oscars, and was generally hailed as one of the best action movies of all time, Australian filmmaker George Miller, now 79, could have left well enough alone and ridden off into the sunset and a well-deserved retirement. But he didn't, and the prospect of a follow-up to Fury Road – a prequel about that film's breakout character, one-armed action heroine Imperator Furiosa – left many fans and critics wondering whether Miller was biting off more than he could chew. As it turns out, however, he wisely followed his own Mad Max roadmap: if Fury Road was, in some ways, a revamped Mad Max 2 (1981), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a film in the spirit of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – an extremely productive break in tone, pacing, and narrative project that extends the scope of the Mad Max world and deserves to go down in history as a far more valuable contribution to the series (and to cinema) than a more straightforward retread of what made its predecessor good would have been. Spanning some 15 years, the film chronicles the journey of Furiosa (played by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy) from being abducted by the warlord Dementus (a career-best Chris Hemsworth) to becoming something of a sleeper agent in the desert stronghold of Wasteland dictator Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Although, when compared to Fury Road, somewhat pared-down in the presentation of its invariably imaginative, expertly directed action set pieces and more visibly reliant on CGI panoramas, Furiosa soars both as bone-crunching spectacle and a more narratively involved, more indulgently character-driven take on the Mad Max formula. By harking back thematically not just to Fury Road but to the first three series entries as well, Miller is able to deliver a darkly funny yet surprisingly affecting expansion of the grieving-through-revenge arc Mel Gibson's Max Rockatansky was made to go through once upon a time – and he ends up in an appropriately bittersweet, intriguingly surreal place. Indeed, Furiosa might be more of a Mad Max movie than a Fury Road prequel – and that's exactly what makes it as good as it is. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is available on Apple TV, blue TV, Microsoft Store, Sky, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Listen to our podcast discussion.)

16
All Shall Be Well
directed by Ray Yeung
(從今以後, Cóng jīn yǐhòu, Hong Kong, 2024)

Ray Yeung's All Shall Be Well, a sharply observed character portrait in the mold of the Hong Kong writer-director's idol Stanley Kwan (Women, Full Moon in New York), is one of those unassuming, deceptively strait-laced dramas that gradually reveal themselves to be the most heartbreaking, not through grand gestures but the diligent accumulation of emotionally suggestive scenes. Indeed, it's one of the finest recent examples of this mode. Chronicling the fallout of the sudden death of the vivacious sixtysomething Pat (Kwan veteran Maggie Li Lin Lin), the film follows her partner of 30 years, the more reticent Angie (Patra Au), as she faces both the Hong Kong bureaucracy, which does not legally recognise same-sex unions, and Pat's economically disadvantaged family, who stands to benefit a great deal from inheriting Pat and Angie's spacious city flat. Armed with a keen sense of the malice that can hide behind social niceties and respectable deference to official protocol – especially when it happens to rule at the expense of a social out-group – Yeung develops this potent, affectingly everyday premise not just into a searing indictment of societal homophobia but also into a quiet celebration of queer kinship and, perhaps more surprisingly, a deft exploration of economic inequality. For all their ruthless opportunism, their slow freezing out of Angie after decades of ostensibly accepting her as one of their own, Pat's family – led by Tai Bo's moving, thorny performance as Pat's tenuously employed brother Shing – is cogently placed in the larger context of Hong Kong's class system, with Yeung's script effortlessly mastering the delicate balancing act of being deeply empathetic without simplistically exonerating its characters. In a way, All Shall Be Well is a somewhat old-fashioned film – a sensitively constructed, sturdily directed drama devoid of flashy narrative tricks or formal showmanship – yet one that perfectly illustrates the enduring value of that approach. All Shall Be Well is currently not available for streaming or on physical media.

15
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
directed by Frederick Wiseman
(France/United States, 2023)

It's easy to fall into the trap of taking for granted that veteran filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman releases one of his trademark documentary behemoths every 18 months or so. Then again, Wiseman, now 95, does lend himself to such bouts of complacency because his work shows no signs that the grandfather of the long-form observational portrait has lost any of the sharp editorial wit, piercing curiosity, and procedural perspicacity that first put him on the documentary genre map some 60 years ago. Like the best of Wiseman's more recent output – such as Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) and City Hall (2020) – Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, a four-hour film about the small gastronomical empire run by the multi-Michelin-starred Troisgros family in France's Loire department, takes a peek behind the curtain of a proudly traditional institution, explores its long-standing routines, and, in doing so, finds the larger narratives and metaphors said institution seems to be subconsciously gesturing towards. Although Menus-Plaisirs takes a somewhat gentler approach than Wiseman's most probing works – he and DP James Bishop do not sit in on a budget meeting for once – its patiently observed scenes of ingredient acquisition, debates over menu changes, waitstaff briefings, meticulous meal preparations, and master chef Michel Troisgros' jovial table-side lectures on Japanese necklaces and 86-year leases coalesce not only into an arresting mosaic of the forces that fuel a gourmet restaurant but also into a deeply compelling narrative on the human desire to create art and the economic realities that require said art to be marketed to a clearly delineated audience and sold to the highest bidder. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is available on Cinefile, Cinu, Filmingo, Myfilm, and DVD. (Read my full review.)

14
Burning Fire
directed by Michael Karrer
(Füür brännt, Switzerland, 2023)

Over the past 25 years or so, Swiss cinema seems to have increasingly embraced the strategy of producing films by committee, favouring the obsessive hunt for mass appeal over the fostering of original ideas and strong artistic visions. So it's always a special treat to see films that manage to flout these conventional funding incentives and present audiences with something that challenges received wisdoms of what a Swiss production looks, sounds, and feels like, what its thematic ambitions are, and how it goes about achieving them. And it's all the more heartening when, as is the case with Michael Karrer and the Sabotage Kollektiv's Burning Fire, such a film is a debut. Depicting three groups of young people over the course of one hot summer night in present-day Zurich – Millennials at a garden party, Zoomers at a riverside bonfire, Generation Alphas roaming a leafy urban housing estate – it is a largely plotless affair, content to observe its roughly sketched protagonists in their respective social settings, chart the shifting group dynamics that gradually unfold, and listen to the hyperspecific cadences and vocabulary of each generation's artfully anglicism-inflected Swiss German. A hangout movie in the vein of early Richard Linklater, suffused with a subtle sense of generational unease, Burning Fire is both a wryly funny snapshot of 2020s Switzerland and a surprisingly stark vision of a world devoid of people above the age 35 – raising poignant questions about the future these characters are heading into, the world they will inherit, and the internet-age sensibility they will bring with them. Burning Fire is currently not available for streaming or on physical media. (Read my full review.)

13
Me
directed by Don Hertzfeldt
(United States, 2024)

It's rare for a short film to make an appearance on a list of the best films of the year, but when Texas-based animator Don Hertzfeldt – best known for his existential stick-figure fugues It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012) and World of Tomorrow (2015) – releases new work to Vimeo, unorthodox measures must be taken. Aptly described in the production notes as "a musical odyssey," the completely wordless 22-minute film about a humanoid figure – looking a bit like a Minion by way of Matt Groening – who invents a revolutionary gadget but becomes estranged from their family in the process is at once an impressive showcase for Hertzfeldt's ever-evolving animation craft, a perceptive refinement of his œuvre's thematic obsessions, and a dizzying departure from the narrative techniques of his more recent work. Blending minimalist hand-drawn animation with more abstract 3-D elements, as he did most conspicuously in his two sequels to World of Tomorrow and the 2021 autodocumentary On Memory, Hertzfeldt wrestles with the tension between artistic creation, the need to exist in relation to other people, the encroaching darkness of a seemingly crumbling society, the megalomaniacal desire to leave a legacy that will last into eternity, and the mixed blessing that is technological advancement. With its playfully inquisitive nature and its willingness to present its audience with an at times disorientingly oblique mix of sights and sounds, Me not only speaks to Hertzfeldt's extraordinary ability to find ever new angles from which to tackle his pet subjects, both narratively and aesthetically, but it further cements his standing as perhaps one of contemporary cinema's pre-eminent artists. Me is available on Vimeo.

12
The Taste of Things
directed by Trần Anh Hùng
(La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, France, 2023)

While it would be perfectly accurate to say that The Taste of Things is a beautiful movie about three of the great joys in life – food, love, and friendship – such a pronouncement would do an exceedingly poor job at giving expression to what distinguishes the delectable latest from Vietnamese-French filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya). For what risks sounding like trite sentimentalism on paper is a much more grounded, though no less affecting affair in execution. Told in large parts through extended food preparation sequences set in the sun-drenched kitchen of a country estate in 1880s France, and directed with precise attention paid to procedural and emotional detail, the film chronicles the evolving relationship between veteran chef Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) and master gourmet Dodin (Benoît Magimel), gradually crafting a moving, intriguingly multi-layered portrait of love that embraces its ephemeral mystery – a portrait where adherence to socially sanctioned gestures of romance, such as marriage, is far less important than the never-ending accumulation of mutual appreciation through shared passions, unspoken rituals, and the sheer beauty of creating something together. In the world of The Taste of Things, there is nothing more romantic than spending hours preparing a sumptuous meal for one's friends and oneself; and it sustains itself on that edifying idea for its entire 134-minute runtime, right through its well-calculated moments of droll comedy and earth-shattering tragedy – not least thanks to Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, two of current Francophone cinema's premier actors, whose excellent performances leverage their own real-life romantic history to wonderful effect. The Taste of Things is available on Apple TV, blue TV, Cinefile, Cinu, Myfilm, DVD, and Blu-ray.

11
Trap
directed by M. Night Shyamalan
(United States, 2024)

When I put Knock at the Cabin on my list of the best films of 2023, I wrote: "His cinematic output may be notoriously hit and miss, but when M. Night Shyamalan gets his high-concept mystery-thriller mixture right, there are few mid-budget genre filmmakers on the American scene who can touch him." Well, take out the reference to the mystery genre and the sentiment holds equally true for Shyamalan's latest. Set predominantly at a Philadelphia concert venue hosting an afternoon concert of teenage idol Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan), attended by teenaged Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and her affable firefighter dad Cooper (Josh Hartnett), Trap puts the audience in Cooper's shoes as he realises the concert hall is crawling with police closing in on a notorious local serial killer – him. If Knock at the Cabin was Shyamalan working through cultural anxieties surrounding climate change, Trap, with its point-of-view character sociopathically treating every social interaction as a transaction, finds him tackling people's susceptibility to opportunistic performances that present themselves as being reassuring and uplifting. Even more intriguingly, Shyamalan filters all this through the highly evocative clash between three contemporary mythical figures – the pop star, the serial killer, and the good family man – whilst moving through a tense location-based thriller plot with remarkable efficiency and aesthetic heft. The extended sequences of Josh Hartnett – giving one of the performances of the year – traversing the concert venue, looking for alternative exit routes whilst fulfilling his fatherly duties, deliver genuine movie magic, courtesy of Shyamalan's purposeful direction and DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's nimble camerawork. And just as Trap, like Cooper, seems to have exhausted all its possibilities, it, like the very best thrillers, shifts gears and seamlessly transforms into an even more unsettling exploration of the unstable performances that uphold the respectable façades of bourgeois suburbia. Dismiss Shyamalan at your own peril – we're lucky to have filmmakers like him. Trap is available on Apple TV, blue TV, Microsoft Store, Sky, Sunrise TV, DVD, and Blu-ray.

10
The Room Next Door
directed by Pedro Almodóvar
(Spain, 2024)

That a 75-year-old filmmaker would make a movie about death isn't much of a surprise. That he would shoot it in a language he's not made a feature in yet, perhaps more so. Yet it's a testament to the enduring power of Spanish cult auteur Pedro Almodóvar (Volver, Parallel Mothers) that his latest, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, manages to be as surprising in its treatment of death as it is adept in (mostly) circumnavigating the potential pitfalls of Almodóvar switching from Spanish to English. Granted, there is the odd turn of phrase in The Room Next Door that will alert viewers to the fact that English is usually not its director's working language; but these are moments that feel perfectly at home in a film that is, at least in part, all about trying and failing to find the right words and gestures to convey a difficult message. Set in and around New York and revolving around a cancer-stricken war correspondent (Tilda Swinton) asking an estranged friend (Julianne Moore) to keep her company as she's preparing for her suicide, The Room Next Door is a deliberate, sharp-edged melodrama that is not so much about the fact of death as an individual tragedy but about the question what makes life liveable in the first place. Within this thematic frame, Almodóvar works through life, death, and art as both metaphor and practical conundrum – art as the provider of meaning in life, a means of living on after death, and a sarcophagus keeping individual moments frozen in dead time all in one, the ethics of suicide, the insignificance of one person's demise in the face of human-made mass death and planetary cataclysm-courting climate change – all while staging an emotionally thorny, dryly funny conflict between two women who both love and resent each other (and themselves) for the insecurities they reveal in one another. In other words, The Room Next Door is quintessential Almodóvar – and a touching, intellectually bracing late work that never stoops to cheap sentimentality. The Room Next Door is currently playing in Swiss cinemas.

9
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
directed by Mohammad Rasoulof
( انجیر معابد, Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma'ābed, Iran/Germany/France, 2024)

It is one of the more depressing facts of world cinema that freedom of artistic expression is under such intense and prolonged attack in Iran that "Iranian dissident cinema" has become a fully-fledged subgenre unto itself. Some one-and-a-half decades into its current iteration, arguably kickstarted by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's 2011 masterpiece This Is Not a Film, the theocratic regime's persecution and prosecution of filmmakers critical of the status quo has become, if anything, even more draconian, with Mohammad Rasoulof (A Man of Integrity, There Is No Evil) being its latest high-profile target. Having been sentenced to eight years in prison, lashes, a fine, and the confiscation of his property, Rasoulof fled into exile in May 2024, lending The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the last of his films to be shot in Iran (for now), an extra layer of extratextual poignancy. Yet what makes this tense psychological thriller drama about the political and generational conflicts within a Revolutionary Court judge's family a particularly noteworthy achievement is not just its turbulent production context, nor the excellent performances from lead actors Missagh Zareh, Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, and Setareh Maleki, but the ways in which it seems to be dreaming of an Iranian cinema that doesn't have to brand itself as "dissident" in order to compete on the international market. As the 168-minute film progresses – and it does so with remarkable swiftness – it gradually sheds some of its more recognisable arthouse trappings in favour of decidedly stranger, more genre-inflected stylings. In parallel to Rasoulof's metaphorically suggestive tale of a regime loyalist losing his authority over his home, these genre nods seem to suggest an Iranian cinema that is free to tackle subjects other than its own precarious situation. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, then, is as much a furious and principled paean to the Iranian opposition as it is a seed of hope bestowed by Rasoulof upon his filmmaking compatriots: one fine day, films such as this will be history. And when that time comes, Rasoulof's latest will be cited among the very finest of them. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full review.)

8
Flow
directed by Gints Zilbalodis
(Belgium/France/Latvia, 2024)

Gints Zilbalodis' acclaimed debut feature, 2019's Away, was entirely a solo effort. If that fact alone didn't already suffice to mark the Latvian animator as a talent to watch, Flow, his follow-up film, should be enough to drive home the point. Made using a somewhat more conventional division of cinematic labour – with special extra plaudits going to Zilbalodis' co-writer Matīss Kaža and co-composer Rihards Zalupe – Flow is a gently post-apocalyptic spin on the popular Homeward Bound formula: living the good life in a world seemingly devoid of human beings, a cat is suddenly driven from its home by a swiftly rising sea level and soon finds itself marooned on a boat, along with a capybara, a dog, a lemur, and a large bird. Told entirely without dialogue, Zilbalodis' second feature is not just beautifully animated – splitting the difference between 3-D animation, Studio Ghibli-imbued production design, and the aesthetics of video games like The Last Guardian (2016), Abzû (2016), and Stray (2022) – but also a masterclass in visual storytelling. By mostly letting its animal protagonists remain believably animalistic, making anthropomorphic allowances primarily for their ability to steer their boat, the film retains a compelling sense of intrigue throughout: the characters are emotionally legible but, being animals, not fully transparent; and the excitingly and – especially for cat people – hair-raisingly perilous adventure Zilbalodis and Kaža have in store for their hapless menagerie admirably threads the needle between being unfussily direct and mysteriously abstract. This renders Flow both a moving piece of narrative cinema and an elegantly implicit – and exceedingly timely – fable about migration, community, and rivalling visions of home. And, of course, there's no arguing with a film built around an adorable cat behaving in an unmistakably feline manner. Flow is currently playing in Swiss cinemas.

7
The Beast
directed by Bertrand Bonello
(La Bête, France/Canada, 2023)

One of the last two years' omnipresent topics of cultural conversation was that of AI. A deliberately hazy term, it seems to encompass anything from "creative assistants" – such as large language models like ChatGPT and imaging tools like Midjourney – to Spotify's algorithmic playlist creation, rendering it the perfect weapon for marketing departments, start-ups seeking to spruce up their funding pitches, and Ponzi-scheme-adjacent hype merchants looking for the next big payday after the deflation of the cryptocurrency market, NFTs, and the so-called Metaverse. Yet, for all its outsized promises, the AI-industrial complex's inroads into the art world – especially in the form of AI-generated ideas, scripts, commercials, and films – do present a hard-to-ignore challenge for cinema, both creatively and economically. And while the medium, with its notoriously protracted production schedules, has yet to address this latest AI wave on a grand scale – outside of the latest Mission: Impossible installments, that is – a first major approach was hazarded by the ambitious 2023 film The Beast: a loose adaptation of Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, it sees intrepid French director Bertrand Bonello, of Saint Laurent (2014), Nocturama (2016), and Zombi Child (2019) fame, imagine the near future of 2044, where an advanced artificial intelligence has taken over the reins of humanity, gently guiding it away from its own self-destructive impulses and excesses. In an effort to leave behind her menial dead-end job, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) seeks out the treatment that would qualify her for a more demanding, more satisfying profession – an AI-mandated cleansing of her humanity-addled brain, which involves her mentally reliving moments of emotional turmoil from her past lives. This conceit allows Bonello to tell a stylistically audacious and thematically challenging three-part story featuring three iterations of Gabrielle meeting and being pursued romantically and/or sexually by three iterations of Louis (George MacKay), rendered as a costume drama set in 1910s Paris, a home invasion thriller set in 2010s Los Angeles, and a science-fiction dystopia set in 2040s Paris. Filled to the brim with provocative and terrifying ideas about our present moment and the historical processes that led us here – and capped by end-credits-by-QR-code – The Beast is a work of invigorating artistic indulgence and unapologetic melodramatic excess that rails against our enduring cultural obsession with realism and the resulting notion that the predictable, unremarkable, perfectly tempered average is the crowning glory of human achievement and experience. The Beast is available on Filmingo, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Read my full review.)

6
No Other Land
directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor
(Palestine/Norway, 2024)

When Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, two of the four first-time directors behind the incisive Palestinian-Norwegian documentary No Other Land, took to the Berlinale stage in February to collect the prizes they had been awarded, their respective speeches caused a perhaps all too predictable uproar. Just a few months after the horrific Hamas attacks of 7 October 2024, during which more than 1,100 Israelis were murdered, and the start of Israel's response – a brutal, human-rights-violating invasion of Gaza – Abraham, an Israeli journalist, and Adra, a Palestinian activist, criticised the indignity of Palestinians living under apartheid conditions and called for a cessation of Germany's weapons exports to Israel. What followed was a wave of politicians and media figures pillorying the pair – and, by extension, their film – as antisemitic, a characterisation that still hangs over the discourse surrounding No Other Land. This should not keep anyone from seeing the film, however, as it is one of the clearest, most emotionally impactful examples of the ideal that cinema is a potent tool for underrepresented voices to speak truth to oppressive power – a narrative that's a film festival marketing favourite – in recent memory. Directed by Abraham, Adra, the Palestinian Hamdan Ballal, and the Israeli Rachel Szor, and told from the first-person perspective of Adra, who lives in the West Bank village community of Masafer Yatta, No Other Land is primarily a chronicle of what it means to be living on Palestinian land claimed by Israel. Set mostly between 2019 and 2023, it depicts both the struggle of the people of Masafer Yatta against the daily onslaught of Israeli bulldozers and military vehicles coming to tear down houses and schools, fill up wells with cement, and demolish pigeon coops and playgrounds, as well as Adra's personal efforts to capture the destruction on film and help his friends and neighbours. Throughout the film's 97 minutes, the specifics of the footage remain largely the same. Indeed, the images shot by Adra are supplemented by depressingly similar ones caught by his father in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But that is very much the point: Abraham, Adra, Ballal, and Szor make tangible the sheer absurdity of life in the occupied West Bank, the ways in which this persistent state of exception denies Palestinians not just citizenship and stability but the right to a collective identity and the chance of meeting even their Israeli comrades – such as Abraham and Szor – on a level playing field. No Other Land is a stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating film, a deeply personal, stirringly eloquent rallying cry against the moral and humanitarian rot that has been allowed to fester in the Israeli government's Palestine policy. The world would do well to listen. No Other Land is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full review.)

5
All We Imagine as Light
directed by Payal Kapadia
(പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം, France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg/Italy, 2024)

The great Hollywood director Howard Hawks once said, "A good movie has three good scenes and no bad scenes." It's a directive that's as hard to argue with as it is to follow, so special attention must be paid to those films and filmmakers who manage to do it. Case in point: All We Imagine as Light, Indian director Payal Kapadia's second feature (following 2021's A Night of Knowing Nothing), which not only contains no bad scenes, but whose good-scene count far exceeds the number called for by Hawks. Revolving around the everyday routines and comparatively small-scale struggles of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), two Mumbai nurses, it's a gentle, patient drama about carving out a living and a life as an individual in a globalised metropolis that runs on but isn't built to accommodate its working class. By turns evoking the cinema of Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women, First Cow) and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), All We Imagine as Light demonstrates the joys held by a film that allows itself to sit with its characters, to linger on moments, incidents, and spaces without being beholden to pure narrative utility. Far from rendering proceedings uneventful, this cumulative approach, buttressed by emotionally rich character and milieu detail and a strong, at times quasi-documentarian sensibility, gradually reveals not only the compelling narrative shape of Prabha and Anu's respective and intersecting lives; it teases out the tender ode to gender and class solidarity and the political nature of community formation that Kapadia has assembled her understated dramatic threads into. With her assured but impressively light directorial hand, Kapadia resists the easy didacticism her material might have inspired in a lesser director and underscores the life and the political edge that's left in the optimistically-minded slice-of-life-drama. All We Imagine as Light is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full review.)

4
The Zone of Interest
directed by Jonathan Glazer
(United Kingdom/Poland/United States, 2023)

There's a scene late into The Zone of Interest – more of a cut, really – that turns English director Jonathan Glazer's first feature since 2013's Under the Skin from a formally and narratively bold, thematically devastating visualisation of the banality of evil that underpinned the Holocaust into an even more searing challenge to its present-day audience. As the camera follows one of the film's Nazi protagonists, Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), drunkenly wandering the halls of a government building in Berlin, the screen turns black and the film transports its viewers to present-day Auschwitz, where cleaning personnel is busy dusting the various exhibits in the concentration camp-turned-museum – the glass cases holding inmates' belongings, the blue-tinted floors of the gas chambers, the industrial ovens designed to dispose of the dead. After 95 minutes of witnessing the Holocaust taking place in the margins – in the form of barbwire-topped walls bordering the Höss' pristine garden, sinister orange glows at night, cries and shots heard off-screen – while the camera's attention rests on the day-to-day routine of Höss and his family, The Zone of Interest bridges the 80-year gap between its story and its making, imparting on the audience the sobering conclusion that we are the custodians of history – and that, as the horrors of the Holocaust gradually recede out of living memory, it is incumbent on us to understand it not as the horrifying work of a few extraordinarily evil people but as the result of a collective, societal system of prejudice, opportunism, and willful ignorance. Yet while the unpleasant but essential brilliance of Glazer's film is best represented by said cut, it is The Zone of Interest's cumulative effect – the editing's keen sense of rhythm and process, the camera's uncanny, unchanging angles, the script's ability to locate the horrific in the mundane, its way of conditioning the audience to see the cruelty lurking beneath seemingly innocuous lines of dialogue – that renders it an indispensable and unforgettable work of art. The Zone of Interest is available on Apple TV, blue TV, Cinefile, Cinu, Filmingo, Myfilm, Sky, Sunrise TV, DVD, and Blu-ray.

3
Evil Does Not Exist
directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
(悪は存在しない, Aku wa Sonzai Shinai, Japan, 2023)

Originally intended by Japanese writer-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) as a dialogue-free 30-minute short dominated by Eiko Ishibashi's score, Evil Does Not Exist eventually blossomed into a feature after all – though one which retains the intriguingly controlled open-endedness that marks the very best shorts. Set in a small mountain community outside of Tokyo, the film follows eight-year-old Hana (Ryō Nishikawa) and her widowed father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who becomes a local guide of sorts to Takahashi (Ryūji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), two PR emissaries from a city firm looking to construct a glamping site in the village. Although Evil Does Not Exist arguably finds Hamaguchi, whose cinema is known for its calm introspection, at his most radically contemplative – with its refrain of long shots depicting forest scenery, running waters, the creation of artisanal ramen dishes, and Takumi chopping wood – this is a work of remarkable thematic urgency. As true as the titular aphorism may hold – the village is not a prelapsarian paradise, and Takahashi and Mayuzumi, despite the capitalistic intrusion they personify, are genuinely trying to do their best – the film, a marvel of purposeful editing and elliptical emotional storytelling, ultimately argues that the time for abstractly contemplating the complex moral gradations of environmental destruction has passed: Hana and Takumi aren't paragons of virtue, Takahashi and Mayuzumi aren't evil incarnate; yet the fact remains that the latter are engaged in a concerted effort that will inevitably wreak havoc on both the former's way of life and the mountain ecosystem they live in. In essence, Evil Does Not Exist, down to its shockingly blunt, deliberately heightened conclusion, is a potent parable on the diffuse question of culpability and consequence in the era of runaway climate change, an attempt to dramatically capture the all too literal downstream effects of insisting on shaping the world to adhere to the gospel of economic productivity. Evil Does Not Exist is available on Cinefile, Cinu, Filmingo, Myfilm, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Read my full review.)

2
Dahomey
directed by Mati Diop
(France/Senegal/Benin, 2024)

In November 2021, the French government, in a widely mediatised act of restitution, returned 26 artifacts looted during the 1892 invasion of the West African Kingdom of Dahomey to their place of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. In Dahomey, her Berlinale-winning sophomore feature, French director Mati Diop (Atlantics) uses this development – which, in isolation, is an unambiguously positive one – as a starting point for a remarkably multi-layered, deliberately slippery discourse on history, its maddening yet inevitable refusal to tell a single authoritative story, and the attempts of cultural institutions, political entities, and other interested parties to resist that fact. Seamlessly moving from an observational documentary mode that recalls the work of Frederick Wiseman to a more emphatically poetic, slyly essayistic approach – one that is marked by spectral voiceover narration from the artifacts themselves, courtesy of Haitian author Makenzy Orcel – Dahomey confronts its audience with a host of thorny questions and implications, all of which ultimately serve to illuminate the impossibly diffuse, insidiously pervasive, and stubbornly enduring legacy of colonialism. Why, for instance, did France only deign to return 26 objects out of the hundreds of thousands it plundered during its imperial campaigns? To what extent, ask students at Benin's University of Abomey-Calavi during a spirited debate Diop sits in on, is this restitution a political ploy of Beninese President Patrice Talon, designed to distract the country from his government's failure to address more pressing domestic issues? Indeed, what are the people of modern Benin to make of Dahomey as an aspirational symbol of pre-colonial glory and pan-African identity – given that Benin is very much a republic in the European image that has long since replicated European structures of inequality, and that Dahomey was itself a kingdom with a history of expansionism and enslavement? Dahomey is invigorating political filmmaking, precisely because of its reluctance to unquestioningly accept any of the edifying – or more pessimistic – stories one might graft onto the 26 artifacts' homecoming. Diop is led by an insistent inquisitiveness, a boundless curiosity, and a principled willingness to take the invaluable cause of decolonisation seriously enough to embrace the intriguing contradictions and grey areas it necessarily raises. In an era where decolonisation is quickly becoming a dirty word again, a film as intellectually rigorous and aesthetically daring as Dahomey shines especially brightly. Dahomey is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full English review. / Read my full German review.)

1
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
directed by Radu Jude
(Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii, Romania/Croatia/France/Luxembourg, 2023)

What does it feel like to live in the now? To exist as a person in the extended Global North in the mid-2020s, in a hyper-connected, tentatively post-pandemic world, where cartoonishly inept oligarchs and bumbling would-be authoritarians appear to be ascendant, while everyone else is struggling to adapt to the anxiety-inducing absurdities and indignities of living amid the crumbling structures of late capitalism? It's an impossible question – not just because of the hundreds of millions of possible answers, not just because it is in the nature of any present moment to remain forever unrepresentable in its specificities, complexities, and stupidities, but also because any answer one might give will inevitably be proven wrong, short-sighted, or laughably naïve before long. In short, it would be a fool's errand to try to answer this question, especially in a form as perishable as that of a feature film. So it's a good thing nobody seems to have told Romanian provocateur extraordinaire Radu Jude, whose 163-minute opus Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is one of the funniest, one of the most abrasive, and – despite having premiered at Locarno in 2023 – still one of the most fiercely contemporary films in recent memory. Mostly set over the course of one exhausting day in the life of Angela (played by an incredible Ilinca Manolache), an overworked and underpaid production assistant on a workplace safety video commissioned by an international conglomerate, the film shows Angela navigating the endless menial tasks that keep coming in – visiting potential protagonists for the campaign, attending production meetings on Zoom, picking up camera lenses from an Uwe Boll film set – whilst navigating the heavy Bucharest traffic. If Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) was a heady blend of philosophical and historical referentiality, crude humour, and caustic social satire for a world staring into the abyss, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is its supercharged escalation, a gallows humour-filled plunge into the sobering reality that work never stops, even when everything else goes to hell. Touching on everything from Goethe, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Matsuo Bashō to anti-Romani prejudice, EU economic incentives, the war in Ukraine, Charlie Hebdo, TikTok, and Andrew Tate – all the while being engaged in a Godardian deconstruction/cultural-historical reappraisal of an obscure Romanian film from 1981 – Jude's latest is an exhausting, breathtaking, darkly hilarious satire that somehow manages to give expression to the pervasive cultural sense that the time for contentedness, the illusion of existence without moral implication, the warm afterglow of the defeat of Nazism and the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the "End of History" is well and truly over. Film isn't a great medium through which to effect social change, but it is perfectly suited to capturing the zeitgeist – and with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude once again reveals himself as the premier chronicler of this particularly weird age in which we find ourselves. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is currently not available for streaming or on physical media. (Listen to our podcast discussion.)

Dienstag, 31. Dezember 2024

The Best Films of 2024

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