This Had Oscar Buzz

Chris Feil's Top Films of 2024

Added 2024-12-28 14:00:10 +0000 UTC

What a horrible year!! Just not at the movies. Overall I'd say the film year 2024 was on par with 2023, if fewer unquestionable greats.

A few pop culture (and adjacent) blessings I had this year: the slapstick decadence of Oh Mary!. The grim alternate American reality that somehow doesn't feel that far from our actual reality in Catherine Lacey's Biography of X (yes, this was published in 2023, but I read it this year and books can be fudged for these purposes kinda). The character arc miracle that was Tricia on Somebody Somewhere, I loathed her when the show began and now I would lay on the tracks for her. I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell's Hejira. I briefly abandoned hot yoga and started a habit for expensive fragrance and moderately priced skincare. I wrote about acceptance speeches with Joe, Mike Leigh with Fran Hoepfner, Harris Dickinson with the devil on my shoulder saying "do it!", and Oscar history with ample caffeine.

Otherwise,

Let's have a list, then...

1. HARD TRUTHS

Mike Leigh’s return to contemporary setting is a post-COVID character study of Pansy, a woman consumed by rage and fear after the death of her mother, played with torrential and often hilarious fury by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Around Pansy is a supportive family she nevertheless pushes away, especially her sister Chantelle (a seismic, underrated Michele Austin). They all seem to manage what’s impossible for Pansy: pushing forward through setbacks both big and small. Pansy is frozen by every little infraction the world accosts her with, and it’s very funny until it’s very not. Yet Hard Truths is about more than one woman–it’s a litmus test of where we are at after catastrophe and as the horrors persist. Leigh’s genius here lies not just in his ability to capture our everyday humanity (one of his specialties, obviously), but to leave us with the question of what we’re going to do about our circumstances. (Expands theatrically beginning Jan. 10)

2. THE BEAST

An extrapolation from a Henry James novella, Betrand Bonello’s divine freakout The Beast depicts one woman’s past lives over the course of a century, with each lifetime perched on catastrophe. In the near future, Gabrielle–a simply stunning Lea Seydoux–begins a process to “purify” her DNA and render herself a shell to have more function in society. But she wavers when she connects with a man, one who has had a starkly different role (or has he?) in each of her past lives. Bonello mashes genres while questioning if some of the key threats to our times–AI, commodification, technological advances that ultimately make us more isolated–may also be timeless, resulting in a film both devastating and synapse-pummeling. Maybe the apocalypse has already happened, maybe the tragedy is ourselves. (Now on The Criterion Channel)

3. DAHOMEY

Mati Diop’s imaginative non-fiction Dahomey witnesses the repatriation of two dozen pieces of art from the Kingdom of Dahomey back to their home in West Africa. While Diop focuses on a college debate sparked by their return and the many varied perspectives within, the film also daringly fictionalizes a narration from the artwork’s point of view. Diop’s film is thrillingly expansive in its brief running time, lingering on each of its ideas in only enough time for us to process each, resulting in an immersive meditation on the spectre of colonialism against the art, soul, and history of a population. In a fusion that’s equal parts Wiseman and Varda, Dahomey’s fleet, but exhaustive presentation of interconnected ideas and emotions is the structural accomplishment of the year. (Now on MUBI)

4. THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

“There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy,” Julianne Moore says in Pedro Almodovar’s melodrama about compassion and bearing witness, The Room Next Door. I’ve called this movie “a hot knife of clarity” in a confounding, very difficult year personally, and I could honestly just leave it at that. But I would also suggest (especially to those thrown by the film’s artifice) that this story of female friendship has intentions and implications beyond the confines of its narrative. (Now in theatres, expansion begins Jan. 17)

5. A DIFFERENT MAN

Maybe the first #representation satire, maybe the influence of Charlie Kaufman roaring back to life, but writer/director Aaron Schimberg has made one of the most singular comedies in ages with A Different Man. Sebastian Stan stars as an actor who takes an experimental treatment to cure his neurofibromatosis, only to have his story commandeered by the neighbor he pined for. As the actor who plays Stan’s double and mirror for his insecurities, Adam Pearson is exquisite in suave dandy mode. (Now on VOD, on Max beginning Jan. 17)

6. JANET PLANET

Exactly the debut film you might expect from playwright Annie Baker, and by that, I mean it’s tremendous. It’s about a preteen child and an adrift mother in the 1990s, told with Bakerian minutiae and pregnant silences. You ever recall a memory or time in your life and begin to relate to the other people in the memory more than your own experience in that memory? I guess we could call that growth (or regression, depending on the circumstances?) but that’s the magic trick this movie pulls off. (Now on Max)

7. NICKEL BOYS

Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel about two Black teenagers sent to a Jim Crow detention center, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is in dialogue not only with actual history but the telling of history–how stories like this are captured onscreen and how we consume them. Much of the accolades have justifiably fallen on cinematographer Jomo Fray’s first-person cinematography, but equal credit is due to editor Nicholas Monsour for helping to assemble the overwhelming emotional and intellectual shape of the film, particularly its staggering closing montage. (Now in theatres, expansion begins Jan. 17)

8. I SAW THE TV GLOW

A queer warning siren, I Saw the TV Glow denies catharsis to a disarming effect. I was uncharacteristically rattled by its depiction of teens who sublimate their identity through an obsession with The Pink Opaque, a fictional variation on the genre likes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jane Schoenbrun proves to be one of the most exciting of a new generation of filmmakers with their sophomore feature, once again drawing on a slew of non-film influences to construct an entirely fresh narrative structure. (Now on Max)

9. PROBLEMISTA

Yes, Julio Torres’ comic mind has gifted us with a panoply of vivid human eccentricity, incongruous objects, and a keen but bizarre personification of inanimate forces. But what also makes him a unique comedic voice–and now, an exciting filmmaker–is a point of view devoid of self-congratulation or piety to innumerable status quos. His debut film, Problemista, is the story of an immigrant toymaker navigating a needlessly arcane labyrinth of bureaucracy, and its uncloying optimism is near miraculous. (Now on Max)

10. UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Depicting an imagined version of Canada where Farsi and French developed as the national language, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language tracks an unlikely foursome in a surreal alternate Winnipeg: a tour guide, a dejected government worker, and two children who find money frozen in ice. Owing as much to Abbas Kiarostami as to Wes Anderson, the film’s blend of deadpan and melancholy provide unexpected access into Rankin’s view of national identity as transference. And a killer final song cue. (Theatrical expansion begins Feb. 14)

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