Films of 2024: Pt I of II

We need art now, like we never have before. In times of ease and peace we forget its value, and confuse it with entertainment. Entertainment has to be 1) fun and 2) easy to understand. Art, on the other hand, is not so limited. It can transcend mere fun, and shake your soul. Art is the only profession that explores what it means to be alive. Unlike science, religion and philosophy, it is not constrained by the obligation to provide answers. It just is. As Milan Kundera wrote, "Only the most naïve questions are worth asking. They are the questions with no answers." And Art is all about such big questions. This is why AI has nothing on art and never will: it is incapable of experience. It can only acquire knowledge, never wisdom. It cannot conceive of the intangible. Art is how we will find each other again, make sense of our squandered age, and build back up anew. 

Below is my list of films for last year. Film is the great empathy-building machine, and there was never a more urgent time for empathy. We've been atomized by communications technology, isolated and alienated. This is how they make society incapable of uniting, of revolution, of communal love and respect. Smartphones, social media and the 24-hour news feed have made everyone else in real life an Other, and each of us into an island, our old communities replaced by digital approximations of community. Maybe we once thought the positives of this would outweigh the negatives. Maybe they do. But these days, I feel the negatives. Film and other art is a solace for me. 

My training is in filmmaking and photography; this list is not critic's list but a filmmaker's list, so form/style/aesthetics is as important to me as subject; and, I'm trying these days to remember not to evaluate Art as if it's supposed to be Entertainment. Art doesn't have to be easy to understand. It can be about challenge, or even pain. All the most important moments in life involve pain. Only art can help us through those moments. Escape is not an antidote to despair. Somehow we seem to innately grasp all this when it comes to music. People value the great breakup albums (l have my favorites), and they don't require answers from music. I see cinema in the same way. This is not a list of fun or easily digestible films, but don't click away! We never remember those for very long anyway. This is instead a list of ten (okay, actually twenty) interesting films, films with flaws but which take on challenges, ask hard questions, and the best of which push the medium to new places.

Beginning from the bottom:

20. Love Lies Bleeding, by Rose Glass. 104m. Trailer.​

“Anyone can feel strong hiding behind a piece of metal. I prefer to know my own strength.”

The ending shot is a question, and an acknowledgment of accepting flawed humanity. The most interesting relationship in this fascinating picture is the one between Sterwart and her father, Ed Harris. What is Stewart thinking in that last shot? (SPOILERS:) That, perhaps, I am not so different from the father I was desperate to distance myself from, whom I thought was so different than me. What am I doing here, performing the exact same action he once did, and which I so detested: burying undeserving innocent bodies in holes in the desert? It is a reconciliation of sorts, after the fact. She has a choice about where she goes from here, now that she can name this similarity. We are always more like our parents than we realize.

Like Drive, another contemporary ~100 minute genre thriller that's actually about loneliness, Bleeding’s violent moments are too violent for me. But the rest, including Kristen Stewart's incomparable performance (another masterclass in indistinguishably fusing acting, reacting and being), make it worth the journey.

19. Pigen med nålen (The Girl With the Needle), by Magnus von Horn. 123m. Trailer.

“The world is a horrible place. But we need to believe it's not so.”

Contemporary European art cinema (my favorite subgenre) flying high. An unnervingly dour portrait of 1910s Copenhagen, with production design, costumes and lighting fully capturing how roughshod life would've been in these environs. Reminiscent of Hard to be a God in its fully realized setting, too strange and awful to turn away from, and yet this film's world is our world, a past not too distant, with similar moral quandaries and hidden horrors.

18. The Outrun, by Nora Fingscheidt. 118m. Trailer.

“The past follows us. Energy never expires.”

The film concludes with a style of montage I’ve only seen climax one other film: Terrence Malick’s The New World. And by the time we get there, it feels earned. Included are moments of both light and dark, because all of it, at the end of the day, was important and worthwhile. I liked in particular the Melvillean focus on process– both on some very strange jobs, the haphazard nonlinearity of recovery, and the act of being alone as an important and necessary project of fulfillment. Fingscheidt has great instincts for immersing us aurally and visually. It's a big-screen picture.

17. Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes), by Victor Erice. 169m. Trailer.

“I dreamt he was alive more than once.”

One of the most affecting special features I've encountered is the Victor Erice interview on the Criterion disc of his unfinished 1983 gem, El Sur. In it he describes, years later and with great detail, what the second half of his film would've been, had he been able to make it. The exacting specificity of Erice’s memory reveals what a crushing blow this was for him. You can feel the heartbreak. He wouldn't make another fiction feature until this one, 40 years later. What did Erice do, now finally willing and able to make a film again? Did he shoot the rest of El Sur, and try to make right the past? No. Close Your Eyes is about an aging director beguiled by a film he started 40 years earlier but never got to complete. Erice knows we cannot correct the past; we can only process it.

You can feel the cathartic liberation of Erice working through the pain, channeling his frustration into art, finding something beautiful in the journey. I wonder if he knows that El Sur is a better and more mysterious film in its incomplete state. This new work suggests that, at long last, he does. A film about belief, the unknowable, and peace.

​16. Kinds of Kindness, by Yorgos Lanthimos. 164m. Trailer.

“That woman who says she's Liz... chopped off her finger last night and served it to me to eat. I didn't, of course, eat it. The cat did.”

Poor Things, creative as it is, features two elements that helped its popularity: a prescriptive, role-model hero and an obvious villain. Kindness, filmed concurrently, illustrates the difference between entertainment that is artful and art that is entertaining, though I’m not even sure if Kindness qualifies for the latter adjective. It certainly is high art– as challenging, difficult and rewarding as Flannery O’Connor or the Franz Kafka short stories. Like these authors, Lanthimos here presents three stories which are parables in the true sense of the word– that is, like the biblical parables, stories whose meanings we argue about. One doesn’t watch Kinds of Kindness; one wrestles with it. Lanthimos and cowriter Efthimis Filippou somehow manage to blend apparent simplicity with baffling opacity. It's the most active viewing experience of the year, and one that illustrates the towering capacity of cinema as unadulterated, uncompromising, capital A-art. In this painful film's depths lie multitudes.

15. Bird, by Andrea Arnold. 119m. Trailer.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Andrea Arnold takes so long in between making her portraits of young women on the cusp of self-awareness that each of her last three outings represents a portrait of a different generation. Bird, the latest, is the first to dive deep into a world of youngsters who grew up with the Internet, smartphones, social media and all the splintered multitudes they bring. Her empathy for even these oft-derided souls astounds me, and humbles me with its sincerity and gentle glow. It is easy to dislike the unfamiliar, and young people live in a world unfamiliar to me; but Ms. Arnold, generations older than both me and her subjects, reminds us all how universal a quality goodness remains, and how valuable a perception aware of it is.

​14. Parthenope, by Paolo Sorrentino. 137m. Trailer.

"It's very difficult to see, because it's the last thing you learn.”

Okay, I'm not going to try to defend the film's squarely male gaze (the cinematographer actually being a woman should be noted)– the film isn't perfect– but one thing this reworking of the eponymous myth can't be called is misogynist. It isn't dismissive or contemptuous of any of its female characters, least of all its witty and thoughtful heroine; it's a celebration, not of physical beauty but of an attitude that transcends it. Like her mythic namesake, the protagonist is hampered by her beauty and the effect it has on others. But she isn't defined by it, nor by romantic or familial obligation. If beauty opens doors for her, it's her intelligence that gets her across the threshold every time.

​This Parthenope doesn't throw herself into the sea after being rejected by Odysseus, as per the ancient story; she instead bears the sorrow of losing a loved one to that act, and chooses to embrace life, joy, optimism, and possibility, alongside the undercurrent of melancholic mystery that never leaves those of us who have lost. Although there may be things to criticize here, I see much to treasure. Notice how she returns the gaze of Mr. Sorrentino and Ms. D’Antonio’s camera with a gaze of her own, cheekily taking over the agency of sight at key moments.

Most of all, I shake my head in awe at the wisdom of Sorrentino’s writing (I was actually pausing to scribble down lines in the third act, they were so attuned to the questions I ask of life), and his inspiring inability to judge any character. A film that leaves you elated by its end, utterly committed to go out there into the world being your beautiful best self.

​13. Emilia Pérez, by Jacques Audiard. 132m. Teaser.

“Truth is the most painful form of freedom.”

I know, I know, I know. Hear me out here. We forget that this was well-loved when it played at Cannes, that it got great reviews both stateside and in Europe… but we do remember when American audiences subsequently discovered it via its slew of Oscar nominations and Twitter fallout with one of its actors, and how much they hated it. It's become especially fashionable to hate Pérez online, but my concern here is with the film itself and nothing surrounding it. Mediocrity in filmmaking bores me, and one thing Pérez can’t be called is boring. I have a weakness for wild swings, and Pérez is a wild swing if there ever was one, imperfect but endlessly intriguing. I’m actually not sure the film is about transitioning so much as Audiard’s career-long fascination with the possibility of the second self. He presents different outcomes of this concern in each of his pictures; here, the supporting character played by Karla Gascon has such clear aims for good, and is mostly successful... but she cannot quite escape her first self (I'm not referring to gender here, but character: her entitlement and treatment of others), and in doing so she both reveals her humanity and signs her fate. How many of us are able to transcend our habits? She aspires to be a saint. The final scene is a question only the viewer can answer. 

12. La passion de Dodin Bouffant (The Taste of Things), by Tran Anh Hung. 135m. Trailer.

“Happiness… is continuing to desire what we already have.”

Like Jean-Pierre Melville and Michael Mann, and myself, Hung is fascinated by people at work, and specifically by process. If you are too, this film’s for you, in which the cooking can go on in uninterrupted stretches lasting over half an hour, and which Hung somehow manages to stage in such a way that they feel like action scenes, if action was not just urgent but also absorbing and reflective. Also, watching Benoit Magimel act is always a great use of time. He makes sitting still riveting (as he does in Pacifiction). The Sean Penn of France, if not better. Binoche rivets us as well, but that's no surprise!

​11. Nickel Boys, by Ramell Ross. 140m. [No trailer because all trailers include a major visual spoiler.]

“If I look the other way, I'm as implicated as the rest.”

Stupefying. Imagine if for the first century of literature, all books were written in the third person… and then someone decided to write in first person. The effect can't be overstated. Ross’ first fiction feature is also the first dramatically successful attempt in cinema history at what it's trying (no, Lady in the Lake and Hardcore Henry don't count), and the most formally audacious film I've seen in years. In all other films we learn about characters by watching them behave; here we learn about them by watching what they see. Also, note the deft economy of how the film teaches us how to watch it, when it plays a scene twice to introduce the Turner character’s perspective.

​Check back next month for Pt II!