Joshua Polanski is a Boston Hassle staff writer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Baltic, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film. He is a Tomatometer approved critic and a member of the Michigan Movie Critics Guild.
The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, whose newest title grabs a spot on this list, recently observed that “I find [the crisis of modern cinema] exhilarating in a certain way. Of course, I regret many things … but I think we live now in the most interesting time regarding cinema, regarding images. I don’t even have this feeling that many people have that the best films were made in the past… it’s pessimistic on one hand, but at the same time, I really think we are forced to take advantage of that or disappear.”
2024, more than any other year of the century, corroborates his claim. There is no denying big big-budget cinema is in a hard place with the pressures of commercial success, algorithmic green lighting processes (that come up with “success” equations like The Rock + talking combat-ready polar bears = big bags of cash), and artificial intelligence. Even other traditional harbingers of cinematic flourishing like the festival-styled art-house drama show signs of decline. Some of this is the natural outcome of new production barriers via streaming where lower-budget productions are now being held closer to the standards of easy-consumption entertainment as the average $150,000,000 four-quadrant crowd-pleaser than ever before. But light slips into even the darkest of cracks, as Leonard Cohen observed. The superheroes look dead as a doorknob and it’s clear to even the dumbest of executives that films based on known IP are not the same thing as printing money. The landscape is changing, one way or another, whether we like it or not, and it’s from this creative purgatory that innovation emerges. (More to come on light blasting through dark cracks later in this list.) That’s what purgatory is in a classical sense anyhow: a purging or cleansing before one meets the Divine — a bath to get rid of the dirt one last time and not a hedonistic deluge of sin and despair as it is usually depicted. To get to heaven, we first need a good cleansing.
To keep the theology going for a minute, Hans Urs von Balthasar, an influential 20th-century Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher, re-ordered the classic philosophical transcendentals from the good, the true, and the beautiful to the beautiful, the good, and the true. Without getting too far into the weeds of something you surely don’t care about, it will suffice to say this: to Balthasar, the philosophical ideal of beauty had lost its meaning as a way to see the source of true Beauty (to Balthasar, a good Catholic, that was God) and to even reach back at the source. He believed the beautiful emanated from God. Only by giving beauty a proper place in aesthetic thought and our evaluation of the aesthetics of culture can we move from a commercial and ephemeral appreciation of beauty to a higher-order beauty of love, hope, grand emotion, freedom, and mystery.
More than the other two transcendentals, beauty also captivates and grips the year’s best films. For a few of them — The Brutalist and All We Imagine As Light — there is even an air of spiritualism to the task of capturing, defining, and recreating true beauty. For others, The Beast and Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to name a few, it is about a beauty lost in our world and the quest to re-enlighten life with the beautiful. For still others, such as Black Velvet or Lyd, it’s about a beauty never seen — a place that can only be dreamed about. The Substance, a film I didn’t particularly love, probably dealt with this the most directly from a thematic standpoint, as did Anora, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and a dozen other prominent titles in their own ways. In a year darkened by ethnic cleansing, global conflict, and hopeless elections, it’s beautiful that beauty, more than depravity, captivates the minds of our best artists.
The best films I saw this year come from all over the world, though perhaps less so than in previous years. This is tied for the most American movies (four) I have featured on my annual year-end lists. Even the smaller titles are likely known to most up-to-date cinephiles and that’s a sign for optimism as Jude alluded to. For the third year in a row, one of my Top-10 films (Lyd) I first saw through the Boston Palestine Film Festival, one of the best-curated small regional festivals anywhere in the world. It’s also the first year with a complete absence of Korean and Chinese films, though I’m not surprised considering my viewing habits this year led to fewer East Asian new releases than in previous years.
In all reality, I surely didn’t watch many of the best films of the year, and that’s how any year will go. Some dad in the Philippines has the best work of motion art of 2024 somewhere on his iPhone. It’s not the responsibility of the critic to be an omniscient completist; the job is to open new doors into cinema, in both introduction and perspective, and it is my hope that this list and the films on it may open a door or two for you.
Some of the snip-its are lifted from or adapted from my writings here at the Hassle or other publications.
Honorable Mentions: No Other Land, The Monk and the Gun, Everything Will Be Alright, She Is Conann, A Part of You, Exhuma, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, All Your Faces, & Carry-On.
10. Kill (dir. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat) — India
Kill was the most fun I had in the theater this year. From start to finish, it is one glorious bloodbath about a man, played by newcomer Lakshya in what is surely the first of many action roles, trying to save his lover on an express train from Ranchi to New Delhi where every passenger wants to kill him. The action pulses with creativity and the blows seem to hit even harder in the narrow corridors of a train than they would on a wide-open set. The villains are comically mean, the heroes impossibly perfect. Forget the boring and rote John Wick comparison that every new action film with formidable choreography is drawn to: Kill is the most exhilarating action spectacle of the year and it’s not particularly close.
9. Black Velvet (dir. Liene Linde) — Latvia
A genre-defiant drama about depression with a formalist flare, the Latvian-Lithuanian co-production Black Velvet uses some killer editing and funky cinematography to zero in on the strangeness and alienating effect of that unique sadness. Inga Tropa is magnificent as Marta in one of the most nuanced performances I saw this year. She lives in Riga, and a group of friends come in and out of her life (and apartment) as freely as they want, Davids Smiltiņš’s camera following them as they do. He pushes the lens just close enough to allow us to smell the stinky dishes in Marta’s apartment and to hear, in every audible detail, the bawdy noises of her sex life. The omniscient access to her life magnifies her destructive tendencies like Franz Rogowski in Passages or Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World. Her depression and immaturity eat her away.
Read my full thoughts at There Were No Gods Left.
8. Trap (dir. M. Night Shyamalan) — United States
After Old, one of the great horror movies of the 21st century, I vowed to never miss another M. Night Shyamalan film in theaters. My ticket for Trap was as much of a sure thing as the Democrats blowing another election. His entire filmography going back to After Earth has me convinced that part of what makes him so unique of a mainstream voice is that he makes family-oriented movies with the garments of an adult film. The horror of Old stems from the fear of missing out on your children’s lives, and the anxiety of Trap comes from nowhere other than the fear of being a good dad. Other than the kidnapping and terrorism, is Trap the year’s most innocent film? Perhaps.
7. Lyd (dir. Sarah Ema Friedland, Rami Youniss) — Palestine
Lyd would seem to teeter between disaster and even greater disaster on paper. It’s an American, Jewish, and Palestinian co-directed film that moves fluidly between a straightforward documentary about Lyd, the Palestinian city, and a science-fiction animated storyline that imagines an alternative reality for Lyd and the Levant more broadly had Israel not been their occupier. The documentary shows archival footage never seen of the elite Israeli Palmach soldiers that once ethnically “cleansed” (language they actually use) the city recollecting on the atrocity many years later, though some of them still think of what they did as a “liberation” instead of a war crime. Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Youniss take up a dangerous task — at a very dangerous time — and, through their carefully hopeful speculative history, they find a brave new reality where Palestinians are free and Jewish immigration to Palestine occurs peaceably and even welcomely instead of through ethnic cleansing and war. And right when the viewer feels that hope and longs for this reality, they rip it away and return to our Palestinian-oppressed reality.
Read my full thoughts here at the Boston Hassle.
6. The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet) — United Kingdom, United States
Adrian Brody is László Tóth, a Hungarian Jewish survivor of the Shoah and the former architect of the famed Budapest library. Now he is an immigrant in Pennsylvania searching for meaning in a world where the lights have already gone out. The war may have ended but the scars don’t fade so easily. Legally shackled down by Zsófia (Emma Laird), their niece she presides as guardian over, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) struggles to find a path from Hungary to immigration. His talents are eventually discovered while working as a furniture maker and in local construction and he’s hired to realize the ridiculous surbantropolis ego-fantasy of arch-capitalist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The project is referred to as the “institute” and is nothing short of an all-for-one community center. Despite being a government-funded community center from a Jewish architect, the institute features a church at its center. László doesn’t cut artistic corners with the worship space. He envisions a cut-out in the chapel ceiling that when the light hits it at a certain time of day, a cruciform of light takes over the space and projects onto the chapel floor. The behemoth of the incomplete structure glimpses like a spiritual window into his soul — from the claustrophobic darkness of the concentration camp to the dramatic and salvific potential of freedom — in a way art usually only pretends to.
5. All We Imagine As Light (dir. Payal Kapadia) — India
I’d wager that every peeing scene in cinema history is comedic or embarrassing– that is, until Payal Kapadia’s 2024 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner All We Imagine As Light. In her peeing scene, the camera peers up at the star-spotted night sky filtered through the canopy of a forest. Like a painting, the light of the stars seems to fit perfectly between the trees. Then Ranabir Das’s camera repositions to a close-up of a woman’s hairline, so close one can spot dandruff, before slowly revealing the full body of the squatting woman, Anu (Divya Prabha), peeing on the forest floor. The moment is both beautiful and mundane. The iconoclastic women of All We Imagine As Light bludgeon the stereotypical images of Bollywood and Hollywood. Kusruti and Prabha (the actor who portrays Anu, not Prabha the character) portray their characters with mean streaks and without shying away from normal bodily functions (like peeing). The characters do not always conform to the beauty standards set by the industry, nor do they feel the need to play by the standards. Kapadia allows her women to be fully human; and if that’s a radical statement, that might say more about the state of cinema than it does about this particular film.
Read my full thoughts at DMovies.
4. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (dir. Radu Jude) — Romania
It should come as no surprise to Radu Jude-heads that the premier Romanian cineaste made perhaps the defining film of the 2020s. The specificity may limit the film’s ability to age, particularly transculturally, though that will become the norm in the culturally-decaying commercialization of our media-omnipresent environment. Jude is one of the first filmmakers to market his film to Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” while still seeing a revolutionary path on the horizon. Even the images used to market the film — Ilinca Manolache’s Angela in the bathroom — are shown in their original color for commercial purposes; in the film, the same image is a manipulated and aesthetically flapping black and white. Claire Denis is big on Instagram, but beyond Jude, how many great filmmakers of our age have a TikTok account and let the influence of new media slip into their own image-making and do so without compromising a mastery of film history and iconoclastic political sentiments? The children of Coca-Cola don’t watch their commercials in black and white.
3. Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice Of Blood and Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (dir. Zack Snyder) — United States
The mythic opus of the controversial and talented Snyder’s still young career, the director’s cuts of the two Rebel Moon films add up to roughly six hours of very bloody (and very Snyder) screen time. It’s also very human. The Rebel Moon saga is one of the most quintessentially anthropocentric space fantasies on screen. Aliens and non-human species are deprioritized. The emphasis on sexuality and on manual labor is testament to the human-centeredness. Even the reasons the outcast heroes join Kora (an incredible Sofia Boutella) and Gunnar (an every-man Michiel Huisman)’s last stand on Veldt all come from deeply human places: lost motherhood, revenge, duty, and redemption.
One of my favorite scenes in Snyder’s entire filmography is the regal assassination. It works like a scene in a silent film yet it uses a huge pulsating operatic score with touches of Wagner. The best part about it is how ultimately damning it is of Kora’s past. This is her Anakin kid-killing moment and it’s a different Kora than the one we have come to admire so far; she has been redeemed from such a deep low. Her heroism begs questions that our current culture isn’t ready for and probably won’t be for the near future. Should the limits of forgiveness be cast away? Can anyone be morally redeemed? Even a kid killer? Most sci-fi films with Nazi-ish villains end up with a clear-cut morality. Black is black and white is white. Snyder challenges that binary in Rebel Moon and in doing so uncovers a truth about heroism that the superhero movies never arrived at: heroism is something you do; it’s not who you are.
Read my full thoughts (a very long & hopefully very good essay!) at There Were No Gods Left.
2. Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross) — United States
A stylistically abundant and intimate portrait of segregated Florida through the eyes of two teen boys, Nickel Boys is simultaneously a machine for empathy — driven by the film’s use of first-person POV and tight aspect ratio — and distanced with experimental and stylized pillow shots of the engine of history revving up in the background. Sometimes these connecting shots are experimental extreme close-ups of nature, sometimes they are of Black hands. Sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes not. Other times they are newsreels of spaceships and presidential assassinations. And these occasionally link the boys’ past — at the abusive “reform school” called Nickel Academy where Elwood Curtis tries his best to keep his head down and cause no trouble— with the present, where Google and New York look the same as they do today.
What’s most remarkable about Nickel Boys, an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, is how the alienation moves the viewer back to the real world and recenters empathy rather than removing the audience from it. Normally, anti-verisimilar alienation does the opposite: it cuts the audience from empathy rather than multiplying it. One senses this is just how the world worked and does work, and that this world is our world. Grandma Hattie’s (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) concluding voice asking the elder Elwood (Daveed Diggs) what he is going to do about it, over a black screen, is a call to action straight from Sergei Eisenstein. As crazy as it sounds to compare a director who just completed his sophomore feature to the greatest filmmaker to ever live, if RaMell Ross plays his cards right, the American Eisenstein may be waiting at the gate.
Read my full thoughts at There Were No Gods Left.
1. The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello) — France
The best film of the year is one of the year’s two French-language adaptations of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle. The new film by the French digital-modern poet Bertrand Bonello orbits around two lovers doomed across a multiverse of past lives. His film doesn’t build a chronology like most of contemporary cinema but an entanglement of emotions by following two lovers across three times and two geographies in a mix of chronological and emotionally rhythmic order as they fail to couple despite an evergreen yearning for each other. Léa Seydoux gives an indelible, once-in-a-lifetime performance as Gabrielle across three incarnations: 1910, 2014, and 2044 as she lives with the immense and perpetual fear that something terrible will befall her. It isn’t just the best of the year; it’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. She yearns with intense emotion, across two languages and supplemented with inimitable body acting while building otherworldly chemistry with George MacKay (as Louis) across three timelines and three technically unique characters. It’s a difficult role for both leads. Most versions of this film would have failed.
Bonello, a composer at heart (and for this film), thinks musically, and The Beast benefits tremendously from its song-like structure where the propulsion of a feeling rather than the passing of time motivates the organization of the piece as a whole. Like repeating choruses in a pop medley, key characters return across time and space and say similar things while wearing wardrobes more appropriate to the time. And sometimes, like a catchy lyric, he uses literally the same visual or sonic cue — a scream, a specific reading of a line, a pigeon — presented earlier. A single sequence may weave image fragments from three different timelines without a jolting disconnection or unnavigable story. Images relate with other images like the tangled hair of two lovers in lip-locked intimacy or the mixed watercolors of a post-impressionist painting: as one hardly discernible mass of passion.
Bonello accomplishes the essentialization of emotions in part by draping his created worlds in real-world history. The substance of the lovers more or less remains untouched by the specifics of history — the Great Flood of Paris, news articles about large-scale riots and the response of the militarized police, and fictional civil wars mentioned only as ancillary comments. The history that gets closest to the characters has to be whatever the United States is still going through with its epidemic of gun violence and specific references to the misogynist terrorism of Elliot Rodger. Even the future timeline cloaks itself in a blanket of history. Taking place in a dystopian post-history doesn’t do any good for the coupling of Louis and Gabrielle either. Their tangled and painful histories across reincarnations end in a guttural cry too raw to call a dirge. Their history of emotions amount to nothing but destruction and pain: the cries of lovers who could not love, of dreamers who couldn’t not dream, of two souls Platonically torn apart at creation. C’est la réalité. C’est parfait.
Read my full thoughts (in what I think is one of the best pieces I have ever written) at There Were No Gods Left.
