The proliferation of the so-called “content” we are witnessing has long been in the making. The decline of superhero blockbusters, the monumental small-screen budgets, streaming services enlisting some of the biggest names in film, auteurs scoring big in the awards seasons, or attempts at a revival of lower-budget indie filmmaking – there has indeed been plenty of market and creative turbulences in the past half-decade or so.
Still, not all we get is CaaS (cinema as a service). A new filmmaker boldness emerges amid financial and PR turmoils, SAG-AFTRA strikes, artificial intelligence threats, and the general chaos of postmodernity. Emerging voices and celebrated doyens alike seem to be searching for stranger narratives and new angles on existing legends, gifting us with a plethora of intriguing and, if you will, fresh releases signalizing a revitalization of a threadbare industry. That’s why, this season, some of our lauded releases feature a terminally ill woman trying to ensure a dignified death, an infatuated man looking to cleanse his soul with ayahuasca, mismatched cousins touring Holocaust memorials to honor their grandmother, shameless cardinals scheming to secure themselves papacy, tennis pros taking their rivalry off court, and service robots adopting runt ducklings.
All in all, 2024 has been good for film. Here are our favorite releases this year. – Ana Yorke
PopMatters Best Films of 2024 are presented alphabetically by title.
Aïcha – Director: Mehdi Barsaoui (Mubi)
One of the year’s quietly impressive films broaches an idea some audiences will have thought about—if you could disappear and start over, would you? The reality, as Aya (Fatma Sfarr) finds out, can be perilous. She might be one of the year’s most unfortunate characters, whose freedom quickly becomes a cage.
In Aïcha, Tunisian director Mehdi Barsaoui crafts a labyrinthine trap for his protagonist, whose naïveté thwarts her resilient and audacious spirit. Aïcha is the classic story of a small-town girl struggling to survive in the big city, with no shortage of twists and turns, as Barsaoui leads Aya and his audience deeper into the volatile story about police corruption and politics.
Aïcha transcends its geographical setting to tap into universal themes of anger towards institutional power. Aya could be a character with metaphorical currency for feminist and progressive politics. It’s also a story about cause and effect, and it’s not only our choices that steer our path. A suspenseful drama about one woman’s fear of what will happen once her secret is exposed, Aïcha is essentially a coming-of-age story. For Barsaoui, after his 2019 feature debut, A Son, it’s a continued interest in characters struggling against a lack of control and power. – Paul Risker
All We Imagine As Light – Director: Payal Kapadia (Luxbox)
There’s a presence to Payal Kapadia’s work that can only be explained if you know that All We Imagine as Light is a transition from documentary to narrative fiction. In as much as there is a story here, All We Imagine as Light is an emotional or sensory experience. Kapadia chooses not to expose her characters. Instead, she allows her three Mumbai nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), to reveal themselves. Using music instead of words to penetrate the souls of her characters is striking. This is attributable to the director’s humility as much as her documentary background.
The film’s music is decisively fresh, especially the piano arrangements that infuse it with layered energy. It’s naïvely playful, filled with innocent wonder, and dramatic and contemplative. If the cinematography is a window into All We Imagine as Light‘s soul, the music, as much as the characters, is a dual voice. This means the characters can indirectly reveal themselves to the audience and hold onto an aura of mystery.
This fresh energy recalls the impact of Miles Davis’ jazz score on Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller, Elevator to the Gallows, and Duke Ellington’s composition for Otto Preminger’s 1959 masterpiece, Anatomy of a Murder. Kapadia’s feature debut is already making itself an integral part of the story of film and its evolving conversation. – Paul Risker
Anora, Director – Sean Baker (Neon)
The films in Sean Baker‘s offbeat oeuvre have a refreshingly unflinching focus on the marginalized. For example, 2017’s Florida Project highlights the dichotomy between fantasy and reality: impoverished outcasts with authentic lives exist in Disney’s omnipresent shadow. This year’s Anora thematically harkens back to 2015’s Tangerine, as both films center on sex work in a raw and real way. Indeed, the story of feisty exotic dancer Anora, who marries the interminably spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, is rife with social commentary.
Of course, it would be easy to brand Anora as a film that merely exploits the exploited, but it overflows with too much heart and soul to be pigeonholed as prurient. The remarkably credible performances by the young protagonists and the film’s humorous and humanizing approach and defiant transgression of puritanical mores earned Anora the Cannes Palme D’or. Anora thrillingly celebrates female agency while offering a blistering critique of capitalist trappings. – Alison Ross
Black Dog – Director: Guan Hu (The Forge)
Guan Hu’s charming story netted the Un Certain Regard Award at the Cannes Film Festival, a coup d’ cinema, considering it competed with Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Such is the power of the story that it won so many hearts, all the while demonstrating a naturalistic tale of two strays: a human and a pooch.
Black Dog is noteworthy for the impressive, frequently jaw-dropping, scenery, but at the heart comes a story of Lang (Eddie Peng): a convict who empathises with the titular animal. Lang and the dog are scorned in a town preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, creating a pact against all odds, including a hefty bounty on the animal’s capture.
Furthering the emotional undercurrents, Guan Hu shoots many of Black Dog‘s more impressive moments in the Gobi Desert. The opening – a vehicle colliding with a wild animal – highlights the duality of industry and geography, a biformity that cements the picture. Whenever Black Dog gets too serious, Lang provides moments of levity, not least his hopeless efforts as a motorcyclist. Peng has a Chaplinesque quality as a physical performer, which is fitting for this (near) silent film. – Eoghan Lyng
The Brutalist – Director: Brady Corbet (A24)
Talk about a confirmation of someone’s talent that doesn’t caress you like a pleasant breeze but knocks you down like a concrete block. The 36-year-old Brady Corbet, a man enthralled with the darkness within and without whose Childhood of a Leader was one of PopMatters‘ best films of 2016, ambushed critics and audiences alike with The Brutalist, a 215-minute epic of the American dream not so much in the vein of Once Upon a Time in America or The Godfather, but rather akin to Kafka’s first novel, Amerika.
Aided by extraordinarily organic 70 mm (some say it was 35 mm) shots made with VistaVision and Lol Crawley’s (Black Mirror, The OA) uncanny cinematography, The Brutalist towers above the viewer like the upside-down Statue of Liberty – Tóth’s first omen upon deboarding – then the ever-shrinking walls of the grey compound builds for Van Buren, his own Bell-Tower… or Moby Dick. – Ana Yorke
Challengers – Director: Luca Gudagnino (Amazon MGM)
A film about tennis made as a thriller, a film about dreams told through the crushing resentment of maturation, a film about sex that is in actuality a soul-crushing meditation on impotence: Challengers is yet another triumph of narrative, cinematography, performance, and yes, music, all in the competent hands of Luca Guadagnino and his cohorts. Written as an original script by the hugely talented Justin Kuritzkes, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist in visceral, emotionally bare roles, with a mightily kinetic soundtrack from Guadagnino’s friends Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Challengers deftly oscillates between a coming-of-age story, romantic dramedy, and a sports drama.
Told non-linearly (and being all the more engaging for it), the film opens at the end of the story with a Challenger Tour match between two men in their early 30s. One of them, Art (Faist), is a former tennis great one title away from a Career Grand Slam (winning each of the Big Four tournaments) and a millionaire media superstar; the other, Patrick (O’Connor), lives out of his car and pays his bills by scavenging around these lowest-tier professional tournaments. The two are acquaintances of old, bound together by friendship, intimacy, training – and Art’s wife, Tashi (Zendaya), formerly Patrick’s girlfriend. Intrigue and one-upmanship dominate the more melodramatic of the story’s aspects, but it’s the fear of loss and letting go that ultimately set the stage for all major developments.
Equal parts hilarious, riotous, and devastating, Challengers is a fully realized cinematic feat brimming with energy and subtext. Typically, for Guadagnino, this is a love letter to cinema and an empathetic, charitable analysis of its flawed but deeply human characters. – Ana Yorke
Civil War – Director: Alex Garland (Lionsgate)
The big knock on Alex Garland’s Civil War from some quarters is that it doesn’t explain how the future United States devolved into schismatic warfare. While a pile of backstories might have been interesting, they would also have been beside the point, as Garland aims for a more universalist story.
By focusing not on the fighting itself but a clutch of war reporters following one army as it drives through a ghostly devastated South towards Washington, D.C., he shows how this civil war looks in many ways like most civil wars. The battle lines are fuzzy, the ideologies opaque, the cruelty evenly divided, and the voyeuristic thrill of combat and survival sickeningly implicating. Coming across a sniper team shooting it out with another sniper, a journalist asks them which side they’re on. “We’re trying to kill them,” one of the snipers responds, with an icy tone that makes clear any deeper examination of motive would be pointless. – Chris Barsanti
La Cocina – Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios (Willa)
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s 1957 stage play, The Kitchen, brims with an energy that whisks its audience along. A moment’s lapse in conversation, and you’ll miss something—be it a small detail or slipping out of the flow of the scene. This fevered pace is likely deliberate, intended to capture authentically the unbelievable pace at which the busting Times Square kitchen must run.
Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina is one of the year’s most captivating cinematic experiences. A producer I spoke with on the festival circuit suggested it was filled with indulgences that would have likely irritated the producers. La Cocina isn’t perfect, nor should it be. This claustrophobic space is its unique milieu, a cacophony of sounds that should set the audience’s head spinning, if not make it hurt. Ruizpalacios’ artistic rapacity must be reckoned with—one monologue feels unnecessary.
La Cocina, however, is passionate about its dialogue, and it shows. Juan Pablo Ramírez’s cinematography treats the actors’ faces like changing landscapes, especially Raúl Briones, a tour de force unto himself, and complimented by the excellent Rooney Mara. Outside the potential fatigue brought on by its unrelenting pace and a little of Ruizpalacios’ rapacity, the audience hangs on to every word.
La Cocina‘s overarching success is that the inherent politics bleed out of the human drama’s escalation. It confronts the gamut of emotions over power, control, and manifest destiny, culminating in a blazing mix of theatrical realism. – Paul Risker
Conclave – Director: Edward Berger (Focus Features)
Do not be fooled by the solemn occasion of papal passing or the thriller/drama taxonomies – Conclave is easily the funniest film of the year. Edward Berger’s aesthetically supreme feature, based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, is a Germanic-style low-key but consistently biting satire of the embarrassingly banal immorality of power politics that, however, treats faith itself with a wonderfully human touch. Campy, soapy, and stylish to a fault, Conclave is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously while serving some dead earnest truths about the nature of governance and public relations, far beyond organized religion itself.
Ralph Fiennes is in his perhaps most repressed and subdued role as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, Dean of Cardinals and a moderately respected bureaucrat tasked with the thankless job of congregating a pack of divas to elect a new Pope. Weary and generally tired of institutional work, Lawrence will nevertheless stop at nothing to ensure his brethren don’t make a mockery of the notion of holiness (which they absolutely will despite Lawrence’s dry pragmatism). Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati, and especially Sergio Castellitto shine as gossip boys hoping to become the world’s next most worshipped mortal, while Isabela Rossellini adds a mean sneer as Sister Agnes, the cardinals’ much-ignored housekeeper who knows more about the childish plots than she lets on.
Faith in earthly and heavenly phenomena will be tested as allegiances form and evolve over Conclave’s smooth 120 minutes. Surprisingly, the film’s biggest hit is not the sly, muted comedy, but Lawrence’s doubts and the gravitas Fiennes carefully lends to his role, ensuring some potent lessons on morality don’t get lost among the scheming and backstabbing. – Ana Yorke
The Count of Monte Cristo – Directors: Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte (MUBI)
Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s adaptation of Dumas’ 1844 classic literary tale of revenge is a triumph. Kevin Reynolds’ 2001 adaptation is a delightfully fast-paced swashbuckling tale, but Patellière and Delaporte adopt a slower pace. They choose to sit with the characters and allow the Count of Monte Cristo’s (Pierre Niney) vengeful machinations to unfold slowly—like a one-sided chess match.
The directors don’t reduce Edmond Dantès’ stolen liberty as a segue into a tale of vengeance. Instead, they emotionally impress upon the audience the deep sense of injustice that bleeds into the rest of the story. You can feel Dantès’ anguish in your soul, knowing he can never be compensated for the years lost, which complements the tragic love story at The Count of Monte Cristo‘s heart. This adaptation reminds us of Dumas’ integral role in developing the modern-day superhero. The parallel between Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego Batman’s ploys and moral struggle to not become the story’s villain is a homage to Dumas and his timeless tale of good versus evil. – Paul Risker
A Desert – Director: Joshua Erkman (MUBI)
A despairing sight greets audiences as Joshua Erkman’s A Desert opens to a closed cinema scarred by the wounds of neglect. Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), a lonesome photographer, is the only source of life now in this long-abandoned theater of dreams. He snaps an image of the empty screen for his book on America’s decline. Clark’s journey through Yucca Valley, California, opens with a metaphorical inference of the death of cinema in America’s mythological heartland. From the outset, there are layers of subtly orchestrated symbolism.
The wandering photographer and the private investigator hired to investigate his disappearance bring to mind Michelangelo Antonioni‘s cinema. The Italian maestro was drawn to wandering amid an undefined crisis, and Erkman and his characters channel this vibe, even if A Desert is vividly distinct.
A Desert is a deliriously fun genre picture that values cinema as an experience as much as a narrative art form. Erkman’s feature debut dramatically evolves across its 103 minutes, echoing David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and James Wan’s Insidious (2010)—all different films in their second halves. Individual images and sequences create layers of symbolic meaning as Erkman takes his character down a nightmarish rabbit hole. He effectively plays with neo-noir and horror to create a wild hybrid that will test his audience’s tolerance. – Paul Risker