Here’s my final HE roster of 2024’s 33 best films. My enthusiasm levels are naturally strongest among the top ten (all of which are Howard Hawks-approved**) and start to taper off after #20 or thereabouts, but they’re all noteworthy or at least watchable stand-outs, one way or another.
Almost everyone has lamented that 2024 was a weak year, but the more I weigh the top 20 or 25 the more I’m thinking it wasn’t such a bad one.
Update: What does it mean that I initially forgot to include Wicked? It surely means something, and yet in all fairness it delivers impactfully and as well as could be expected. Rather than inserting it somewhere and having to change the numerical order of several films, here’s my 11.19.24 review. Fair?
Apologies to commenters for tech issues that forced me to copy and re-post the whole piece, and in so doing jettison their comments.
1. Sean Baker‘s Anora / HE review (5.22.24)
2. Edward Berger‘s Conclave / HE review (8.31.24)
3. Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine as Light / HE review (5.24.24)
4. Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera / HE review (4.24.24)
5. James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown / HE review (12.10.24)
6. Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer / HE review (9.18.24)
7. Halina Reijn‘s Babygirl / HE review (12.10.24)
8. Steven Zallian‘s Ripley / HE review (4.27.24)
9. Robert Lorenz‘s In the Land of Saints and Sinners / HE review (4.5.24)
10. Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice / HE review (5.20.24)
11. Tim Fehlbaum‘s September 5 / HE mini-review (10.24.24)
12. Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain.
13. Alex Garland‘s Civil War / HE review (4.9.24)
14. Halfdan Ullmann Tondel‘s Armand / abbreviated HE non-review (11.18.24)
15. Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez (audacious but calm down) / HE review (6.18.24)
16. Steve McQueen‘s Blitz / HE review (11.5.24)
17. Magnus von Horn’s’s The Girl With the Needle
18. Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Two.
19. Coralie Fergeat‘s The Substance
20. Christy Hall‘e Daddio (Sony Pictures Classics, 6.28)
21. Rose Glass‘s Love Lies Bleeding
22. Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist.
23. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Asphalt City (formerly Black Flies)
24. Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2
25. Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers
26. Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator II.
27. Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Kinds of Kindness
28. Wes Ball‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
29. RaMell Ross‘s Nickle Boys
30. Greg Kwedar‘s Sing Sing
31. Zellner Bros.’ Sasquatch Sunset.
Apologies for having still not seen Vera Drew‘s The People’s Joker, Pedro Almodovar‘s The Room Next Door and Nathan Silver‘s Between The Temples.
I also still haven’t seen Jane Schoenbrun‘s I Saw the TV Glow.
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Kinds of Kindness was booed at the end of yesterday afternoon’s Salle Debussy screening.
It’s a kind of darkly humorous, oddly grotesque, Bunuelian satire of middle-class misery…an attempt to capture the cold, deathly emptiness of things…the self-loathing, the horrifying banality.
It’s basically a surreal elevated horror film…dead-eyed zombies and slithering serpents and empty robots eating food, talking about their fears, manipulating each other, indulging in wife-swapping, diving into empty pools, a husband asking a wife to cut off a finger and serve it as a snack, and then deciding to give it to the cat instead…you get the idea.
There’s a point to all this cold repellent antiseptic shit, and I respect that the humanity-hating Lanthimos had a deeply perverse vision in his head as he put it all together, but unlike Bunuel he hasn’t much chuckle in him, and when a film gets booed, even if only by two or three malcontents, it usually means something.
** Three great scenes and no bad ones.
