Best Films of 2024: #40–31

Convergence and divergence are sometimes indistinguishable from each other, especially when occurring in an ecosystem so rapid, cacophonous, and reflexive. This is the bubble we call digital media, and its operations are living, breathing paradoxes: as algorithmic neurons aggregate trends and in some cases preempt them, individual clusters of thought steadfastly commence out of the ether, defiant in diversity and variegated in their fractured, precarious opinion. One would not be remiss to think this a description of Megalopolis, the Film Event par excellence of 2024 and Francis Ford Coppola’s grandiose culmination of statement, seed, and sobriety; any drunkard could produce common hokum, but only a seasoned alcoholic — and therefore a self-aware one — might  embark on a journey 40 years long, take stock of the present, and freeze it as an unflinching tribute to the future. “Time stop!” is the instinct’s self-preserving streak, our civilizational attempt to memorialize all history and also our contingent, desperate plea to the Angel of History against the rubble piled unceasingly at his feet. It is our One Perfect Shots, our critics’ lists, our earnest syntheses of parody and pastiche; it is also our obsessive inclusions, our enthused counterpoints, our commitment to “we’re so back” regardless of the cause.

Which is to say that this year, like many of the years before it, is a bit of a mess. Discourse dominates, but discourses as a plurality ebb and flow depending on who you ask. There are, of course, bigger and better films, a product potentially of last year’s Barbenheimer fad just as such films exist independently of watershed marketing and are defined by such fickle considerations as  taste, bias, ideology, and how many theaters they play in, which are in turn determined in part by which festival programmers saw which screeners and liked whose mise en scène. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, apparently, was thought a goner before it got revived into the Main Competition at Cannes. Sean Baker’s Anora was always destined for greatness — engineered so, some might argue. Need we peer beyond the studios and study the indies? We’ll likely find similar machinations at work, but this is not to say that the aggregates are wholly and unreasonably manufactured (unless you’re talking about Barack Obama’s list, whose eager inoffensiveness looks more and more like ChatGPT output). Manufactured all opinions are, and our hope here at InRO is that you, the reader, know of and consent to this fact at the very least. To this end we are centrists, trading neither in impersonal consensus nor in dogmatic contraries. We’ll just have a bit of both.

It’s a rare treat in recent years to find a work seemingly at odds with itself. Sriram Raghavan’s Merry Christmas plays like a collection of false starts, an off-kilter quartet’s struggle to complete some popular tune, instead winding down into a whirlwind of sorrowful notes. A hotly anticipated film starring actors Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif, and helmed by Sriram Raghavan, an unusually intense devotee of classic hollywood, closely adapting the great French crime writer Frédéric Dard’s Bird in a Cage, the film is a strange battle between all four’s intoxicating influences. Sethupathi plays his archetypal self-loathing loser against Kaif’s dissatisfied mother, one ritually reserved, the other pedantic and affected, fronting a convincing game of agonizing disappointment and will-they-won’t-they comedy in the front half, all the while saving a whirlwind of tragedy and eccentricity for after the interval. The film is dedicated to Rohmer, and alludes to a handful of pre-code Lubitsch works, and while it certainly matches both of those filmmakers’ penchant for complex tragicomedy, the friction between performers, director, and material propel Merry Christmas to far stranger heights. A story about two people telling themselves lies in order to keep their lives whole — isn’t it only right, then, if the film threatens to fall to pieces with every minute? — FRAN KURSZTEJN

Choosing the best entry from the Youth trilogy is even more potentially foolhardy than the average film series: the hundreds of hours of footage that served as the raw material were shot during the same period between 2014 and 2019, and Wang Bing’s steadfast dedication to his observational aesthetic can make it difficult to spot the differences between last year’s Spring and 2024’s Hard Times and Homecoming. But even as this may be a case of a quintessentially accretive project, with each installment building upon and expanding the strengths of its predecessor, Youth (Homecoming) still distinguishes itself by virtue of its significantly expanded palette and approach to tone and subjects. As Wang follows the garment workers into their provincial villages, frequently amid strikingly beautiful and snowy mountain ranges, the viewer’s perception shifts to encompass a fuller understanding of their family lives. Rituals are observed and intimate, but tense conversations are held, culminating in a lively wedding that’s nevertheless leavened by the less optimistic portraits of marriage surrounding it. When Wang returns to his main setting of Zhili, it’s with an ever greater eye for the individual quirks and overarching commonalities that bind these disparate collectives, lending renewed meaning to the grinding work that had been avoided up until now. As Homecoming and Youth both draw to a close, the hopefulness of Spring and the despair of Hard Times coalesce into something suitably ambiguous. Wang recognizes that the enormity of his films can still only capture so much, which makes his willingness to embody the contradictions of his people, time, and place all the more powerful and moving. — RYAN SWEN

At the level of its logline, Aaron Schimberg’s third feature about a lonely and failing actor who is disfigured by neurofibromatosis sounds like it might risk offending the audience; on the count of moralizing, that is. But Schimberg’s steady-state is subversion, and A Different Man unfurls at a constant tension between its attuned sensitivity and its wry sardonics, as he imports critical gestures under the cover of humor and metafictional conceit. By sharing more with films like The Face of Another and Seconds (both 1966), A Different Man inverts the lineage of films that feature impostoring doubles — notably, Persona (1966), Face/Off (1988), The Double (2011), and Enemy 2013) — by situating its protagonist as his own incidental impostor in this investigation of the negotiation between inter- and intra-personal recognition. The result is an sneakily intelligent study of social performance punctuated by Schimberg’s singular comic articulation, and registers as of the year’s most distinctive films. — CONOR TRUAX

India Donaldson’s debut, Good One, bears a simple premise: a teenager, her father, and his best friend go on a hiking trip. While the film sketches out broad narrative lines within that premise, in which characters bicker about preparedness (or lack thereof), joke about old times, and cross paths with another trio of hikers, Donaldson meticulously meters out the divisions between them. Among many things, Good One is an attempt to express the feeling of disillusionment. Even the title captures some of that feeling, an ironic rebuttal to what is essentially, for Sam (Lily Collias), a weekend of suffering through Dad jokes. The film is dramatically uneventful, so Collias’ interiority becomes the most critical element of the film. She guides us through the weekend from the inside out, and brilliantly so, as the lighthearted joshing and subtle competition between her father, Chris (James le Gros), and his best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), becomes more grating and embarrassing every minute. Collias’ skill presents itself, and in a way facilitates the film’s sudden inflection point. After an evening of storytelling and reminiscing with a trio of young male hikers that crosses their path, Matt, drunk and melancholy after dinner, suddenly ruptures the tenuous normalcy of the dynamic between him and Sam. It’s too simple to call Matt’s actions the byproduct of toxic masculinity; it’s something altogether more sinister, and unremarkable, than that. What is plain to see, however, is that nothing after that point will ever be the same. Even if, as was the case before, one pretends everything is fine. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

In his film Here, director Bas Devos creates both an inviting intimacy and a quiet reverence for the natural world’s ability to take root in even the most densely constructed urban environments. The film, in two intersecting narratives, follows Stefan (Stefan Gota), a construction worker, and ShuXiu (Liyo Gong), a researcher of moss, navigating a few unassuming summer days in Brussels. Stefan bids farewell to family members and friends with servings of homemade soup before returning to his hometown in Romania, and ShuXiu balances field and lab research with teaching university classes and working shifts in her aunt’s restaurant. The climactic scene, encapsulating the film’s core aesthetic and narrative concerns, is a delicate odyssey wherein Stefan spontaneously joins ShuXiu in examining mosses in a local forest. Here, Devos and director of photography Grimm Vandekerckhove shoot many of these mosses in closeup, revealing with near-tactile detail the verdant, complex forms that ShuXiu calmly asserts will outlast humanity. Another highlight, earlier in the film, is a monologue in voiceover in which ShuXiu recounts a morning when she suddenly lost her capacity to remember the names of everyday objects and sensations, giving her a brief sense of total unity with the world around her. In the film’s gentle twist of a conclusion, Devos reminds the viewer of this transcendent linguistic loss, and the subtle yet stirring implication is that the connections people make with one another — and with the intricate, often-unseen networks of life around them — can resonate on levels beyond the structures of contemporary life. — ROBERT STINNER

The year’s most uproarious example of micro-budgeted DIY filmmaking, Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers possesses the rough-hewn qualities of something which feels like it began its life as a private joke between friends and the visual acumen and comedic timing to draw comparisons to Buster Keaton. A live-action cartoon that draws inspiration from silent filmmaking, Looney Tunes, and old Nintendo games, Chesilk’s film (which was conceived of with his leading man, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) is quite simply an exhaustive/exhausting gag-machine. Built around the knowingly silly conceit of “fake Shemping” a skeleton crew into a handful of googly-eyed beaver (and rabbit and wolf) costumes alongside 1500 computer effects done on a personal laptop, Hundreds of Beavers leaves no meat on the bone. Cheslik returns to a dozen-or-so juvenile set pieces and gags, iterating to no end on slapstick violence and trial-and-error style mishaps culminating in an extended mad dash through the snow-covered wilderness that provides exactly what the film’s title promises. Don’t let the film’s jankier qualities mislead you; it takes a real appreciation of physical comedy and the way we process information — in keeping with the silent film nature of it all, there’s no dialogue in the film and only a handful of title cards to provide exposition — to make something this knowingly silly while avoiding flailing about. It’s a film that appeals to cineastes and anyone who’s ever laughed themselves sick watching Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote shorts alike. — ANDREW DIGNAN

This year’s Directors’ Fortnight was something of a coming out for upstart production collective Omnes Films; Carson Lund’s Eephus, depicting the final game played at a community baseball field, will be released in March and may well make InRO’s list of favorite 2025 releases a year from now, but it’s Tyler Taormina’s (his 2019 film Ham on Rye was Omnes’ first) Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point that features their starriest cast and has gotten their widest release. In a cast featuring a number of non-professional actors, children of both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, and a nearly commercial buddy cop duo of Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington, Taormina casts somewhat less heralded but similarly dependable character actors Maria Dizzia and Ben Shenkman at the center of a family Christmas Eve dinner. Dizzia in particular is stunning as the film’s emotional fulcrum: like Eephus, Christmas Eve depicts the ending of a tradition, but it’s only Dizzia’s character Kathleen who possesses the combination of information and emotional intelligence to realize her family is moving in a new direction. After a difficult discussion with her siblings about their mother’s future, the conflict with her daughter that occupies much of her early scenes gives way to a deep melancholy. Dizzia neither under- nor overplays this shift, and the space vacated by her retreat allows for a delightful aside as Kathleen’s daughter and a cousin played by Francesca Scorsese venture out into the night to join their peers, including a welcome Elsie Fisher performance, providing assurance that as some traditions end, new ones will take their place. In a film flooded with the broadly recognizable but rarely depicted beats of a family holiday, it’s the grief Dizzia portrays as her daughter approaches adulthood and her extended family begins to come apart that is, heartbreakingly, both the film’s most specific and familiar element. — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER

Mati Diop’s Dahomey is one of the precious few art-docs that have had the chance to break into the mainstream this year. In Dahomey, the director’s first feature since her breakout Atlantique, Diop sought again to strike a balance between the political and fantastical. The documentary follows the case of 26 looted artifacts from the Dahomey kingdom, the royal treasures leaving Paris after 130 years of captivity for their present-day home of Benin. Narrated by artifact “26” (voiced by Makenzy Orcel), the film takes on its perspective as it is packed, sealed, and crated across the world to a home it does not know if it will recognize — but, of course, did the world it was in ever really recognize it? Musing on its captivity, the artifact decries its numerical designation “26.” Why didn’t they call me by my real name? Didn’t they know it?” When greeted in Benin, the first thing the museum staff say upon opening its crate: “Statue of King Ghezo.” The film is surprisingly patient for 68 minutes, taking in the local architecture and flora of King Ghezo’s new (old) home, introducing the dynamic world which has been hidden thus far. Dean Blunt and Wally Badarou provide a storybook soundscape that manifests a dreamlike quality in the piece. The real meat of the film, however, begins as students and community members engage in a lively debate about the nature of the return of these artifacts. Why return only 26 out of thousands? What good do these artifacts do in face of colonialism’s ravages? Even King Ghezo, as portrayed by Diop, is not totally satisfied — he will not see daylight again, forever confined to the interiors of the museum. As Wisemanesque as it is totally singular, Dahomey introduces as many modes of asking as it does questions, none easily answered. — JOSHUA PEINADO

There’s a joke, attributed to Groucho Marx (recounted as a telegram he sent to the Friar’s Club): “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” This joke was rattling around in my head while I watched Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William Burroughs novel. The word Queer is complicated in this film; while William Lee prefers it to gay, the adjective still has sharp, uncompromising edges, with Lee always teetering on the edge of self-hatred, cruising the bars of Mexico City for salvation, or, as consolation, sex. William Lee isn’t like other girls. Played by Daniel Craig, in a career-best performance, he infuses Queer with a delightfully bitchy sense of humor, whether it’s aimed at the other queer men he goes bar-hopping with or, in moments of introspection, at himself. Grappling with despondency and inadequacy as he obsessively pursues the enigmatic, sexy Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), Lee begins to lose himself in addiction and desperation. This manifests in some of the most striking visuals in Guadagnino’s filmography; the way that he fades into the static of a TV screen, or a ghostly afterimage of William Lee’s hand reaching out to embrace Eugene with surprising tenderness, Queer is a deeply lonely film that’s desperate to find a way out of its loneliness, with a final act that comes close to a fascinating, terrifying transcendence. — SAM MOORE

The protagonist of Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower is a middle-aged Beijing food writer named Gu who can barely say anything without following it up with a too-polite retraction, and a divorcee who is too depressed to raise his young daughter properly and who has let his sister and her husband essentially adopt her. Gu’s ex-wife is dealing with cancer, and his father was kicked out of the family ages ago due to an accusation of molestation that may have been false, but he has since re-entered the picture to watch his children and visit his wife’s grave. Gu’s photographer coworker Ouyang, meanwhile, is a little too interested in Gu and his relationships, and occasionally ropes him into role-playing as father and daughter. All of this sounds like material for an explosive soap opera, but Zhang’s approach is inspired by the titular metaphor, a white pagoda that casts no shadows in the immediate vicinity. Everything is a little too bright and uncompromising, and scenes seem to bleed into each other like the ever-shifting architecture of an increasingly modernized Beijing. It’s an expansion on the infamous Tokyo Story “Isn’t life disappointing?” proclamation, with the cast making their way through their fractured lives and ambling long takes, continually reckoning with themselves but never quite facing an actual reckoning. It’s a film that knows resolution doesn’t come easily due to ever shifting-dynamics, and that it only really comes when we disappear from this earth. — ANDREW REICHEL