Best Films of 2024: #50–41

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.

Let none accuse we, the writers at In Review Online, of viewing cinema as a medium with strict borders. What other reason could justify the inclusion of Jenny Nicholson’s The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel? The cynic may highlight the need to justify spending four hours watching a YouTube video or contrarianism grounded in the desire to zig where others zag. This writer would never endeavor to speculate on the motivations of his colleagues or forward a definition of “the cinema,” yet there is still the task of commenting on the year’s breakout video essay sensation and merciless anti-Disney driveby, wherein Nicholson rigorously details, well, the titular, spectacular failure. Ours is a time of absurdities, from the capitalistic excess crafting a dogshit luxury experience in a warehouse dressed up as a fictional fascist cruiser to the weaponized nostalgia evaporating the consciousness and bank accounts of its visitors. The madness is intensified all the more in Nicholson’s own role, deploying the self-financing medium with aplomb as a neoliberal court jester or harlequin par excellence, functionally mute despite the many breathless words, isolating the vulgarity and emptiness of all that she loves and wears but without the consciousness to extrapolate its essence. Few works have better captured the nihilism of the contemporary cultural moment, and yet within it one senses a semblance of hope, a subject embodying Deleuze’s active nihilism: nothingness devouring itself and finding an affirmative stance against the void. Is such a comment its own absurdity? Probably, but such is our time. — MATT MCCRACKEN

2024 saw Kevin Costner cast off the yoke of prestige television to return to the director’s chair for the first time in 21 years for his intended four-part epic, Horizon: An American Saga. While only Chapter 1 has been released thus far — Chapter 2 had a festival premiere earlier in the fall, and is rumored for a 2025 release — Costner’s ambitious and carefully measured vision of the West is no less satisfying, even if it does currently exist in what is essentially an incomplete and even introductory state. But quibbles of unfinished narrative strands be damned; more important is that Costner has made one of the finest oaters in years, delivering a beautifully Fordian reckoning with America’s past and the inevitability of westward expansion, traveling back to the mid-19th century to witness the foundations of his homeland. And he’s not going at it alone, either: Chapter 1 greatly benefits from an impressive coterie of Names and Faces in its stacked ensemble, every single one memorable, many turning in career-best work. As a Western, the film is a shining example of the best the genre can offer, brimming with an array of gorgeous landscapes, flavorful frontier settings, terrific production design, seismic character interactions, and unbelievably intense confrontations; a striking showdown that culminates in an ice-cold shot of Costner’s taciturn but deadly saddle tramp reflected on the surface of a water trough already feels like it belongs in the annals of Greatest Movie Moments. Bring on Chapters 2, 3, and 4. — JAKE TROPILA

As much as it’s a sharp essay film on decolonized resistance and imperialistic suppression, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is also most certainly a jazz film, not just in its freewheeling incorporation of jazz numbers from the ‘50s and ‘60s, but also in its usage of jazz to shape its structure: in its back-pedals and propulsive jumps in the historical chronology, syncopation of songs with actions in the archival footage, juxtaposition and modulation of different audiovisual elements (footage, sound, and text), and oscillations in pace, slowing it down to savor the ephemeral victories of resistance and throttling the imperialist justifications with a textual and aural density of references. A tribute to the ever-evolving jazz of the time, Johan Grimonprez’s film never loses sight of the injustices inflicted by the West on Patrice Lumumba and the Congo, articulating the historical contingencies surrounding the Congo and dancing between the various players involved while revelling in the radical possibilities offered by jazz and its artists, despite being wary about how such music can be co-opted by the higher powers and serve as instruments of oppression. — ANAND SUDHA

There’s no getting around it: Flow is shamelessly manipulative. It would be easy for a right-winger to characterize it as climate-panic propaganda, and they wouldn’t exactly be wrong. But director Gints Zilbalodis’ intellectual choices can’t be denied. As humans, some part of us believes that we deserve ecological disaster, but animals absolutely do not, so aligning our point of view with a small black cat, dirty pool though it may be, is brilliantly effective. Flow often mimics the movement and behavior of real animals — cats, dogs, lemurs, secretarybirds — but gradually becomes allegorical. Jeffrey Overstreet is absolutely correct when he compares Flow‘s sensibility to the dinosaur scene in The Tree of Life. These creatures survive by expanding on their instincts, accessing motivations that go beyond and even contradict self-preservation. They learn, somehow, that they need each other to live. Flow is also an explicit condemnation of tribalism in favor of chosen family and cooperation. This may not be realistic, but so what? Zilbalodis no doubt understands that the reactionary wave in global politics is partly couched in an anti-humanist appeal to “nature.” So-called philosophers like Jordan Peterson, and blatantly hateful meatheads like Andrew Tate, insist that humans are animals in the basest sense of the word. Flow answers this moment by postulating a kind of emergency-response mode that comes on like Lamarckian evolution. The lower beasts look within themselves and find a higher purpose, and even if it’s wishful thinking, it provides an ethical map for what rational humans can do for one another. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Nothing is more indicative of Hong Sang-soo’s recent output of minimalistic and stripped-back dramas than In Our Day, which simply focuses on two different artists — an actress (Kim Min-hee) and a poet (Ki Joobong) — who are both reaching the end of their respective careers. Both receive a visit from a younger person possessed with a myriad of questions, ranging from how to approach the creation of art to the very meaning of life itself. Like most of Hong’s recent work, the film is shot from a series of fixed camera angles and long takes. Through these he captures a succession of graceful moments highlighting the beauty found in simple things: new friendships formed whilst playing drinking games, or a lost cat returning home. Most interesting here is the aging poet Uiju, who lives in a small apartment, entirely in isolation after the passing of his wife. Uiju, a chronic chainsmoker and struggling alcoholic who has had to stop both due to a medical condition, exists as a close simulacra to Hong himself, who has his own continual battles with sobriety. He offers advice about seizing the day and not to get caught up in the finer details: something symbolic of Hong’s own impressionistic and loose cinema, which often feels driven by singular moments rather than grand narratives. All of this leads to one of 2024’s most evocative moments: Uiju blissfully sitting on the roof of his apartment, doing what he loves most: drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes, even with the knowledge it could kill him. — AUTUMN PARKER

At one point in REFORM!, creator Jon Bois details third party Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot’s 1992 television appearance, in which Perot discussed at length his plans to balance the federal budget with the assistance of a bunch of allegedly hand-drawn graphs. “Let me get this straight,” Bois narrates. “A half-hour long video where a dome dork just sits there and talks about charts the whole time? Who would ever watch that?” The self-deprecating joke here is obvious, but it bears repeating that Bois has, along with a growing generation of YouTube documentarians in his wake, completely upended the form, function, and indeed even workflow of documentary filmmaking. In this, his first longform work to move away from a sports-related topic — here he covers the rapid rise and equally rapid collapse of the Reform political party — Bois continues to mine small emotional stories, uncover bizarre ironies, and illuminate long-forgotten real-life characters. It’s simultaneously excruciating and hilarious to watch Donald Trump present himself as a progressive candidate while the Reform party is consumed by literal fascist Pat Buchanan, but that footnote of history is ultimately eclipsed by a total and seemingly inevitable systemic failure to provide any hope of progress at all. Perhaps you find this nihilistic, but Bois would suggest otherwise, and REFORM! ultimately reassures that these cyclical repetitions, data spikes, and news clippings that he uses are less designed to chart the dusty past than to potentially map the way to some better future. — MATT LYNCH

While the film landscape of 2024 certainly delivered its fair share of predictability, there were also plenty of pleasant surprises that surfaced throughout the year. For those of us of a certain age, Conner O’Malley’s brilliantly offbeat mockumentary Rap World could fall into both categories; it simultaneously feels like it documents an event all of us remember (or struggle to remember) experiencing, and something that’s never been made before. It’s a film that captures the absurdity of late-2000s suburban and small town living so perfectly that it feels like watching a half-forgotten memory unfold, with all the cringe and misplaced confidence intact. What elevates Rap World, then, is perfection of specificity. From the sideways-brimmed beanies to the faint hum of Coldplay in the background, the film is steeped in the aesthetics of 2009 in a way that feels almost too real — the smell of Axe body spray and taste of below-bottom shelf liquor bring back memories I certainly wish I didn’t have. But it’s not just about the jokes and the nostalgia; beneath the absurdity is a richer story about longing for significance, the fear of being ordinary, and the lengths people will go to feel like they matter. By the time the film reaches its chaotic finale, it’s clear that O’Malley has delivered something truly unique. Rap World is more than a mockumentary — it’s a time capsule of and portal to a very specific era, brought to life with humor, heart, and just enough self-awareness to leave you laughing and squirming in equal measure. — EMILY DUGRANRUT

Tolkien had little respect for Herbert’s Dune. These authors, despite their shared genre, exist inverse to each other. Tolkien wrote a great work of spirit, in which prophecy is revealed, and the absolute of good triumphs over the absolute of evil. Herbert wrote a work of material; a work of anti-spirit. In which prophecy is not revealed, but arranged; in which the fundaments of religion are built entirely around practical contingencies. Where Tolkien provokes the corrupting moment as a moral challenge, in Herbert the supposed dilemma of Paul is false. It is merely the appearance of a dilemma; it is the existence of a cog who, mid-rotation, thinks it would rather turn the other way. Dune is therefore the materialist epic. A narrative that exists on the premise of self-fulfilment; of inevitable movement. Despite this basic opposition, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (here in its second, superior half) becomes the new Lord of the Rings, less in the form of Tolkien than in that of Peter Jackson. It’s a vast technical marvel, a film whose leading property is the immersive principle. Villeneuve does not approach Dune as an extension of his personal cinema; his stated intention is to sublimate himself entirely: a point by which the text is not mined for its entertainment value or translated into some relative form, but expressed as though the nature of the text were inherently and immanently valuable. For Villeneuve, the point of novelistic detail is essential, to build up the frame, the scene, the world with so many otherwise tangential or peripheral details. This is a hyperfocus on accumulated minutiae, which over so many hours contributes to an encompassing aesthetic mood. One watches the film as much for its narrative, or its beauty, as for a conduit into some other place. It is rendered utterly and completely. — MILO GARNER

Back when we still called it “deepfakes,” Alexander Sokurov used this face-swapping technology to present a hellish hangout film featuring a handful of dictators and other historic personages. It’s well-trodden material for the legendary Russian filmmaker, but a first for Big Chill-ing Hitler with Jesus using no real actors — just a machine learning program’s collection of photographs and approximation of movement. The conceit itself would be tiring in other hands — it already feels like a setup for a College Humor or Epic Rap Battles of History sketch — but for Sokurov, the long 20th century is far from over, and there’s still plenty of questions to be mined from the likeness of Hitler, so long as one stays away from the obvious and oft-traveled. Unanswered questions and general observations flow from the lips of the voice actors as they visit ruins and remnants of a vaguely European purgatory (Hell, again, is too obvious), as if these were tourists in a Terrence Malick film. To combat any uncanny valley blips in the animation, the whole of the movie is covered with a haze that seems to slow down these figures, allowing their movement to read as spectral or otherworldly rather than boring digital mistakes. There’s humor and curiosity here to make the film rise above its mere conceit, but the conceit itself is something special — something only a director such as Sokurov, who’s concerned himself with these men for decades, could accomplish. — ZACH LEWIS

Genre purists have been up in arms against the A24-ification of genre cinema for a while now, and understandably so. These synthetically polished films, not just produced and/or distributed by A24, but also by fellow trendy studio Neon — and, to a lesser extent, streaming giants like Netflix and Apple TV+ — have increasingly replaced the viscerality of genre cinema with an often hollow intellectualization of it. Take any “anti-thrillers” or “elevated horror,” and the results appear somewhat similar: we feel the shivers or goosebumps after experiencing these films more so than while watching them; the full-bloodied impact of the filmic experience is replaced with a more (compromised?) cerebral one. Director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) has often trafficked in this very genre-subversive mode quite successfully while still feeling like he’s working overtime to subvert genre tropes. But with his latest film, Rebel Ridge (which went through all kinds of production hell), Saulnier seems to have achieved something usually only director Bong Joon-ho manages regularly with his cinema: the ability to both play by the tropes and against them without losing the thrills afforded by adhering to the former and the subversive edge promised by practicing the latter. On a meat-and-potatoes action-genre level, Rebel Ridge is little more than a riff on First Blood (1982): it pits one hulking man (a towering Aaron Pierre, giving a star-making performance that ought to be getting more notice outside of critical award circles) minding his own business against an entire county of corrupt police officers incapable of minding their own. But rather than lean into the Stallone film’s revenge fantasy, Rebel Ridge builds up to it by rooting it in modern-day America’s racial politics and warped legal realities, replete with a protagonist who actively avoids engaging in the all-guns-blazing revenge fantasy central to the appeal of Rambo. The thrill of Rebel Ridge, then, comes in seeing Saulnier effortlessly escalate said (genre) de-escalation — the film, at first, plays out as a rigorously researched legal thriller — into a bruising and brilliantly staged revenge drama. It’s viscerally moving stuff; a remarkable reminder of genre-subversive cinema’s ability to also pack a knockout punch. — DHRUV GOYAL