Best Films of 2024: #30–21

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.

In a Lisandro Alonso film, when a shot begins with a character crowded to one corner of the frame — at the top of a rocky slope, far from the camera, for example — there’s not likely to be a cut until after the character exits the opposite corner, having descended the hill and passed the camera. On the one hand, this contributes to the impression of arduousness that his films convey. His characters exist on the margins, and the drudgery that sustains them is never referred to in shorthand. On the other, Alonso’s stubbornly placed camera seems to defer to place over person, demonstrating a vastness of landscape that will pre- and post-date the human subject. From Los Muertos (2004) through Jauja (2014), Alonso’s films have been rent with a throughline of disappearance. In Eureka, his first in a decade, that fixation with vanishing — what happens when place reclaims sovereignty — returns with conviction. Structured as a triptych, Eureka’s first panel is a highly stylized Western, its second a sober contemporary portrait of a mother and daughter on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation, and its third a dreamlike passage through the Brazilian Amazon of 1974, as a young man ventures out from his remote village to pan for gold and a better future. The film opens on the image of an Indigenous man on a rocky outcropping, the ocean stretched out before him. The margins, to which the Indigenous peoples of Alonso’s interest have been forced, slip constantly into the sea. First-time actors dominate the film’s second section at Pine Ridge, which has some of the lowest life expectancies in the Western hemisphere and school dropout rates of over 70%. Eureka here follows a member of the Pine Ridge Police Department and her daughter, Sadie. “If we had a button on our shoulders and just by pressing it you could commit suicide when life gets rough,” Sadie tells an outsider, “well, we all would have done it by now.” Eureka’s third act, then, departs from chronos and epistemological certainty, mixing dreams and waking life between achingly slow dissolves that build an eerie sense of simultaneity. Everything’s happening at once, or perhaps it happened at once long ago, and we’re merely living in the echo. To manage these panels, Eureka requires a delicate balance: to observe the preponderance of disappearance in the modern world, particularly for Indigenous communities, and to question the determined value ascribed to such disappearances. Fortunately, this is less a tightrope balancing act for the Argentine filmmaker than it is an expansive drift, wondering while mourning and mourning while wondering, in the eternity that it takes to cross the screen, and the eternity that awaits after it has been crossed. — DYLAN ADAMSON

How do you make political art when it appears to have no discernible, positive impact on reality? This question, among others, haunts No Other Land, winner of Best Documentary at this year’s Berlinale. That very prize-winning ceremony was steeped in contradiction and political compromise after German officials labeled Palestinian co-director Basel Adra’s portion of the acceptance speech as anti-semitic, but not Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham’s. This embarrassing, enraging debacle was just one moment in the harrowing, ongoing journey for Adra, Abraham (the film’s subjects), co-director and DP Rachel Szor, and co-director Hamdan Ballal to bring this film into the world. Through a mix of vérité and archival footage, No Other Land charts Adra’s entire life, from his political awakening as a seven-year old when he saw his father, a longtime activist, arrested for the first time, to the Fall of 2019 and beyond when Israeli settlers renewed, with escalated brutality, their attacks on Adra’s home of Masafer Yatta. Talk of readership and views of Adra and Abraham’s reporting, both written and visual, and the tenuous solidarity between Abraham and Adra, the latter of whose highly politicized existence characterizes the act of trusting the former as a fool’s errand, keeps the question of futility in constant proximity. So, too, does Adra’s optimism at the beginning of the film, which, viewed in December 2024, carries the sting of naïveté. In spite of seeming futility, however, No Other Land itself is proof of cinema’s many other capabilities. It employs the medium as a narrative framing device, placing the contemporary, vérité footage in conversation with the past: as a means of protest, by its very existence outside the purview of Israeli state-funding, and as an archive of unfolding atrocities. In the face of waning hope, it is the least of our responsibilities to hold onto these examples of the film’s accomplishments. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

As discursively, obsessively set piece-driven — set pieces of sounds, cuts, and camera movements — as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 is inextricable from its technical background. The warp of its lensing points to its source material: 360-degree footage re-directed via VR headset, a method that earns easy points for novelty but would be a mere gimmick if not for the ecstatically unruly, unpredictable, and oneirically suggestive performers that waypoint and wander through its frames, a polyglot cast of… friends, avatars, and/or strangers who banter about billionaires, hang out, kiss, float, and run inexplicable errands through the space created by Williams’ camera rig. This is a film overflowing with detail, in a way that genuinely expands the tunnelling transformations of the first Human Surge. For all its rhythm change-ups and image distortion, I was reminded of something like the experience of first seeing Richard Linklater’s Slacker — which also happens to end with a camera being hurled off the top of a hill. In both films, a polyphonic approach — fairly or unfairly attached to generational portraiture — is as seriously concerned with the prosaic business of hanging out and getting around as it is a seemingly ultimate philosophy, of what it means for one part of life to link to another, or for a camera to capture something ultra-specific, a pixel in a haystack. Both films are full of conspiratorial dream talk, but their extreme divergence in camera capture and direction suggests not only the possibility of something innovative, but how that shock of the new requires a relay, between the supposedly genre-divided worlds of nonfiction and fiction. Williams’ approach means he can create a mirage of highly populated, improvised yet novelistic detail, displace it with ambient wandering, and both aspects can retain a sharp spectacular potential, like the one that always unfurls before an unnamed MC in a town at the edge of the universe. — MICHAEL SCOULAR

Pascal Piante’s Red Rooms announces the director’s talent in compelling fashion — so compelling, in fact, it might be better to watch this film without reading any further, lest some of its intrigue be dampened. A brief scene of the protagonist, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy, in one of the year’s best performances), entering a courtroom gives way to a virtuoso 15-minute shot. Over opening remarks, Plante’s camera slowly makes its way around the room, turning away from lawyers to focus first on an accused murderer and then on Kelly-Anne, spectating. This scene would promise a precise, juridical methodology, if not for the unnerving score (by Plante’s brother Dominique) that casts doubt on the professed simplicity of the proceedings; in fact, the film soon abandons the trial almost entirely, providing instead a depiction of Internet usage more convincing and appropriately enigmatic than virtually any other put to screen (take note, All About Lily Chou-Chou fans!). A dual-monitor moment is topped only by a pair of close-ups on characters watching snuff films as exemplary of “the way we live now,” and the courtroom opener and another already-viral trial disturbance ensure that Red Rooms passes Hawks’ apocryphal “three great scenes and no bad ones” test with room to spare. The horror trappings of the premise — the murderer is alleged to have live-streamed himself torturing and murdering teenage girls on the dark web for paying viewers — and the opacity of Kelly-Anne gives Red Rooms countless analogs, but few so successfully withhold the “reason” or “explanation” for the protagonist’s behavior. At a time when so much art is deadened by the need to provide backstory or explicate trauma (and so much horror cinema, in particular, looks to explicate its would-be subtext), Red Rooms’ willingness to conceal its cards makes for one of 2024’s most memorable viewing experiences. — FORREST CARDAMENIS

Leos Carax’s highly unusual 40-minute featurette was commissioned as part of the Centre Pompidou’s ongoing auteur series Where Do You Stand? The director took the assignment as a long, difficult look in the mirror, one that expands to encompass global and universal concerns. Is the planet safe? Am I a good father? What is my relationship to the cinema, and to the spectator? In one key moment, Carax considers the life events that shaped Roman Polanski into the problematic figure he remains, offering a case study for artistic ethics. But It’s Not Me has another grand old man of cinema in its sights. It’s no secret that Carax has been deeply influenced by Godard, but It’s Not Me is the first of this director’s works to fully engage with the late Godardian style: essayistic, materialist, and, above all, concerned with the force that images and sounds exert on our psyches. (We see Carax’s daughter walking with him on a bridge, as she describes a dream she had. She asks her father why things took on the shape they did in her dream, and he replies, “I don’t know. You’re the director of your dreams.”) In an astonishing final sequence, Carax recreates what may be the single most iconic shot in his entire oeuvre, but in a way that emphasizes the role of the director in shaping reality. It’s an image of total freedom, meticulously controlled. In the end, cinema is puppetry, but it’s hardly child’s play. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, the director’s sophomore feature-length project and first fictional effort at this duration, is a tidy fit as the fulcrum for our list of annual cinema superlatives, achieving as it does several other superlatives along the way. First, there’s its title, which has to be the year’s longest (don’t fact-check that). Then, there’s its delivery of 2024’s funniest scene: “Run to the wall. Now suck on my nipples,” howlingly flouts any assertion that sex has some baseline of sexiness, somehow managing the trick of holding the essential erotica of BDSM-defined psychosexual dynamics side by side with slapstick. And most importantly, it’s my favorite film of the year, and as InRO’s editor-in-chief, that designation holds particular weight (please note my devotion to democracy in the film’s placement here). But Arnow’s film is also strikingly confident in its structure, delivering a surprising anti-character study, one which strings together encounters without any legible temporality so as to keep its submissive-inclined protagonist, her growth, and her motivations fundamentally mysterious to the viewer. The result is a film that turns character into an unmoored anthropological waypoint, interrogating something essential but also essentially elusive about this particular transitory period of early adulthood. In its very construction, then, we are made to move through The Feeling’s slipstream, Arnow imparting that though indeed time we may recognize time has passed, we are never the closer to knowing where it has gone, where we’re at now, or what comes next. It’s nearly impossible for even the most seasoned and accomplished of filmmakers to deliver projects that manage to be this funny, intelligent, and singular in equal measure, but Arnow accomplishes the hat trick with seeming ease. Try to name an upcoming director more worthy of your attention right now. I’ll wait. — LUKE GORHAM

Throughout his 50-plus-year career, Mike Leigh has become synonymous with his “process.” His method begins with actors rather than a script, and together they create three-dimensional characters whose actions guide the film. In order to do this, he only casts intelligent character actors and prefers ensembles over traditional star vehicles. Leigh focuses on the drama of everyday life, but his films are not geared towards naturalism. Sometimes, very little happens, but there is almost always an emotional sucker punch headed the viewer’s way toward the film’s end. Hard Truths, Leigh’s latest drama set in contemporary London, is true to form then. In this project, the director reunites with frequent collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Perhaps best known for playing the clear-headed Hortense in Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning Secrets and Lies, Jean-Baptiste here flips the script (in true character actor fashion) with a warts-more-warts-and-all performance. Always on the boil, Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy takes no prisoners. She berates cashiers, yells at pedestrians in a car park, and, most notably, dresses down her family. Jean-Baptiste’s performance is often funny in its exaggerations, particularly in her hilariously aggressive outbursts early on, but over time, Pansy’s pain becomes overwhelming and alienating, something the audience comes to feel alongside her. The only person who challenges Pansy’s self-immolation is her sister Chantelle (another Leigh regular, Michelle Austin), and after one of the worst Mother’s Day celebrations in all of cinematic history, Chantelle starts to realize her sister’s pain. “I don’t understand you, but I love you,” she tells Pansy, and these words are a balm. They don’t end Pansy’s fire, but they do provide her with a semblance of long-absent relief and a glimpse of some other, new path forward. — CLARA CUCCARO

Pity the studio executive who thought reuniting the director, writer, and stars of Forrest Gump would translate to boffo box office numbers and awards glory. Robert Zemeckis has spent the better part of two decades creating deeply idiosyncratic, even experimental, works to audience indifference and critical dismissal. Here, then, is not so much the return to form that some might have hoped for as it is a further burrowing into a high-tech, avant-garde sensibility — a fascinating, frustrating, ultimately desultory look at 20th-century Americana. It’s some kind of miracle that it even got made at all, let alone widely released in commercial cinemas. It’s an undeniably weird, extremely dense odyssey that traverses millennia through a series of familial genealogies. Think of it as Zemeckis’ Tree of Life, except the camera never leaves its static perch, the entire movie viewed from one corner of a living room, the virtual camera slightly tilted down and enveloping the space via a wide angle lens. It’s not quite a proscenium, even if most of the performances are pitched at a kind of heightened, theatrical register. Most invigorating is Zemeckis’ complete eschewal of traditional montage; adapting the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, the filmmaker fills the movie with frames inside of frames, collaging different eras on top of one another in a dizzying avalanche of visual information — think Michael Snow but with state-of-the-art CGI at his disposal. The film begins with the extinction of the dinosaurs, then proceeds to follow, in non-linear order: the Indigenous people who occupied the land prior to the arrival of Europeans; an early aviator enthusiast; the inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner; and, finally, the Young family. Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly are the bright-eyed couple buying their first starter home, and the pair who will eventually sire the young man played by Tom Hanks, who will, in turn, marry Robin Wright and raise a family of their own in the very same house. All the actors are digitally aged or de-aged depending on the era during which any given scene is happening, and the cumulative effect is a litany of miseries that befall the post-WWII “greatest generation.” Dreams are deferred or outright abandoned, PTSD manifests itself in constant alcohol abuse, the sexual revolution leads to unwanted pregnancies, and the nuclear family reveals itself to be a nexus of neuroses (take a drink every time Hanks’ character complains about paying taxes). The ending is bitterly ironic, either underscored or upended by Alan Silvestri’s treacly wallpaper music, suggesting that you can, in fact, go home again, but only once your mind has been ravaged by dementia. To paraphrase Beckett: we can’t go on, we go on. — DANIEL GORMAN

In a streaming-first cinema industry of four-quadrant appeals and TikTok attention spans, “safe” and easily digestible cinematography is the norm. It’s within this context that All We Imagine As Light rebels. Very few films this year employ a lens as soft and empowering as Payal Kapadia’s Mumbai-based film, and perhaps no film plays with light to such great effect. The camera looks adoringly and respectfully at its two lead women, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), as they navigate tender and sultry emotions and life events. India declined to select the title for the Academy Awards for ostentatiously political reasons, despite having much better odds of winning something than the film they nominated, and it’s tough to not wonder whether its confident non-exploitative recentering of the female body had something to do with that. Not only is sexual pleasure in Kapadia’s Mumbai delicately woman-centered, but Kapadia also iconoclastically humanizes the female body. But it’s just as likely that the interfaith romance and discursive plots discouraged the conservative group behind the selection committee. The film wasn’t “Indian enough,” they said, despite featuring at least three Indian languages, multiple religious traditions, and taking place entirely in India and with an Indian cast and crew. They must have failed to realize the uniqueness of their interfaith romance theme — a staple of Indian cinema and a pariah subject in most other comparable cinema industries. All We Imagine As Light isn’t afraid of India or its citizens — warts and all — and that’s unmistakably commendable in a world so increasingly defined by fear and division. — JOSHUA POLANSKI

The rare Hong Sangsoo protagonist to hold no stable profession, Iris (Isabelle Huppert) is a character who, despite using introspective phrases to teach French to her Korean students, is so deliberately impersonal that when she exits a scene halfway through the film by disappearing, this registers as something plausible within the world Hong has built around her. (Huppert, in interviews, has furthered this reading, describing Iris as an entity halfway between a witch and a fairy.) Hong has used Huppert’s star presence as an element in two previous films, In Another Country (her Anne is a “woman of many faces”) and Claire’s Camera (she holds a carefully developed theory of transformation, and claims to be a teacher). It can be easy, then, to treat each recent Hong film as an object of subtle, nearly indistinguishable variation. (By the Stream, so far universally acclaimed, is more likely to stand as the “major” film of his from 2024 international releases.) But what’s striking about A Traveler’s Needs is its perfect control of our ability to understand Iris. Unlike Huppert’s Claire, or the often-misread protagonist of In Front of Your Face, there is no late-arriving character detail that imparts a gravity to the actions we’re witness to. (This lack of backstory is the explicit subject of a key final act scene in A Traveler’s Needs.) Iris arrives inexplicably as a guest. She gives gifts of phrases, and shares a drink. She leaves. For Hong, this repeatable cycle is a model for artistry, translation, and Huppert’s force — as a comic foil, a philosopher, and a splash of color to fit the flowery association of her character’s name. As the consistent element in each scene, one could say Huppert uses the film’s latent poetry and language games to invent something new and disruptive, sequence by sequence, while Hong’s deliberately cool-headed compositions create a system of glancing, clashing patterns that make what could be only ephemeral gestures into generative possibilities — the type of epiphany possible in teaching, where repetition builds something not necessarily new, but necessarily personal. — MICHAEL SCOULAR