Best Films of 2024: #20–11

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.

Ask anyone from Boston what they think of Boston City Hall — the building itself — and their response will range from tepid dismissal to a rant that’s as vitriolic as it is rehearsed. Brutalism has no place in the hearts of most Americans, yet other elements of Bauhaus philosophy have found their way into the homes of millions by way of IKEA. This ambivalent relationship to a modernist, foreign way of seeing the world is at the center of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, in which a mega-industrialist with a blue-blood American surname, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), funds, with many provisos, the vision of Holocaust refugee László Tóth (Adrien Brody). The immigrant experience narrative fits snugly within American white-elephant filmmaking, whether it’s James Gray’s The Immigrant, Coppola’s three Godfathers, or, the film most resembling this one, King Vidor’s An American Romance. It’s a perilous task to work within a grand genre that began with none other than Charlie Chaplin, but thankfully The Brutalist honors this filmmaking tradition with aplomb. It’s knowingly grand — 70mm presentation, VistaVision format, ostentatious runtime, and all — but meets its ambitions with craft and talent to match. Shots of Tóth’s unfinished building resemble the curiosity camera in Heinz Emigholz’s architecture films, with buildings’ curves and hidden spaces dancing with the environment around them, which is made all the more foreboding in a proto-warehouse-rave sequence in the project’s final stretch. By the film’s end, Corbet illustrates that Tóth’s finished project is simultaneously a material failure and a spiritual success, inverted to the history of Bauhaus itself, but much like the project of America. — ZACH LEWIS

Angela Schanelec’s Music is something of an enigma, a tale that doesn’t quite reveal itself, a film shaped and assembled like an abstract painting or a protracted, repetitive psychedelic tune in the vein of “Hallogallo” and “Für Immer,” the opening tracks of Neu!’s first and second albums, respectively. The knowledge that Schanelec’s mysterious drama is a retelling of the Oedipus myth will only take audiences so far, but it does make for an interesting contrast between the formal austerity — the 108-minute film is comprised of something like 160 shots, for instance — and the images the director captures, which are so clearly imbued with a mythical force. Robert Bresson is an obvious reference point for this kind of spare European arthouse cinema, but you could just as easily compare Schanelec’s approach, especially her preference for fixed camera angles, to such filmmakers as Erich von Stroheim (sans the lavish set designs) and Ricky D’Ambrose. Like the latter’s The Cathedral, Music will at times leap ahead years at a time in a single edit, but unlike that film, Schanelec’s does so with no voiceover and barely any dialogue to help us grasp its slippery relationship to time. But by eschewing the narrative and formal conventions that even most arthouse fare falls back on, the film does open up an avenue for us to consider an aspect that is all too often neglected: the Image. And with images this profoundly hypnotic, this extraordinarily beautiful, anything more would feel like an intrusion. — FRED BARRETT

Much has been made of director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray’s decision to adapt Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys via first-person point of view; at first blush, it sounds like an easy gimmick on which to hang a marketing campaign, not unlike the numerous recent films that purport to take place in real time in a single, unbroken take. In actuality, Ross and Fray have created a deeply moving, remarkably rich adaptation that anchors audiences to a single, unique perspective, but only intermittently; the film frequently allows for all manner of essayistic interludes and, eventually, leaps between past and present, creating a tapestry of remembrance. Like the novel, the film begins in the 1960s and follows (or, more specifically, inhabits) young Elwood (Ethan Herisse) as he is railroaded into a segregated reform school in Florida. While there, Elwood befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the pair subsequently navigate the harsh, deeply racist conditions of the Nickel Academy and the cruel vicissitudes of its administrator, Spencer (a terrifying Hamish Linklater). The horrors of the school exist just beyond the frame, a constant threat of violence hovering on the periphery of the image. But Ross and Fray also hone in on the experiential formal quality of the point of view shot, allowing for poetic, gentle interludes that mimic the subjective, ephemeral nature of memory. In an interview with Film Comment‘s Devika Girish, Ross describes his interest in “the epic banal” and “adjacent images,” and how photography can “rescue interstitial moments from time.” Nickel Boys is ultimately not about abuse (there is almost no violence shown in the film), but about excavating the past to tell the stories of those whose lives where cut short. — DANIEL GORMAN

An anti-capitalist, anti-love story for our emotionally-dulled times. There’s no real romance in Sean Baker’s screwball comedy, just dollars and cents, slapstick sex, drunken pratfalls, and endless grift. Anora’s first meet-cute, between Anora (Mikey Madison) and Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), happens as a purely transactional moment, while the second meet-brute, between the more winsome couple of Anora and Igor (Yura Borisov), comes in the middle of a black comedy set piece that’s part rape-joke. That Anora still manages to be one of the most charming, entertaining, and classically satisfying movies of the year is one of its many mystifying merits. Baker channels Verhoeven by way of New Hollywood, taking all of the unerotic pornography, juvenile violence, and “American Dream” gimmickry that sustains our Hollywood fantasies and dialing it up just past the point of good taste and satiation. Part of the fun of Anora is in wanting it to stop. Even if we can’t help, we love watching it unfold, from the Safdie-esque grittiness to the Hawks-ish screwball wit; it’s the unconscious cynicism and constant sense of futility behind the hustle that offers the film’s most persistent feeling. The name Anora means ”light,” and in the dark of the strip club, the brightest lights are the tacky glitter strands in Anora’s hair. They produce a cheap effect, trying for seductive mystery but coming across as a crass Gen-Z affectation. It’s as good an image as any for the world we live in. — JOSHUA BOGATIN

It’s both easy and silly to reduce Aggro Dr1ft to news items about Harmony Korine — that it’s an act of art-world trolling from his edgy company EDGLRD, that it’s a product of Korine’s fascination with TikTok and streaming and video games and slop, or that it’s simultaneously the first step toward an AI-powered film dystopia but not worth taking seriously. What’s actually going on here is a sort of “genuine trolling,” where Korine is clearly having fun with the lowbrow detritus no other self-respecting director would touch. In that way, there’s nothing very revolutionary about it; it’s simply that audiences maybe weren’t ready for a Miami demon dual-wielding katanas and humping the air and commanding “dance, bitches!” over and over like a scene from Trash Humpers: the Game DLC. In other ways, it really is ground-breaking — the heat register photography technically makes this an “animated” movie in a bizarre mo-cap kind of logic, and any AI-like tech is being used in its rightful place as a toy. It’s structured like a distilled shonen anime: long rants about family and honor give way to sudden fan service in the B-plot, and the final boss showdown has more power-ups than actual fighting. There’s truly nothing else quite like it, even in Korine’s filmography. That said, Aggro Dr1ft fits nicely in the prankster-director’s Florida triptych (or, with the upcoming Baby Invasion, tetraptych). The rest of the nation already derides the Sunshine State as the home of Mar-a-Lago and “Florida Man,” alligator wrestlers and Miami gangsters, Bitcoin millionaires and cheap strip clubs. These stereotypes, the ugliest parts of America to some, are to Korine as the ballet was to Degas. — ZACH LEWIS

Soi Cheang continues to be the standard bearer among his generation of filmmakers for the virtues of classic Hong Kong genre cinema, all but extinct now given the current state of the Mainland censorship system. The densely-titled Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is an equally dense allegory for Hong Kong’s political present, grounded in the Special Administrative Region’s past and set in a gorgeously elaborated recreation of the Kowloon Walled City, that ungovernable limbo between British Hong Kong and the People’s Republic that was at one time the densest place on Earth. Cheang valorizes the Walled City as a synecdoche for the city itself: an improvised community built up by desperate people out of the literal garbage of two incompatible civilizations, and he explores it through that most ingenious of the former colony’s creations: outlandish action cinema. Raymond Lam’s immigrant hero finds himself exiled to the Walled City in the early 1980s after running afoul of Sammo Hung’s Triads. There he discovers friends and a makeshift family, played by relative newcomers to the film industry, but is also thrust amid decades-old gang rivalries involving Hung and other stars of Hong Kong cinema’s illustrious past, men like Louis Koo, Richie Jen, and Aaron Kwok, representations of the positive and negative aspects of the old colonial system. As twin seismic upheavals (the Handover and the impending destruction of the Walled City) are mirrored by escalating gang war, Lam and his new generation of heroes are forced to gather their strength and overcome their various injuries and disabilities to take on the new boss in town, a supernaturally powerful Philip Ng, standing in for the overpowered modern Chinese state. They win by subverting him from within, smuggling the tip of a blade into his body, not unlike the way a clever team of filmmakers might slip a confrontational political statement past a censorship board. — SEAN GILMAN

Bertrand Bonello’s Coma is to The Beast what Chungking Express was to Ashes of Time — a relatively spare, low-budget affair, made during the gestation period of the larger, more lavish project, that nonetheless manages to dazzle in its inventiveness and virtuosity. Indeed, although Coma belongs to that inauspicious genre of the pandemic movie, saddled with all the constraints that such a tag implies, it substantially extends what one might call Bonello’s interest in the ontology of events, capturing with terrifying precision the zero time of the Covid era. Like The Beast after it, Coma is a dizzying mise en abyme that comprises at least four distinct “layers.” There are the scenes centered on Louise Labèque, an unnamed teenager credited as Young Girl, who sits alone in her bedroom, alternating between watcher and watched. There are videos from Patricia Coma, an influencer who hosts “a channel to help you live better,” and which Labèque watches with some interest. There is a dollhouse soap opera which unfolds within Labèque’s room, but in some sense goes beyond it. And then there’s the film itself, which is framed as a kind of missive from Bonello to his own daughter. As the singer Bonnie Banane puts it in one of Labèque’s nightmares: “Quelle mise en scène / Mise en abyme Éternelle.” No mere structural exercise, however, Coma unsettles and confounds in the way that its various levels bleed into each other, suspending us more fully into a present from which there is no escape. — LAWRENCE GARCIA

In a year dominated by aged auteurs producing outstanding films that, for one reason or another (but usually corporate malfeasance), failed to click with audiences and/or critics, films like Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One, Juror #2, Megalopolis, and Here, George Miller’s fifth Mad Max movie had perhaps the highest expectations. A decade after Fury Road was met with near-universal acclaim, Miller dared present a follow-up that did something new, rather than simply reiterate a once successful formula, and the film world made him pay for it, with Furiosa ultimately grossing about half as much as industry speculators expected. But a triumph it is nonetheless, eschewing the propulsive drive of Fury Road for a more expansive approach to storytelling, dividing its narrative into chapters from the life of its title heroine, from scrappy child defying her kidnappers to adult woman well-versed in road war. This approach, along with an increased use of visual effects (most noticeable in an uncanny blurring of the faces of stars Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa ages), links the film as much with Miller’s last movie, the overlooked masterpiece 3000 Years of Longing, an effects-heavy meditation on storytelling told in discreet chapters. Where Longing is ultimately about stories of romance and sex, Furiosa is about tales of revenge and violence, summarizing the entire Mad Max saga as a chronicle of the stories we tell in the wake of social tragedy. Furiosa, in the end, transcends her need for personal vengeance, an arc which seamlessly continues in Fury Road when she chooses social reconstruction over personal safety, and which Miller captures in one of the most striking images in a career overrun with remarkable sights: out of the villain, a man who can only respond to tragedy with chaos and violence, Furiosa brings forth new and perpetual life. Or so the story goes. — SEAN GILMAN

For a film that threads a stylistic needle between pastiche and innovation, it’s strangely fitting that Jane Schoenbrun’s elastic, elliptical parable portrays a life entombed in the comfort of familiarity, with meaningful discovery always in view but perpetually out of reach. As the sands of time wear down the downcast Owen — who waits in vain for a rescue that can only come from within — the surfaces and textures of our protagonist’s world begin to shrink, hollow out, and invert. Possibility is postponed, selfhood suspended, and fruition foreclosed. A literal signpost scrawled in sidewalk chalk reading “there is still time” is shown too early to decisively rupture the final stretch’s downward — and inexorably forward — spiral, but it splinters the most abject moments into a more explicitly symbolic plane, placing them in merciful quotation marks that do little to assuage the devastation they engender. I Saw the TV Glow is two movies that gradually intersect and part ways, after all; an elusive, and seemingly literal, narrative comprised of fictional doubles, vicarious fulfillments, psychic slippages, and surrogate selves gives way to a clear-cut allegory of thwarted transformation, bolded and italicized in pink lettering for all to see. The film vividly captures the emotional violence and hijacked stupor of adolescence and then stretches it out into seeming eternity, a state of arrested development so extreme that only the supernatural could explain it. What could have been a series of cruel and confining gestures instead unfurls into something rich, resplendent, and raw — never “real,” but always true. — ALEXANDER MOONEY

It says a lot about Catherine Breillat’s body of work that her latest transgressive drama, Last Summer, doesn’t feel all that transgressive. Where others would waver and undercut the blurring, graying lines of desire, consent, and manipulation, Breillat transcends them, her willingness to push buttons emerging from a commitment to honesty rather than a lust for empty provocation. There’s a brutality to the film’s emotional and sexual frankness, one conjured by Breillat’s brilliant use of closeups but also the ever-shifting dynamic of the two leads’ performances: with every encounter, Théo’s (Samuel Kircher) teenage troublemaker cockiness, already a flimsy cloak for his teenage insecurity, unravels as Anne’s (Théo’s stepmother, played by Léa Drucker) disposition hardens into a mask. The shifting temperature of their physical relationship not only plays against their emotional states, but also the public-facing theater in which they both participate. Breillat’s films, even the ones as straightforwardly dramatic (read: less experimental) as this, have a political-historical dimension as well, but filtered through Last Summer’s icy psychodrama politics and history here become inscrutable, malicious. An example: the legacy of the sexually liberated 1960s figures into the story not as nostalgia but as a time of cultural upheaval that was quickly subsumed by bourgeois society and left its children vulnerable and, it is implied, traumatized. It’s one of the many ways in which the film feels out of step with filmmaking trends — how often are the attitudes of the sexual revolution connected to anything sinister? — but it’s the director’s ability to stare the consequences of her characters’ behavior straight in the face without falling into easy judgments that truly sets her apart. — FRED BARRETT