Best Films of 2024: #10–1

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.

Night Shyamalan is a father of daughters. We know this, in part, because one of them, Ishana, is a director herself (The Watchers). Saleka, on the other hand, is a musician, and through an undeniable nepo baby casting process, she is also Lady Raven, the superstar pop diva at the centre of Trap. This is a huge Dad Move, but it also capitalizes on a running theme through his work, and especially since Old (2021): what does it mean to be a parent? Granted, this question is routinely put through the wringer in these stories, from Old’s mania-inducing temporal acceleration, which is primarily refracted through a parent’s eyes, to Knock at the Cabin’s mythic sacrifice in the blind hope that your child will have a better future, and finally to Trap, where even a crazed serial killer’s main concern in life is making his daughter happy and keeping his own demons as apart from her life as possible.

Trap is many things. It is a testament to Josh Hartnett’s intrinsic charm, and how that quality (along with his whiteness) can be wielded, again and again, to get what one wants — his performance should be on any list of the year’s best, because he sells every side of this with aplomb. It’s a masterpiece of spatial awareness, as cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who had a banger year, also shooting Challengers and Queer) thoughtfully draws out the music venue for us and inserts a number of wildly off-putting compositions along the way. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year, confirming all over again that Shyamalan is vastly underrated as a director of comedy (the most hilarious line and delivery of the year is surely “wouldn’t it be unbelievable to see what’s down there?”). That is likewise built right into the film’s structure, as it continually introduces new, seemingly impossible situations for Hartnett to find his way out of, leaving us slack-jawed each time he does. It’s also an exercise in taking the high-concept film and executing it with supreme confidence; the film itself takes on the belief system of its central character as a way to reorient any space or interaction, depending on perspective.

All of which is a testament to the ways that Trap is an artful if unhinged film about parenthood. On the one hand, it’s about a father’s desperation to make his daughter happy and realizing any chance of succeeding is progressively slipping away. But on the other hand, Shyamalan signals that there is a rot within the family unit that he spends so much time and effort upholding, and — of course — that loss of control is reflected back at us, with a smirk, through the absolute, utter, ultimate control of Shyamalan himself as a filmmaker. — JAKE PITRE

Films that make study of the tip-toeing steps children take into adulthood typically commit one or more of a number of familiar sins: saturating the proceedings in sentimentality; deploying narratives that center coming-of-age Events; blanketing all in the embrace of yesteryear nostalgia. All of these paths make for easily digestible viewing, but are usually emotionally, psychologically, and thematically bankrupt and do little more than reinforce a mass media-approved CliffsNotes’ version of The Human Condition™. Far more difficult is finding a filmmaker willing and capable of trying to sketch out what exactly this specific liminal space looks like when divorced from Screenwriting 101 templates, particularly from the perspective of youth’s interiority in the grasp of transition. Not since Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman has a film so masterfully made study of childhood’s awakening into adulthood through the disruption of our infant selves’ state of fundamental and total solipsism as does Annie Baker’s debut feature, Janet Planet. Both films detail the first twitters of a young girl’s actualization through a burgeoning understanding of an imperfect, richly complex mother, establishing an arc of experience connecting life’s early immutable glimmer to the light we must later learn to continually stoke.

As a playwright, Baker has long been known — and praised, and criticized — for her comfort with silence, and that facility with sitting in moments is an absolute boon to Janet Planet’s delicate observationalism. Far from the mid-century dramatists whose works were often suffused with affected ostentation and florid psychological pronouncement, Baker has always proven skilled in teasing power from a governing restraint, carefully punctuated — punctured — by lines that blend punchline with disrobed emotional weight. Just such a line anchors Janet Planet. Lacy, ever awkward and anxious, announces offhandedly to her mother, Janet, roughly a third of the way through the film: “You know what’s funny? Every day of my life is hell.” In the moment, it scans as a characteristically melodramatic declaration from a child who has been established from the first sequence as possessing a fickle emotional equilibrium, but as we move through the film’s remainder, and Lacy is met with further versions of her mother as reflected and refracted through the people who move through their shared existence, we come to understand what she is really saying: who are you, Janet? And then, who am I? All of this leads to the year’s finest final shot, a moment where the essential unknowability of another person plays out across Lacy’s face. The film cuts to black; the fiddles continue; life goes on, or begins. — LUKE GORHAM

Hailed as a throwback to when it felt like solid, actually-lit, suspenseful films were more of a standard than a treat, Clint Eastwood’s courtroom thriller Juror #2 is all of that and more. Lensed with wonderfully chilling, expressive weight by Yves Bélanger, the film puts the American justice system under a microscope, revealing a web of faults and fractures, stress testing the coping mantra of multiple characters and even the film’s screenwriter in interviews: “It might not be perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got.” As these fractures multiply and connect toward a shattering miscarriage of justice, the hollow center of that truism is exposed. As in the Western (e.g. The Outlaw Josey Wales), where community is constituted by its limit, in the form of an outcast who could never be a part of it, here the justice system too is constituted by its limit: an innocent man and his merciless railroading. In a system where everything hinges on reasonable doubt, Eastwood opens the film with certainty as to the defendant’s innocence and the protagonist’s guilt, shifting it into a sort of ragtag character piece orbiting around the ironic dilemma Juror #2 Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) has forged and found himself in.

Moving through the trial, Eastwood lays out multiple points at which that reasonable doubt should take hold, often due to systemic incompetence or malice — an overworked medical examiner and public defender, police following tropes and statistics rather than evidence, an overly dutiful witness, the political blinders of an ambitious prosecutor (Toni Collette), and the human idiosyncrasies of the jury. Unflinching “guilt”’ vote Marcus is a standout, with Cedric Yarbrough’s frustrated and tender performance giving the character a paradoxical depth, utterly refusing to change but modulating subtle shifts in his intensity of feeling, and in his read on Kemp. Collette, too, gives one of her best performances, as prosecutor Faith Killebrand questions her role in the justice system and circles back to fill investigative gaps, and possibly to do penance, in a way. The film really shines in this orbital structure, where we frequently loop through sonically rupturing, rain-blasted flashbacks of the night of Kendall Carter’s death, with details slightly different each time. The past is written from the present, and both are littered with small objects and gestures and looks — an untouched glass of liquor, the precisely timed drop of an AA token and a stack of papers, names on a Thank You card — which give the film a radiant sense of meticulous propulsion, matched only by the breathtaking patience of its final exchange. — ALEX BROADWELL

A passion project reportedly four decades in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis personifies the duality and the fascinating contradictions that define its legendary filmmaker. This self-identified fable decries the moral rot and spiritual deterioration of a complacent, decadent society (its title city is an amalgamation of ancient Rome and present-day New York) and beams with hope for a world where humanity is unrestrained by dogma and the confines of how things have always been done (or, to reference an expression that was rattling around in our collective consciousness at the time of the film’s abbreviated theatrical release, “unburdened by what has been”). The film’s central figure, the brilliant architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), dreams of a future where building monuments to the impossible, even constructing them from fantastical, physics-defying materials, inspires and unites a fractured population, and it’s impossible to not see Coppola speaking through the character. Cesar is a demanding artist, once hailed as a boy genius who’s come to resent the yoke of expectations. A man consumed with grief for his dead wife (notably, Coppola’s longtime creative and romantic partner, Eleanor, had been in failing health for years before passing away a month before the film’s world premiere at this past Cannes) who, even in his despair, yearns to reinvent the artform as his lasting legacy to the world. An artist fighting against the finite nature of time and those cowed by small-mindedness and mercenary concerns to embrace the medium’s full potential. Wait, are we still talking about architecture here?

Megalopolis is an achingly uncynical, practically quixotic, vision from a filmmaker who’s never let the wildly impractical nor financially irresponsible stand in the way. Self-funded after selling off a large portion of his family-run vineyard and including seemingly every idea Coppola’s ever scrawled on the inside of a notebook, Megalopolis is expansive — or undisciplined — enough to embrace Shakespearian verse and erection jokes (of the non-construction kind). It conflates the bread and circus of the Roman Colosseum with chaste pop stars selling off their virginity and the weaponization of deepfakes. Here’s a film that finds room for weeping statues, jackbooted fascists in red baseball caps, and a modern Bathsheba deliciously named Wow Platinum. It is all, in the most glowing sense, absolutely deranged. No film this year so unabashedly spoke to both the past and the present, nor willfully flouted good taste and common sense in trying to arrive at a new cinematic language. Such a lofty, nebulous endeavor was doomed to fail (commercially, critically, reputationally), and yet what’s so thrilling here is how much Coppola’s aspirations brush up against something truly form-upending. Embracing the artificiality of digital photography to leave behind stuffy notions of “realism”; busting apart the proscenium stage of the theatrical experience by incorporating scripted audience participation; conceiving of his film to not simply “play big” but genuinely make use of the dimensions of the IMAX screen, turning his morality play into a multi-paneled art installation several stories tall. One of the many tragedies of the film’s compressed theatrical run is how quickly it was shunted off to home viewing, which only further encouraged snarky, distracted viewing in a bastardized format. However, those who ventured out to take in the film as it was designed to be seen, and with open hearts and minds, witnessed something revolutionary. This one’s for the romantics and the sickos alike. — ANDREW DIGNAN

In the new mid-length feature Chime, Kiyoshi Kurosawa dissects his career-long, trademark obsession with “ambient dread” from a pointedly aural perspective. Like many of Kurosawa’s films (from The Guard from Underground and Cure to Pulse and Creepy), Chime expresses the diffuse anxiety of contemporary life, but it represents its subject as a specifically auditory phenomenon. The film elides facile didacticism about, say, the horrors of labor exploitation or pernicious surveillance technology (though it traffics subtly and intelligently in such subtexts). Instead, Chime draws fear from the abstract and non-linguistic tension between diegetic and non-diegetic sound — that which cannot be written or said, but must be experienced; in other words, the very stuff of dread.

The film’s carefully designed soundscape illustrates the “objective reality” of protagonist Mr. Matsuoka’s (Mutsuo Yoshioka) day-to-day life as a cooking instructor: screaming train cars, slurped noodles, sizzling onions, clanging recycled cans, and so on. The menacingly singsong titular chime announces a non-diegetic breach whose terror stems from its indeterminacy. The film never confirms whether the chime signals a subjective experience (i.e., an emanation from Matsuoka’s interior anxiety or madness) or some other, supernatural intrusion. The chime’s uncanny, unassuming immersion within the film’s diegetic sound is key to its terrifying implications: horror is always already there, both impossible to locate and impossible to ignore. Explicitly non-diegetic sound never arrives until the film’s final few minutes, when a shrill horror score accompanies a grainy image overtaking Matsuoka’s heretofore crisply digital environment.

Chime traffics in the “eerie” titular concept of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie: a kind of placid, almost subliminal detachment that Fisher argues “can give us access to the forces which govern reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.” The chime, then, is an auditory metonym for the eerie, an experience that exceeds the visceral shock of horror to inhabit the more transcendent power of terror — 18th-century gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe defines these terms as two distinct phenomena: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.” In Chime, the high degree of life is the very thing that contracts, freezes, and annihilates. If coherent aural diegesis represents that flimsy thing that Matsuoka perceives as “reality,” then Chime charts its gradual and inexorable movement from dissociation to disintegration. — MIKE THORN

Mysteries thrive off absences, so it may not be a stretch to say that cinema’s entire enterprise is one grand mystery itself, its structuring absence being that of the reality forever mediated — but not quite grasped — through fiction. Reckoning with this mystery, and with no little autobiographical weight, is Víctor Erice’s first feature in 31 years: Close Your Eyes invokes a double pilgrimage against the ravages of time, first through the film-within-a-film about one man’s search for his missing daughter, and then through its director’s journey to recover what’s left of his long-lost friend. But there is naturally that third, autobiographical dimension that impresses upon us Erice’s own artistic hurdles and exile, as Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), the weathered director of the unfinished The Farewell Gaze, comes to refract the melancholic anxieties that arise, perhaps inevitably, with age. Called in one day by a TV program with an eye for literal mysteries (Unsolved Cases), Miguel finds himself trawling through his own, more ineffable past. Personal failures, slight successes, love and tragedy — all tinged with some feeling of loss — coalesce in the figure of Julio Arenas (José Coronado), his leading actor and erstwhile best friend who left set one day and never came back.

Julio is eventually found, but he no longer remembers Miguel, or much of the past at all. Thematically, Erice’s film may be parsed into two resounding quests: the first half focuses on the corporeal state of things, as Miguel — through the excavation of his mostly forgotten work — aims to locate a body, a note, some physical sign at all, while the latter half sifts through the vagaries of consciousness, something much more unsettling and metaphysical in remit. Staring each other in the face, the two friends conjure diverging recognitions; Julio, an unseeing black box, but Miguel’s arguably reveals and obscures more. Of the motivations underlying his decision to track down Julio, which speaks to him the loudest: guilt, grief, nostalgia, or something more blind in its faith? Close Your Eyes does not evoke a grandiose thesis inveighing against the worldly pressures on artistic creation, but gently pries back the illusory curtain of its stage. Facing the screen, yet in spite of it, we look but may not see, and so, in the act of closing our eyes, we waken to the realization that our pursuits may be in vain. But insofar as Erice himself has returned, after all these years, vanity does not necessitate inaction. Structurally, Close Your Eyes begins with the first reel of The Farewell Gaze, and concludes with its last. The missing reels are the center, and they constitute our very own journey. — MORRIS YANG

Often billed as an exploration of power dynamics between its three leads, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers reaches the thrilling heights that it does more so because of its foregrounding of desire and drive, and particularly how those are cinematically deployed, displaced, and reconstituted over time. When we first meet the leads in question, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) are playing tennis, filmed in intense and sweaty slow motion by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, while Tashi (Zendaya) watches, establishing the obvious sublimation of sexuality into sports immediately. But with each complication of the film’s temporal structure, dipping back in time while maintaining a strong anchor in the present, the present-day tennis match becomes richer and deeper, each flashback and each set introducing a new wrinkle in the fabric of the trio’s protracted ménage à trois. It’s of course not enough to simply say that Art and Patrick love each other — that’s beyond obvious from the start, and handled as a matter of course. The film’s success is rather in how they love each other precisely through the mediation of tennis, through the mediation of each also loving Tashi, through her direction and misdirection, and through their incongruous personalities and playing styles. In turn, Tashi loves each of them through those knots and impasses as well, with her desire constantly resituating itself behind one or the other. Art’s lack of dedication to tennis animates her drive, as does Patrick’s apparent lack of adequate reverence for it — points of frustration (as someone who would have been a better player than both of them) that counterintuitively make things interesting and make people desirable.

These dynamics and slippages are intensified through the assertiveness of Guadagnino’s framing and blocking, where a hand might almost involuntarily grab a thigh at any moment, as well as through that of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, alternately melancholic and thumping, often during scenes of simple dialogue. Constantly surrounded by brands, each player slowly becomes a brand themselves, their symbolic identities forming and calcifying over more than a decade, putting more and more hardened distance between them. But these constructions fall away in the fever pitch of the final moments, with a private-language serving gesture echoing back 13 years, for a big reveal to Art about Patrick and Tashi’s night prior. This causes a near wordless, tangled progression of looks, shouts, and smiles (some shit-eating and some genuine), toward a thoroughly moving and contradictory reconciliation, or consummation, or as Tashi said about a match of her own: Tennis. “It was like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist.” — ALEX BROADWELL

If things keep going the way they’re going, Radu Jude will probably never run out of ideas. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World runs you as ragged as Ilinca Manolache’s overworked Angela as she drives around town all day, but you also get the pleasures of her playacting-as-venting: both via directorial intervention as another car-driving Angela from the Communist-era film Angela Goes On, where life was slower (sometimes the frame rate was too), and Manolache hamming it up as a vulgar Andrew Tate impersonator on TikTok who pals around with Uwe Boll. The end of the world has arrived: consequences for your actions are nonexistent if you’re high enough up the corporate ladder, the working class is constantly at risk from their lousy jobs, and everyone lives out of their cars and dies on the side of the road. The form shifts from black-and-white celluloid to online digital, the edits go from rapid-fire to nearly nonexistent, and the humor is exaggerated, bitter, and Godardian (Nina Hoss plays a heritage nepo baby named Doris Goethe; one of her fellow corporate stooges does a debased quotation of Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le Fou and then leaves the film).

Jude’s film is simultaneously overwhelmingly loaded with ideas and digestible for anyone who thinks about the horrors of daily living; an educational beatdown and a film that’s unafraid to confront the maximalist qualities of present-day bombardment. After nearly two hours of Angela flying around Bucharest in her car, fueled by rock music and bubble gum (they match her sparkly party dress) while recruiting injured workers to appear in an ass-covering corporate workplace safety video, Jude finally locks himself down for a 45-minute commercial shoot that technically resembles a long take until it isn’t one anymore. Some directors have portrayed the contemporary apocalypse as bombast, others with stasis: Jude has his cake and eats it too, while his cast of characters plays at influencing its direction via weaponized moving images. Are they expecting too much, or not enough? In either case, Jude certainly doesn’t think it’ll save us. — ANDREW REICHEL

In casting around for a director worthy of the title of “best working filmmaker,” Ryūsuke Hamaguchi would receive few detractors in being selected for such an honor. Over the course of a career that began in 2008 with his graduate project Passion, Hamaguchi’s prominence was secured with 2015’s five-hour long Happy Hour, before crystallizing in full in 2021 with the duo of Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, films which received an Oscar and Berlin Silver Bear respectively. Working first and foremost as a dramatist, Hamaguchi’s chief skill is in riddling what is familiar in the film-image and -fiction with a sense of contradiction and discomfort that brings to mind Godard’s reflection in King Lear (1987) of artistic sense being rooted in: “A reconciliation of two realities that tell more as far apart… [and] the more the connections between these two realities are distanced, too, the stronger they get to be, the more it will have emotive power.” It is in this sense that 2023’s Evil Does Not Exist stands in a tradition of interests particular to the filmmaker that have repeatedly hewn to the world of human emotions and relationships and found their force in how each contest with an irrepressible void and unknowability embedded within ourselves, others, and finally the very earth on which all life moves.

Beginning life as a project to create visuals for the film’s composer Eiko Ishibashi’s live performances, who previously collaborated with Hamaguchi on Drive My Car, a twofold work materialized: Evil Does Not Exist and Gift (its score-only reimagining). The richness of the shoot, which became preoccupied with the natural world surrounding Ishibashi’s home studio, generated a philosophical reflection on life writ large, and ultimately the film’s aphoristic, Nietzschean title. As such, the fully formed feature, as most viewers have received it, brings to bear the ominous, amoral intimations of the name on events surrounding the occupants of a rural Japanese village and representatives from a Tokyo-based glamping agency entreating the town to consider their project regardless of its dangers. Forming a pair with each of these elements, apart and together, are the arrestingly spare and portentous images of winter landscapes and the wildlife that moves indifferent to the human drama. In setting these distinct realities in relation to one another, Hamaguchi fashions multifarious tensions that move the viewer to reflect upon the fragility of human ethical codes as a higher order of life easily debased, whether it be through direct violence from one person to another or that of capital forces operating at an impersonal remove. The result is a mysterious, unsettling work rightly counted among the very best of the year, and which only underscores the adroit, flexible skill of an artist operating at the height of his powers. — MATT MCCRACKEN

“Do you want to relive the events of 2025? Those tragedies?” And a Happy New Year to you too, Bertrand Bonello. Like his masterpiece House of Tolerance, but updated for a society spiraling ever further into the post-human void, The Beast sifts through the detritus of more than a century of fears and anxieties — forces that seem to be gradually, thoroughly, and incontrovertibly overpowering our ability, or willingness, to feel anything at all, let alone love. This tripartite film’s middle chapter, set 10 years ago, seems to locate the crux of our unspooling civilization. (For more on that developing story, see the director’s other 2024 commercial release, which also made our list.) Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), a model with designs on being an actor, hunches over a laptop in a lavish Hollywood home that she’s house-sitting. The collection of browser windows reads like an ersatz epitaph for the era: “deadly riots”…”multiple fires”…”YOU ARE AT RISK”…”Medical Aesthetics.” The Internet isn’t The Beast, of course — just a symptom of what one cyberspace clairvoyant calls our “deep narcissistic crisis… the great evil of our times.”

Flash-forward 40 years, and the nerve-fraying unpredictability of our present has been traded for further and complete control by the state. Call it fascism, or maybe a catatonic utopia, or, as one dead-eyed girl at a nightclub muses, “The catastrophe is behind us. We’re bored shitless.” In this new, boring society, what remains of our own unwieldy emotions can be suppressed with the prick of a syringe to the inner-ear. We can even “clean our DNA,” a procedure which rids the patient of trauma accumulated during their past lives. But hold on — “I don’t want to become a Buddhist nor a robot,” snaps the 2044 reincarnated version of Gabrielle (still Seydoux) at an enlightened friend who pushes this new treatment on her (and who, incidentally, happens to strangle her cat).

Thankfully, Bertrand Bonello isn’t some soul-soothing spiritualist and The Beast isn’t his The Fountain. New age-y sci-fi tropes are but one node in this liberally mounted Henry James adaptation’s knotty constellation of artistic and thematic referents — with some others being Sherry Turkle’s writing on technology and the body, Harmony Korine’s impish termite art Trash Humpers, and, uh, mass-murderer Elliot Rodger’s chilling incel manifesto. Perhaps the most significant influence, though, is the cinematic poet of the uncanny, David Lynch. Not only do the Hollywood scenes in The Beast vibrate (sometimes literally) with the same sense of ethereal dream logic as Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Dr., but Bonello manages to conjure a similar eerie surrealism in scenes of 20th-century Parisan high society (the setting of The Beast’s first extended storyline). Moreover, just as the primal scream that concluded the last transmission from Lynch’s cinematic universe registered as a reflection of its times, the final moments of InRO’s best film of 2024 offer a kind catharsis for all the disillusionment we’ve put ourselves through over the course of this cursed year. Here’s to a tragic 2025. — SAM C. MAC