The strikes of the Actors and Writers Guilds of America proved, among other things, that cinema quality is not predicated on the size of the blockbuster nor on the USA centrism of distribution.

Big productions from that country were delayed to 2025 because of the strikes, and yet, since indie studios (that agreed to the terms of the workers almost immediately) and non-American projects (usually funded by publicly-owned government agencies not for-profit) will always exist for culture and for the arts, 2024 was another exciting year for moviemaking and movie creativity.

Culturally, we are in a moment in time where everything has to be Intellectual ‘Property’. Not in the sense of Insight being protected to run free to consider the nature of human experience and connection, and then allowed to be eloquently crafted into Art for us to read and luxuriate in. No. More like IP-content coming out of a streaming machine that mines pop culture connections to keep making money out of the promise to the audience that everything will finally be explained.

One of the essential qualities that makes good cinema good, the thing that distinguishes it from content-streaming for casual viewing, is the way it commands an audience’s attention without the need to promise big scope or big budget. IP compulsion is just momentarily diverting our eyes from the small screen of our phones to a bigger screen where another spin-off, sequel, or prequel feed us empty calories of ‘lore’ and over-explanations.

Look, I love Big American blockbusters. But, if the “I love movies” part my personality was just that.. well.. it would mean I was not really paying attention. And the strongest impacts happen when we are truly paying attention. When a movie has subtlety instead of brute-force in its narrative communication, so the filmmakers’ deep emotional insights are elevated into our own emotional clarifications. When we do not feel we are being rewarded for being mindless.

Lists like this, that I try to log and curate every year, are me paying attention and sharing with all of you both the quantity and the quality that is always here to experience, and, also, to hopefully connect to on more deeper levels.

And, like last year, there’s a lot to discover. So, I won’t be writing about all the new movies I’ve seen in 2024. I won’t even name the ones I found to be uninteresting or bad. I will start by listing a group of Honourable mentions, which were movies I did not completely vibe with but found to be good and potentially enjoyable for tastes different than mine.

Then, I will write about a small group I call “Happy to describe”, which were movies I DID vibe with, but admit being a bit biased in their favour. Next, the group “Very good movies”, which I tried to be as objective as possible so the subtitle speaks for itself.

And, finally, the “Best of the year”, which were the 30 films I found to be the best representation of 2024 as a group of works excelling in quality that also comprehensively, and in some cases inspiringly, embody the different virtues of the artistic field.

Honourable mentions:

• La Chimera
• Tótem
• The Unknown Country
• About Dry Grasses
• Gladiator II
• Exhibiting Forgiveness
• The Old Oak
• The Monk and the Gun
• His Three Daughters
• The Wild Robot
• I Used to Be Funny
• Amanda
• Emilia Pérez
• Sleep
• Fancy Dance

Happy to describe

The Fall Guy

Like previous David Leitch movies, Fall Guy keeps asking “ARE YOU HAVING FUN?”, “YOU ARE HAVING FUN, RIGHT?”.

Well, this time.. I actually was having fun. It helps Fall Guy that, for a change, a David Leitch movie has a good actor, and not a try-hard, as a leading man.

Leitch’s direction itself is not as try-hard either, with a welcomed sincerity in his staging that made this movie a truly worthy homage to the work of stuntmen and women.

Emily Blunt is, as usual, very good, with the chemistry between her and Ryan Gosling feeling genuine, like the occasional smirk escaping scripting. I would even affirm that the biggest star of the movie is neither him nor her, but the moments they get to interact with each other.

Winston Duke and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are also not overacting their supporting roles for laughs.

All in all, for a movie about stunt work, I would’ve preferred the cinematography to be more naturalistic and rawer. But, hey, at least we finally got a sincerely funny movie out of David Leitch.

Twisters

In the history of cinema it’s not uncommon for studio heads to try to make magic happen by coupling big budget moviemaking with indie auteurs with artistic sensibilities. I don’t know what’s the batting average of those bets, but I do know that, without Lee Isaac Chung directing this legacy sequel, Twisters had all the likings of an uninteresting cash grab.

Instead of just millions of dollars spent on a CGI sludge, this movie actually has some indelible images. Lee, born in Denver, to a family from South Korea, and reared in a small farm in Arkansas, continues to have a knack for expressing via camera the true details and livelihood of rural America.

It also helps that the biggest star of this movie, Glen Powell, is himself interested in indie filmmaking. Twisters is the result of director and star knowing that, for a movie like this to work and mean something, it is as important to have time for spectacle as it is to have filmic space for pathos and contemplation.

Btw, for people who like country music, banger of a soundtrack.

Kinds of Kindness

I like Yorgos Lanthimos’ filmmaking.

He knows how to use the toolset of the medium to create shots at some of the biggest taboos and constructs we mindlessly accepted as cornerstones of our civilizations.

That being said, such ideas and humanistic expression also make me have a complicated relationship with his art. Even if having ideas is more than most movies and television series, coming from the type of production companies Lanthimos now has access to, care to have, JUST having ideas is not enough for me.

Sometimes, Lanthimos says cinematically “see, this is stupid, this is wrong”. And I agree. Then.. I wait for the narrative to propose a different way to construct after the deconstruction. In some films he does it, but in others, like Kinds of Kindness, he doesn’t. So, I tend to not be as kind to those.

It is still worth a watch because the deconstructions here are MAX Lanthimos, as he tackles maybe bigger sacred cows than ever before. And the performances by the entire cast are all of the highest quality, particularly Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, who continue to cement themselves as some of the best actors of their generation.

The First Slam Dunk

As someone who played and watched tons of hours of basketball, this is the best I’ve ever seen the sport being portrayed in a non-documentary framing. (to be honest, it rings even truer than all the documentaries I’ve watched about basketball).

And this is animation!

Great credit goes to the technique of the artists composing these body animations, since, if you know you know, they express all the idiosyncrasies of dribbling, pivoting, posting up, shooting, and even off-the-ball movement. It’s uncanny, without losing the beauty of it all.

Add to that the typical depth of Japanese anime when it comes to personal struggle, as well as the attention to detail the complexity of the push-and-pull between the personalities in a team, and you get a really powerful and emotional sports movie.

This film is based on Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk manga series, that ran from October 1990 to June 1996. But don’t be wary of not being able to follow the plot covered in the TV anime adaptation. It enriches the movie, of course, but this was clearly made with people who have not read or watched the original story in mind.

Am I OK?

For a TV movie, this one is pretty good.

Yes, Dakota Johnson’s acting charisma does a lot of heavy lifting, since it seems to come out of her so naturally. But the movie is more than that.

It is very well-written for the angles chosen to tackle its subject matters, especially in the third act when life messiness becomes a credible antagonist, and the characters have to confront it and each other.

And the cinematography is very competent at modulating the different moods of the scenes and moments of the film.

Sonoya Mizuno also needs to have more meaty roles like this.

Gasoline Rainbow

It honestly doesn’t matter if we label this movie a documentary or not.

What is very palpable in Gasoline Rainbow is that the language of cinema vérité was creatively and innovatively put to use to communicate the life stories of very real people and very real places.

This relationship between people and places is clearly what matters for the filmmakers. The contrast between huge swathes of land and a new generation of pre-adults who don’t feel at home anywhere.

And the gradual discovery of belonging, not due to geography, but via community and a sense of place because of the people who are nice to each other.

Very much admired this film, and how it defied barriers and code in order to be able to express itself more openly and show us its artistic vision of how life really is.

A Quiet Place: Day One

If every new commercially successful plot premise is bound for the ‘franchise’ tag, even if the premise itself has drained its storytelling purpose by the ‘first’ movie, at least let these sequels be more like A Quiet Place Day One.

Completely unconcerned with excavating for lore or dragging plot threads forward, congratulations to whom decided to invite someone like Michael Sarnoski to helm this project.

With Sarnoski the focus of the narrative lens is on people and not on mythology. Who cares where did the aliens come from. If a new Quiet Place movie has to be made, let writers and directors at least explore the potentially thought-provoking connective tissue between us, diverse audiences, and the drama of completely different humans from the family of the first two movies having to face somewhat the same plot constraints.

It shows nuance, something most of these franchises are lacking due to insecure obsessions like fake self-awareness and fan-service taking all the space of scene creation.

Congratulate also who decided to cast Lupita Nyong’o for such nuance delivery, and herself of course for another great performance. She really is magnificent in directing the priorities of everything and everyone to the most meaningful and correct place – from the camera to the audiences’ gaze, we all now understand what really matters in this ‘universe’, thanks to her.

I was not familiar with Joseph Quinn, but, considering he was sharing the screen with such powerhouse like Lupita, I was very content with his own unforced presence and signature.

This movie would be even higher in my consideration if it had even fewer action scenes. Not that the ones here are bad… It simply would’ve been more coherent with the overall tone and message of what they aimed to explore this time in this already saturated canvas.

Good One

A small movie about a small day, with everything ultra-planned so as to our characters can have a nice one as usual, and, out of nowhere, a giant bad thing happens.

Good One is a very bright directorial debut by India Donaldson because she avoided the temptation to build the majority of the feature-length around the bad thing that happens. Nor did she frame it in what could’ve been the obvious narrative construct of “Innocence lost”, since the main character is a 17-year-old called Sam.

This is both exquisite and exciting filmmaking by a first-timer precisely because she seems to already have the understanding of old masters of what best delivers meaningful tension: patience and restraint.

Most of the movie is about a well-planned leisurely day, the importance of those for us to escape the stress of our main routines, and about specifically getting to respect Sam and her maturity in this relaxation. Lily Collias, the actress portraying Sam, is also very promising.

Then, when the bad thing happens, since the scripting was so properly weighted, the message the film is truly interested in – of how we tend to dissociate from those bads so the day continues to be good as planned – lands even strongly.

Inshallah a Boy

Even though this is a very strong debut by Amjad Al Rasheed, employing the techniques of social realism, what really makes his filmmaking auspicious is how he, here and there, risks breaking the audiences’ expectations of documentary-like drama with imagery that seems a bit more ethereal.

In my opinion, it’s these occasional dashes of sublime ambiences on the reality that make us better connect with the psyche of the main character. The director was not content in just making a movie about observations on the culture or simply rooted in social commentary.

The large focus on 1 character – Nawal, with amazing acting by Mouna Hawa –, complemented with small tinges of esoteric cinematography, becomes a filmic conversation between objectivism and subjectivism that, counterintuitively, invites any type of audience to enter this dialogue more than a documentary-like. Because it’s an actor, a mise-en-scène, and even a metaphysically earthly colour grading all speaking the language of empathy, and not of didacticism.

So, when the movie reaches its surprising ending, we understand it. Because we understand both Nawal’s mind and soul. We understand, and are kind to the film and, more importantly, kind to a person.

And, to be honest, that’s what matters coming out of a movie like this. Something that we, between civilizations and cultures, still have much work to do to get better at. Movies like Inshallah a Boy help with that.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

Yes, the premise is quite cool for whoever is wary of Coming-of-Age mixed with Vampires.

It’s the Dark Comedy that makes this movie a good one of those. The writing is really, really good. And Sara Montpetit, as the titular humanist vampire, was casting perfection. It’s one of those performances that could easily be dismissed as intentionally one-note. But, it’s not. The writing lands because she has so much micro-diversity in her delivery and facial expressions.

Another aspect that could’ve broken the movie is the usual one-notedness of comedy in coming-of-age movies and how that would lend itself to express thoughts on such a multi-layered theme like Suicide.

You know what.. mid-movie I was starting to be concerned about that, but, by the end I found it to be quite tactful (the writers show that they know what they know, and also show that they know what they don’t know about the subject).

As a matter of fact, the final scene even surprised me by how poignant it is about the topic.

Very good movies

40.    Conclave

The technical aspects of this film are so good that make it a memorable experience.

The cinematography, the production design, the music, and even the way the editing and the screenplay worked in tandem to give rhythmic tension and thrills to the film… all these crafts are top tier. Some frames do look like Renaissance paintings sometimes.

But, oh brother.. the writing of the plot and of the dialogue…

No matter how good an adaptation this is (like I said, the macro-structure of the bones was perfectly cut and organized to create a gripping film), there was nothing that could’ve been done about the quality of the meat.

The original novel must’ve been one those airport bestsellers that are nonchalant about complex concepts so as to not bother too much its buyers.

It has some ideas about democracy and the democratic process. But, it’s like the first questions you get in an introductory course on these studies.

An early-in-the-movie long monologue by Ralph Fiennes about the dynamics between a society of certainties, the beauty of life’s mysteries, and where faith finds its place in this triangle, saves the writing from always being obvious.

Particularly because it has an intelligent call-back during the last revelation of the story.

39.    Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

It took more than 20 years to assemble a team of filmmakers to finally embrace and deliver this project.

What certainly started in the early 2000s as a John Woo joint about the mythos around his own home-country’s “City of Darkness” – Kowloon Hong Kong’s Walled City –, throughout the years the film, now by the hands of director Soi Cheang, clearly morphed into an homage to those same Hong Kong action flicks popularized by Woo and others.

And yet, what made all this journey worth the wait is not the pinpoint perfect recreation of what made that Hongkongese take on the action genre so unique and good. Yes, it’s a shame that that style of moviemaking has become somewhat of a lost art, and it’s amazing that there are still people that care for that craft and that can deliver it. But what makes Twilight of the Warriors a special movie is that it’s more than just a well-made and accurate tribute; it also carves a space for itself in the legendarium by contributing with different approaches from the formula of its own inspirations, as well as having something to say about the mythology itself.

At first, during the movie, I was thinking “huh, this should have more fighting scenes”. However, the mission statement of this new revitalized project started to be readable, and everything clicked into place. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of action extravaganza. But this new team of filmmakers responsible for the now homage was interested in adding a layer to the whole affair.

Demystification.

While the movies that inspired 2000’s Dragon City (the original title) were all about telling the lore and even enhancing the mythos. 2024’s Twilight of the Warriors uses that backdrop of action folklore to enhance the folk. All those moments when I though more fighting should be happening… Those are precisely the spaces the film found it fitting (and I agree) to showcase the real people that were living in ‘bad-reputation’ real Kowloon Walled City.

When I said that the mission statement was readable, it means I started to notice the amount of care the production team had given to not only the sets, filling them with lived-in personal objects and decorations, but also to the extra actors getting by in their daily lives and to the detail in how they interacted with each other.

In the end, Twilight of the Warriors was not finally completed in 2024 to just make us understand why Hong Kong action cinema was so influential. It’s also a eulogy to the Walled City itself, a remembrance on the marginalized people that only found a home there, and a cinematic choreography of those bonds in motion.

It’s really cool to see a tag-team in this genre of movies. It’s more powerful when it means something.

38.    Longlegs

The fact that, weeks after watching it, I was feeling the need to study this movie better to try to make sense of its ambiguous occult ending is: 1) a praise to the film itself, because it was not bland; and, at the same time, 2) precisely the type of modern relationship to art or human expression the film is poking at.

It’s quite refreshing that we are getting a new generation of meticulously maniacal American directors like Robert Eggers or Osgood Perkins (the writer-director of Longlegs), clearly obsessed with every little detail in the frame, and how that makes a film the opposite of undistinctive, but they are not trying to be David Fincher.

These new directors, despite being sticklers for precision and measurements, are poking at the notion of third acts disappointing modern audiences if the revelation about the mystery in a story turns out to be magic. They are interested in why modern humans are so disenchanted as to entitledly expect numerology or the profane to be more clever or to have more intrinsic value as answers to puzzles than the breathtaking of the supernatural.

Longlegs, specifically, uses the typical twists of the genre (and respective revelations, or, in its case, break of the promise of revelation) as very shocking and indeed clever moments of suspension of disbelief to connect us audiences to the very real possibility that, for various socioeconomic reasons, there are still regions and people who need the supernatural in their lives, because they don’t have anything else.

37.    Only the River Flows

From the evocative cinematography to some narrative tropes, this film is unapologetically neo-noir.

But then.. comes the third act. Very different from most modern neo-noirs. Instead of having the usual cavalcade of connecting the dots towards solving the case, it uses its own framing of filmmaking to say “if you are expecting real life to be like that, that’s because you’ve watched too many neo-noir movies disconnected from truth”.

It was a better twist that this movie is about our obsession to correlate, organize, and clean everything in our societies. And what we do when reality is not aligned with that. More than a crime drama, this is a truth drama.

Zhu Yilong as the main actor was a revelation to me.

36.    Ghostlight

This could’ve been just a totally fine movie about the power of the arts and fiction to, sometimes better than day-to-day, make us understand others and even ourselves.

Ghostlight is more than just a fine movie because three things happened during the writing of its screenplay by Kelly O’Sullivan:

1) She was patient about the dramatic bomb in her story;

2) She wrote the main role for Keith Kupferer, who gives one of the best performances of the year, because 2.1) he is individually and technically adventurous while being flawless, and 2.2) he is in complete service of that patience and of the storytelling as a collective;

3) And, finally, the way Romeo and Juliet, a story known by everyone, is used to not only connect arts-and-fiction to real life, but also to explode the bomb and surprise everyone – the past of the characters in the movie, their evolution, and we ourselves the audience.

Something simple made complex by calm and collected writing that allowed the structuring to navigate to its more intelligent placement, and a main actor that completely understands that the drama of a material is not in how much you dig deep in search of it…

… but in being in the same wavelength of the narrative tone, and trusting that both humanities (the writer’s and the actor’s) will connect with each other and thus deliver an empathic and meaningful message.

Like I said, the power of arts and fiction to make us understand 🙂

35.    Strange Darling

Sometimes, we just want a neat B-movie with twists and counter-twists.

However, more often than not, all those surprises and counter-surprises end up tasting like a cook over-seasoning a meal because they know the depth of flavour in the primary material is quite bland.

What if I told you that Strange Darling has all the coolness and power of a B-movie with counter-twists, but without that overbearingness and try-hardness to mask predictability?

How did JT Mollner, the cook writer-director, pulled this off?

Well, thanks to astute outlining and impeccable execution of non-linear storytelling, one can even propose the notion that the final product ended up resorting to zero twists, even if we have the perception of them.

The acting of Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner also contributed a lot to that essential feeling of intoxicating doubt. And using Z Berg’s songs as cornerstones of the soundtrack was a genius collaboration for both atmosphere and meaning.

Final shout to Giovanni Ribisi, known actor now making his debut as Director of Photography. And what a debut. This film looks amazing and, more importantly, completely in line with the vibe its narrative is going for.

All these people created an artwork with potential to be a cult hit. Even so, what I am more interested in now is their own potential as artists. I’ll be following their careers with much more attention.

34.    Dahomey

Mati Diop, writer-director, reaffirms herself as one of the best contemporary examples of someone who is in complete control of all the tools cinema has to offer.

Now, with the toolset of documentary filmmaking, she not only plies the traditional formula to her will (sign of someone who completely knows the rules), but also does that for substantiated audiovisual declaiming of very contemporary issues.

Cutting to black each time a statue was put into a transportation wooden box (now a plane, before a slaver boat), and just hearing the haunted monologue coming from the statue (worried once again about the promise of the journey, about the non-power of being a socioeconomic asset, about the cultural darkness of the ‘elsewhere’ in History) is more than just a transgressive technique expertly executed…

… it was one of the best audiovisual denouncements I’ve ever felt about the relationship of the Western world with Africa.

And even when the movie becomes more documentary-like, with footage from an organized debate in Benin between citizens discussing the significance of celebrating the repatriation of 26 out of 7000 artefacts, one can already feel a triangular border forming around the possible futures of that country: acculturation; reappropriation; or exploitation of cheap labour by stronger economic powers.

Very sharp film. Intelligent in its craft, intelligent in its observation, and intelligent in its reclaiming.

33.    Mars Express

Not the most innovative story for a cyberpunk movie. Still, the detective and action elements are well staged and well positioned throughout the plot. And the messages the film is trying to send are, even if not trailblazing, robustly earned during the worldbuilding and characterizations.

What is avant-garde in Mars Express is the animation technique.

It may look ‘traditionalistic’, but that’s just 80’s call-back as base reference for us audience. Then, the creativity and inventiveness start to assert themselves either in the spectacle of action sequences, or even in slice of life moments for us to assimilate the state-of-the-art technology and activities that beings in that universe are already accustomed to.

Really. I think the story is good. But, I could almost say that the creations and ideas, and how they animate, are worth watching the movie just for them. So inspired were these artists.

32.    The Shadowless Tower

Sins of the father stories are usually very effective, since their central thread is generally very relatable.

With The Shadowless Tower, writer-director Zhang Lü seems to be interested in a different angle of these relationships between characters, as well as how that direction extends to the self-identifiable connection between the characters and the film’s audience.

Yes, Gu Wentong has a complicated relation with his father, and he is trying to better understand himself by recognizing that as a formative apparatus which shaped his current personality.

However, the film goes a layer deeper by being more concerned with the connection between the apparatus itself and Wentong life’s decisions, rather than the father-and-son one.

In essence, the film wants to examine the self-apology that comes out of too much relatability. More than the easier-to-grasp flesh-and-blood thread of family drama, The Shadowless Tower stages its recognizable situations around the power of memory and its impact on self-perception.

Of course, the past shapes our present. But, more than that, a constructed memory that is perceived during those days ends up becoming an even bigger role-model than our parents, family members, or friends.

Despite being formed as defences against that very consanguine trauma that “sins of the father” stories usually try to deconstruct, the apparatus, during the past, that builds memories in real-time towards self-actualization is a very powerful dictator of what we think is a better version of that bloodline.

Because those future goals, targeted from memory, were erected with the strength needed to disrupt and distinguish the personal horizon from the ethereality of condemned destiny, when they become our own prison of self-ideology it should be a wake-up call.

The dissociation, derealization, and overall stodginess that that entrepreneurship ends up infesting our psyches with is much more of a self-own than an inheritance. Gu Wentong can’t really truly connect with people, because in the past he both constructed a memory and erected a future goal to be nice to people like his father never was. So, it’s not genuine. It comes from a sacred cow in the meadow of his own idealized horizon.

This is a very good movie about we being characters in our own stories, and how we pre-write all these scripts that gradually remove the agency in the adventure.

Where many movies interested in this topic frame it by showing career motivation, sexual objectification, or even the call to action to kill the numbness as byproducts of a tethered need to prove others (in the past or present) wrong or correct…

… The Shadowless Tower films it as a toxic otherness that we’ve injected into ourselves. We are doing these things, i.e. living, to prove something to ourselves. And that is even more dissociating and hurting to the true experience of being here.

31.    No Other Land

There’s not much I can write about this documentary that can make it justice.

I’ll just say this.. By looking at the giant swathes of empty countryside that are very visible in the footage, it becomes clear that destroying these people’s houses, families, history and culture was never about Land.

Just watch it, please.

And, even if we conduct our lives with the mental outlook that only the improvement of the ”me” truly matters, because the “me” can’t save the entire rest of the world… A documentary like this is proof that we can make more of a difference by helping one person at a time.

Best of the year

30.    Red Rooms

I don’t remember seeing a single drop of blood in the entire runtime of this film. And yet, I think it’s one of the heaviest movies I’ve watched in the last few years.

Its doom bleeds from the interstitial between the two main types of images the film uses to capture its subject matters.

Sometimes we are in cold clear-eyed institutional settings, but the camera decides to not focus on nothing or no one. It just roams.

Other times we are in the comfort of home, with hot saturated colours, but the camera decides to ignore that and laser focus on a person’s face. With pitch-blackness bleeding through the edges.

The way the camera moves around and ignores the procedural elements we should be following in a courtroom thriller, or how it completely stops for too much time on the face of someone doomscrolling for too much long, it gave me both physical and emotional goosebumps.

Considering I have a hard time watching movies with these subject matters, it is easy for me to say that this film has genuinely excellent craft. Pascal Plante, writer-director, is a name to follow. With Red Rooms, he creates a very unique atmosphere that is completely in line with the weight of such a difficult main theme.

And then, even more salient is how that ambience connects the plot with other themes we are gradually not suspicious of anymore. Online communities; social signalling via the aesthetics of the online persona; illusory democratization of information with the computer providing stats and KPIs for every aspect of life; untraceability of cryptocurrencies; virtual gambling. All with a tone that is not moralistic.

The film is about the involvement of all. From the ones in the procedures to the ones just watching. And the main character, Kelly-Anne, played stirringly well by Juliette Gariépy, is a symbolic vessel of many hip and techy trends that are gradually dehumanizing us.

While watching the movie, I was having trouble reading its message. But then, it clicked for me with an action from Kelly-Anne that showed that the point of this screenplay was never to analyse if she is sick or not, or, if yes, to measure how sick is she.

Pascal Plante is warning us all, with big red lights. We are the ones gradually getting sick with an addiction: ownership.

Whether we are doing a good deed or an evil act, even in the good ones altruism is getting more and more replaced by the need of ownership.

Civil procedures are being less perceived as a collective of humans trying to improve society, but just numbers and facts. Or even the individual lives of others we see on the internet, are watched with less empathic curiosity, and more with the need to have the number of things they have.

That’s the paradox of modern life that the film so penetratingly showcases. We are more connected than ever to each other, but we are more disconnected than ever from the dream of a better life or the mystery of human existence. We are numb, so only the darker strata of society remain mysterious to us.

The film is not saying that there are more underworlds now. It’s alerting to the addiction to numbers, factoids, bets, etc. and how that is gradually disinteresting us from the beauty of achieving something real in the chaotic subjectiveness of life.

That we are artificializing feelings so they are objective.

So we can measure them.

So we can own them.

29.    Hundreds of Beavers

More than a worthy homage to the movies that began it all.

Hundreds of Beavers has the timeless humour that only the illusion of filmmaking can create. But it is also completely modernized, since the other big inspirations were video games.

Particularly the escalation from the second act on, which was designed to be an adventure for the viewer in the best of both worlds:

The orchestration of a cinematic interconnection touching everything in scope. And the reverie that is brought about when watching a video game world that seems to be totally dynamic and emergent.

This movie is exceedingly funny because each skit or scenario are inherently comical. But what makes the humour keep landing and landing is precisely the combination of the cinematic scale with the mechanical responsiveness of the world to the skits.

Part of the joke is witnessing the escalation of goofiness because every systemic rule in the “board game” is connected to the previous broken rule by the main character, and how that leads to cinematic intensification of wackiness.

All the credit to Mike Cheslik, who directed, wrote, edited, and created the visual effects for the film. One of the best examples this year of why creative endeavours like this should be supported. It was shot over the course of twelve weeks by a six-person crew using a Panasonic GH5 (filmed in 1080p), with a budget of $150,000. And then over 1,500 visual effects were made using Adobe After Effects, with editing and post-production taking two years to complete.

Huge kudos also to Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, whose silent physical acting was crucial for the comedy to always feel relatable, and not just mechanical. Him also having writing credits probably helped in establishing that human connection.

Finally, a mention to Bobb Barito on sound design, who created the literal punches in the punchlines of every joke. Particularly important in a silent film like this.

28.    Rebel Ridge

Jeremy Saulnier has been writing and directing some pretty violent movies in the last 10 years.

Consequently, it’s even more provocative that, in the current self-destructive moment the United States are living, Saulnier decided to build an entire police action-thriller around the techniques and the act of de-escalation.

To be honest, it’s not just the social message in a close quarters combat movie that is refreshing. The scripting and choreography of action scenes to prevent any bullet from being shot, or to disarm individuals, is way more riveting than the typical one-person army affairs we’ve grown unfortunately too accustomed to.

Add to that well-written non-action scenes of going through the civil systems in place to try to defuse and correct the circumstances of the plot, and the movie gets dramatic tension and twists that never feel manipulative, but rather supportive of the main message of the story.

Nothing in this film are empty calories. The cinematography is both nuanced and expressive; the writing is more detailed and tense than it seems in the beginning; the meta-commentary on violence is indeed impactful; and Aaron Pierre…

… Man, Aaron Pierre…

When I first saw him in The Underground Railroad (one of the best series ever made), as a supporting character, he didn’t need much to catch my attention as possibly someone to keep an eye on in the future. And now, as a lead, and as such an unrelenting force, I know he is a movie star.

From internal sensitivity in drama, to external physicality in action, he has all the acting range.

27.    The Dead Don’t Hurt

This film has one problem – the villain. Everything else is just fantastic.

Nothing against Solly McLeod, the actor portraying the villain, but he was clearly miscast. Maybe he auditioned with the introductory scene, in which he presents a lot of thrilling promise, and the directors were misled like me. I actually found his arc possibly interesting; I just think Solly McLeod might not have, at this moment in his career, the profile needed for that type of character development.

But, like I said, everything and everyone else in this movie is so compelling. Viggo Mortensen, as a sophomore director, does a really good job in transporting us to a time and a place, and then manoeuvring the tone so the narrative advances naturally without having to be pushed by too many plot devices.

Essential to that was the complete opposite to a miscast – Vicky Krieps.

Every scene they are together, or even the ones where she is alone… it’s cinema magic.

She is so natural in a movie set.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is about deconstructing the myth of the Old West. And that work lands truthful because, as the writer-director, Viggo could give an entire frontier governed by mythical men to a woman like Vicky, and she is so realistically mesmerizing to the camera that we can’t but find her day-to-day challenges more immersive than a big orchestrated shootout.

Finally, just a note to Viggo again. Alongside writing and directing the picture, he also composed the music for it. And the movie is better for it.

It might not be a grand Western epic candidate to two-digit Oscars, but the film industry should support more movies like this. Where the filmmaker has final cut to put all his heart into what clearly is a labour of love.

26.    The Outrun

This movie has two excellent creative expressions coming from it.

The first is how it articulates two types of ethereal. How we somewhere along our evolution started resorting to one instead of the other, when inevitably we are in need of the ethereal to escape to.

The Outrun was really good at creating images of the ethereal artificially generated when consuming alcohol or drugs. And then, was even better at channelling the ethereal of Nature and staging it in comparison. The connection we used to have with Nature for the moments to de-centre from our problems.

The other amazing expression in this movie is Saoirse Ronan’s acting.

She already is one of the best to ever do it. And now she even improved on herself, by giving here her best performance to date.

25.    The Substance

As someone who is not the biggest fan of the body horror subgenre, I respected The Substance immensely.

Coralie Fargeat, writer-director, has the signature of an artiste. This is only her second feature and she already shows so much command of the medium’s tools to manifest into reality the themes in her head and, more importantly, to express them as indelible images.

And what themes and images she has in her head. In fact, I’m convinced she is an extraordinary director because the images rise to the challenge of saying something actually effective about the gravity of the themes.

In Revenge, her first film, the themes were rape and sexual assault. She resorted to the tools of the action genre to bulldoze any relativism of a predicament so repulsive. As a filmmaker, she is not interested in digging in search of depth, if the lasting impact is not moving forward from the same place we begun the dig.

And she makes it work without losing any nuance or humanism in her characterization of the world. The depth of her first movie was precisely in the crater that resulted from really hideous assaults to the body clashing into the power reclaimed by the lead actress on screen (Matilda Lutz). This direction also empowers the viewer to not look away and thus repay that performance with our total support to see her enact her revenge. It’s the hardest I rooted for a character in many years.

Now, with The Substance, she summoned again her sensorial sledgehammer to tackle a different set of themes (but not completely unrelated). This time she used the horror medium to raze to the ground how the entertainment and marketing industries commodify beauty, slurp on it, and then spit it to the sidewalk when there’s no more capital in it.

Fargeat is particularly interested in demolishing the culture that clones from it, in non-famous people, the notion that such beauty standards are critical measuring sticks of self-worth.

Once again, she uses the power of cinema to bare naked the nonsense and the importance we apparently are taking too long to see and to solve. It’s genius how she shows the cult of channels like TLC as disgusting as when you bring a camera very up and close to a refined French cuisine dish being prepared.

This direction is not just show-y. The power of its punch results from the precision of its technique. There’s a meticulousness in the geometry and design of everything. From the composition of insert shots or close-ups, to the type, amount, arrangement, or colour of the objects in each set. I know there’s a written script, but the visual storytelling here is so good that the plot could’ve been expressed almost entirely without a line of text.

As I’m more of a fan of more contemplative films, I missed the more descriptive screenplay. However, The Substance has one target, and one idea on how to execute it. And, by doing it with such accuracy, integrity, and conviction, I cannot but stand up and applaud.

Moreover, what really continues to impress me the most about Coralie Fargeat’s filmmaking is how, despite this strong confident artistic expression, her movies are not imposing or paternalistic.

No matter how much heaviness or violence they involve themselves in, they tend to have an underlying thread of comedy. I think this comes from, at the root, the subject matters being perceived as so egregious and outrageous, for a species that considers itself so elevated and intelligent, that the lesson is either to pulverize anyone responsible for these things in our civilizations, or ridicule that self-important supremacy with tragic humour.

Finally, a note of love to Demi Moore:

She had her name made for herself already.

She didn’t care.

Art means something different to her.

And now, she is immortalized with one of the best performances ever given in the History of cinema.

24.    Monkey Man

In 2014, Chad Stahelski made his directorial debut with the first John Wick movie.

That film is airtight perfect, because the filmmakers obsessed over it and polished it to a tee.

John Wick 2 is not as perfect, but I prefer it. You know why? Because, instead of obsessing over making it a flawless meet-the-expectations movie for the audiences, Chapter 2 was given breathing room to also express the chaotic creativity that had been clearly bubbling in Stahelski’s and Derek Kolstad (the screenwriter’s) minds.

2024 was the year for Dev Patel making his debut in the director chair, with Monkey Man.

And he jumped straight to the John Wick 2 stage. I.e., not flawless filmmaking, but one that showcases so much raw artistry and announces Patel as also someone with a distinct directorial vision.

If you see the soulfulness in his eyes as an actor in this movie, and trace that back to the intensity of the things he tried as a director (successfully or not), this is one of those early movies from a filmmaker where the amount of passion put into it is part of the experience for an audience.

For example, one of the choices I’m sure will not work for everyone is the handheld shaky-cam being very felt in some scenes. But, even in those tricky moments it is undeniable that such brushstroke creates a bump of animalistic rawness that more action movies should contend with.

The aspect of the film that I think really worked well was the subtext given to the typical revenge plot. It is about the mother, but the word Mother contains multitudes in this screenplay.

For those who want power, the word is expressed with strong connotations to the industrialization of nationalism and religion. Whilst for the character of Dev Patel (and the people who made the movie), the connection is to Mother-Nature, and how rurality and true spirituality are being lost in order to bring about a type of progress that is very positive to the rich (who don’t need it) and only residual to the poor (who need it the most).

So, when the main character evolves from doing things for his own revenge to doing them for those marginalized groups, it gains an extra meaning. It’s an intersection with real political issues that are so rarely touched in this movie genre.

The image of two different visions for Mother-India finally face to face is quite powerful.

Like I said, Dev Patel risks some fails here and there. But, because of that, when he hits, it creates images that will probably stay with us forever, such are the aesthetics of this whole endeavour.

23.    Kneecap

This movie was already a meaningful riot about the importance of language.

But, when I found out that the three main characters in the band are the real musicians from whom the story is based on, and they even had writing credits…

Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó Hannaidh

Naoise “Móglaí Bap” Ó Cairealláin

JJ “DJ Próvaí” Ó Dochartaigh

Go raibh maith agat.

… You’ve just delivered one of the best and most creative “documentaries” I’ve seen in years.

Continue the fight!

22.    Challengers

At this point, it shouldn’t surprise me that a Luca Guadagnino movie surprised me.

In my defence, precisely because he was interested in directing this script from Justin Kuritzkes, I thought this was about using tennis as a metaphor for interpersonal relationships and/or sexuality.

And, to be fair, Challengers has that. But, what surprised me is how both director and screenwriter take that first level of the metaphor and turn itself around again to create a second allegorical layer.

If the first layer is addressing how people relate to each other (emotionally and physically), the second real narrative twist is taking that interpersonal/sexual signalling and analyse how we relate to sports, and how sports are extensions of those more primal needs.

Tennis is the premise. The text and the camera focus on power, dominance, expulsion of gasps and fluids. But then, the subtext takes us back again to sports, and the real meaning of sports in our societies.

Great screenplay writing.

Yes, it’s about a relationship. But, it’s about our relationship to sports. And, essentially, the film is interested in three components/stages of this relationship:

— Physical pleasure of having an authorized space to exudate to the earth the true self;

— Addiction to industrialize everything, and transform natural pleasure into artificial one with competition, statistics, trophies, wealth or fame; and finally

— Remembering back why we decided to touch the physical in the first place, a more soulful attraction, a love for the art of the sport.

All these stages are scrutinized by a screenwriter who did his homework well by diligently studying the different facets of sport.

The trick shot of this movie was not just structuring the transitions from one stage to the next, but, like human relationships, show how they intertwine with each other, and how the push-and-pull between them creates unpredictable results that are not ideal, yet, because of that, are more compelling.

The macro-structure that resulted from this approach might not be pleasing to all tastes. I liked it, though. It’s loose and non-linear, and I liked how the cut was made to focus more on the thematic residue from those stages in the career of an athlete than on the stages themselves.

No matter how hard humans try to compartmentalize the different facets of their activities, things have a knack for finding themselves bouncing from one box to another. And, even if we think we are aces at commanding the laws of physics to put the objects of our challenge in the basket we want, more often than not, real victories are not operated by the laws of physics.

The cool effect is that the edit of this film feels like being in a tennis match itself: plot points, sentiments, residue, all bouncing from one side to the other, from one side to side, side to side…

The second act could be as visually bold as the first and last. But, that’s just a small nitpick.

And we have Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composing music to guarantee a vigorous aesthetic throughout the entire runtime.

And of course, Zendaya is the kind of superstar that also guarantees that.

Mike Faist increasingly asserts himself as someone we can’t take our eyes off when he’s in a movie. And Josh O’Connor confidently cements himself as a thespian who can do everything.

21.    I Saw the TV Glow

There are two ways of expressing ambiguity in art:

Comfortably planting the flag in a softened middle ground, because the artist has nothing really to say about the themes they set out to address. Or making an effort to study and contribute to a subject matter and arrive at something new but ambiguous. (because real life is complicated and decoding that, if even possible, requires further investigation)

One of the many elements I love about this film is the scepticism it has about its own premise. I Saw the TV Glow is an expression about more than just enjoying movies, series, subcultures, etc. It’s an analysis on how these things have a very real effect on us, on our growth through life, and, most of all, on how we position and present ourselves to the world; how, in essence, we see ourselves.

And the connective tissue bringing all that together.

Even if that space is abstract and the subjects impossible to physically touch, art and culture stand in as decryptors of our feelings, helping not only each individual understand more of themselves through the things they like, but also finding community of other individuals.

This film is particularly interested in the non-intentionality of it all. How it’s so possible to experience these art/culture objects without the aim of finding self-identity or communities of friends or similar people, or even be contorting them to find illegitimate meanings, and still, we will find something very legitimate and very real.

At the same time, I Saw the TV Glow suggests scepticism towards a militant nostalgia for what we loved when we were a teenager. There is a possibility that those art/culture objects that we consumed then and continued consumed by, even if they helped us get through difficult periods of our lives, were not that incredible.

This demonstrates a high level of maturity on this film’s part.

Jane Schoenbrun, writer-director, has the ability to speak with depth and specificity about these past feelings. But, with distance, to realize that some of these things we were fans of (that helped define our current identity) could possibly be of poor quality, and maybe also harmful to our current self and its further development.

They can live in that moment in time, and thus we don’t need to cling to them forever, as if they meant everything, because they are not everything.

All that being said, and like I proposed in the beginning: there are two ways of expressing ambiguity in art.

I Saw the TV Glow gave due respect to its central theme by making a genuine effort to draw new conclusions about what it set out to better understand.

So, when the film communicates ambiguity like “these things we were fans of, that cultivated our identity and the people we connected to, if we force a detachment from these truths, that’s when we start to lose ourselves, don’t let them go”… we know we are in the presence of art and artist that are not being defensive or fake-sincere about their findings.

And this is where the film finds its emotional core. It’s a whole and fair movie because it has scenes about the vitality of letting go of some nostalgia, while, at the same time, it has scenes about the oxygen that comes with letting art and culture shape our identity.

In short, there are aspects of pop culture that remain static and are worse for it, but there are also those that are open to their own reinvention, and it is in this intellectual and emotional complexity that we must navigate through life in order to be on the path of better understanding our own selves.

This is one of best cases of a story, told by someone who gave their all to better understand their own specificity, that it became incredibly universal and relatable.

20.    Godzilla Minus One

I knew the kaiju Gojira was culturally created in 1954 post-war Japan as a strong metaphor for the fear of nuclear holocaust and the terror of the bombs.

“Mankind had created the bomb, and now Nature was going to take revenge on mankind.”

But nothing would’ve prepared me for how humane Godzilla Minus One is.

More than the monster itself, this is a film about PTSD.

Human beings realizing that there’s no point being a great nation if you lose so many lives in a war you entered because you think that’s how greatness is measured. And, even after losing, you still are victim to other nations’ evil by serving as a testbed to another wrong measurement of power.

How would a country react and lift itself up after a fallout like that?

That’s the question Godzilla Minus One set itself to answer. And, in my opinion, it succeeds pretty profoundly.

Instead of dramatizing people rising from the ashes, it transmits something fundamentally more transformative. It is a film about how Japan, and Japanese culture, changed not for bloody vengeance or survivalism rooted in individualism, but towards a more peaceful country, and where greatness is now more measured in collective uplift.

19.    The Settlers

One of the best films I’ve ever seen about how there is always a bigger predator, if you decide to govern your life by the food-chain motto of “only the strongest survives”.

This movie shows that there is a fulfilling human experience by living in communion with nature, if we stop trying to always be the stronger.

It also shows the contradiction of how we become less human the more we try to advance via that aggressive conquest.

18.    The Bikeriders

At first glance, we think this movie is going to be ‘Goodfellas on Harleys’.

Maybe we take that from the visuals. Yet even those are way less stylized than a Scorsese picture.

That’s because Jeff Nichols is pointing a different light to these subjects.

Even the motorized theme could generate the expectation of a fast-paced film. Nope, not that either.

The slower pacing and less postmodern aesthetic of The Bikeriders are perfect for what the movie is trying to investigate. Underneath the leather jackets, or the loud motors (as some proof of man’s exceptionalism), the film is in reality analysing why were these men in need of external engines to pump their internal ones.

In its essence, the film is using the cinematic language to examine the dichotomy of two different types of freedom.

On one side we have the freedom fabricated by a fast-pacing world, with a type of constant change that renders the boundaries of kingdoms or codes completely obsolete. But, on the other side, we have the prison that also results from that. Because.. a world in constant metamorphosis is also a world decoupled from history and wisdom that would’ve been passed down to us.

If, within a lifetime, no boundaries are maintained, no codes of conduct or honour are there as reference points, we not only grow foreign to our own world but also lose agency and dignity in it. Things change faster than what we are capable of processing them, let alone understand.

Johnny’s motorcycle club emerged not only as a response to a socioeconomic problem, but also in response to a spiritual one.

That’s The Bikeriders in a nutshell: a cinematically layered object that is very interested in using its images to peer into its subjects’ souls. It works because the filmmakers are never judgmental about the biker lifestyle or the biker way of expressing (the movie was inspired by a documentarian’s photo-book). And, from that vital base they create frames from which to sequentially peel off the layers of externalization to reach motivation.

Can we truly be liberated from the prison of a fast-paced world? Or is it bound to happen no matter how hard we try to preserve some reference points? Does progress really have to be manifested this way?

In this case, what individual and/or societal events (or the absence of them) happened in the lives of these ordinary men to motivate them to self-identify with these myths and codes of masculinity? The movie even has the nuance of analysing different generations of externalizations and motivations.

Cut to Jodie Comer, playing the wife of one of these bikers, describing some equally-carefully chosen events, and the study of the myth gains an even extra non-generalized layer. She is fantastic in the role. Finally understood the hype surrounding her as an actress.

Tom Hardy is the best I’ve seen him in 10 years.

And Austin Butler… I mean… What the actual fuck… Him being aware of all this makes it even more uau.

17.    Civil War

Whether you think Alex Garland was too direct in saying the right-wing conservatives and nationalists are the bad guys in this Civil War, or you think Garland was not direct enough…

Ultimately, I think that his screenwriting and decision-making as a director were more interested in pointing the camera at the fraud moral high ground of western imperialism, every time it sends its soldiers to take trophy photos in Mexico or in the Middle East.

“Each time I survived a War zone, I thought I was sending a warning Home: Don’t do this. And yet, here we are…”

Designing a war/action movie around the image of a journalist photographing a soldier killing another human being is very confrontational towards the audience. Each shot is no longer dehumanized (like in many war/action movies) because we have the record of all the humans involved in it.

Instead of the grand scale of the genre, Garland is much more focused on the individuality of the people that die. As well as the individuality of the people that are responsible for things like this having the very real possibility of happening in our high-and-mighty Civilized countries:

From the one that shoots, to the one that sits too comfortably in its front porch.

It looks like a movie about the big flag, tanks, and other iconography of hegemonic power. However, it’s not an anti-America screenplay. Quite the contrary. The film, more often than not, is permeated with aesthetic moments that convey a considerable love for “Americana”. Natural aspects of the Continent are accentuated, and the culture in architecture or music are showcased with pizzazz.

What this film is.. is a deeply anti-Gun movie.

Gunshots in this film are disturbing.

And, ultimately, Garland is collecting photos and receipts of western hypocrisy and saying that this is not circumscribed to cultures or nations like Mexico or the Middle East. Triumph through guns is still very present in the cornerstones of western civilization.

When it’s so, it’s a slippery slope until what we closed our eyes to, because we were made to only feel safe through it, becomes the very same instrument of our own self-harm.

Civil War is about those self-destructive addictions crossing borders (internal or external) and suddenly finding ourselves being the “bad guys” in the triumphant photograph.

16.    Sing Sing

Let me just start with the obvious (because I have some people to name). Colman Domingo is one of the best actors working today.

As such, it’s not obvious and amazing that he decided to produce this movie with equal pay between all cast and crew, as well as eventual revenue to share.

Now the names to name:

Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin

David ‘Dap’ Giraudy

Patrick ‘Preme’ Griffin

Sean ‘Dino’ Johnson

Jon-Adrian ‘JJ’ Velazquez

and some other smaller roles in the movie

All these people are formerly incarcerated men, wrongfully or not, and they are living proof that the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison not only works, but also can do something profound.

To be honest, it doesn’t really matter that Clarence Maclin, sentenced to 17 years in jail at the age of 29, now 59, has given one of the best renditions of Hamlet I’ve ever seen on screen.

What matters is that the RTA program changed the course of his real life. And that’s what the film Sing Sing perfectly encapsulates.

With a third act that is a hymn to human empathy, and the power of the arts to establish that connection, both within and outside of ourselves.

And that score by Bryce Dessner in the last few scenes… Man.. is like the final ingredient for the tears that are already there ready to come out.

15.    Evil Does Not Exist

Eiko Ishibashi is one of the best musicians working today.

Her music is so good at creating worlds and metaphysical sensations that this new film by the master Ryūsuke Hamaguchi started as an original concept by Ishibashi herself.

Hamaguchi took a cast of mostly non-professional actors to Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo, and started with only Ishibashi’s soundscape in conversation with the natural landscape captured by the camera. If it ended up as a 30-minute short film with no dialogue it would’ve been more than enough, such is the strength of these two artists working together.

Since the production developed into something lengthier, dialogue between the characters became a natural evolution to accompany Ishibashi’s score. And, for non-professional actors, their line delivery and screen presence were always of high quality. Particularly a scene at halfway mark that is essentially a debate between the village inhabitants and the consultants who projected the ignorantly good-intentioned and nefarious glamping initiative. One of the best scenes of the year.

And then comes the ending.

I’m still not sure if I totally understood it. Maybe because it hit from behind with a brick, or because some things are not meant to be fully apprehended.

Whether you figured out its meaning or not, that’s the essence I got from Ishibashi’s music and from Hamaguchi’s imagery throughout the whole movie: that the most important things in life, and on this planet, are not meant to be had.

14.    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

A masterful debut by Raven Jackson in feature-length direction.

Her, and director of photography Jomo Fray, are two names I will be following in the coming years. What they do together in this film is something I’ve never seen before.

The images they capture to tell this story would be meaningful enough, but it’s the way they use the camera to capture them that elevates this film to a transcendental level.

I’ve never felt this way looking at cinematic photography. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to tasting and smelling the nature of a place through images. More, it’s not just that first layer, which is already impressive, but also that deeper level of remembering a place through its texture in our senses.

That’s what this film set out to do. To tell the story of a place and its people by showing how there is a boundless connection through time between soil to skin, then skin to skin, and back to skin to soil.

“You wanna know a secret? It doesn’t end or begin. Just changes form.”

Charleen McClure is also an acting revelation.

13.    Janet Planet

Annie Baker, playwright, in this wonderful debut as film director creates a story with a plot and a rhythm that seems to allow viewers to discover the personalities of both mother and daughter at the same pace the characters are unveiling it for themselves.

These plot developments of human self-discovery are written by Baker, and acted by Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler, so realistically and mysteriously that the movie doesn’t need any more machinations to work or to be remarkably compelling.

So, when the last sequence of scenes finally introduces cinematic artifices outside of their relation, it feels more earned than in any other movie I’ve ever seen about this particular human dynamic.

Janet Planet is fair in its runtime. I.e., it never sells itself above price by wasting psychological space with a lot of external entertainment. Its scenes are framed for us to consider the interiorities of both Janet and Lacy. And, as such, having the first crossroads of the narrative only by the end of it all elicits, counterintuitively, the most fulfilling of feelings.

The movie’s narrative conceit is studying, alongside the characters, the way they develop internal psychological tools.

The pay-off is seeing them finally employing them.

We don’t know what will happen in the crossroads, but we are fulfilled because we know, for that specific challenge, the hardest part has already been overcome.

And, let me tell you, the last three scenes of Janet Planet are some of the most powerful sequencing and staging I’ve seen all year.

12.    Full Time

Not futuristic, set in dystopian cyberpunk mankind. Nor a present-day horror movie.

But, the way it was filmed, edited, and scored, it could’ve easily passed as one of those genres… if it wasn’t so real.

Laure Calamy gives one of the best performances of the year, modulating her expressions through fully-believable transitions in emotions, settings, or challenges.

The last scene of this movie is so scary. It’s terrifying because it’s presented as something good and normal, but we viewers (and the main character) already have the information that it won’t be.

11.    Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

This would be the funniest movie of the year, if it wasn’t so tragic.

It is a very well-written comedy because it’s not exploitative, as it takes us on a journey of different perspectives, letting irony appear in the frames, instead of going for the low-hanging fruit of mockery.

To be very critical, you have first to be very precise in the language you are using to exhibit such criticism. Radu Jude, writer-director, clearly knows this, and he came prepared to express his analysis via the audiovisual apparatus.

In 4 distinct aesthetics, he exposes the irony that connects through time:

1) The ridiculousness in the illusion manipulated by Ceaușescu nostalgia;

2) How the opposite of Ceaușescu – western neoliberalism – is also failing current-day Romania, and uniformizing in another way;

3) How that uniformization is leading to the reactive creation of the worst type of people in the world (Bobita);

and finally, at the End of the World, the end of the film, 4) One of the most haunting sequences of the year, in which we are using our human creativity to produce audiovisual stories of beauty and good deeds to sell ourselves a different (and yet the same) illusion that things are not so bad, and how we should aspire to have/consume/own more of that not so bad.

Radu Jude is an essential 21st-century filmmaker. He doesn’t go for easy laughs, because we apparently learned nothing from History, and are back again testing the limits of nervous laughter.

10.    Dune: Part Two

Even though I prefer Dune Part One, this sequel is undeniable as a directing feat by Denis Villeneuve.

I loved that Part One was such a tone-poem of worldbuilding. Big-budget adaptations of known IP are NOT that. Instead of state-of-the-art digital effects or practical filmmaking employed to generate grandiose settings or sequences, Part One was designed and delivered first as a feeling:

The process of constructing a fictional universe is not just creative architecture, cool technology, or never-before-seen choreographies. It is also geography, history, culture, and even unspoken language.

And, more important than creating something epic, Villeneuve understands that there has to be space for soulfulness. Even if it is otherworldly, only through that feeling can you lend the extra life to images that make audiences believe that: 1) such imaginary universe could possibly exist; and 2) they are there when watching the movie.

Dune Part Two continues to follow this ethos, with actually indelible images, because, in contrast to the addiction of siphoning out IP as an audiences’ easy-fix, this project intentionally avoids telling people stuff. It takes them there and shows it to them.

However, since this second entry has more set-pieces than Part One, I was not as immersed as I was during the first movie.

Don’t get me wrong, I was still very much in that world. Yet, I missed the higher number of negative spaces of Part One. Those are still there in Part Two, way more than even good blockbusters, but the increment in ‘positive’ space for action sequences was, here and there, yanking me around (like I was a baby audience member in need of being woken up), thus removing me a bit from absorbing and being absorbed by the soulful worldbuilding of this cinematic project.

Like The Two Towers entry in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Denis Villeneuve’s Part Two has probably already secured its place, in the collective consciousness about this type of films, as the most enjoyable and engaging of its trilogy.

And people are probably right. Part Two is bigger in scale, it has more alien imagery, its plot is more expansive, the characters exteriorize more emotion, moral conflicts are more explicit, the action is bigger and louder, and the overall pace is way more energetic.

I just preferred the slower, more contemplative style of the first.

That’s the same reason why I think The Fellowship of the Ring is the best film, and best experience of going to the world of that trilogy.

All that being said, Dune Part Two is still way more than pure entertainment. More than a great work of adaptation, you will not find in many pieces of western media a line reading like:

“Our resources are limited, fear is all we have.”

The very distillation of why colonialism breeds terrorism, but said by the “good guys”, and by one of the major young actors in Hollywood nowadays.

Finally, I would like to give a note of appreciation to Hans Zimmer.

I know that he won an Oscar for the score of the first movie, but the music in Part Two is even better.

The motif he composed for the track “Beginnings Are Such Delicate Times” that resurfaces in other parts of the story like “A Time of Quiet Between the Storms”, or by the end in “Kiss the Ring”, is… I can’t believe I’m considering this… probably at level of “Time” from Inception, as some of the best pieces of music ever put on a film.

9.      Close Your Eyes

Only an old master like Víctor Erice, who has been making movies for more than 60 years, and who stopped making them 30 years ago, would have the perspective to express this about storytelling.

Narrating stories through the form of moving pictures, is specifically his outlook.

This is a film about the power of cinema. But such gift can be perceived as such, because the film is also knowledgeable and informative about what cinema cannot achieve with its capacity to manipulate time and memory.

In fact, Close Your Eyes uses most of its runtime to demystify the illusion that, if we capture good deeds of the past and transpose them into a present in motion towards a future, bad things will start to happen less often, because there is less space for them in the nietzschean tape that is life.

What cinema can do, according to Erice’s life experience, and maybe what we can ultimately do, not change or add memory to the world, is to be a beacon of sincere images of human aspiration and limitation (fiction or non-fiction) and, through that ample enlightenment, touch a person’s heart, even if one at a time.

And, one person, and one art piece at a time, we walk on the road of gradually saving the soul of the world.

Because: “La memoria es muy importante, sí. Pero una persona no es solamente memoria.”

8.      Anora

Perfectly constructed movie.

What do I mean by that? Only a perfectly constructed movie would be able to have a structure of three acts so different in tone and pace, in complete service of writer-director Sean Baker’s deconstructive intent, and still feel both narratively and aesthetically coherent, AND still have cinematic content and stylings for all kinds of audiences.

This film is a rare case where having everything for everyone makes it a more thematically resonant experience.

The first act is propulsive beauty edited in ways so that excess never feels gluttonous or unmanageable. Seductive bodies, blood-pumping music, private rooms, private jets, and private property, all with the amenities needed for work to finally be totally replaced by leisure.

The bait is set by Sean Baker – the promise of neoliberalism.

Then, the second act, like Cinderella’s carriage turning into a pumpkin, turns into a comedy, even risking slapstick in some masterfully choreographed scenes. This is really well-written comedy because, by being positioned as a bridge between the reverie of the first act and what’s coming in the third, it mirrors the stage of tragic exaggerated comedy consumption that societies get addicted to before tragedy is no longer unavoidable. Like we know we are communicating too much in satire and being too sarcastic, because we are afraid to be sincere with each other. Yes, we are laughing a lot, but it’s more defensive-mechanism laughter than true happiness.

We are already in a trap set by Sean Baker – the promise is already breaking left and right, and neoliberalism is starting to show its true colours (the cinematography of the film also conveys this really well).

And, finally, the third act. Music stops, laughs stop, the colour palette loses all creativity and becomes uniformized like there was a hostile corp takeover to improve efficiency of the assets.

At this stage, Sean Baker could be just expressing how the rat race dehumanizes the vibrant personalities we’ve seen in the first two acts, putting them in competition against each other, while the ones who truly have power benefit from that conflict.

But he goes an extra mile to end in optimism.

Yes, the promise of the mountain not only makes us look at others as a number of obstacles on the way to climb it, as well as having to start seeing the self as an efficiency machine to win the race (that’s what Anora herself is realizing by the end).

However, there’s hope.

Find yourself back by finding community. By seeing your true self in the eyes of someone who sees you for who you truly are. Someone, probably from your social stratum, who understands the dehumanizing needed to do the climb.

All this journey, with so many important swings in tone and pace, wouldn’t have worked without the amazing performances from one of the best acting ensembles I’ve seen in years:

Mark Eydelshteyn is overacting done right.

Portraying his parents, Darya Ekamasova and Aleksey Serebryakov are having a ball with the small amount of screentime they got in the script. In and out, but it’s a lasting impact, and crucial acting for the movie’s message to land.

Then, the secret sauce for this great screenplay to gel – the goons. In a less thought-provoking mafia drama or slapstick comedy, the tough guys would only serve as gravitational reference points for physicality, either for fighting choreographies or physical comedy. Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borisov are spectacular. They are physical, menacing without ever pulling a gun, have perfect comedic timing, and evolve as real people. And evolving from the conflict against a person equal to them, and through self-realization gradually finding humanism in their selves and in that other person, is the mirror this film is ultimately trying to be.

Yura Borisov, in particular, is remarkable. The camera can’t get enough of his interiority.

And, of course, Mikey Madison. Top acting of the year, and one of the most complete performances I’ve ever seen on screen. She runs the full gamut. And, when I say full, I mean FULL.

Impressive physicality, commanding voice, and, above all, a depth in her eyes and micro-expressions that create a totally layered person, without the need of backstory.

What Mikey Madison is doing with her micro-reactions in response to what the world of the film is throwing at her is a feat that tells you she is a very good actress. On-the-fly and simultaneously, she communicates two things that are very difficult to express together without losing the audience:

Madison is believably processing the plot happenings the way me or you would think about them, with the difference that we have time to do it while other shit springs up. And, at the same time, she is showing us who Anora is as a fleshed-out person by how she reacts (or not) to that processing.

She is the real deal as a performer. One to absolutely follow in the coming years.

7.      The Taste of Things

For the lovers of gastronomy, Trần Anh Hùng, writer-director, just delivered one of the most exquisitely films ever created about the art of cooking.

If you are more utilitarian about food, no worries. This is still a dazzling feat of direction on the subject of loving another person.

To be more precise, The Taste of Things is about two people who love each other, feel that love differently, and thus deconstruct it differently in their heads. And yet, by becoming second nature in their respective lives, it transforms into a nuanced evolution of a two-person community built around a shared interest outside of themselves.

This detail of a shared passion for an activity being experienced differently for each of the lovers, and still each one understanding what the other is differently feeling, is the crux of the film.

Then, from that outside of a relation, two very different shapes find each other inside the melting pot of common understanding, either in activity or in personality.

This human paradox is totally believable throughout the movie because it is staged very delicately and maturely by both the director and the two leading actors.

Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel are the personification of complex adults, completely confident in their respective crafts and places in life, while, at the same time, using the stage set by the film to explore how such fully-formed characters would react to their own feelings and to one another.

(I bet that even if you are utilitarian about food, you’ll also enjoy that atmosphere of the film. It’s hard to be cynical when you are looking at something so beautiful.)

6.      The Seed of the Sacred Fig

It continues to be bittersweet to celebrate Iranian cinema.

The quality is so good because they have the civilizational tools to not be in the real tragedy they currently are in.

And this is one of the big-name movies coming out of the country that is even more direct at denouncing the evil happening right now. The film is a thriller structured around social realism, but writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof accuses by crosscutting with real footage captured by mobile phones of Iranian citizens.

Knowing this, plus me being aware beforehand of the biological irony in the name “sacred fig”, explained in the opening credits of the film…

« Ficus religiosa is a tree with an unusual life cycle. Its seeds, contained in bird droppings, fall on other trees. Aerial roots spring up and grow down to the floor. Then, the branches wrap around the host tree and strangle it. Finally, the Sacred Fig stands on its own. »

… I thought this movie was going to have an even bigger focus on Iran’s anthropological and social specificities that sustain the current dictatorship, as well as a heavier indictment on religion.

Yes, the film is that, and yet much more.

Firstly, it is quite fair in the way it depicts taking advantage of religion as a means for accruing power versus the very human need for faith, namely faith as a stabilizing component in everyday people’s routines and difficulties.

For example, the moments of prayer shared by the central couple of the story were always filmed as calm scenes where husband and wife felt to be in equal spiritual ground to be able to share with each other deeper thoughts and concerns than in any other circumstance.

(of course, there is a metacommentary here to this limitation within the couple, but it doesn’t take away from the honesty being portrayed).

And secondly, regarding its framing as a political thriller to, through that lens and of the found footage, scrutinize what makes Iran the way it is right now, The Seed of the Sacred Fig extends its investigation into more than that old empire.

For the third act, instead of settling for the typical revelations of a thriller, Rasoulof decides to take us on a journey. A voyage of how we, humans across the world, have been deciding to build our own great nations.

Through characters we’ve been following in the movie, now chasing the final answers to the puzzle, and running from place to place in Tehran, from new to old, to older, the writer-director is challenging our own perception of history, culture, and foundational certainty of what it means to be ‘civilized’.

This movie is more than a dissection that shows “see! that’s the reason why Iran is the way it is right now”. This is a wake-up call to all countries in the world that consider themselves too cultured to turn into “that”.

The final sequences are filled with images that are as powerful as they are relatable at making us consider the forces we not only close our eyes to, but also accept as part of our cultural identity, in exchange of our country gradually becoming richer and stronger.

5.      Grand Tour

Despite being the new film from my favourite director from my home country, I swear I’m being as objective as possible.

Grand Tour is a triumph for putting so front and centre the two big contradictions of storytelling, making them talk to each other, while staging that debate not as a back-and-forth but through a more truthful historical continuum. (and still have drama coursing through it all!)

On one hand we have the Production Design, Art Direction, and Set Decoration departments all working together to create soundstages that landed perfectly in the last boundary between real and artificial. And, on the other hand, we have two cinematographers, Rui Poças and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, filming in two very different styles.

Rui worked in the soundstages and, through black-and-white photography, assured that those liminal spaces between authenticity and make-believe came across in one coherent aesthetic. While Sayombhu filmed on location across Asia, in colour, and documented both the routines and the idiosyncrasies of daily life in very different countries, with a type of technique that also managed to transmit his footage as liminal spaces between reality and folklore.

So, the final cut directed by Miguel Gomes is a psychosocial conversation between soundstages recreating 1917 British colonial Asia (all in Portuguese, amusingly) and 2020’s documentary footage of the different cities ‘Edward’ and ‘Molly’ travel through, with poetic voiceover in the respective Asian languages.

I really appreciate Gomes’ filmography because his most acclaimed movies are still very much about the Portuguese experience, from studying the influence of myths in the present, to conveying a timeless feeling of living in my country.

Grand Tour, even if it retains a bit of that Portuguese self-identification, particularly in the colonialist shades, is a much more multicultural movie.

On a first thematic layer, the narrative is interested in exploring the heedless utilitarianism in the way settlers relate to a newfound culture and country being colonized. But that’s just the start of the analysis.

Like his previous films, he wants to connect the main threads to something simultaneously more present and more timeless. With the plot thread of a groom-to-be running away from his bride across 1917 British colonial Asia, and with cinematography from current-day Asia, the movie is exploring two ways of alienating ourselves from observed reality. One coming from fear, the other from too much commitment.

Then, by crosscutting the artificial melodrama with the documentary-like footage of different countries, the film plays with time, geography, and even the concept of marriage to say something about culture. Not only how we relate to the differences in other cultures, but also how we define our own.

How fear can prevent us from seeing commonality. Or, the other way around, how too much focus on our own legends and day-to-day routines can dilute the real power that cultural differences bring to the human experience.

Finally, to conclude, I would like to give some words of appreciation to the work of the two leading actors. Gonçalo Waddington is an uncanny portrait of good demeanour masking fear, and he plays it really well as something coming from insecure ignorance. And Crista Alfaiate is a superstar actress. She has so much screen presence.

4.      Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Why did George Miller decide to make a prequel to Mad Max Fury Road?

Particularly him, a director who doesn’t seem anxious to tell stories filled with plot monsters or exposition for a lore-craving audience.

Fury Road is one of the best movies of the 21^st century precisely because it tells one of the most powerful stories about feminism and environmentalism without having to over-explain or over-describe how did society collapse, or how do we start to rebuild it.

So, why George?

Having experienced Furiosa, I can positively say that I was a dummy for doubting master Miller. Of course! His main motivations for going back to this plot did not come from the how did she lose her arm, or the how did she find herself being Imperator to Immortan Joe. But rather the why did she lose the arm, and the why is she Imperator in Fury Road.

It is structurally and thematically different, which surprised me. Particularly the change in themes. And that, not only legitimizes the development of this prequel, it is also the main reason to see the movie.

Knowing that the final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus was one of the first images that came up to Miller’s mind when he was storyboarding Fury Road, 25 years ago, now having studied the themes articulated there, it makes sense that he was longing to put that to film.

That scene, despite being key to the auditions of the 2015 movie, it is not about feminism or environmentalism. It is about what necessitates those philosophies.

And that’s what Furiosa, the movie, is all about.

A visual tale of transformation, where caged intent will inevitably collide with what is happening around you, and will influence your actions in the real world. That scene, and the movie as a whole, is mythmaking around the difference between belief and will.

Despite having been written more than 20 years ago, Dementus is very timely to what constitutes the rise of fascism. What’s in it to figures like these to desire to be in charge, to be at the centre of power? Is it resources, ego, a hole at the centre of their soul, or maybe a combination of it all?

This is where the lost arm of Furiosa and the ugly nose of Dementus come into play. In conversation with other myths of awfulness from their past, they are out there in the desert, trying to feel something, or, if no longer that, trying to live up to those stories they tell themselves about their selves. To vanish into their own imagination, because there are things in the real world that they don’t want to deal with, or don’t know how to solve.

And this is where the crux of the movie comes as a challenge to everybody, characters and audiences. Because, if you feel less than, what type of philosophy greater than yourself are you going to embrace to feel more than? Hate or hope?

It’s in these moments that societies fall even more, or start to recover.

For people like Dementus, and the ones that follow the philosophy of nihilism, it’s all about power, big persona, and only thinking of others like it’s a race/competition and wanting to win/dominate. These personas, despite leading to hurt, destruction and death, are paradoxically very captivating – wow, that’s a big rig, can I have it?!

Or, you follow the philosophy of the next chronological movie, Fury Road…

Honestly, these two films are fine art.

Images worthy of museum. Moving frames of men putting machines and power above their own humanity and the real life that surrounds them. How this cult of the progressing energy of machines will doom us if we lose sight of our place in the natural world, and the place of our future children in it. What could evolve us as a species can also devolve us very rapidly if we turn society into a race for the power at the end of portentous / charismatic / creative destruction.

All that being said, a haunted society that was not able to protect its children, a squandered Earth that seems impossible to live in or to heal back to life, and yet, these are not pessimistic movies.

Furiosa is even more contemplative about loss and grief, and explores revenge through a more cathartic lens – two aspects of the narrative structure chosen for this prequel that made me really fall in love with it –, yet, once again, it is the way action is shot in these films that makes the whole saga one of optimism.

George Miller is a master at that because his technique is completely coherent with his message. There are the shots of portentous / charismatic / creative action, battling for all those spaces, geographies and resources, and then there are action shots in a different visual language. A more singular one, more physical, practical, where a human is trying to do a good deed. And that specific experience of the person, cinematically captured and transmitted via the physical expression, is what gives agency to these movies’ optimism for healing the wasteland out of nihilism.

Yes, both action styles are epic. But, it’s from the skill and inventiveness of putting these two visual languages debating each other and, through that, exploring their different narrative significances that a master filmmaker can take story and worldbuilding and make them cohere. To express a message of slow positive change in the grandest possible scale.

Painterly storytelling of the highest craft, with inspiring emotional depth, because its progressive ideas have been reflected and tested inside the painter’s head for many maturing years.

Oh, by the way..

This film has, by far, the best acting of Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth’s careers up to this point. Completely different from each other, totally complementary, and, more importantly, both perfectly at the level needed to deliver the complex humanity I described above.

Genuinely, two of the best performances of the year.

3.      Perfect Days

“Next time is next time.

Now is now.”

These two statements encompass not only the life philosophy Wim Wenders’ latest film is trying to show as actionable on a daily basis, but also, for us, the feeling associated with ending up truly appreciating it.

At first glance, the phrases read as Epicureanism. But that’s the western systematization of being. In western culture, and art as its interpretation, ‘Now’ is presented as tales of materialism and hedonism, and ‘Next’ enters the fray as the legend of suffering as necessity for ambitious goals.

Wim Wenders, despite being a German writer-director, partnered with Takuma Takasaki, Japanese screenwriter, to create Perfect Days. And, in Japan, those two sentences, said like legendary actor Kōji Yakusho says them, are rooted in a completely different system of philosophy.

For decades, western cinema and TV have been either stating that the only life worth living is the ambitious one and thus pain and hardship should be embraced, or that because that’s the only way forward we are destined to recurrent states of dissatisfaction and angst.

Then comes Perfect Days, a film made by an illustrious western director that clearly has read eastern philosophy. ‘Next’ and ‘Now’ are not supposed to be in adversarial positions in that dialogue. They are part of one continuum that is the composition of random patterns and purposes in the lifetime of a person.

And, in very Japanese-fashion, like the existence of this movie, that expression is communicating both the arrangement of a life philosophy and the very real feeling of actually living it.

In western culture, it’s more difficult to find direct equivalents or translations to this communal oneness because we express ourselves, and thus dictate our lives, more from an event-structuring point-of-view, and from the observation of the phenomena that result from such events.

This is a movie that offers a different way of seeing the world and of experiencing life – without ambition. And it’s not an empty suggestion. Perfect Days shows us the beauty, calm, and happiness that is possible when we actively free ourselves from the obsession with ambition.

If our minds are always stuck to where they could be, we miss out on being where we are.

Also, a note to Cinema Trindade, a local theatre in my hometown, that continues to have Perfect Days in exhibition every week for more than a year since its premiere.

Not only a practice like this should be applauded and more common, but also makes perfect sense, because a film like this is so good for the soul that re-watching it several times in a year can only be recommended.

2.      Here

By being observant of the coexistent delicacy and breadth of the natural world, Bas Devos, writer-director, created in Here a tone-poem about the immigrant experience that also articulates both the beautiful and embracing feelings of finding commonality when an environment seems dissociative.

Like the way there is as much individual difference at microscopic level as there is ecosystemic balance and kinship in the colours of a forest… Our societies will never flourish and cultivate their evolutive potential if they don’t become safe environments for cultural and personality differences to connect to a bigger broad-mindedness.

Set in Brussels, the entanglement of the different roots (yet similarly disenchanted) of a Romanian construction worker and a Chinese doctorate student is turned into potential symbiosis by the simple first step of a warm soup.

And, sometimes, in our differences, all we need to not escape into anonymity, or discredit of language, is to connect by sharing a soulfully made stew out of vegetables coming from our common earth:

«« I woke up this morning from a deep, intense sleep. I opened my eyes. I looked around the room. And there, half-awake, half-asleep, a sudden sense of panic took a hold of me.

I couldn’t remember the names of the things around me. I saw my alarm clock on the nightstand. And I knew what it was. But the words wouldn’t come to me. The word ‘nightstand’ either. I knew what the curtain was, floating there gently in the breeze. But I couldn’t conjure up the word curtain, or the words morning breeze.

Slowly, the panic subsided.

I lay there, looking up at the nameless world. I felt animal-like.

The whole room felt like it was a part of me. I was curtain and alarm clock and bedspread and morning breeze. I was there, and I was here.

Everything became fluid and I surrendered to the oneness of ten thousand things.

But then, I heard a siren outside in the distance and I thought:

Siren.

And the names of things came back, like a wave crashing over me.

Then I got up and made coffee. »»

One of the most meaningful monologues I ever heard on film.

Not only because of when it happens in the script, or how it is accompanied by naturalistic cinematography.

But also because of how it echoes throughout the second half of the movie, until it gains complete significance in the final scene of the story.

1.      The Beast

More than the best film I have ever experienced about Artificial Intelligence, The Beast is the most accurate and powerful depiction I’ve ever seen of the humanity we destroy by continually building our civilizations around work, and the technological advancement to serve that same work.

Bertrand Bonello directed a masterpiece. By cross-cutting timelines with synthetic artefacts in the transitions, it juxtaposes typically idyllic but fabricated images of the past with the real state humankind is currently living in the present… how that is more alienating and dissociative than aspirational… particularly for a being aware of its rationality… and for what purposes it is using the technology it invented since the past.

Then, in the final timeline of the future, the film confronts the characters (and us) with a type of humanistic cross-examination that even the AI is not able to formulate or compute meaningfully: if we know that the past was worse than the present, why do we fabricate images where the past was better than the present?

Léa Seydoux gives the best acting of the year, and one of the best performances I’ve ever witnessed. She coherently navigates these swings and contrasts worked in the edit, while transcending technique by expressing real human feeling when defied by more metaphysical, anthropological, or philosophical scenarios.

George MacKay is also an excellent and essential supporting actor in this story.

For the drama and thriller aspects of the movie to work, Léa needed to have an acting partner that was not just perfectly serving the storytelling. George shows that he understood and connected with the underlying themes on more than a professional level. And, because of that, their scenes together are bigger than just thematic clash via characters clashing. As audiences we feel the real sparkles that come out of fellow humans when an intellectual challenge renders more than just an examination.

As a whole, The Beast explores the History of human edifice and tendencies, not via a retrospective procedure, like the plot might suggest, but through a primal gut punch that transports us through time and space to be able to both objectively and soulfully see what kinds of efficiency monsters we have created and have become.

This is an extraordinary film because it is able to show us that we are not only closing our eyes to the emotions we destroy by having a civilization of work, and of progress for work. The Beast is us actively choosing to dismantle that very human natural empathy, those feelings, those passions to build technological advancement on top of them.

A recurrence throughout eras where we rationalize this erasure as justifiable for our betterment. But, on a closer study like this film, it becomes clearer that such betterment is collateral to the pleasurable addiction that is the simplification of life offered by work.

In the end, it comes as no surprise that we as a species heartlessly accept disassembling our most beautiful and unique qualities, if intangible, when the trade-off is collateral progress and the drug-like gratification of a task-oriented life, alongside the measurable treats it rewards when we accomplish each task.

The Beast, among other questions, asks if Artificial Intelligence (or other technological advancement for that matter) is REALLY going to create a world where ALL people work less, and we get more time to explore the more interesting and romantic layers of our psyche.

And this is not a movie that only reveals its thesis by the end. From the very first scene, Bonello is brilliantly using the apparatus of the cinematic industry today to challenge if we are really improving technology most of the time for our betterment.

Best of the year

1. The Beast
2. Here
3. Perfect Days
4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
5. Grand Tour
6. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
7. The Taste of Things
8. Anora
9. Close Your Eyes
10. Dune: Part Two
11. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
12. Full Time
13. Janet Planet
14. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
15. Evil Does Not Exist
16. Sing Sing
17. Civil War
18. The Bikeriders
19. The Settlers
20. Godzilla Minus One
21. I Saw the TV Glow
22. Challengers
23. Kneecap
24. Monkey Man
25. The Substance
26. The Outrun
27. The Dead Don’t Hurt
28. Rebel Ridge
29. Hundreds of Beavers
30. Red Rooms
31. No Other Land
32. The Shadowless Tower
33. Mars Express
34. Dahomey
35. Strange Darling
36. Ghostlight
37. Only the River Flows
38. Longlegs
39. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
40. Conclave

Happy to describe

• Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
• Inshallah a Boy
• Good One
• A Quiet Place: Day One
• Gasoline Rainbow
• Am I OK?
• The First Slam Dunk
• Kinds of Kindness
• Twisters
• The Fall Guy