Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For better or worse, directly or inferentially, movies reflect the zeitgeist. This year, they predominantly resonated dread or resignation, and even those focused on personal endeavor had a political tinge. With humanity’s and especially America’s scabrous underbelly fully exposed, both idealism and irony seem to be taking a break, leaving something in between that doesn’t quite amount to earnestness. It’s not the nineties or even the seventies, though the occasional and fleeting nostalgic nod to better days lightened things up. Here’s one (alphabetical) list of the year’s notable movies, with the usual acknowledgement of idiosyncrasy and incompleteness.
Anora. With his patented verve and wit, Sean Baker plumbs a contemporary woman’s paradoxical forging of self-sufficiency by retailing sex, humanizes Russian oligarchs without elevating them, and elicits a transcendent breakout performance from Mikey Madison.
Between the Temples. Nathan Silver gets wryly disruptive, enlisting an inspired Carol Kane to play the instigator of a May–December romance with a sad-sack widower, oblivious to convention for the sake of happiness, however jarring that may be to the unadventurous.
Blitz. At once immersively and elliptically, Steve McQueen reaches back to a London besieged from the air in 1940 to frame war’s complexity, in particular its cruel, staccato contingency and its abundant opportunities for depravity and redemption alike.
The Brutalist. Outré and divisive, Brady Corbet’s fetid and febrile deep dive into the immigrant experience rivals Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood as an indictment of American capitalism and exceptionalism, adding exasperating but piquant ambivalence about Randianism.
A Complete Unknown. James Mangold fixes a confident lens on Dylan’s transition from aspiring Greenwich Village folk singer to auteur for a generation, capturing his unforgiving single-mindedness, instinct for myth-making, and defiantly offhand charisma.
Hard Truths. Anchored by Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s relentlessly desperate performance, Mike Leigh’s dark comedy recalls O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in its sharp and tragic presentation of unfathomable irrationality and damage as part of the daily grind.
Janet Planet. Set in bohemian western Massachusetts in summer 1991, playwright Annie Baker’s film debut radiates subdued hope while implicitly lamenting that any promise of a less contested and more tolerant world, wistfully associated with the nineties, has faded.
La Chimera. Fellini meets Visconti in Alice Rohrbacher’s sui generis road movie, gritty yet dreamy, about a modern-day grave-robber and his somewhat merry band searching Italy for lost love, getting muddy with history, and dissing high-end art collectors enroute to humble repose.
The Outrun. Nora Fingscheidt’s visually stunning, triumphantly non-linear, and instantly canonical movie furnishes a perfectly calibrated Saoirse Ronan, who as the cringingly alcoholic Rona sells the study of seaweed and its environmental virtues as a way out of self-destruction.
The Room Next Door. In his first English-language film, Pedro Almodóvar liberally but authentically translates to the screen Sigrid Nunez’s novel What You Are Going Through about the agonizing humanity of confronting the end of life.
September 5. Peter Sarsgaard, Leonie Benesch, and John Magaro are superb in Tim Feldbahm’s riveting account of Black September’s 1972 kidnapping and murder of 11 members of Israel’s Olympic team in Munich, depicted as a transformative moment in TV journalism.
Small Things Like These. In Tim Mielants’ sober testament to worldly decency, Cillian Murphy’s melancholy coal delivery man in 1985 Ireland uncovers the notorious “Magdalene Laundries” scheme, whereby Catholic nuns wrested babies from indentured unwed mothers.
Other estimable 2024 films include Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, with the terrific Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer at once dissecting and reinforcing the myth of the rugged individualist; Alex Garland’s Civil War, projecting a worst case that is no longer unimaginable; Michael Keaton’s Goodrich, a fond and knowing riff on careers in art; Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which posits a creepy romance with a weird drollness only he could muster; Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s artful and innovative adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel about an infamous reform school for Blacks; A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s nicely judged existential meditation on coping; Sing Sing, the nuanced and inspiring prison story directed by Greg Kwedar; and Tuesday, Daina Oniunas-Pusic’s magical realist contemplation of loss via Julia Louis-Dreyfus. One belated vintage discovery warrants mention: John Crowley’s rollickingly nasty Irish comedy Intermission from 2003, featuring Colin Farrell, Kelly Macdonald, and Cillian Murphy, before they were famous, as Dublin ne’er-do-wells.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
