This year’s best movies feel plugged in, inextricably connected to forces bigger than the ordinary faces of local and private authority—and confrontationally so, with a sense of danger and urgency amid forms of pressure that are all the more terrifying for acting invisibly and inexorably. In other words, these movies are all political thrillers—some of them literally so, with stories that overtly involve governmental actions. Others, whose stories merely suggest a political perspective, are no less energized by it. In all, the usual cinematic run of crime and evasion, desperate measures and paranoid obsessions, reverberate with a specific sense of playing for more than a payday or a romance. The films belong to history at large.
Spectacular cinema, regardless of substance or commercial appeal, places special artistic demands on directors, for the simple reason that it involves events and actions beyond the daily purview. Extraordinary subjects call for extraordinary styles, which is why this year’s best films offer the special thrills of aesthetic tours de force pulled off with flair. That’s also why there’s something especially disheartening about mediocrity on a grand scale, as with the glut of overproduced, overblown franchise films, which lack both personalized imagination and the more modest virtue of clear observation.
Last month, the industry analyst Richard Rushfield noted that “suddenly, Hollywood isn’t making dramatic films anymore,” and did some box-office analysis demonstrating both the dearth of drama (defined loosely as earnest realism) and its lack of commercial success. But he also noted that the genre still thrives—on TV. The success of drama in TV-series form suggests that it’s actually wrong to blame the box office for the waning of the genre on the big screen. What has doomed movie dramas is, instead, their aesthetic (or lack thereof). Because their basic concern is with psychology and messaging, screenplays dominate and the direction is often merely functional, as it also tends to be on TV (because of the script-driven demands of showrunning) and with franchise films (because of domineering studios). Even independent dramatic features made without overbearing producers are often directed no more originally than ones made for TV. That’s the artistic hazard of realism: the filming of ordinary life in realistic ways defaults to inconspicuous and modest styles.
This isn’t just a problem for Hollywood and independent filmmakers. It has long been an issue in international filmmaking, intensifying in recent years. Because of economic difficulties in national film industries (whether a matter of box-office or of financing) international co-productions have proliferated, and these often yield a blandly homogenized international style. Alternatively, sometimes the quest to reach world markets by way of film-festival acclaim gives rise to the opposite—to big swings and big misses, the kind of festival films that, by ambition, idiosyncrasy, and length, cut through the clamor but exude affectation and effortfulness. (Such flashy methods also often elide substance in favor of hand-waving generalities and coy silences, as in such recent releases as “Sirāt” and “Sound of Falling.”)
In other words, festival darlings, from here or elsewhere, frequently offer borrowed styles, modelling themselves either on commercial successes or on succès d’estime and providing little in the way of an immediate and first-person reckoning with cinematic form. This, above all, is what’s at stake in the year’s exciting spate of self-aware cinematic spectacles. In their confrontations with power, the year’s best films also confront the artistic power of the cinema itself. Their spectacular aspect neither diminishes nor merely adorns their subjects; the challenge that this year’s best films meet is to develop copious texts, energetic dramas, and substantial ideas by way of a turn to the image, by attention to the “how” and the “why” of movies. The year’s best movies are reflections, assertions, and expansions of the art of the cinema itself, at a time when the art form is under siege from its small-screen rivals.
1. “Sinners”
Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton in “Sinners.”Photograph courtesy Warner Bros. / Everett
The dazzling virtuosity with which Ryan Coogler meets the technical challenge of casting Michael B. Jordan in the dual role of identical twins is matched by the conceptual audacity of this historical drama, set in rural Mississippi in 1932, and centered on the essence of the blues and the music’s colossal reach—emotional, cultural, political, economic, and even metaphysical. The twins, returning home after enriching themselves in gangland Chicago, open a juke joint and hire a young prodigy and an esteemed elder to perform there. By raising their music to new local prominence, they unintentionally attract cosmic predators (vampires!) who hope to lay hold of it. Coogler melds a richly detailed social background—a vision of the inescapable violence of the Jim Crow era—with the overwhelming romanticism of love and lust under fire.
2. “The Mastermind”
Setting this drama of a quick heist and its long aftermath in 1970, amid nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and Nixonian efforts to repress dissent, Kelly Reichardt extracts a criminal scheme from the petty realm of profit and recognizes it as desperate, blundering existential revolt. Josh O’Connor plays the titular planner, an out-of-work cabinetmaker at odds with his suburban comforts and the vague constraints of ordinary life, who devises a plan to steal paintings from a museum and thereby launches himself into extraordinary adventures—comedic, melancholy, calamitous—that mesh ever tighter with the political conflicts of the day.
3. “The Secret Agent”
The mind-bending pressures of political persecution under an authoritarian regime are merely the premise for the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ample, turbulent, propulsively energetic, and ferociously principled drama, set in 1977, while the country was ruled by a military dictatorship. Wagner Moura brings taut control and thoughtful dynamism to the role of a scientist driven into hiding by legal and extralegal threats. Mendonça centers the expressively written, finely observed story on the safe house where the scientist is harbored and exalts his extended community of secret sympathizers while also contemplating in unflinching detail the crude malevolence of his persecutors.
4. “The Phoenician Scheme”
Wes Anderson’s films are always plugged in, or, at least, have been so since “Moonrise Kingdom.” With the highest degree of fantasy, he approaches political life with a blend of hands-on conflict and philosophical abstraction, and in this movie he pursues the tendency to distant extremes, viewing international tycoonery and industrial modernization amid espionage, imperialism, and revolt—and also amid family conflict. As ever, Anderson’s hyper-ornamental style is a crucially substantial embodiment of power. Here, that power is also domestic: this is one of the year’s many films in which a father-daughter bond is the engine of drama.
5. “Hedda”
Tessa Thompson in “Hedda.”Photograph courtesy Amazon MGM Studios / Everett
Nia DaCosta supercharges Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” by expanding its setting to the hermetic majesty of a lavish country estate and the overheated whirl of a welcome-home party for the heroine and her overtaxed husband, and by making her purple past dominate the present tense. The film also brings the intellectual achievement at the play’s center—an academic manuscript—to passionate dramatic life. Here, the action takes place in nineteen-fifties England, Hedda (Tessa Thompson) is Black, and the scholar who was Hedda’s former lover is a woman (Nina Hoss). DaCosta rightly finds Ibsen capacious enough for dramatic and cultural possibilities far beyond his immediate purview—apt tribute, both faithful and free, from one artist to another.
6. “Afternoons of Solitude”
Sixty-five-plus years of lightweight synch-sound cameras—and, then, compact video equipment—have turned observational documentaries into a cliché in constant need of reimagination. Few filmmakers do so as comprehensively as Albert Serra does, with a subject that demands an especially wary form of observation: bullfighting. The result is a rigorous, unflinching view of mortal showdowns ravishingly stylized. The film follows a single torero through a year and a half of bouts, showing behind-the-scenes preparation and after-the-battle medical care and emotional decompression—but it’s dominated by the dangers of the corrida, and Serra, needing to find a method for seeing closely but from safely afar, invents an aesthetic to go with it.
7. “Highest 2 Lowest”
Spike Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” is better than the original because it filters out the police-procedural sidetrack and endows the story with a substantial and provocative blast of cultural politics. Lee sets it in Brooklyn—where else?—but in a sleek and posh new waterfront high-rise. The protagonist, played by Denzel Washington, is a music executive who must ransom the kidnapped teen-age son of his longtime friend, and whose rescue effort brings him deep into the world of hip-hop, which he once boosted and now disdains. The visual swing, confrontational dialogue, and wide-world stakes expand Lee’s cinematic universe into strange new turf.
7½. “This Life of Mine”
For her last film, Sophie Fillières, who knew that she was terminally ill while making it, ran to the end of a path she’d long been following and leaped into the void. The inhibitions and idiosyncrasies on the basis of which she crafted her protagonists in more than two decades of filmmaking are here expanded to transcendental adventure. Agnès Jaoui—starring as a poet who works at an ad agency where she no longer fits in, grabs avidly but awkwardly at a new life, and then gets sick—invests every impulse and hesitation, every exclamation point and question mark in Fillières’s script, with a self-affirming lilt of liberation. (This film, released in France in 2024, is still unreleased in the U.S.)
8. “Misericordia”
Alain Guiraudie, who has for decades explored the emotional and social dimensions of gay life in rural France, crafts an erotic thriller that’s also a murder mystery, albeit one of a distinctive and inventive sort. A thirtysomething baker returns to a small town for the funeral of his mentor, a man with whom he had been secretly in love. He’s welcomed into the household by the mentor’s widow, and, when that couple’s adult son vanishes, he comes under suspicion. While unfolding the investigation, Guiraudie also finds the town seething with stifled lust that’s ready to burst out volcanically—and that’s inseparable from the natural mystery and wonder of country life.
9. “One Battle After Another”
Teyana Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another.”Photograph courtesy Warner Bros. / Everett
The lucidity and directness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s premise—revolution is a thrilling and ruinous myth, community organization is comparatively dull but urgently helpful—is this year’s cinematic purloined letter, too obvious to be acknowledged, especially by those who either share in the myth or decry it as reality. Much of the movie is a muddle of tone, with scattershot antics and tossed-off themes amid scenes and moments of immense power. On the other hand, its grand and deft action scenes are balanced by breathtakingly exquisite pinpoint observations: one of the year’s great cinematic touches is a small rug rolling itself back automatically, by design, to conceal a secret escape hatch.
10. “Marty Supreme”
This hectic and violent, romantic and antic drama, set in 1952 and freely adapted from the life of the table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, stars Timothée Chalamet as a fast-talking, shamelessly self-serving, recklessly self-confident young star of the game whose schemes propel him far from his Lower East Side beginnings—into the city’s high-culture cloisters, the criminal underworld, and the realm of international diplomacy. As directed by Josh Safdie (who wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein), the tale lurches wildly through a series of tense adventures that defy logic and prudence, as Marty himself does, in favor of experience and excitement—and that fill the screen with a tangy array of brazen, willful characters who put up a good fight.
11. “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon”
Andrew Scott and Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon.”Photograph courtesy Sony Pictures Classics / Everett
The accidental diptych offered this year by Richard Linklater, of two artists—the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on his way up and the songwriter Lorenz Hart on his way out—also offers contrasting dramatic styles that suggest the polar extremes of bio-pics. “Nouvelle Vague,” about the making of Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” is a hedgehog movie, defining Godard by the ideas that emerge from his working life with his cast, his crew, and his fellow-filmmakers; it’s a marvel of impersonation. In “Blue Moon,” Linklater’s vision of Hart is personal and fox-like, an intimate portrait of him at a bar as he dispenses glittering aphorisms of lifeworn wisdom in the face of professional and romantic disasters—a marvel of incarnation.
12. “Eephus”
For his first feature, Carson Lund developed a daring premise, telling the story of a single baseball game—in a New England adult-recreational league, some time in the nineteen-nineties, on a field that’s about to be erased by the construction of a school—from the time that the players approach the field to the time that they leave it. Lund keeps the action tethered to the site, ranging no farther than the dugouts, the woods beyond the outfield, and the nearest street. From this challenge, Lund provides a pointillistic group portrait of idiosyncratic characters, parses the sport’s action with a singularly analytical yet subjective eye, and expands the melancholy of farewells to symphonic dimensions.
13. “Peter Hujar’s Day”
From the amazing but narrow premise of reënacting a 1974 interview of the photographer Peter Hujar by the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, Ira Sachs develops a mighty and vivid portrait of an era and a milieu—and a memorial for Hujar himself, who died in 1987, of aids. The subject of the conversation is what Hujar did in the previous day. The movie has only two actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, but their performances are more than merely precise and expressive—they’re evocative, and what they evoke is the people under discussion, such as Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg. The movie conjures them all, bringing these personalities to the mind’s eye as vividly as if they were physically filmed as characters.
14. “Invention”
In a year of father-and-daughter movies, it’s refreshing to see this boldly accomplished daughter-and-father movie, from the woman’s point of view—one that’s sharpened and amplified by its blend of fiction and nonfiction. It’s made jointly by Courtney Stephens, who directed, and Callie Hernandez, who co-wrote it and plays Carrie Fernandez, who travels to a rural Massachusetts town to claim the ashes of her late father and gets entangled in the economic, social, and supernatural mysteries surrounding a dubious medical invention that he’d tried to market. With observational precision and unhinged dialogue, the filmmakers traverse the wilds of conspiracies and frauds to discern mighty and enduring connections of nature and culture.
15. “The Fishing Place”
The veteran American independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza, filming for the second time in Norway, here probes the country’s history in a drama set during its occupation by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. A Norwegian woman who’s installed as the housekeeper for a German émigré priest in exile gets caught in a tangle of conflicting loyalties and high-stakes maneuvers. The movie is a series of intimate confrontations, public and private, which Tregenza—doing his own virtuosic cinematography—films in monumentally extended shots, mounting the camera on a crane that he wields like a paintbrush that ultimately pivots toward his own activity in one of the boldest and strangest of recent reflexive twists.
16. “This Woman”
This first feature by Alan Zhang, which she co-wrote with Hihi Lee, builds a shifting interplay of fiction and nonfiction into the melodramatic story of a young woman in Beijing named Beibei, a real-estate agent who gets drawn ever closer, albeit platonically, to a male colleague whose wife lashes out threateningly. Burdened with family obligations, Beibei needs money and takes increasingly desperate measures to get it—then the pandemic freezes her life in place. With coolly passionate images, frankly declarative dialogue, and interludes in the form of interviews, Zhang discerningly sees through the characters’ immediate troubles to the pressures imposed by Chinese society at large.
17. “The Empire”
On a decade-plus roll since the self-reinventive inspirations of “Li’l Quinquin,” Bruno Dumont extends that local epic to cosmic dimensions in a “Star Wars” parody set on France’s rugged northern coast. With a story of secret cabals and a child born to rule, Dumont projects the nasty prejudices and bureaucratic rigors of local politics, the tangles of family allegiances, and the tender grunge of young lust into divine and diabolical clashes run from celestial and subterranean castles. The result is as outrageous and uproarious as it is visionary.
18. “Fire of Wind”
The Portuguese director Marta Mateus’s first feature, baring layers of history and legend beneath local events, is set in a vineyard where laborers, menaced by a bull that gets free—or perhaps has been unleashed against them—take refuge high in the estate’s trees. There, they tell stories of their lives and the difficulties and deprivations that they’ve long endured, including ones involving war and persecution. The cast features nonprofessional actors drawn from the area; their declamatory style of performance, along with Mateus’s hieratic images, endow the movie’s dramatic realism with the power of myth.
19. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”
The Zambian-born British director Rungano Nyoni sets this drama in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, where a young woman who has recently returned home from Europe for a family visit chances, on a late-night drive, to find a corpse in the road: her uncle. In the resulting turmoil, female relatives voice accusations that he had sexually assaulted them. As family secrets emerge, the protagonist is outraged to discover the prevalence of sexual predation—along with the power of patriarchal institutions and a code of silence to protect the predators. Nyoni films with a keen-edged clarity while finding in daily life a rich array of symbols ready to release their explosive meaning.
20. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Rose Byrne in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”Photograph by Logan White / A24
Mary Bronstein, in her second feature, captures fury under pressure with as distinctive a tone and a style, and as unusual a realm of sympathies, as she did in her first, “Yeast.” In the story of a mother whose chronically ill daughter requires exceptional attention and whose husband, a sea captain, is away for long stretches, Bronstein discovers new and nerve-shredding ways to compose and deploy closeups, turns casual encounters into emotionally violent crises, and—amid intense visual identification with the protagonist (incarnated with red-hot energy by Rose Byrne)—doesn’t hesitate to consider in context the calmer virtues of forethought and reason.
As a general rule, documentaries should be judged no differently from fiction films. But, in this year of foregrounded spectacle, the rule is hard to keep to. The best of this year’s many excellent nonfiction films are no less worthy than the year’s fictions, but it’s essentially impossible to rank comparatively across the two categories. So I’m putting them on their own here: “Suburban Fury,” “Life After,” “Pavements,” “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” “Zodiac Killer Project,” “Carol & Joy.” ♦
