Out with Old Forms

I’ve often had trouble getting together even three or four new releases for a best-of-the-year list. In 2024, there’s probably two dozen I could include, while still regretting a number of deserving films that didn’t make the cut. This is in part because I haven’t paid close attention to contemporary cinema since the pandemic started, if not earlier. Films playing at the theater slipped right by me and fest favorites looked like little more than a bunch of boxes to check to say that I’m informed.

What I think are the best movies to come out this year and what I think are the best images are separate. Many of the most incredible moving images I’ve seen in 2024 aren’t what you would conventionally call “cinema”—IndyCar racing again on the Milwaukee Mile proved to be one of the most exciting prospects in motorsports by dipping back into the past and diving into the future, and the way Leigh Diffey called the last laps at the Coke Zero Sugar 400 and Watkins Glen, where the camera flies and dives to the track to the tune of V8s. I’ve also become fond of this YouTube video riding along the worst-reviewed cruise in America, where the cracks in the utopia-at-sea reveal itself nakedly under the 360-degree camera of a vlogger.

And on a serious note: the most powerful image created this year is the drone footage of Yahya Sinwar, tired, hunched iconographically in a dusty chair in a bombed-out building, blood dripping from the stub where a hand should be—the general dying on the frontline against his people’s annihilation, captured by the cold, unfeeling machine that seeks to destroy him and his entire nation. With his one good hand, resisting till his last breath, he throws a pole at the drone—and the machine recoils.

The films that drew me in the most this year tended to rip apart the old forms—Kiyoshi Kurosawa stripped apart his naturalist horror to its barest (and shortest) bones with Chime and David Cronenberg dropped any pretense of narrative momentum in The Shrouds to make a philosophic work worthy of his New Wave sci-fi contemporaries. But more in line with the present, Philip Thompson dove into the psychosis of the kinds of sitcoms that stopped being endemic to the culture sometime in the 2000s with Living Reality, and Rap World took us lovingly back to Bush-era DIY that never had the ability to make anything of itself. Most importantly, we gave a coda to 2010s independent films with Zia Anger’s My First Film.

I also found myself getting lost in the 1990s that reminded me so much of my largely 2000s childhood through Annie Baker’s debut Janet Planet. Another debut, Jinho Myung’s Softshell, suggested a way to take the now-aged ways of microbudget American indies and play with them for a new generation. Looking to the future is entirely the concern of Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau’s Direct Action, a film which more clearly explicated my approach to anarchism than anything I’ve ever seen. But if there’s an emerging future, it’s happening in mainland China. Many have proclaimed the 21st as the “Chinese Century,” a concept that hasn’t been solidified in images until now with Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, a work which defines the word “major,” bobbing through the last 25 years of his digitally-realized China and painting a portrait of a country that this century—like America in the last—will shape the things to come.

My Top 10 of 2024:

—Caught by the Tides dir. Jia Zhangke

—Janet Planet dir. Annie Baker

—Softshell dir. Jinho Myung

—Direct Action dir. Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau

—The Shrouds dir. David Cronenberg

—My First Film dir. Zia Anger

—Living Reality dir. Philip Thompson

—A Traveler’s Needs dir. Hong Sang-soo

—Rap World dir. Danny Scharar & Conner O’Malley

—Chime dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa