Though next week brings one last spate of prestige releases—including musician biopics A Complete Unknown and Better Man, Nicole Kidman kinkfest Babygirl, and upscale Gothic horror Nosferatu—2024 is now pretty much a wrap as far as “the seventh art” goes. All the relevant titles (including those above) have duly been screened for critics, and after a long year of movie consumption, yours truly has been cramming in as many remaining stray titles as possible.
The end result was basically the same as ever: There were a lot of good movies released over the last 12 months, though not all that many of them came from “Hollywood” per se, and their number do not necessarily include some of the more conspicuous awards-bait titles getting heavily pushed at present. (Generally speaking, you can guess which pricey/lofty enterprises we weren’t enthused about by their lack of coverage in this column. It seemed counterproductive to dump on, say, Megalopolis, when in theory that’s still just the kind of wild gamble the industry should be encouraged to support.)
The future seldom looks bright these days, and who knows how it will work out for cinema, at least in the US. The incoming administration is led by a media addict nonetheless terribly spiteful about his supposed mistreatment by the media—never mind that he owes a great deal to a certain “reality TV” series not to be confused with the Apprentice feature noted below. Forever thirsting after Hollywood glamour yet resentful of being spurned by most living exemplars of it, he can be expected to make life difficult for an already nervous entertainment business. Plus, already there are ominous signs of accommodation from studios now owned by corporations whose CEOs are hardly in it “for art’s sake.” They may well soon consider too risky (and/or too “woke”) projects that would’ve raised no eyebrows a few years or even months ago. Then there’s the whole existential threat of AI, which might render the palpable human touch of non-programmed creativity an object of wistful nostalgia some not-so-distant day. We shall see.
So, all the more reason to enjoy what we got in 2024. The alphabetically-ordered top 20 and honorable mentions below weren’t strictly from that year, but they reached our shore in one form or another during the last annum. (Don’t ask me why something as good as Nowhere Special took nearly four years to travel from festival premiere to US screens—long enough that its director’s subsequent film, The Return, is already in theaters.) As is so often the case, there were far too many good-or-better documentaries to choose from, so I included just those that really stuck with me. All titles following are US productions, unless otherwise noted. You can click on each to see our prior coverage… in a few cases there wasn’t any (usually because nobody told us it was opening), and in a few more, the film in question will be reaching the Bay Area in coming weeks.
Top 20:
All Shall Be Well (Hong Kong, Ray Yeung)
Anora (Sean Baker)
Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy (Stephen Ujlaki, Chris Jones)
The Bibi Files (Alexis Bloom)
Blitz (UK, Steve McQueen)
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (Argentina, Tomas Gomez Bustillo)
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Conclave (UK/US, Edward Berger)
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
Disco Boy (France, Giacomo Abbruzzese)
The Fox (Germany/Austria, Adrian Goiginger)
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
Infested (France, Sebastien Vanicek)
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Vietnam, Thien An Pham)
Janet Planet (Annie Baker)
Love Lies Bleeding (UK/US, Rose Glass)
Kneecap (Ireland, Rich Peppiat)
My Old Ass (Canada, Megan Park)
A Real Pain (Poland/US, Jesse Eisenberg)
Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink (Rick Goldsmith)
Honorable Mentions:
The Apprentice, The Beast, Between the Temples, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, La Cocina, A Complete Unknown, Eno, Girls Will Be Girls, High Tide, How to Have Sex, The Last Stop in Yuma County, Lies We Tell, The Line, The Monk and the Gun, No Other Land, Nowhere Special, Oddity, The Seed of the Sacred Pig, September 5, Sing Sing, Small Things Like These, Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat, Starring Jerry As Himself, Terrestrial Verses, Touch, Woman of the Hour.
Last weekend saw the annual voting meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics’ Circle, and after all the hair-pulling, screaming and miscellaneous battery was done (I’ll be wearing a tourniquet for some time), these were the results:
Best Film: Anora
Best Director: Brady Corbet, The Brutalist
Best International Feature: The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Best Documentary Feature: Sugarcane
Best Animated Feature: Flow
Best Actor: Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
Best Actress: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths
Best Supporting Actor: Yura Borisov, Anora
Best Supporting Actress: Joan Chen, Didi
Best Adapted Screenplay: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin, John Whitfield, Sing Sing
Best Original Screenplay: Sean Baker, Anora
Best Cinematography: Lol Crawley, The Brutalist
Best Editing: Sean Baker, Anora
Best Original Score: Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist
Best Production Design: Judy Becker, The Brutalist
Marlon Riggs Award: Rahsaan Thomas, Cori Thomas and the San Quentin Film Festival
Special Citation for Independent Cinema: Femme
New movies are scarce this week, but there’s one old movie getting revived that you probably haven’t seen: Toute une nuit, a 1982 feature by the late Chantal Ackerman, who remains best known for 1975’s 201-minute minimalist epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. This is far breezier affair, but in its own way just as experimental, with no lead characters and no real plot. Instead, we get a sort of tasting menu of both, as two dozen or more people are glimpsed—mostly in couples, however amorous or conflicted—during the course of one long night’s course towards dawn.
Very few of these actors are familiar (you might recognize Aurore Clement or Tcheky Karyo in passing), and the settings are even more anonymous than they are: Otherwise-empty cafes and bars, apartment building staircases, sidewalks, street corners, residential front doors, all the semi-public places where people meet or part. These vignettes are variably dramatic or comedic, offering as a whole a sort of poetical-abstract survey of the complexity in ordinary human relations. There is very little music or dialogue. What do these enigmatic, often visually compelling miniatures add up to over 91 minutes’ course? Something evanescent, arguably formless or frivolous, yet in its very fragility warm, droll, and universal. The newly restored feature opens at the Roxie on Thurs/19. (More info here.)
If you’d rather take your experimental cinema at home and in less quasi-narrative terms, San Francisco Cinematheque is a partner in presenting three titles (Colectivo los ingravidos’ The Winged Stone, Simon Liu’s Refuse Room, Ayanna Dozier’s Bounded Intimacy) within the annual Media City Film Festival, whose 27th virtual edition is currently running through December 30. It offers free access to over seventy artworks, a majority world premieres. But there are also archival titles, like Funeral Parade of Roses director Toshio Matsumoto’s frenetic 1975 short Atman, and Harun Farocki’s 1969 Inextinguishable Fire, a grim indictment of chemical warfare weapon napalm made in the midst of the Vietnam War.
There are shorts in myriad idioms from around the world, and a handful of features, including The Soldier’s Lagoon, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa’s essay on impact of a colonialist legacy on Colombia’s natural environments, and Deborah Stratman’s geologically-minded Last Things, which we previously wrote about here. The Canada-based organization Media City, founded thirty years ago, embraces “artists’ cinema” in myriad forms. This year’s contributors to the online program include Sky Hopkina, Sharon Lockhart, Skip Norman, Jocelyne Saab, Mona Hatoum, Richard Serra, and many more. Info and access are here.
