I’ve made one of these wrap-up posts every year since 2016, which save for one or two cursory paragraphs merely acted as a repository for me to list all of the films that had a strong affection during that particular release year; over on The Film Stage I also wrote a few sentences that accompanied each film on my top 10 from 2017 to 2020. However, this year I felt like expanding this into a full-fledged feature. There are a number of reasons for this: first and foremost, I recently saw that Jonathan Rosenbaum reposted one of his yearly lists for the Chicago Reader on his website and decided it was another one of his great ideas that I could poach (cf. the titling system and rating blocks at the head of each review on here); Justin Chang’s Los Angeles Times roundups played a part as well. The fact that this exercise had started to feel de rigueur and needed spicing up for me to remain interested in it certainly helped matters.
But just as important is the quality of films this year, and how I and others have received them. By my estimation, this might be the very best year I’ve experienced for film (when taken by US theatrical release) since I started truly paying attention to it back in 2016. In terms of sheer number of truly great films, only 2016 and 2019 truly compare, and I generally feel a greater passion for this year’s selection that I can’t chalk up just to recency bias; this, despite the fact that I’ve gotten around too far fewer films than in those years. Part of this is simply canny prioritization, but part of it is a potentially worrying further step in my longstanding leniency—I avoided seeing a single film I flat-out didn’t like until the last few weeks.
And yet, despite this overall positivity, there’s been a whole spate of American films where my admiration is leagues more muted than the general consensus. I was rather sorely tempted to dedicate a large section of this post simply to Armond White-esque Better Thans, making comparisons just between these excellent but mildly-to-moderately overpraised works to films that I loved more and had a greater insight into a peculiar shared subject matter, yet didn’t make it onto my top 10, but I’ll just confine myself to listing and not explaining, some more readily explicable and commented upon than others: Priscilla > Killers of the Flower Moon; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. > The Holdovers; Occupied City > The Zone of Interest; Nobody’s Hero > Passages; Ferrari > Oppenheimer.
With those juxtapositions in mind, it’s at least a little frustrating to see some observations that have risen up about the nature of consensus with regards to this particular year. It’s true that, to take just my list as an example, that every film—with the perennially hazy example of Hong Sang-soo—has and will continue to appear on many people’s top ten lists, though some are inevitably vastly more popular than others. But the aforementioned multitude of films that people have praised inevitably causes certain gaps in what some publication voting blocs focus on compared to others. To take just the Film Comment list—a fairly widespread group of people (which I am a part of), close to if not fully representative of a person well-versed in this year’s offerings—as an example: I could very easily put together a list of ten films that have gotten an overwhelming deal of praise in one sector or another but which did not even make the published top twenty: Oppenheimer, Barbie, The Holdovers, Past Lives, Poor Things, The Taste of Things, All of Us Strangers, The Killer, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., Perfect Days. The fact that this list just on its own could be the entirety of a fairly average critic’s top 10 (not to imply that this is the case) speaks to the breadth of this year, as do the pointed exclusions from the above list of a moderately well-seen acclaimed work like The Delinquents or a more divisive effort like Maestro. Sure, there are still the ideas of over-generousness and conformity to contend with, and the lack of something like A New Old Play which got infinitely less recognition than anything on my list from last or this year (Locarno premiere notwithstanding).
But I would contend that this is nothing new, that listmaking when it comes to the best films of the year always risks the potential of repeating others (especially those with a marked influence on one’s own taste). Does the film culture landscape absolutely need yet another list with, say, the Todd Haynes on it? Absolutely not. But I know that my list would not be true to myself and what I love in film if it was absent, and that’s ultimately what these gratifying endeavors entail. So, from my vantage point enmeshed in far too many different areas of this cinematic landscape, to imply in such a year packed with brilliant films that it’s the same ten films over and over again is total nonsense.
As always, this list is merely meant to capture my feelings about the films I was able to see at this moment in time, strictly limited to the films that were theatrically released in New York City this year.
1. Walk Up. Admittedly, much of my total ardor likely rests in its synthesis of my favorite period of Hong Sang-soo, stretching roughly from Oki’s Movie to Yourself and Yours, and his current occupations with aging and mortality. Haunted is the word I’ve applied over and over again to it, and it also handily describes the way it hangs over my psyche; in truth it’s a hard film for me to write about, both because I saw it only once a year ago and because the emotions it stirs up within me are themselves elusive and unsettled. If it makes for an odder and less popular number one (and top-tier Hong) than, say, The Novelist’s Film or On the Beach at Night Alone, then maybe that’s for the better; when my favorite working director can shake and confound me, it’s all the more wondrous to behold.
2. Pacifiction. A film that, despite being resolutely atmospheric, seems to be filled with nothing but indelible moments. Still resoundingly the directorial achievement of the year, Albert Serra’s effort just looks and feels like nothing else I can recall seeing, fit for an examination of all things uncanny and defamiliarized. While it takes the ghosts of colonialism and militarism potentially resurrected as its subject, the settings and hazy glow are modern yet out of present time, as is Benoît Magimel’s still best-of-the-year performance. One in the great trilogy of white-suit outsider films from the past few years (alongside Joe Alwyn in Stars at Noon and Josh O’Connor in La chimera); I’ll never stop thinking about him fruitlessly searching for a submarine with a handheld flashlight at night, or surmounting a mammoth wave on the back of a jet ski, or standing in the rain at a stadium. The sights and sounds it offers can’t be encapsulated, only witnessed.
3. Showing Up. Such a forthrightly quiet and minor film, such that it’s become something of a deserved cause célèbre for those of us who adore “smallness.” I’d trade that quiet scene of sculpting arms for most anything this year, and Kelly Reichardt’s wry comedic sensibilities go hand-in-hand with the sense of negotiating one’s own way of life, one little action or word at a time. The corporeal weight of what in other hands might be caricature or heavy-handed metaphor grounds this in a way that represents a new apex for this American treasure: creativity struggles to free itself from drudgery for all of its characters with varying degrees of visibility, and its exhale offers such a sweet reprieve.
4. Anatomy of a Fall. The most misunderstood great film of the year. I must confess that it’s been a relief to see people actually familiar with Justine Triet’s interests broadly appreciate this more than those just seeing it as the prestige Palme d’Or winner/courtroom drama, but its virtues—a uniformly strong and cunning ensemble, a multivarious approach to various means of videography, a canny understanding of the limits of narrativity in both fiction and in ostensibly truth-finding endeavors—still feel undervalued to me, even apart from the more obvious virtues of Hüller’s performance and the engrossing screenplay. If only the average example of middlebrow filmmaking was even half as entertaining or intelligent as this.
5. May December. The word that keeps coming to mind with this unexpected consensus favorite is diabolical, which for me puts it in the same quality of emotional savagery as Orphan, which is a genuine compliment. Todd Haynes’s high-wire act straddling the nasty and the painful, the queasy and the tender—all often in the same scene—never yields its secrets or offers an easy explanation, and what emerges in its wake is a ferociously brilliant moment-by-moment interrogation of perception augmented by a great modulation of dramatic interrogations. Maybe it’s this mix of ruthlessness and generosity that is exciting so many people, maybe it’s the delicious sparring between two stars and the ingenue caught between them; whatever it is, I’m glad its place is secure.
6. Fallen Leaves. Admittedly, my general lack of firsthand familiarity with Aki Kaurismäki’s world might mean that I’m overvaluing this. But it’s also true that my ever-increasing passion for this film led me to overhaul the bottom half of this list just before I began writing this piece. More than anything it’s an elemental film, one that weirdly reminded me of nothing less than Letter From an Unknown Woman in terms of its sheer appeal towards me with respect to its purity of emotion and expression. The detail of work, the deployment of Ukraine-Russia war broadcasts and a future-dated calendar as counterpoint to the simple pleasures of a karaoke rendition or a postmodern zombie film, the sublime ease of a piece of paper blown into the gutter: such things are to be cherished, and that feeling has only strengthened.
7. Afire. Really a marvel of slow genre shift, from scabrous satire about the creative process and artist myopia to its rapprochement within the context of catastrophe. Even taking into account the protean nature of the films of Christian Petzold I have gotten around to, I wasn’t prepared for his willingness to dive into tragedy after making so many (deserved) jokes at his hapless protagonist’s expense, working on a series of quiet revelations with each character that more than earns its deliberate invocations of La Collectionneuse. That Sakamoto needle drop and sudden intrusion of voiceover herald a fraught relationship with fiction and swell of a blindsided, choked-up sensation that reminded me of nothing less than Romancing in Thin Air; I moved this up along with its predecessor and still might be underrating it.
8. De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Even allowing for my definite preference for the experiential documentary above all else, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s latest project got to me immediately. It isn’t just the abstract interior views of fellow members of our species; the corridors of the hospital are treated as every bit an object of aesthetic fascination as its purported subject. Indeed, the film continually expands outwards by focusing inwards; as the bodies accumulate, I felt only more aware of how weird it is that we’re alive and breathing at all, able to experience the hopeful betterment of others. One of the best, most mystifying final scenes of the year too, full stop.
9. Youth (Spring). Like with #6, I don’t know exactly how much of my appreciation for Wang Bing’s film comes from my total lack of experience with his work, which stings doubly considering I had meant to watch a lot of his work this year. Hopefully that’ll happen in the next half month, but purely based on this, the experience of his cinema is more legitimately engaging and invested in the interactions of individuals than I expected. The sly construction of mini-narratives, the rough-and-tumble camerawork to capture the motion of its subjects, the abbreviated epilogue; there’s a degree to which surprise can form an outsized influence on this list, but this formed three and a half of the most shockingly engaging hours I experienced all year.
10. Asteroid City. This was the other big adjustment on the list, which I’m already reconsidering. By far my favorite Wes Anderson since his masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel nine years ago, it’s not that I’ve come to love it significantly less than signified by its prior place just outside the top five, just that these other films have since taken up more space in my brain. There’s something almost too assured about its conceit that has eluded Anderson in the past, a delicate interplay between two strands of fiction still capable of the outpourings of feeling, complex blocking, and surprising cast configurations that will always be absent from his imitators. And the bass clarinets swelling as the camera soars skywards as the green-bathed spectators stare in awe at the spaceship is a thing of immense beauty.
As I’ve repeatedly made clear, this was a tremendous year for film, and I’m still surprised I couldn’t make room for the labyrinthine Argentine triumphs of Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, Hong’s genuinely radical in water, or Michael Mann’s exquisitely thorny Ferrari. Some other extraordinarily worthy releases: Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros (finally one of his I can fully embrace), Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (myth as all-consuming quest), Miyazaki Hayao’s How Do You Live? (the masterpiece-hailers and totally confounded are both probably right), Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (my favorite of his films, a thoroughly considered structural marvel), Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults (utterly gutting sibling dynamics and self-loathing), James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s Still Film (image interrogation as hilariously logorrheic auto-crosstalk x4), Ashley McKenzie’s Queens of the Qing Dynasty (a miracle of face and eye acting), Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (ludicrously fun in the spirit of Feuillade), Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (curdled iconography as its own off-kilter glamor), Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (surprisingly fascinating and moving in its adaptation choices), Alain Gomis’s Rewind & Play (scintillating archival footage, equal parts indignant questioning and genius performance), Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji’s Stonewalling (one of the definitive films about the gig economy *and* pandemic), Soi Cheang’s Mad Fate (wonderfully insane spirituality, even if it isn’t as singular as his Limbo which I thought was eligible for much of the year), and Kelly Fremon Craig’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (genuinely felt studio filmmaking that engages with its period). May 2024 bring both just as many strong films and better results in the things and places that matter.
Taipei Mansions 