Favorite Films of 2024

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. - James Baldwin

I have a Mark Rothko themed 2025 calendar hanging next to my desk . The painting for January was Untitled (Seagram Mural) (1959), one of his thirty Seagram murals. I stared at it several times for long moments almost every day last month. I wish to see it in person someday at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. Its stunning simplicity strikes me, its squares of red hues, bright and dark. The smaller square, windowboxed by the brighter red, is both beguiling and entrancing. The dimensions of the painting remind me of the 4:3 aspect ratio in film (or the slightly wider 1.37:1 ratio, the old Hollywood standard, also known as the Academy Ratio), which helps to emphasize the darker red in the center, like closeups in 4:3 films are intensified by the smaller frame. Since the passing of one of our greatest artists, David Lynch, I’ve been thinking more and more about what art means to me and what it’s done for my life. I’ve always loved reading and music was my first love (I initially sought films for their scores). I started going to movies by myself shortly after getting my driver’s license. I quit baseball to have more time after school to write and watch movies. 

During my college years, I found solace in an abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, turning a gallery corner and being completely overcome by Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51). Another powerfully red painting, much larger and wider. Its bright red was potent, I couldn’t look away. I stared at it so long, my friend who had accompanied me became irritated. I felt consumed, invigorated, and deeply moved in a way I’d never felt before and still can’t quite explain. The painting has vertical lines, or “zips” as Newman called them, forming squares within the painting. The middle square, flanked by a black zip on the left and a white zip on the right, again is fairly redolent of the 4:3 aspect ratio (in my experiences with other art forms, I can’t help but tie cinema into it). This changed everything for me. It was when I began to understand that nothing needs to be understood. That the doctrines and structures I grew up with and tried in vain to be a part of - knowing deep down I didn’t belong within them - were too stable, unable to collapse. But life, and art, is more beautiful when things are allowed to fall. To live imperfectly under any belief is a predisposition that ails us all. But I wanted to live imperfectly, with contradictions and doubt, and without pretending or believing to know the answers. “Life is filled with abstractions,” Lynch once said, “and the way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition.” Abstractions give people room to dream, he said. Barnett Newman wrote, “If we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?”

What cinema has excelled in creating are these singular bodies, conveyors of new emotions. Cinephilia isn’t the love for old films; it’s the love for these singular inventions that wreak havoc in our forms of perceptions and in the tenor of our emotions. - Jacques Rancière

I preface this list, my favorite films of 2024, as such because while I do love to write about films, to analyze them and understand them on an intellectual level, I am so enamored by cinema simply because of how the medium makes me feel. And that’s all that matters. I’ve always prided myself on my curiosity, I love to observe and daydream, because I am instinctively driven by the emotional weight of seeking questions with no answers. All the arts, but especially cinema, compels me to understand the world through intuition, dreaming, and feeling. Beauty is found in the sensations within us, in the disorientation of our dreams, in the need to find meaning in a world where it's entirely possible that it may never be found. Art gives me peace in that. And that’s all I need to know, to understand. So whoever reads this, if you choose to watch any of these films, I hope they move you, make you feel an understanding that can’t be clearly pronounced. David Lynch was the master at making such works because he, through intuition and dreaming, understood perhaps better than anyone else. No clarity, no resolution, letting things be how they want to be, and feeling, fervent feeling. When it comes to the state of cinema and the world, I’ll let my favorite films of 2024 speak for themselves (along with my blurbs for each one):

1. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

The subjective, point-of-view camera is nothing new to cinema. Many films, especially classical Hollywood films of the 1940s, when it was an experimental fad, used it in quick flashes. Though a few famous examples put it on full display, allowing audiences to feel like they are the character in a story. Rouben Mamoulian and cinematographer Karl Struss added some pre-Code lust to their POV shots when using it to delve into the idea of split-personalities in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Robert Montgomery’s noir from 1947, The Lady in the Lake, using POV for the majority of its runtime, attempted to turn cinema into a detective game and exhausted the shot almost to the point of gimmick. Dark Passage, from the same year, employs the technique sparingly but successfully, it helps that we’re seeing Lauren Bacall “through the eyes” of Humphrey Bogart. Hitchcock devised a thrilling use of it in his 1945 film, Spellbound. The noir Hangover Square (1945) also briefly utilizes it to chilling effect. Even Orson Welles planned to experiment with the approach in adapting Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” but the film was never made. The POV shot quickly went out of style since cinema can already effectively and efficiently convey subjectivity and the character’s thoughts/emotions through many other formal techniques without literally having the camera act or move as the character. 

And then in 2024 came RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. A film that has, after all these years and out of nowhere, not only perfected the POV, subjective camera but has, through its innovation, raised the bar on the possibilities of cinema. Based on Colson Whitehead’s stunning Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, Nickel Boys is about two Black boys, Elwood Curtis and his friend Turner, imprisoned in an abusive Florida reform school during the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s. The school, Nickel Academy, is based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida which was open for over 100 years and closed in 2011. The school was a site for abuse, torture, rape and murder, of which the majority of victims were Black. Over 100 deaths have been logged and unmarked graves were exhumed in the 2010s for identification. 

Whitehead’s novel seems almost unadaptable in its construct, but RaMell Ross ingeniously devised a cinematic formal conceit for what it means to be a Black body in America. We see through the eyes of both Elwood - an intelligent boy who idolizes Martin Luther King, Jr. and believes in the idea of the United States - and Turner, who has spent a lot of time in Nickel and has a more realistic and cynical outlook on what the country stands for. Elwood is taken to Nickel for a crime he had nothing to do with. Along with flash forwards featuring a different camera rig behind the character’s head (for reasons I don’t want to spoil, just read the book or watch this movie ASAP), the film cuts back and forth between their perspectives (long takes and complex camera movements) along with brief archival footage of all the progress of white America, including the space race. Even footage of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) is shown throughout the film, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as two chain gang prisoners chained together as they escape, highlighting the so-called “progress” of Black and white relations of the time that helped to conceal what was still happening at places like Nickel. 

The film is filled with both beautiful and heartbreaking moments. One in which we watch Elwood, through Turner, happily open mail from his grandmother, only to reveal the potential and passion this young man has is slowly being snuffed away. Another breathtaking scene involves Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is sublime) trying to visit Elwood at Nickel but is refused. When she runs into Turner outside on the grounds, she tells him he’ll have to do for a hug. They hug twice and each time the camera, as Turner, goes into her shoulder, blurring the screen. The film plays on this impressionistic idea of the POV camera as an artistic contrivance and being known to us, the audience. We can both be and live in the heads and bodies of Elwood and Turner, understanding their feelings and beliefs. It’s as raw and honest as cinema can get, miraculously effective in imbuing the viewer with the interiority of the protagonists, whether they’re invigorated with joy, reliving memories or suffering from the injustices thrust upon them. And this scene with the hug proves that while the United States has been cruel, unfair, and gratuitous with its inhumane acts to Elwood and Turner, they are more than that. It’s not about all that they’ve suffered, but what they've lived wholly and truly. Even the flash forward scenes work to help us understand both the character’s life perspective and a sort of distant historical perspective. Nickel Boys perfectly encapsulates the fact that, despite this country’s diminishment of their humanity and institutions that can only be trusted to perpetuate their oppression, they still live lives with beauty, wonderment, and love.

2. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)

Amidst grief and finding new love is a scathing indictment of capitalism’s incessant ability to strip away our basic humanity and corrupt our appreciation of beauty. I can’t really find the words for this film, it’s simply a stunning work of art, beautiful cinema meant to be seen and experienced by as many eyeballs and beating hearts as possible. I love this film, everything about it and all that it stands for. I felt my breath taken away when the credits rolled and then suddenly I felt as if I could breathe again, all the suffocating issues of real life were put away for a spell. And only blessings like this film can cast such spells. These are the experiences I seek in cinema and why I can’t ever escape the act of watching movies (not that I’d ever want to anyway). I always go back to cinema and this is one cinematic masterpiece I’ll always find again.

3. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)

A modest film of breathtaking moments. Lulls you into its lovely, mundane embrace and leaves you with a newfound hope. A blend of unforgettable intimate moments and lush urban soundscapes. That ending is wonderful, the final image will never leave my mind.

4. Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)

A film that ponders whether cinema has already spun its last reel and it is a miraculous achievement. Victor Erice’s third feature film in fifty years is perhaps the greatest cinematic love letter to cinema ever made only because it refuses any grandiose statements about the power of cinema, instead relying on intimate moments between characters and their understanding of not only each other, but what cinema has the potential to do. The film itself understands this, displaying gentle and marvelous moments with a precision that only the camera can capture and an editor can convey. We see ourselves this way, others see us that way, the camera sees us as something else entirely. A stunning, stunning masterwork.

5. The Dead Don’t Hurt (Viggo Mortensen)

If there’s a Western showing in theaters you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be there. This edition of the frontier is a gentle, soulful picture from Viggo Mortensen. He utilized his creative capacities to the fullest for this thing - writing, directing, starring, producing, and even composing the beautiful score. Featuring an excellent Vicky Krieps, the film works formally as a throwback to classical Westerns while containing an unconventional story for the genre. It’s a wonderfully quiet film that’s been quietly slept on all year. And it shouldn’t be.

6. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)

The title says it all. Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude makes pure spectacle of our current hell and refuses to let us stifle our laughter when we realize with hopeless horror that every visual gag is a true recreation of our absurd postmodern reality. We don’t want to go with the flow, yet we go with the flow. It’s so frustrating and so screwed up that all we’re left with is to laugh at the situation, so we laugh. The final scene is one of the greatest scenes of the century. A brilliant film.

7. No Other Land (Rachel Szor, Hamden Ballal)

An infuriating, important documentary that still has yet to find wide distribution in the United States due to its criticism of the Israeli government. The film follows Palestinian activist Basel Adra who, along with Yuval, an Israeli journalist with whom he befriends, films and resists Israeli soldiers’ displacement of Palestinian families in his home region in the West Bank. Like his father before him (“This has been going on for decades,” he says), Basel has been fighting the forced evictions of his people and the grazing of their homes. The Israeli government has been committing these abhorrent acts on the pretense of building a “military training zone” but a recently leaked document disclosed their attempt to “prevent Arab expansion.” There’s nothing complicated here. Nothing is complicated about IDF soldiers closing the doors on Palestinian children in an elementary school, leaving them to jump out of a window as a bulldozer drives up to demolish it. When IDF soldiers push around Palestinian families, even teenage boys, as they watch their homes get bulldozed to rubble. Shortly after that, the families recover what they can and move their belongings into caves in the hills. Or the fact that cars with yellow license plates (Israelis) are free to roam where they please while cars with green license plates (Palestinians) are restricted in their travels. All of this was happening long before October 7th, 2023, when the film was finished. The last footage Basel sent to the filmmakers, shortly after the October 7th Hamas attack, was an Israeli citizen murdering his cousin. It’s extraordinary to see the endurance of these Palestinian villagers. This a film working as witness to their existence and resistance. “We have no other land,” one of them says, “that is why we suffer for it.”

8. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

2024 had plenty of films about where we are and where we’re going. Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths came knocking hard with the ultimate story about living in the misery of the now and the alienation of our modern times. Even if you’re not really alone. There’s a scene in a small apartment that is one of the best shot scenes of the year, a lesson in superb blocking and staging. Besides also containing some of the best acting of the decade, the production designer deserves so much praise for how perfectly banal, dull, and boringly sleek the main house is; a modern cookie-cutter home stuck in its uniform monotony, inhabited by characters pleading to be given life again. We can give ourselves a little boost by opening the back door, breathing in fresh air and listening to the noises of the world outside, but that’s only a temporary relief. The pain is too much these days.

9. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

Just a beautiful movie in every way. Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin are phenomenal in this story of prisoners (Domingo’s character is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit) at Sing Sing who find solace and resilience in a theatre group with other incarcerated men. Based on the real Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, Sing Sing is unlike any other prison film, instead focusing on an honest depiction of immured humans empowered and enlivened by art’s endless capacity for hope and strength.

10. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)

A monumental film from the legendary nonagenarian Clint Eastwood. I wrote about it here.

11. Janet Planet (Annie Baker)

It’s lovely when a film utilizes the medium’s aural (and in this case, completely diegetic) capabilities. The deafening sounds of cicadas and summer birds dominate the world of Janet Planet, just like Janet dominates the world of her eleven-year old daughter, Lacy. It’s easy to feel a sense of nostalgia for the pre-cellphone world of the 1990s, but the film, in its unique form, is more interested in the limitations, fractured memories, and puzzle pieces of childhood. There’s a scene involving a reading of Rilke’s “Elegy IV” that is one of the most astonishing moments of the year. An extraordinary picture from the celebrated playwright, Annie Baker. 

12. Sometimes I Think About Dying (Rachel Lambert)

Daisy Ridley gives the performance of her career as Fran, a woman who daydreams about dying while going through the motions of her working life. On top of that, she’s miserably shy and depressed. Things are changed when a new co-worker, Robert, arrives, who finds an interest in Fran and happens to also be a cinephile. The best thing about Rachel Lambert’s film is that it’s less about the humdrum existence of our current everyday life than about depression and social anxiety through wanting to be both left alone and connected at the same time. Fran is introverted and seems to avoid small talk more out of necessity rather than impoliteness. Her reluctance comes from an inability to skilfully engage. In another one of the film’s more genius subversive strokes, Fran reveals that she actually likes her office job. She’s good at it. It’s the co-workers she can’t find the capability to involve herself with. The film never has us believe that she feels superior to everyone else. She listens to her colleagues' banal conversations, steals curious glances at their cubicles, and imagines herself dead (in creative tableaus) because in her alienation, she may as well already be. There’s one scene that really stuck with me. At a house party with Robert, Fran plays murder mystery with the group. She comes out of her shell a bit, unveiling a humorous, clever side that nobody else has seen. Everyone is surprised by Fran, even Robert tells her he didn’t know she had that in her. It’s a telling moment about the assumptions people have about quiet, closed-in people. Always the shock of a later revelation, never the early readiness to know. However, when someone like Robert does come along and genuinely seeks to connect with and know Fran, she can’t help but keep him at a distance too. Sometimes people just can’t be known, either by other people or themselves. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Being a person?” someone says to Fran at one point. The camera stays on Fran’s face and we get the sense that she understands this to her core, but also truly empathizes with the grieving woman sitting across from her, finding that life is hard no matter what, so might as well give it the time of day. A charming little film, this one, deceptively complex in the best way.

13. Anora (Sean Baker)

Maybe my packed 35mm screening helped, but I was deeply moved by Anora. The discourse around it has been just as compelling and the fact that there has been so much discourse is proof that the movie holds plenty of merit. There’s an immense sadness underscoring the film, found in a group of people who refuse to take off the blinders put on them by their wealthy lovers or bosses. Fun in its frenzy, amusing in its absurdity, and delayed in its despair, the distance from Ani, the sex worker protagonist, works to elevate the idea of the American dream, rather than the dream itself. That’s what a great Sean Baker film is all about.

14. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)

Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore film will be seen as one of the greatest achievements of the 2020s. I Saw the TV Glow is a mesmerizing film for those who become unrecognizable to themselves by suppressing their true selves through shame, fear, or loss. The film’s metaphor is obvious, but there’s a delicate balance in what it unveils about its suffering adolescent characters (Owen and Maddy), a TV show (called “The Pink Opaque”) that both saves and kills, and a nostalgia that reveals itself to be a “trap” in the worst possible way. In fact, the film is the perfect response to our current nostalgia-driven culture because it understands the perniciousness in the comfort of nostalgia (though its appreciation for the tactility of the 90s is one I can’t help but relish). What does it matter? Things happened, things were enjoyed. And then they changed, you changed. The memories are still there, though they are in shreds and help to reveal what could have been, forcing you to question what happened. Why am I not what I hoped to be, should be? And suddenly you’re watching a screen, because that’s all that’s left, and you’re wishing that the media (TV show, movie, book, etc.) you loved and still love, will take you back somehow. Or away from everything all over again. “Sometimes ‘The Pink Opaque” feels more real than real life,” Maddy says. Sometimes movies feel more real than real life to me, and this is one of them.

15. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)

A film that so elegantly and devastatingly captures the worst of where our deeply troubled times are probably heading to. Lea Seydoux and George MacKay give career best performances.

16. Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)

Now this film captures where we’re already at, though with less elegance and more soullessness and dismay. Contains one of the most shocking, jaw-dropping scenes of the decade. I forgot that films could and were still willing to go so far and Red Rooms is a breath of fresh air in the most disturbing, sickest fashion.

17. I’m Still Here (Walter Salles)

A devastating portrayal of the true story of the Paiva family, torn apart by the disappearance of their father at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Fernanda Torres deserves the Oscar win as the wife and mother holding things together, growing old without her husband whose death was still a mystery for countless years after he was taken away from her and her kids. An important, must-see film.

18. The Girl with the Needle (Magnus von Horn)

I’m a big fan of bleak cinema and this is as bleak as it gets. Based on horrifying true events, The Girl with the Needle is a sharp historical display (stunningly shot in black-and-white and 4:3 aspect ratio) of one of the patriarchy’s worst consequences. An impeccable balance of brutality and empathy.

19. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)

Not that it matters much but I still can’t wrap my head around the box office failure of George Miller’s spectacular Mad Max prequel. Furiosa is a rare instance in our time where a filmmaker knows how to use CGI and digital effects as an artistic feature. This is action at its most poetic, emotional, and magnificent. Not to mention a surprisingly explosive performance from Chris Hemsworth. Some of the best action set-pieces ever shot and maybe the best revenge film ever made.

20. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)

Luca Guadagnino is one our most exciting filmmakers. Challengers is a thrilling, sweaty, sex, heart-thumpingly erotic good time. Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist, and Zendaya are clearly having a good time as well, letting it all out on the tennis court. It’s almost fortunate that athletes have a place to relieve their sexual frustration and with all the drama that entails, viewers of both sports and films are lucky too. Also featuring a pumping, invigorating house score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, Challengers is one I’ll always revisit. 

21. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)

With his stellar performances as Donald Trump in The Apprentice and as a deeply insecure man who changes his disfigured appearance in A Different Man, 2024 cemented Sebastian Stan as one of the greatest working actors today. When Stan’s protagonist, Edward, becomes “normal looking,” he meets a man who has the same condition that Edward had. This man, however, is confident, the life of the party, and ultimately, the envy of Edward. This is a darkly sardonic film, both pointed and subversive in its explorations of identity, disability, and self-acceptance. Truly one of the most original films of the year.

22. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

A stunning departure by the master Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Evil Does Not Exist is an alarming clash between capitalist exploitation and nature in a small Japanese village. This tension and the ambiguity that follows is staggering and disturbing, but the title seems to point to what we should already know: there is no evil in nature. It is instead found in the arrogance of humanity’s belief in its superiority, in our greedily insistence to take away, ruin, and build. Nature herself is more than willing to remind us of this.

23. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)

Perhaps the most confounding film of the year. Francis Ford Coppola, in his old age, has taken on American decline as well as a cluster of other ideas from his palette and splattered them all over the canvas. The results are incoherent yet sometimes brilliant. It’s not a “mess,” Coppola knows what he’s doing. It’s a spectacular and diligent attempt to capture the beating heart of whatever postmodern existence we are all currently enduring. One thing is for certain: you can’t look away. Also doesn’t get enough love for its classical Hollywood influences. Coppola loves cross-dissolves!

24. Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants)

Cillian Murphy gives another excellent performance as another tortured, guilt-ridden man in this quietly powerful and subtle film about the Magdalene Laundries, one of the worst injustices committed by the Roman Catholic Church in twentieth-century Ireland.

25. Dahomey (Mati Diop)

A formally brilliant documentary about the return and restoration of 26 pieces of artworks to what is present day Benin in West Africa, all of which, along with thousands of other treasures, were looted by French colonial forces in the former Dahomey Kingdom in the nineteenth century. Along with simply observing the complexities and thoughtful conversations behind such a historical (or back-patting) movement by the French government, director Mati Diop gives narrational voice to one of the artworks, who doesn’t recognize its home nor belong in a Paris museum.

26. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

What else can be said about Corbet’s epic film? For all its talk of its technical feats, it's fairly conventional on a formal level. Its grandiose moments (the opening scene) are instantly unforgettable. But for the most part the film is a fascinating achievement in how it manages to work as a construction of symbolic characters and two-halves (a three-and-half hour film with a 15-minute intermission) working, plotwise, both for and against each other and culminating in an epilogue that confounds in both its literalization and ambiguity, leaving too many questions unanswered yet simultaneously allowing for a clear interpretation. Maybe that’s the point - in the end, the American dream leaves one feeling lost and empty.

27. My Old Ass (Megan Park) 

Maisy Stella gives a wonderful breakout performance in Megan Park’s lovely tearjerker. When a shroom trip conjures 18-year old Elliot’s (Stella) 39-year old self (played by Aubrey Plaza), she asks for guidance from her older self and things get complicated when her older self tells her to keep away from a kind, charming boy with whom she begins to fall in love. I adored this film and it made me wish these simple, romantic, and touching dramas (even from Sundance) weren't always buried under short theatrical runs and little-to-no publicity.

28. The Order (Jed Kurzel)

I haven’t stopped thinking about Jed Kurzel’s thrilling new film since I caught it during its one, maybe two, weeks in theaters in December. Out of nowhere came this intriguing study of an FBI agent’s (a stellar Jude Law) clash with a white supremacist group in Idaho. Nicholas Hoult plays the ringleader of The Order, a neo-Nazi brotherhood bent on overthrowing the government with guidance from William Luther Pierce’s novel “The Turner Diaries,” photocopies of which were found in Timothy McViegh’s vehicle when he was arrested after the OKC bombing in 1995. The film is less interesting in its superficial navel-gazing on white supremacy and back-slapping prescience and more interesting in its Heat-esque attempt (though still a bit thin here) in unpacking two indignant characters on different sides of the law, both obsessively devoted to their causes with fury and resentment. I don’t like to criticize a film for what it lacks or what it’s not but for all it’s “it gets worse” callouts and snapping at our faces to see how white supremacy has further entrenched itself in 2024 America while comparing these two men with no threads whatsoever to law enforcement’s place and enabling of white supremacy is a sorely missed opportunity. Otherwise, it’s formally spectacular with tense action sequences and a haunting, powerful score. This film also showed me how little people, including great professional film critics, know their wildlife. The animal at the end of the film is an elk, not a moose as many many reviews have incorrectly identified. 

29. Blitz (Steve McQueen)

If ever a film was “throwback” this year, it’s Steve McQueens’s Blitz. Unceremoniously in theaters for a short time before being dumped on Apple TV+, McQueen’s film is a Dickensian adventure amidst the London Blitz during WW2. The German’s bombing aircraft, it turns out, aren’t the worst part of this story. It’s been unfairly maligned as “average” or unremarkable. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Blitz is the sort of film that should be major in its classical storytelling, subversiveness, and emotion.

30. The First Omen (Arkasha Stevenson)

This prequel to the Gregory Peck-starring horror film, The Omen (1976) features some actual, refreshing filmmaking rarely seen in major horror releases these days. All of it leads, of course, to the requisite reminder that it’s IP backwash. But the rest of it rips.

31. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

A special, lovely little film with an exquisite performance by Kieran Culkin. Lots of heart and impactful moments, a perfect balance of laughs and tears. Sounds simple, but gems like this seem exceptional these days.

32. Dìdi (Sean Wang)

An extremely relatable film for millennials who had MySpace and still think 2007-08 were the best years of their lives. My favorite thing about Dìdi, however, is the film’s refusal to change its protagonist, he’s still an awkward, insecure kid at the end. He doesn’t suddenly become popular or even likeable by the kids he wants to hangout with. The only difference is that he learns what truly matters and accepts his mother’s unconditional love as a sort of motivation to go on. It’s hard to be a kid and they do need the love of the older, wiser people around them, whether a mother, grandmother, or older sibling.

33. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)

A deadpan comedy about the listlessness of modern life. Both absurd and relatable for so many young people.

As always, there were plenty of films I missed. The notable ones are as follows: 

Conclave

Flow

Maria

Memoir of a Snail

La Cocina

Green Border

Vermiglio

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Good One

Girls Will Be Girls

Between the Temples

My First Film

His Three Daughters

The End

Exhibiting Forgiveness

Here (Zemeckis)

Hundreds of Beavers

The Room Next Door

Bird

Santosh

Emilia Pérez