2024 - A Year in Film

 

Not a movie year goes by without many lamenting the state of the art form. That, despite the occasional huge box office weekend, cinema is in dire straits, awash in endless IP, while good-to-great adult fare gets buried amongst the pile of "content" housed in the basement of the streamers. But for me, and many others, who try to take stock of the recently-passed calendar year, end up with a glut of great movies to discuss. Are movies really dead (again)?

Well it depends where you look. Hollywood kind of does suck right now. This is endemic to the industry and to the people who run it. The crevasse between the two parts of the term show business has never been wider and reflects the culture and infrastructure of a country whose defining characteristic in middle of the 2020s is its intent on tightening that very stranglehold. When a great Hollywood movie comes out, it's a miracle--a bug, not a feature.

But movies outside that system (or at least ones that are created mostly outside of it and only entering it for marketing and distribution purposes) flourished as it always does. Because, as it turns out, there are still artists out there and, when left mainly to their own devices, turn the movie year into another great movie year.

And here's another thing about the term "movie year." It's too nebulous. My favorite movie of 2024 is technically a 2023 movie. Sometimes that's not a concern for this kind of list--movies often get, say, festival releases one year only to get legitimate distribution the following year. But La Chimera, though it only got released locally in my area in early 2024, was a wide enough release that many considered it a 2023 release and eligible for Oscar consideration that year and made many year-end lists. Had I seen it in 2023, it would have been my #1 of that year too. But outside of the big markets, it only came out in 2024 and even some of the bigger critics and publications included it in their 2024 lists. Once I started to notice that, rather than let it vanish into the ether, I decided it would be included here. And while the other top choices on my list were outstanding, La Chimera was always going to stand alone.

I hope you enjoy the video. 

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Full list: https://boxd.it/EeKbS

2019 - A Year in Movies

I feel like I say it every year: "It's been a great year for movies." And 2019 was no exception--in fact, it was one of the best years for movies that I can remember. Each year I keep a running list of movies that would make a potential best-of list and for the first time that list reached triple digits. Certainly, a large number of those movies had no real shot of making a top 10 or 25 list of the year's best, but it goes to show how deep 2019's slate really was. Even with that, I still feel like I missed a handful of movies that may have been included had I been able to screen them in time.

As always, the final list is in order of how I felt at the moment I finalized it. Ask me in two weeks or two months, something between 15-25 could be in the top 10 or something in my list of honorable mentions (see below) would be in the video. What feels like fixtures, though, are the two titles at the top of the list. There are a several things going on in each of those films: the internal conflict between coming of age in the West, but having your heritage come from the East (The Farewell); the options (or lack thereof) one has in deciding the path they take in life as a woman (Little Women). But what struck me about each of those is that they depict how time and circumstance can slowly pull a family apart. That as we age, even the closest of family bonds need tending to lest they wither away. It's something I've thought about a lot in my life recently and while these two films are much richer than just this aspect, it's perhaps why they seemed to have resonated with me more deeply than others.

I've long praised the quality of the releases from the production/distribution company A24. They are to me what perhaps Focus Features was in the early 2000s, a company that wisely devotes its resources to idiosyncratic auteurs who make personal films that, with regularity, end up being among my favorites of the year. Six A24 releases make the top-25 video above and another two make the honorable mentions below. That also makes 3 out of the last 4 years in which they claimed the #1 spot (Moonlight, 2016; A Ghost Story, 2017).

It almost pains me to have left so many other wonderful films off the video. So in the hopes you'll search some of them out and in honor of 2020, here are 20 more movies I loved released over the past 12 months. Here's to another great movie year.

3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)
The Art of Self-Defense (Riley Stearns)
Asako I & II (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)
Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)
The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine)
Climax (Gasper Noé)
The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch)
Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt)
Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler)
First Love (Takashi Miike)
Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold)
I Lost My Body (Jérémy Clapin)
The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent)
Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas)
One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang, Zhang Jia-Ling)
Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
Starfish (A.T. White)
Waves (Trey Edward Shults)