Dreaming Big: My Top Ten Films of 2024
Heart Breaker: Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora. Pic: © Universal Pictures
1. Anora
Mikey Madison gave everything to the title role of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner about an exotic dancer (Madison) who gets more than she bargained for when a week of purchased fun with the wastrel son of a Russian oligarch leads to a spontaneous Vegas wedding. Wags likened the set-up to Pretty Woman, but Baker’s penchant for exploring lives lived in spaces where sex and commerce are ruthlessly intertwined captured the cold-light-of-day chaos that ensues when the fantasies being traded are exposed for the shams they are. Having broken through in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Madison’s tough, tender, wickedly funny live-wire turn brought a defiant dignity reminiscent of the late Gena Rowlands — and her final scene was an absolute heart-breaker.
2. The Substance
Taking a flamethrower to the misogynistic beauty standards of the entertainment industry, French writer/director Coralie Fargeat simultaneously provided Demi Moore with a Phoenix-like rebirth courtesy of this wigged-out body horror film about an ageing actress-turned-fitness guru (Moore) who uses an experimental beauty product to generate a younger version of herself in a desperate bid to maintain her career. Having both versions of the character (Margaret Qualley played the younger one) share time in the world was the film’s conceptual masterstroke, setting up a bluntly effective sci-fi riff on All About Eve that illuminated the insidiousness of an industry designed to make women hate themselves.
3. Love Lies Bleeding
There was some major flexing on screen and off with this muscular neo-noir crime thriller from Saint Maud director Rose Glass. A mullet-sporting Kristin Stewart and vein-popping Katy O’Brian were electric as lovers on the run from their violent pasts; Ed Harris, meanwhile, was properly menacing as a local crime boss with a gorge full of secrets. With Glass taking the film’s 1980s’ bodybuilding backdrop as a creative cue to cut loose from the rigid demands of arthouse respectability, the film was an entertainingly lurid slice of pulp fiction, full of surreal, juiced-up visual flourishes that tracked the roid rage brewing inside O’Brian’s Hulk-like drifter and culminated in a crazy ending that nodded as much to Gulliver’s Travels as the Coen brothers.
4. Rebel Ridge
Updating First Blood for the era of Black Lives Matter, Jeremy Saulnier’s hard-charging drama was the action film of the year, a movie that took its one-man-against-a-corrupt-town plot and twisted it in thrilling, unexpected ways. It also let British actor Aaron Pierre (a late replacement for John Boyega) demonstrate his movie star bona fides with a commanding lead performance as an ex special forces soldier targeted by a town full of racist good-ole-boy cops who have no idea who they’re messing with. The moment they find out is one of the great, ‘Oh, shit!’ scenes of recent years.
5. Hit Man
Richard Linklater was on easy-breezy form with this sly, sexy, joyously entertaining romantic comedy about a philosophy professor whose second job moonlighting for the New Orlean’s police department results in him inadvertently becoming a hitman when a woman he’s trying to entrap hires his alter ego to kill her abusive husband. Co-written by and starring movie star du jour Glen Powell, the film was partially based on a true story, but Linklater, Powell and co-star Adria Arjona turned it into a supercharged wish-fulfilment fantasy.
6. Challengers
Let’s be clear: Challengers was a ridiculous movie. But that was also part of the appeal of Luca Guadagnino’s taut, trashy, tennis-themed melodrama about a ménage à trois between a confidence-rattled top seeded player (Mike Faist), his wife and coach (Zendaya), and his one-time best friend and rival (Josh O’Connor). The fact that the film’s writer, Justin Kuritzkes, is married to Past Lives writer/director Celine Song gave the love-triangle angle its own amusingly meta dimension, but mostly its gloriously over-wrought action, campy sexual energy and obvious metaphors made it a blast, with Josh O’Connor cornering the market in artfully dishevelled repropates, following this and his turn in Alice Rohrwacher’s strange and beguiling La Chimera.
7. Strange Darling
In a year of innovative horror (The Substance, Longlegs, Woman of the Hour), this indie hit came out of nowhere, distinguishing itself with a chronology fracturing structure that reorientated what we thought we were watching. Essentially a cat-and-mouse serial-killer thriller, writer/director JT Moller’s sophomore feature upended the clichés of the genre not just in the way he assembled the story, but also in the performances he got from stars Kyle Gallner and the outstanding Willa Fitzgerald. With the former deftly navigating his character’s surface sleaziness and the latter bringing real depth and complexity to the final girl trope movies of this ilk get off on exploiting, the film played around with genre and gender expectations in some provocative and uncomfortable ways. It also looked great (actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi shot it on 35mm), with Z Berg’s ethereal folk-pop soundtrack — the year’s best — adding to the unsettling mood.
8. Do Not Expect too Much from the End of the World
The latest from Romanian director Radu Jude was a nearly three-hour mind-melter of a film, a sort of free-form, largely black-and-white state-of-the-nation provocation. Revolving around a sleep-deprived production assistant for a film and video company (the brilliant Ilinca Manolache), it delved into the terrible ways corporations shirk responsibility for their workers, with Jude upping the nightmarish quality by cutting in a Ceaușescu-era Romanian film from 1981 entitled Angela Moves On and using its story — about a harassed female taxi driver — as a kind of parallel narrative mirroring the contemporary plight of his protagonist. It was wild, weird and fascinating in equal measure.
9. Green Border
There are important films that are tough to watch, and then there was this latest effort from veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa). Not just a contender for the most distressing film of the year, Green Border was a contender for one of the most distressing films ever. It was also one of the most urgent. Following refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, as well as a border guard and a conscience-stricken civilian as they all intersect on the Polish/Belarus border, it served up a brutal, angry, deeply moral exploration of the immigration crisis, exposing the savage game of political ping pong the authorities on both sides play with the lives of refugees, batting them back and forth across the border with callous indifference. Holland’s ironic use of stark black-and-white added to the film’s power, forcing us to confront the fact that this wasn’t some atrocity in Europe’s dark and murky past, but an ongoing humanitarian crisis, happening right now.
10. Megalopolis
Maybe you had to be there, but in the twilight of a career characterised by excess, hubris, grandiose cinematic visions, small experimental works, huge successes and spectacular failures, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed, four-decades-in-the-making sci-fi extravaganza was about as singular and strange and unclassifiable as it was possible to get. A film defiantly not cut out for the instant reaction online discourse that feeds modern film festivals, this self-styled fable was many things, among them a multifaceted exploration of the nature of time; a futuristic neo-Roman epic; a satire on our current age of extremes; a comment on its own creation; and, inevitably, a referendum on Coppola’s career as a whole. Watched on a giant IMAX screen, it was also a gloriously out-there testament to the value of dreaming big, the likes of which we’ll likely never see again.