Featured
The Best Films of 2024 As Chosen by Some of Its Key Filmmakers
Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in Misericordia
As the year draws to a close, the urge to compile "best of the year" lists feels both inevitable and deeply complicated. In a world grappling with profound crises—most notably the genocide in Palestine and ever-deepening fractures in democratic institutions globally—such an exercise risks seeming trivial, detached from the urgent realities shaping our collective experience. Yet cinema at its best has always offered a lens to confront, process and perhaps even find meaning in the chaos. This list emerges not as an escape but as a form of engagement, a way to reflect on the artistic vitality that endures and even thrives in fractured times. The idea is simple: to bring together the voices of filmmakers whose works have left an… Read more
The Ten Best Undistributed Films of 2024
Riders
This year was a peak travel year for me, mostly festival-enabled, and I was pleased by the number of good films I was privileged to see along the way that I wouldn't have otherwise. While the globalization of film via the internet has improved access all round, it's a mistake to think that everything good winds up somewhere legally accessible, even if only as an obscure VOD option. Some films remain unaccounted for, which is both unfortunate and a reminder of how many good films there remain to see. Here are ten of the year's best, with links to their longer write-ups. 100,000,000,000 My best of fest was Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000 (its onscreen title, spelled out in the festival program as Cent milliard… Read more
Christmas with Art the Clown: DP George Steuber on Terrifier 3
David Howard Thornton in Terrifier 3
Movies are a uniquely collaborative art form. A painting, a novel or a song can be created in solitude, but you can’t make a commercial narrative film by yourself. That said, the original Terrifier came about as close as you can get: Writer-director Damien Leone is also credited for producing, editing, special make-up effects, visual effects, sound design and props. In addition to putting up money, producer Phil Falcone served as UPM, AD and stunt driver and also assisted with the effects. As for cinematographer George Steuber, he was the entirety of the camera department. He operated, pulled his own focus, dumped his own media and set up most of the lights. As the Terrifier series has continued to grow in… Read more
“Apple Changed the Whole Landscape of How You Market a Product”: Sebastian Pardo on Crafting Graphic Design for The Brutalist
In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the experience of the film as much as it serves as a piece of marketing. The design of the scroll also summons the Bauhaus stylings that inspire the architecture of The Brutalist’s subject, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), highlighting the words on screen around evocations of the movement’s basic geometric forms. That scroll follows a template set by the opening credits of the film, carefully designed—down to the… Read more
Cinema is Not a Sport: My End of the Year List, 2024
One-Eyed Jacks
At the end of each year comes the excitement of listing my favorite released films. This is a moment where I like to reflect on the status of modern cinema. When great films populate my list, ones that make my heart pound, I become alit with hope. Great is the desire to believe in the work being made today, especially as the gems of today’s moviemaking are often found on the deeper pages of Letterboxd.com’s most popular movies. In the 1950s, for example, the most critically lauded films are ranked at the top of page #1, sorted by the most popular with users. In the 2010s, and now halfway into the 2020s, one must dig past the sea of cynical films… Read more
Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
Brandon Wilson in Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and editorial consultant on Hale County; for this film, she co-wrote the adaptation with Ross in addition to her producing duties. Primarily… Read more
Hits & Misses 2024: Case Studies of Six Sundance 2024 Premieres
Ghostlight
In September, Variety declared, “Indie Films Are Staging a Box Office Comeback,” touting the success of the films Longlegs, Thelma and Late Night with the Devil as signs of life for a segment of the industry “crushed by COVID, strikes and streaming,” as reporter Brent Lang wrote. “And while it’s a long way from the arthouse heyday of the 1990s and early aughts, the turnaround is impressive.” Maybe not that impressive. Citing the more than $100 million global gross of Longlegs, a NEON-produced wide-release serial-killer movie, as some kind of indie darling misses the point. Thelma and Late Night are better gauges of the industry, and their grosses were around $10 million. And while those are damn good ticket sales for the… Read more
Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Nicholas Hoult (second from left), Leslie Bibb, Adrienne C. Moore and J.K. Simmons in Juror #2, courtesy
of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not a fortress (the 2024 Toyota 4Runner is 25 percent heavier than the 1996 model seen in the film, as well as… Read more
