The Best Films of 2024

More accurately, the best new releases I saw this year. Also, more consideration of The Beast.

Dec 30, 2024

Picking Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast as my favorite film two years in a row gives me some pause. I’m always conscious of when a new release from one of my favorite filmmakers ends up at the top of my lists, but The Beast also so perfectly captures “how i’m feeling now” that I’m especially worried about losing what little objectivity I have. This isn’t meant to be one of those pieces where a critic diagnoses the present through the movies that came out (I didn’t see enough to do that anyway), but more a reflection of my year, some of the movies that affected me, and another excuse to talk about The Beast.

I left a long-term relationship earlier this fall. I realized that I wasn’t okay with how I was being treated, and that the relationship had incurred a significant cost on my mental and physical well-being. I spent most of the past year and a half so scared that I couldn’t emote or even speak in complete sentences around him. I was in the midst of this the first time I saw The Beast back in October 2023 (This is a whole other story that involves almost getting robbed and pulling an all-nighter. Alan, if you’re reading this, thanks again for helping me that night.). Looking back, wasn’t able to put into words the impact of Bonello crafting a feature about a character struggling to maintain her humanity against the overwhelming force of passivity.

Looking through my list, there are actually a number of films that reflect this theme, and although I didn’t always register of it at the time, include characters who struggle to assert themselves. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is the most obvious example of this, as is Drew Starkey’s in Queer. It’s also worth mentioning that I had visceral reaction to the husband in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, a film I wish I liked as much as everyone else. Above all, these films play on affect, how time, place, and presence has a near-deterministic effect on how we present ourselves. Maybe this is the idea permeates my entire list, from This Closeness, one of the best films I’ve ever seen about being a young Asian American, to the colonial violence scratched onto the film strip of Adam Piron’s Yaangna Plays Itself, to the exposed industrial construction in Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli’s After Work.

The Beast actually strikes me as the most comprehensive of all of these features about passivity, moving beyond the interpersonal specificity of Hard Truths (although political dimensions of race and class are inextricable from Leigh’s work), and the metaphorical specificity of TV Glow (I was happy to see that I deemed The Beast an excellent film about the closet last year!). The Beast is a film grounded in a specific romance, yet in its phasing between three historical flashpoints (Belle-Epoque France, 2014 Los Angeles, 2044 Paris), Bonello charts a conspiratorial evolution in sonic and visual texture, treating these textural differences as results of changes in societal attitudes and ruthless economic optimization. The 2044 section, where AI has stripped humanity of its capacity for emotion, is overwhelmed by inhibitory anxiety, with every minimalist space and derivative club decoration channeling the over-stimulated fear of expression. Bonello’s tortured vision of the contemporary moment actually manages to have it both ways, to ground this overwhelming passivity in a personal relationship, but also reveal its grander structural underpinnings.

This year, those structural underpinnings have felt more distressing than ever. We’re staring into the barrel of a second Trump term, and still faced with an ongoing genocide in Palestine. It’s an environment that has shaped how the culture at large has thought about film. Beginning with the debacles at the Berlinale in January, all the way to the conspicuous distribution woes of two of the year’s most critically acclaimed and political documentaries (No Other Land and Union), the politics behind what audiences are able to see has been especially apparent this year. Throughout the year, I’ve found returning to Devika Girish’s thoughtful response to the Berlinale, and its galvanizing final sentence where she remarks that with the political conflicts revealed by the example of the Berlinale, “The possibility of refusal has reared its head.”

No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 2024)

The question of complicity has been a consistent through the year in film, with protests about institutional complicity facing every major festival, and appearing in the films themselves (see: Misericordia, Being John Smith). What’s the function of art in times of political turmoil? How does art become action? A few of the year’s best documentaries tackle these questions head on. Mati Diop’s Dahomey opens with a phantasmagoric evocation from the perspective of a repatriated Beninese artifact, but eventually transitions to a spirited intellectual debate about decolonization. In its transition from the immaterial to the material (or is it the other way around?), Dahomey posits that the only way to progress is an equal mixture of tangible argument and an irrepressible vitality. Impossible to ignore is that the film’s starting point is the talismanic power of a cultural object. Understandably more despairing is No Other Land, where the impact of political art and the ability to form relationships across insurmountable structural difference are called into question. In a post-COVID world filled with information overload (see also: Sara Cwynar’s transcendent Baby Blue Benzo), where former online channels for political action are now owned by right-wing billionaires, how do we reach each other? And more importantly, how does that translate into material impact?

At the risk of flippancy, The Beast is productive to think about in relation to these more directly political films. The Beast, which ends on a cathartic scream, is, in its own right, a powerful refusal of a late-capitalist world closing in. As the end point of a desperate gesture for connection, Bonello offers a powerful evocation of something we’ve all heard many times, of the power of connection and community (it’s also worth remembering that The Beast if from the director of House of Pleasures, one of the great films about solidarity amidst abusive and rapidly shifting economic structures), and places it against an uncannily recognizable world set on submitting us to atomized isolation. That primal scream is tormented, but it’s also an assertion of humanity.

In the process, much like Dahomey, The Beast also makes a subtle argument for the necessity of art. I’ve yet to see anyone write about The Beast as a movie about movies, but it’s an undeniable aspect of Léa Seydoux’s ventures into her past lives, presented as a descent into a darkened, pitch-black dreamscape. On one hand, the film’s instability points to an existence where we float in a morass of cultural signifiers (perhaps the film’s most potent connection to David Lynch, one that reminded me of Michael Koresky’s review of Mulholland Dr., where he describes the film as a “hyperlink crazy quilt”), but it also ambivalently indulges in the surfaces of these “movies”. These suspended realities reflect and invigorate Seydoux’s indefatigable humanity, and in their own way, they’re also a subconscious comfort, with each section coursing with the love of the aesthete’s sensibility (and the weight of cinematic history) that informs Bonello’s work. From the starting point of Henry James, Lynch, Cronenberg, Davies, Hou, Kreisler, Schoenberg, almost all of Bonello’s films from the past 15 years, and more are tenderly evoked in his deployment of pastiche.

May be an image of eclipse and text — Coma (Bertrand Bonello, 2024)

These familiar, yet nightmarish worlds are paradoxically a form of survival, their sumptuous surfaces and emotional amplitudes revitalize and reaffirm a presence in Seydoux that everyone around her has lost. Bonello genuinely believes in the destabilizing, galvanizing experience of art and our ability to channel those experiences into the real world. It’s no coincidence that Seydoux’s initial divulgence of the film’s metaphorical beast occurs after a performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Formally, this engagement is reflected in The Beast’s transition from the dissociative drifting between 1910 and 2044 (with rhythms that recall his even more apocalyptic 2022 film, Coma) to the grounded nightmare of 2014. In this more complete sublimation, Seydoux’s sepulchral descent into her past lives finally transcends the catatonic experience of drowning oneself in seductive artifice. The experiment, which tests humanity’s ability to engage mind and body, becomes less of a biological operation, than a survey of each individual’s despair. Only with her humanity reaffirmed does Seydoux make the doomed gesture of love that closes the film. To borrow a line from Coma, that vague, sentimental but potent conversion from emotion to action is how we prevent ourselves from “surrender[ing] to the current mood”.

Sunflower Siege Engine | imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival — Sunflower Siege Engine (Sky Hopinka, 2022)

As some of you probably know, movies were really important when I was coming out in college. Expanding my aesthetic tastes also expanded how I felt about my own body (another heartfelt thank you to Apichatpong <3). All this to say that during a year where I felt the most uncomfortable in my own body since then, I turned back to the movies. As I went through the vain project of listing my favorite films from this year, some of the good ones made me feel present, while the truly great ones made me want to get off my couch and engage with the world. Much like what Lea Seydoux’s character might have felt in The Beast, those films harnessed a life force that I’m hoping to take with me into 2025. This coming year, I want to leave my job, be more gay, watch even more movies, write, protest, play music, buy less, feel engaged with my work, and feel like “myself”.

This list contains 40 great movies, that in some way or another embodied the vague notion of “life” I described above. It contains any new release that I saw for the first time this year. If you liked or didn’t like any of them, I’d love to hear about it. Thank you to everyone who’s been reading my scattershot analyses here. It’s already evolved into something beyond my wildest imaginations and I’m excited to see where it goes. Lastly, thank you again to my friends for helping me get through this year.