Movies!!
This is my ninth year writing a year-end listicle for my dear friends at Story Screen, and I am incredibly grateful that they continue to host my rambling opinions and conjectures on the past 12 months of contemporary cinema on their website, as I am grateful to call them my friends. They are an invaluable asset to film culture in the Hudson Valley and are just great people and I wish them nothing but success for their new theater.
The American film and television industry has suffered a great deal of turmoil in the last year. Still recovering from two long and arduous strikes, many studios are now opting to greenlight fewer projects, move them overseas, or cut budgets significantly, leaving thousands of veteran film crews all over the country out of work, as well as the Los Angeles fires leaving crews out of their homes. I hope the industry can recover to a better state than it was left in, and that we can continue together to make films as innovative, original, exciting, and as introspective as the films I am about to list below.
As is tradition, I would like to shout out honorable mentions of great films I would easily recommend that did not quite make it to my final 10. Consider these 25-11 if i were to make a more expansive list.
Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
The Last Stop in Yuma County (Francis Gallupi)
Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
Smile 2 (Parker Finn)
Strange Darling (J.T. Mollner)
Late Night with the Devil (Colin and Cameron Cairnes)
In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash)
Kill (Nikhil Nagash Bhat)
Snack Shack (Adam Carter Rehmeier)
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
Longlegs (Osgood Perkins)
A Real Pain (Jessie Eisenberg)
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
Rap World (Connor O’Malley & Danny Scharar)
Here are my final ten! I did not get to see everything I wanted to before I could make this list. As much as it feels like time is standing still when you’re watching a great movie, in reality that is, unfortunately, not the case.
This list is spoiler free.
10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)
Nearly ten years after he finished his twenty year long production Mad Max Fury Road, George Miller follows up his masterpiece of metal and mayhem with a film that feels so strongly connected to its world and its characters, both on its own and in conversation with Fury Road, that the two films feel inseparable as one grand story of loss, revenge, and gasoline. While a bit more measuredly paced and introspective, Furiosa still delivers the goods when it counts. I felt like I was levitating out of my seat when those bikers activated their parasails.
9. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
Like if Charlie Kaufman remade Vertigo, Aaron Schimberg’s tragic meta narrative of identity crisis and the line between truth and myth-making in art tells a wonderfully unique story, full of hilarious and eerie surprises, with the trio of Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, and Adam Pearson weaving together one of my favorite screenplays of the year.
8. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)
Everything Dune: Part One set up is beautifully paid off in Part 2, making this duology one of the finest sci-fi spectacles of the decade.
7. Anora (Sean Baker)
Sean Baker is a filmmaker that has the gift of balancing humor and heartbreak in a grounded spontaneity that feels so authentic and natural, and this skill reaches new heights in Anora. So much has been said about how terrific Mikey Madison and Yura Borisnov are, this film also features some of the best goon performances this side of a Scorsese film. I could have watched them stumble around New York City for hours.
6. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier)
Jeremy Saulnier’s filmmaking output over the last decade have deftly explored the humanity’s most dark and violent impulses (Hold the Dark, Blue Ruin, and Story Screen’s favorite Green Room) so it was so refreshing to see Saulnier tackle systematic oppression and de-escalation with the same precise tension and character driven set pieces that made his previous films so special. Don Johnson is on fire here and Aaron Pierre is a star in the making.
5. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
The Substance is every bit as gross, disturbing, and zany as you have heard and I am so glad to see a film as out-there and stylishly confrontational as this get the flowers and attention it deserves. I have been championing Coralie Fargeat since the beginning (read my essay on her previous film Revenge here), and it's so great to see her improve her directorial style to such great heights. If Revenge was a destruction of the male gaze, The Substance is an evisceration.
4. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
The little movie that could of 2024. Hundreds of Beavers is a triumphant tribute to Buster Keaton and Looney Tunes that made me laugh so hard it may have almost killed me. Bursting with so much more creative energy than many films 100 times its budget, you owe it to yourself to seek this one out. I mustn’t say more. I don’t want to spoil the surprises it has in store.
3. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
Truly muscular cinema, both in its literal subject matter and its form. Love Lies Bleeding is a perfect little sleazy crime novel come to life with confidence that does not give up one ounce of its personality.
2. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
Growing up not too far out of the same generation as its main characters, the way the film explores our relationship to media and how we use it to understand ourselves at a young age felt as though it was reflecting a mirror directly at me. It has been nearly 10 years since we all collectively experienced Twin Peaks: The Return for the first time, and this is the closest film I have seen that matches its tone and vibe. That is one of the highest compliments I could possibly give. Rest in peace David Lynch, I hope this new generation of filmmakers can effectively carry the torch of exploring the surrealness of our lives the way you did, but Jane Schoenbrun gives me confidence in that being true.
1. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
I did not expect my number one film of the year to be a psychosexual melodrama about tennis, but when it's loaded with this much creative adrenaline, the best soundtrack of the year, and a trio of deliciously toxic performances, you can’t go wrong. A perfect execution, I left the theater exhilarated in a way I haven’t felt in years.
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Jeremy Kolodziejski
Jeremy is a long-time supporter of and contributor to the Story Screen Fam, as well as the entire Hudson Valley Film community, as a writer, filmmaker, film worker, and general film fan. You can find him sifting through the most obscure corners of horror, martial arts, comedy, noir, and crime drama cinema, always on the hunt to discover something new, strange, and exciting.
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