For the past eight years—ever since the last time there was an end-of-year movie season that fell in the shadow of a presidential election with results that were this, let’s just say, suboptimal—I’ve had to dispel a sense of ambient futility as I contemplated the process of Top 10 list-making. What could it matter (whined my dull-even-to-me interior monologue) what my favorite little movies were this year in my little movie world, while outside the door the world was crumbling into the abyss?
But having hung on for all eight of those years to both the belief that movies matter and a job writing about them, this year I’ll thank the howling void outside to kindly shut up. This year, I cast my lot without reservation or apology on the side of movies, which is to say of all the artforms movies incorporate in their very being: literature, drama, painting, photography, music, design. I’m with the arts, bitch, and whoever finds that stance too quietist or unengaged or somehow trivial is free to contemplate what a world without space for art—the world that it often seems the forces of global capital are actively striving to create—would be like to live in. In alphabetical order, here are 10 of the 2024 movies that reassured me (even when the stories they told were less than reassuring) that cinema is as far from being irrelevant as it’s ever been.
In a few of the many conversations I’ve had about Anora this year, I compared the phenomenon of its reception to that of Parasite in 2019. The analogy isn’t perfect: Parasite’s yearlong reign as a critical and popular smash signaled a shift from a Hollywood-centric film industry to a global one, while Anora’s more modest box-office success (a tidy $25 million on its $6 million budget) mostly just signals that writer-director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) will be free to make whatever movie he wants next. But Parasite and Anora do have some important elements in common: Both are sharply observed studies of class relations—specifically, the relations between the plutocratic one percent and the service class that labors to satisfy their every kooky, exploitive whim. Both films work at once as sociological parables and as detailed character portraits of specific and unforgettable people. Above all, both movies are surefire crowd-pleasers, capable of captivating audiences from roughly age 15 to age 84 and beyond (I based that last number on the age of my mother, who saw Anora on my recommendation a...
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