The Pamphleteer’s Top Ten Films of 2024
The Oscars haven’t been relevant for the past twenty years–or so goes the prevailing sentiment. But, this year’s race for gold-stature glory has found itself at the epicenter of the same issues its most noxious personalities like to lecture the rest of us about. Whether through revelations that the post-WWII architecture epic The Brutalist used A.I. to tweak Adrien Brody’s accent or that Anora director Sean Baker and star Mikey Madison opted to avoid an intimacy coordinator to handle the awards frontrunner’s abundant nude scenes, Hollywood has offered a tacit rejoinder to the trumped-up hoopla that invaded the industry shortly after 45’s inauguration and has devolved into the unintentional self-parody most of us knew it was all along.
One wonders how Tinseltown’s political integrity will ever recover from the deathblow of Emilia Pérez–Netflix’s trans cartel musical that quickly gained critical mass as Trump 2.0 pièce de résistance, but imploded when its star’s resurfaced tweets critical of Europe’s immigration policies and George Floyd mania exposed the simplicity of identity politics.
For years, the Right culture warriors who now find themselves ascendant have used Hollywood as a pejorative despite their own largely embarrassing forays to execute an alternative. Such philistinism is all the more shameful because 2024’s cinematic output made for a banner year full of arthouse masterworks and epic blockbusters. On Oscar’s eve, we offer our own take on the best last year had to offer.
10. Ghostlight
There are a lot of ways a movie about a construction worker (Keith Kupferer) who finds purpose acting in a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet after the entirely preventable tragedy that shattered his family could have gone wrong. Yet, this Illinois-shot film from Sundance upstarts Kelly O’Sullivan and Andrew Thompson masterfully sidesteps showy melodrama and indie tweeness on the way to becoming the closest thing the American cinema has had to a multi-demo crowdpleaser in quite some time. Primarily featuring semi-professional actors, the film strives for a sense of universality and truth that the medium’s most vocal critics accused it of abandoning long ago. In a just world, this one would have been the little Oscar juggernaut that could.
9. The Substance
Blame the pandemic or the always online, but campy social satire fell out of favor long ago. So, the success of Coralie Fargeat’s amped-up Hollywood fable about a fading A-Lister (Demi Moore) who takes a mysterious injection with Dorian Gray-like properties to hold on to the last vestiges of fame comes as a quite welcome surprise. Moore fully commits to her everything-bearing performance as Fargeat sidesteps easy feminist platitudes on the way to implicating audiences and Hollywood’s worst tendencies alike. If only Dennis Quaid and Margaret Quallay’s equally impeccable work hadn’t remained in the shadow of Moore all year.
8. Flipside
Michael Moore may be largely responsible for the devolution of the documentary into a mishmash of polemic bromides, but Netflix has made sure it’s stayed moribund thanks to the streaming giant’s penchant for trashy murder shows and Obama-endorsed sleekness. Thankfully, filmmakers like Chris Wilcha have not gone quietly into the night. In his eclectic personal essay film, Wilcha chronicles his early-90s rise as a Gen-X documentary allstar and eventual settling in as a director of commercial and corporate content. Left with a vault of unfinished projects and mementos, he returns to his Jersey hometown to profile the local record store where he worked as a teenager. What results is a mosaic about holding on to the past, fulfilling our potential, and taking life as it comes that jumps from Judd Apatow and a famed jazz photographer to a regional TV host who David Bowie adored. As comforting as it is inspiring.
7. Twisters
The earliest sign of things to come in 2024 occurred when director Lee Isaac Chung publicly stated his aversion to turning the sequel to 1996’s extreme weather blockbuster into yet another treatise on global warming. What Chung offered instead was a perfectly executed melding of disaster movie and western focused on local color. As we said upon its release, it's a poetic interrogation of the “labyrinth of land titles and ownership” that continues to define the west while anchored in the real-deal movie star chemistry of leads Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones.
6. Janet Planet
Acclaimed playwright Annie Baker made her directorial debut with this deliberately paced family drama about a self-obsessed single mom (Julianne Nicholson) whose counterculture dedication causes a rift with her preteen daughter (Zoe Ziegler). While it works spectacularly as a window into the moment we realize our parents aren’t infallible, its greater depth lies in its interrogation of how naked narcissism serves as the foundation for utopian pursuits.
5. The Beast
No filmmaker has brought the energy of the French New Wave back to his native country like Bertrand Bonello. Equally adept at genre play and devastating social critique that has taken aim at the limits of activism (2016’s Nocturama) and pandemic policy (2022’s Coma), he has proven himself as prescient as he is prolific. Though his beautifully unwieldy A.I. treatise about a multiverse romance between a troubled thirtysomething (Léa Seydoux) and her mysterious English suitor (George MacKay) leaves itself open for interpretation, its anxieties about ubiquitous connectivity and Big Tech strike a chord with an ambition few films dare approach.
4. A Different Man
Aaron Schimberg turns the disability movie on its head with this searing anti-fairy tale. Sebastian Stan plays Edward, an aspiring actor whose neurofibromatosis has left his face covered in tumors since birth. Hoping to save his career and become more than an object of pity to his dreamgirl next door, he undergoes an experimental treatment that results in some movie-star looks. But when a universally adored man-about-town with the same condition gets the lead role in a play based on his life, Edward embarks on an epically comedic unraveling that challenges perceptions of disability while excoriating urban creatives for their exploitative tendencies. Its disquieting approach likely sidelined its awards chances, but no other film has ever challenged the Oscars’s favorite middlebrow genre with this much fervor.
3. Challengers
The real Oscars outcry should have stemmed from the total exclusion of this sudsy melodrama from the nominations. Zendeya forms the center of a decades-spanning love triangle set in the upper echelons of professional tennis. With the best screenplay this side of The Social Network and a stunning visual palette, the film indicates that Hollywood is perfectly capable of churning out top-notch projects if it wants to. As we said last spring, “With Italian director Luca Guadagnino at the helm, Challengers not only succeeds as a gripping and epic sports drama, but as a film unafraid to take seriously the innate human drives for dominance and competition that many of our most lauded pundits would pretend don’t exist.”
2. Anora
Their sense of craft and insight into working-class worlds aside, Sean Baker’s films have always exuded a patronizing sensibility that made them admirable misfires. But in his tale of Mikey Madison’s Brighton Beach stripper whose impromptu marriage to the son of a dubious Russian oligarch, Baker crafts a joyous ode to New York with an eye toward understanding a globalized American Dream. Thanks to Madison’s all-in performance and Baker’s revisionary approach to the romcom, Anora rivals the 70s American classics that so clearly inspired it.
1. The Brutalist
The greatest strength of Brady Corbet’s 3.5-hour epic about Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) undertaking the Sisyphean task of building a rural Pennsylvania community center is its obsession with defying categorization. Its rubber-stamped reading as a meditation on the immigrant experience and dark side of the American Dream at the dawn of late capitalism says more about critical laziness than the movie itself. At its core, it’s a film about the all-consuming pursuit of turning tragedy into beauty and the toll life takes on those not up to that task. Fully confident in its unorthodox approach, Corbet’s film shows the true cost of a culture that forgoes aesthetics in its search for a stable identity.