Top 10 of 2024

10. DUNE PART 2, DENIS VILLENEUVE

Villeneuve got me at last! The second half of his Dune adaptation is as thrilling and bizarre as the first half was mediocre and visually tame, spilling over with fantastic costumes and great performances. The real lynchpin here is the treatment of Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica as the story’s true villain, a cynical political operator so contemptuous of the religious zealots she instrumentalizes to put her son on the imperial throne that even the shadow of galaxy-spanning holy war doesn’t give her pause. A stone-cold feel-bad classic of space opera extravagance.

9. THE SUBSTANCE, CORALIE FARGEAT

It isn’t perfect. Its themes don’t always gel. But my God, its straightforward nastiness and cruelty go a long way, and the points it does land are bone-crushing. A sour, empty little woman beaten down by the demands of cannibalistic Hollywood producers burns her entire life to ashes on the altar of youth and beauty she can’t enjoy and for which she receives nothing but exploitation and sexualization. A revolting, Brian Yuzna-esque spectacle of body horror and gendered violence with a finale so stomach-churning it would make Cronenberg blush.

8. THE FIRST OMEN, ARKASHA STEVENSON

The platonic ideal of "they didn't have to go that hard", Channel Zero: Butcher's Block director Arkasha Stevenson takes what could easily have been a fire and forget prequel/franchise reboot and twists it into something equal parts Rosemary’s Baby and Possession. Nell Tiger Free is sweatily incandescent in the lead role, a frightened young nun at the heart of a Catholic conspiracy to drag the modern world back to its fearful, unreasoning dependency on the church’s authority. Sharply critical of religious hegemony and loaded with exquisitely awful crisis images and moments of terrible wonder, The First Omen isn’t just a great prequel, but a great film in its own right.

7. I SAW THE TV GLOW, JANE SCHOENBRUN

Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature is a masterpiece of heartache, an earnest message to the closeted, the detransitioned, and the chronically alone that it’s never too late to stop chasing things you don’t want out of terror of trying real joy. From its loving sendup of late-night 90s teen sci-fi fantasy TV to its genuinely harrowing glimpses of creatures from a parallel plane of existence, I Saw the TV Glow stabs right through an entire generation’s childhood alienation and confusion and pulls out something bright and bloody and frighteningly vital. There is still time, even as the childhood art that nourished us begins to fray and lose its luster, even as our bodies shrivel and begin to die. There is still time.

6. THE TASTE OF THINGS, TRAN ANH HUNG

Set largely in the kitchen of a turn-of-the-century French gourmand’s country home, this melancholy romance lavishes care on every frame and line, lingering on loving shots of Juliette Binoche and her real-life ex-husband Benoit Magimel preparing food. Watching them knead pastry, fillet fish, and nurse stock over the course of hours is so deeply calming and pleasurable that when the tragedy at the film’s heart begins to unfold it feels like catching fire in slow-motion. Love, food, and a meaningful exploration of what it means to choose to live; The Taste of Things is something to savor.

5. KINDS OF KINDNESS, YORGOS LANTHIMOS

Three short films, connected solely by the presence of an unspeaking man. A submissive in a contractual relationship with a strict and demanding dominant struggles with the command to take another man’s life. A husband reunited with his wife after her long disappearance subjects her to increasingly strange tests to prove her identity. A sex cult searches for a promised one able to commune with the dead. Each film is stranger than the last, each immaculately shot and written with Lanthimos’s signature detached and alienating flair. Among the director’s best work.

4. CASTRATION MOVIE PT. 1, LOUISE WEARD

A major feat of lo-fi transgender cinema, Weard’s epic-length Castration Movie charts the lives of trans sex workers, musicians, and other members of the queer fringe while giving a bravura performance as Traps, a full-service sex worker deluding herself into believing that her hateful chaser client is her loving boyfriend. It’s a harrowing movie, scathingly intimate and often unbearable in its deep and loving but unsparing insight into the unique dysfunctions and yearnings of the trans demimonde. It’s impossible not to love her absurd, broken, brilliant characters, just as it’s impossible to watch them fail again and again.

3. RED ROOMS, PASCAL PLANTE

Juliette Gariépy gives one of the most repulsively ghoulish performances in recent memory as online poker shark and model Kelly-Anne, a forum reptile obsessed with the ongoing case of a serial killer accused of kidnapping teenage girls and torturing them to death on camera in the titular “red rooms” before selling the tapes on the Dark Web. Her mounting discomfiture as she explores her own paraphilic fixation on one of his victims while pursuing the lost footage of her death. Red Rooms hides more than it reveals, without a speck of onscreen gore, but the real monstrosity is in plain sight the whole time.

2. THE DEVIL'S BATH, VERONIKA FRANZ & SEVERIN FIALA

A devastating portrait of despair in the face of irreconcilable suffering and beliefs as a woman living in 1600s Germany disintegrates under the weight of her intractable depression. Her crime is unthinkable and yet somehow inevitable, the grotesque output of a system seemingly designed to produce monstrosity, to twist and deform the people living within it until their morality inverts. They live in a nightmarish collective delusion under the eternal reign of Death, and Franz and Fiala’s astonishing direction and star Anja Plaschg’s ominous, doom-laden score make you feel like you are, too.

1. THE ZONE OF INTEREST, JONATHAN GLAZER

A Nazi who calmly, pleasantly spends his days overseeing the mass extermination of Jewish prisoners breaks down and sobs like a child when forced by a reassignment to part from his beloved horse. In that single dichotomy is a sense of disorienting revulsion so overwhelming it metastasizes through the viewer, forcing them to reconstruct their understanding of concepts as basic as guilt and emotion, to consider their own overwhelming complicity in systems of genocidal violence, their quiet complacency, their misplaced sentiment and doublethink. One of the most powerfully disturbing films ever made.