I've Seen Enough

(To tell you my favorite films of 2024)

Happy Almost New Year from Los Angeles, where I’m lucky enough to spend several months a year. Friends, I can promise you that I take full advantage of living in one of the two U.S. cities where All the Movies Play First. It’s actually…it’s kind of stressful at times, okay? For weeks I’ve been living on the almond packets and room-temperature protein shakes I smuggle into theaters. I am pallid, light-sensitive, a little confused. Nicole Kidman’s sequined pantsuit is starting to look like a practical wardrobe staple. My husband is handsome and seems nice, but I don’t really remember a ton else about him? I had a dream that Daniel Craig taught me how to drive stick, and then we made out in a Walgreen’s. It’s been a lot. But worth it, for I have metabolized and contextualized the year in film and can now present to you my top ten favorites of 2024.

In roughly preferential order, with the caveat that I’m often splitting hairs:

1. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun). My weirdest, most destabilizing film experience of the year, and also the most magical. Sure, it’s about the experience of being trans without transitioning—maybe yet, maybe ever. But it’s also about the suburbs at twilight, and the way your junior high cafeteria looks after dark when it’s serving as a polling location. It’s about not being allowed to stay up to watch TV; and tentative friendships with older, cooler kids; and knowing that the only way to survive something is to bury yourself alive and hope you can dig back out. Most of all, it’s about the desolation of your favorite show being cancelled. There was another world available to you, and now it’s just…gone? How can that happen? Where did the other world go, and what if you never find it again? And, of course, it’s about neon pink. The night I first saw this movie, the aurora borealis was over Seattle. I walked back to my car under a sky splashed with the same neon pink as the film, and for a moment I really did feel like I had a foot in two worlds at once. Maybe one day I’ll feel like that again.

2. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross). I Saw the TV Glow was my most emotionally indelible movie experience, but when it comes to pure, masterful accomplishment, Nickel Boys is the film of the year. For the technically innovative way it presents Black subjectivity, for finding a visual language for a novel I frankly thought was unadaptable, for its delicate and non-pandering portrayal of trauma. For its refusal to hand-hold, even though it frustrated me a few times. For its warmth and beauty. And not least for being the only Florida-set film in memory to understand the ubiquity of lizards. It is a singular achievement, one I could absolutely understand you not enjoying.

3. Babygirl (Halina Reijn). In which Nicole Kidman finally gets to finish the thought she started in that Eyes Wide Shut monologue about desire. Babygirl has been marketed as an erotic thriller a la Fatal Attraction, and while I would love to see a revival of the erotic thriller, in this case the marketing lies. It’s a thoughtful, funny, compassionate erotic drama, and possibly the most grown-up, level-headed film about sex I’ve ever seen, even in moments when the sex itself is kinda goofy. Online, many women who openly admit they haven’t seen Babygirl have described it as anti-feminist, a celebration of toxic masculinity and female powerlessness. As a feminist who actually, like, bought a ticket and sat in a theater and watched the thing, all I can say is that I have a very different read.

4. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia). The Indian films distributed in America tend to be either Bollywood extravaganzas or issue-focused dramas. So this quiet, novelistic movie about two middle-class nurses in contemporary Mumbai felt genuinely new. It’s an accessible, relatable film—but when you see it, notice how stealthily director Kapadia modulates the style and tone to deliver both closely observed psychological realism and a panoramic view of the entire city. And when the women travel to a beach village for the weekend, see how Kapadia shifts again into something approaching magical realism. The shimmering beauty, grace, and acceptance of this movie’s final scene will stay with me forever, if I’m lucky. (PS: the title is terrible. It reminds me of my friend Claire’s distaste for book titles that spell out words where any normal person would use a contraction. I’m honestly kind of mad about it. But please don’t let the pretentious, stodgy title put you off the film.)

5. Red Rooms (Pascal Plante). Sterile, austere, withholding, and also the scariest film I’ve seen in years. Real scary, not jump-scary. I kinda hate it. The sound design is astounding and I guess I kinda hate that, too. I have nothing but admiration for this film. I’m very glad to have seen it. I would probably leave the room to avoid ever seeing it again.

6. Good One (India Donaldson). Probably every woman can pinpoint the first time her childhood or adolescence turned creepy, when she realized that becoming an adult would also mean becoming prey. Donaldson’s debut feature, which has the focus and precision of a long short story, illustrates that moment in the life of Sam, a canny, urbane teenager on a camping trip with her dad and her dad’s best friend. The film is so low-key (and sometimes funny) that when the moment arrives, it nearly slipped by me—and then two seconds later, I gasped out loud. Crucially, Donaldson devotes plenty of time to what Sam does afterward; her decisions at first bewildered me and then lit a spark of hope. Actress Lily Collias is a star, and boy was it nice to see James LeGros in a big role again. (Though to me he’ll always be Skippy in Drugstore Cowboy.)

7. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino). I enjoyed Challengers the first time I saw it, but I was also a bit underwhelmed. Then I saw it again, knowing the entire story and understanding the many time jumps, and went “AHA.” Oh my god, what a glorious, grown-up comedy. I’m not entirely convinced anyone in this triangle truly loves anyone else. In fact, I’m fairly sure they should all get as far away from each other as possible. But boy is it fun watching them make decisions I disapprove of. If you, like many viewers, thought Challengers featured a lot less sex than you expected, consider that every tennis scene is actually a sex scene.

8. Anora (Sean Baker). I like to imagine Sean Baker going to studio meetings and saying “Please give me millions of dollars to make Uncut Gems as a rom-com.” This movie could please me by being less shouty, not to mention a bit shorter. I also would not mind if it got going a little faster. But it still won me over via its sheer exuberance and too-muchness and fizzy energy, and especially its universally wonderful performances, which make me long for a Best Ensemble Oscar. I have read all the valid takes on Anora as a metaphor for how oligarchs and capitalists eventually crush us all. But for me, it’s the story of a twenty-three-year-old girl trying to maintain her dignity in ever-worsening circumstances, even if she has to fake it. Watching this exhausted, heartbroken kid her greet her new mother-in-law in carefully practiced Russian, smiling as though somehow things might still work out, was the most heartrending movie sight of the year for me.

9. Janet Planet (Annie Baker). As a playwright, Annie Baker is renowned for her masterful use of pauses and silences. In Janet Planet, her debut film about a preteen girl and her hippieish mom drifting through a 1990s summer, Baker adds ambient sound to her palette, evoking as much color from quaking aspens and chirping crickets as from her spare, precise dialogue. What I don’t understand is how she also managed to make her film smell like August in rural New England. Seriously, what sorcery is that? This is a movie of small occurrences—a trip to the mall, an avant-garde dance recital in a meadow, a migraine, some whispered midnight conversations—and big, hard-to-define feelings. I loved living in the space Baker creates with these pensive, befuddled people and their fragile optimism.

10. Queer (Luca Guadgnino again). A lot of films could have taken my tenth slot, as you’ll see from the runners-up list that follows. And some of them are probably technically “better” than this sometimes maddeningly opaque adaptation of the William Burroughs novel. But it’s here because I can’t for the life of me stop thinking about Daniel Craig’s lead performance, especially the way he conveys man-about-town sangfroid and gawky, aching need in the same frame. I feel like I’ve been this 1950s junkie expat, sweating through his linen suit, trying to pass as a man of letters, desperate for someone to look at him the same way he looks at them. I know how it feels to live in his body. I can taste the way he hates himself. As director, Guadagnino may not always seem to have a clear vision. But Craig does, and he carries the whole film.

I also really liked: Problemista, Love Lies Bleeding, The Room Next Door, A Complete Unknown, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Wicked, A Real Pain, Juror #2, Strange Darling, Woman of the Hour, Exhibiting Forgiveness, The Substance, A Different Man, Sing Sing, Evil Does Not Exist, Ghostlight, Conclave

Mild disappointments: Longlegs, Hit Man, His Three Daughters, Blitz, Shirley

Major disappointments: Emilia Perez, The Brutalist, Maria

Beyond the scope of, uh, normal human evaluation: Megalopolis