Kevin Lally on Film

Thanks to my relatively new perch on the editorial board at Cineaste, I’m getting to see more films a year than ever. (Editing a monthly magazine and website for several decades limited my free time to luxuriate in the three weeks of New York Film Festival press screenings, although I tried to make up for that void with my annual one-week film marathons at the Toronto Fest.) It’s a pleasure to report that I had many superb film experiences in 2024: My top ten is a strong list, and I have a long roster of very worthy runners-up. Here’s the list, in order of preference.

Green Border: As I suspected when I first saw it at the 2023 New York Film Festival, my number-one theatrical release of the year has remained unsurpassed. Veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s urgent drama immerses you in the plight of a group of Syrian and Afghan refugees hoping to find a safe haven in the European Union; instead, they become pawns in the cruel political gamesmanship between Poland and Belarus. The opening minutes offer a warm introduction to the main players, which makes their sudden nightmare even more appalling. The multi-layered story also encompasses a group of defiant activists and a young guard about to become a father. Holland’s film was the target of right-wing politicians in her home country, where it nevertheless became a box-office hit. This powerful and timely drama is available for streaming at kinofilmcollection.com. See my full review here.

No Other Land: An indelible highlight of the 2024 New York Film Festival was this bold documentary written, directed, produced, and edited by Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, depicting Israel’s systematic destruction of the homes of Palestinians in the farming region Masafer Yatta. Adra is the main camera subject, a lifelong activist who courageously stands up to the Israeli soldiers bulldozing his neighborhood, often with his camera on record. Adra’s friendship with fellow journalist Abraham is a fascinating one, the latter painfully aware of their differing statuses in this fraught environment. No Other Land had a brief run at Lincoln Center and opens at New York’s Film Forum on January 31.

Anora: One of the most purely entertaining films of the year is this comic tale of a Manhattan lap dancer who has a whirlwind romance with the feckless son of a Russian oligarch and easily persuades him to “put a ring on it.” Mikey Madison gives one of the year’s breakout performances in the title role, a no-nonsense dynamo who stands her ground when her fairytale meets a harsh reality. Writer-director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project) deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this high-energy fable that concludes with unexpected poignancy. If you subscribe to Cineaste, you can read my interview with Baker in the Winter 2024 issue.

I’m Still Here: Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) delivered one of the most powerful and haunting films at the 2024 New York Film Festival with the real-life story of the Paiva family and their search for the truth when father Rubens, a former congressman, is taken from their Rio home for a “deposition” and is never seen again. For the first half-hour of the 1970s-set drama, we follow the normal daily lives of this close-knit family, so it’s doubly shocking when military goons come knocking. Fernanda Torres is superb as the mother who won’t stop asking questions. The film opens on January 17 in New York and Los Angeles, but I’m breaking protocol and including it in my 2024 list.

A Different Man: You’ve never seen anything quite like this comedy-drama from writer-director Aaron Schimberg, a true mind-bender about identity and self-image that takes some wholly unexpected twists. The excellent Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a reclusive New Yorker who suffers from neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that has generated massive tumors above his neck. One of his few friends is his new neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a writer who decides to write a play inspired by this singular man. Then Edward undergoes an experimental treatment that miraculously transforms him into a handsome specimen. Edward, hiding his former identity, auditions for Ingrid’s play, but encounters a rival, Oswald (English actor Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis), who charms everyone around him despite his off-putting disability. The newly attractive but still highly insecure Edward simply can’t compete, while the audience is left to ponder the true essence of beauty.

Megalopolis: Without a doubt the most divisive film on this list, Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus isn’t perfect, but it’s a strange and audacious big-screen experience you won’t soon forget. In this decades-in-the-making project, Coppola merges modern-day New York with ancient Rome for the fanciful account of a Nobel Prize-winning architect (Adam Driver) whose dreams of creating a utopian city are threatened by corrupt bureaucrats (a metaphor for the maverick filmmaker, for sure). Surreal flourishes abound as Coppola tinkers with his digital playbox, and there’s intentional humor in character names like Hamilton Crassus III and Wow Platinum (a funny and uninhibited Aubrey Plaza). It’s Mr. Coppola’s Wild Ride and, like The New York Times and The New Yorker, I’m glad I hopped aboard.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: George Miller is another senior filmmaker gratifyingly swinging for the fences. I loved, loved, loved his Mad Max: Fury Road, and if this prequel isn’t quite as satisfying, it still offers vivid proof that he’s the most potent action director alive. Here, Miller explores the origin story of the title character played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road, a young girl kidnapped from her secret community by a ruthless biker gang, who grows up determined to exact revenge. Anya Taylor-Joy, with her mesmerizing eyes, is fierce as Furiosa, and Chris Hemsworth has fun hamming it up as the egotistical warlord aptly named Dementus, but it’s Miller’s incredible staging of chases and all manner of mayhem that rules the screen. Here’s hoping he get the opportunity to continue the saga.

A Real Pain: The odd couple of 2024 is Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins of diametrically opposed personalities, who journey to Poland as a homage to their late grandmother and join a Holocaust-themed tour group. Writer-director-star Eisenberg is once more the fidgety and neurotic one, while Culkin spins a variation on his “Succession” character, an unfiltered live wire. The personas may be familiar, but Eisenberg has more than facile comedy in mind: Each of the cousins is not just a “real pain” to the other, but they’re carrying psychological baggage that’s gradually revealed over the course of this always engaging character study. Poland, which never looked more inviting, co-financed the project—a wise investment.

Robot Dreams: My favorite animated film of the year is the tale of a lonely dog living in New York’s East Village in the 1980s who purchases and assembles a robot friend (as seen on TV!). They have an idyllic time enjoying summer in the city, but a trip to the beach leads to disaster. Spanish director Pablo Berger, who got his master’s degree in Film at NYU, beautifully evokes his time in New York in delightful detail—a New York entirely populated by anthropomorphic animals a la Zootopia. Making his first animated feature (adapted from Sarah Varon’s 2007 graphic novel), he’s recruited a superb design team and sustains the story without a line of dialogue—a story that becomes incredibly moving in the final reel.

Io Capitano: A 2024 Oscar nominee in the International Film category, Matteo Garrone’s drama covers unusual ground for an Italian director: It’s the epic story of two Senegalese teenagers (Seydou Sarr, exceptional, and Moustapha Fall) who naively decide to leave home for Europe, with dreams of becoming music stars. Their journey is a harrowing one, including long treks through the Sahara Desert and time in a Libyan prison camp. It’s another powerful depiction of the migrant experience, in the spirit of those great Italian neorealist classics of the 1940s and ’50s.

My runners-up, all worth checking out, are listed in alphabetical order: All We Imagine as Light, Conclave, Didi, Emilia Pérez, Flow, Hard Truths, His Three Daughters, Hit Man, Inside Out 2, Juror #2, Kneecap, Lee, The Old Oak, The Order, Pictures of Ghosts, The Room Next Door, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Sing Sing, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Vermiglio, Wicked, Wicked Little Letters, Zurawski v Texas. Still unseen: A Complete Unknown, Gladiator II, September 5 and The Wild Robot.