Zoe Saldaña, left, and Karla Sofía Gascón co-star in “Emilia Pérez,” one of Stephen Whitty’s favorite movies of 2024.
Every year, I draw up a Top 10 movies list. It’s not easy. I typically begin with about 30 I liked, and then start narrowing down. It’s a fun exercise, and hasn’t changed much since I started compiling these lists, more than three decades ago.
But one thing is different: Most of Hollywood’s big studios have, quite frankly, stepped back from the business of making the sort of movies that used to compete for Oscars.
A few big studios are still in the game, putting out one or two titles they think could win something. But generally they would much rather concentrate on sequels and superheroes.
The good thing, though, is that plenty of other sources have taken up the slack. Scrappy, smaller companies like Neon and A24, and studio siblings like Focus and Searchlight. Big streamers still trying to build their artistic cred. Boutique distributors of foreign films and tiny indies. Tiny, one-film-at-a-time outfits that put out home-made movies that nearly defy description — like a silent-comedy epic about rampaging beavers. (No, I’m not kidding.)
So my Top 10 list doesn’t look quite the way it used to. But neither does cinema in 2024. And that’s OK.
But first, which titles almost made the final cut — yet are still worth seeking out?
Well, I enjoyed the anything-goes dreamscapes of Francis Ford Coppola’s fantasy, “Megalopolis,” and the steamy obsessiveness of Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” the tense incarcerated drama of “Sing Sing” and the quiet grief at the broken heart of “Ghostlight.” And just for thrills, “Hit Man” and “Magpie” showed that blackly comic mysteries and edgy neo-noir are alive and well.
It was also a good year for the Celts, as “Small Things Like These” looked back at the sexual abuse and religious fundamentalism that so scarred the old Republic, and “Kneecap” explored a modern Belfast full of angry rap and youthful rebellion. Meanwhile, that Gaelic idol Saoirse Ronan excelled twice, first as a mother searching for her son during the London “Blitz” and then, in “The Outrun,” as a recovering alcoholic searching for herself on a remote Scottish isle.
Those were 10 very good movies. Now, here is my honor roll of 10 great ones, in alphabetical order.
Mikey Madison with Mark Eydelshteyn in “Anora.”
“Anora”
Sean Baker has become one of the indie world’s most surprising directors, shooting films on his phone, making stirring features starring the sort of marginalized characters most filmmakers don’t even notice. “Anora” is firmly in that tradition: a raunchy comedy-drama about a Brooklyn sex worker who might just have found her prince. (Think “Pretty Woman,” minus the schmaltz and product placement). Yet while it is of a piece with some of Baker’s earlier films, like “The Florida Project,” it is also a leap forward in filmmaking, with terrifically edited action sequences and a laugh-out-loud, star-making performance from Mikey Madison as the tough (but tender) cookie at its heart. In theaters.
“The Bikeriders”
Maybe it was the title — seeming to promise a polite film about the Tour de France — that kept the crowds away. Too bad, if true, because what the film delivered was a great modern mob movie, only set in the Midwest instead of Little Italy, and with its charismatic criminals riding Harleys instead of vintage Caddies. Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter,” “Loving”) long ago established himself as an eclectic, energetic director, but this is just about perfect, from its adrenaline rush of a beginning to its older-and-maybe-wiser finale. Great performances, too, with Tom Hardy as the Brando-esque leader, Jodie Comer as a no-illusions biker chick and Nichols stalwart Michael Shannon, who gets big laughs just by showing up. Streaming.
Adrien Brody, right, with Alessandro Nivola in “The Brutalist.”
“The Brutalist”
Indie filmmaker Brady Corbet ups his game with this 3½-hour, wide-screen drama, which links modern elliptical storytelling with old-fashioned, epic sweep (it even comes with a 15-minute intermission). Spread over several decades, it is the tale of a Holocaust refugee — Adrien Brody, building on all that angst and anguish from “The Pianist” — determinedly trying to resume his life, and architecture career, in America. Tragically, rebuilding turns out to be even more difficult than building, as he struggles to renew his relationship with his traumatized wife and navigate the demands of an eccentric and sometimes rage-filled patron. Moodily photographed, and hauntingly scored. In theaters.
“Conclave”
I began this article by talking about the sort of big, audience-friendly films that we used to see around awards season, but that seem to have fallen out of fashion. Here is one of this year’s exceptions: a juicy old-fashioned drama. Seems a liberal Pope has unexpectedly died, and it is time for the world’s Cardinals to meet and elect a new one — if they just can hold their own grudges and ambitions in check. It’s like “Advise & Consent,” but with Vatican City instead of D.C., and cassocks instead of business suits. Director Edward Berger keeps all the political intrigue satisfyingly intact — with a tricky plot, literate dialogue and a murderer’s row of great character actors, including Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci. Streaming.
“Emilia Pérez”
Like Sean Baker, France’s Jacques Audiard sees people others don’t — the Muslim émigré who becomes a mafioso in “A Prophet,” the double amputee who finds erotic abandon in “Rust and Bone.” But neither prepared me for this Spanish-language film, in which a Mexico City lawyer helps a drug kingpin fake his death and slip out of the country — for gender reassignment. Intrigued yet? It is also pretty much an all-female cast. AND it is an opera. Full of feverish melodrama, daydreamy song-and-dance numbers, and standout performances from Zoe Saldaña, trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez as the mobster’s very confused “widow,” it was — sorry, “Wicked” — the most magical musical of the year. Streaming.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “Hard Truths.”
“Hard Truths”
In 2008, director Mike Leigh made the sublime “Happy-Go-Lucky,” starring sunny Sally Hawkins as a schoolteacher who always looks on the bright side (often to the annoyance of the sad sacks around her). Well, here is her opposite number. The marvelous Marianne Jean-Baptiste — who first garnered real attention in Leigh’s 1996 “Secrets & Lies” — plays a middle-aged wife and mother who doesn’t have a good word to say about anything, constantly lashing out in acidic (and, often, hilarious) attacks. At first, she seems to be in a tradition of comedy curmudgeons stretching from W.C. Fields to John Cleese — until we realize her outbursts only mask a deep, despairing depression. Opens January 10.
“Hundreds of Beavers”
It was a year of determined filmmakers risking all to achieve their controversial vision. But even Coppola, Corbet and Kevin Costner didn’t go as far as Mike Cheslik. Stars? Who needs them. A big budget? It would just get in the way. Besides, who on earth would risk real money on a black-and-white silent comedy about one fur trapper’s war with a community of technologically advanced rodents? And so Cheslik and co-writer and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews went ahead anyway, with this defiantly unhinged adventure full of slapstick humor, do-it-yourself effects and an aesthetic that is equal parts Charlie Chaplin, Jack London and “Dudley Do-Right.” Delightful and truly one-of-a-kind. Streaming.
“Juror #2”
This could have been Warner Bros.’ easy Oscar contender — if the corporation, illustrating what is wrong with Hollywood these days, hadn’t thrown it away, giving it a short, unheralded release in theaters before sending it off to streaming. Too bad. Like “Conclave,” this courtroom drama is one of those mainstream movies-for-grownups Hollywood almost seemed to have forgotten how to make — a thriller whose suspense and surprises are driven by character and dialogue, not spandex and special effects. Anchored by a complex performance by Nicholas Hoult, enlivened by great turns by J.K. Simmons and Toni Collette, it is smart entertainment — and proof that Eastwood, 94, hasn’t lost a step. Streaming.
Jesse Eisenberg, right, with Kieran Culkin in “A Real Pain.”
“A Real Pain”
When Jesse Eisenberg first appeared on screen in 2002’s “Roger Dodger” — nervously joking, overly sensitive — he seemed fated for a career as Woody Allen’s alter ego (a role he eventually filled in “Café Society”). So how wonderful it has been to see him develop his own persona as an actor, and blossom as a filmmaker. An ambitious one, too — while this movie starts off as a sort of “Odd Couple” on the road (two mismatched cousins head off to explore their family’s roots), it becomes something much more, delving into what we owe the past and, ultimately, each other. Marvelously acted by Eisenberg, Jennifer Grey and Kieran Caulkin, who is maddening, and heartbreaking, as the film’s motormouthed misfit. In theaters.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
Iman (Missagh Zareh), a lawyer, is thrilled to get a promotion to investigating judge in Iran’s justice system until he realizes he is expected to rubber-stamp a growing stack of execution orders — growing even faster as women begin demonstrating in the streets for equal rights. Does he simply go along? Not if his young, liberal daughters have anything to say about it. A portrait of a family, and a nation, coming apart, violently splitting across generations and genders, Mohammad Rasoulof’s drama isn’t just a meditation on morality but an illustration of the real price of free speech: Facing a prison sentence for making the film, he had to slip out of his country afterward and go into exile. In theaters.
CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET
Since launching in September 2014, NJArts.net, a 501(c)(3) organization, has become one of the most important media outlets for the Garden State arts scene. And it has always offered its content without a subscription fee, or a paywall. Its continued existence depends on support from members of that scene, and the state’s arts lovers. Please consider making a contribution of any amount to NJArts.net via PayPal, or by sending a check made out to NJArts.net to 11 Skytop Terrace, Montclair, NJ 07043.
