As the curtains begin to close on another film-watching year, two of our reviewers choose their favourite cinematic moments.
Jeremy Quinn
If 2023 was defined by Barbenheimer, 2024 reverted to audiences mostly playing it safe, with franchise entries and kids’ flicks ruling the roost. Still, this was probably the most interesting year for films since 2019, so even if the good stuff flew under the radar, I’m not ready to cash out my chips just yet. These are the highlights I stumbled across this year.
Perhaps a controversial choice for my favourite movie of 2024, this deserves kudos at the very least for bringing high-concept, gross-out body horror into the mainstream conversation. With great performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, the real star is writer-director Coralie Fargeat, following up her stunning 2017 debut Revenge with this instant classic, an ultra-stylish, subversively funny and easily accessible Hollywood satire that plays like a New French Extremity take on such 1980s genre marvels as Re-Animator and The Fly. Fargeat strips the story down to its basic elements, effortlessly reeling you in before pummelling you with an extended bloodbath of a finale.
If Dune was Denis Villeneuve’s Star Wars, this enormous, bombastic sequel is his The Empire Strikes Back, a braver, bolder work that looks set to become the defining sci-fi movie of the decade. It is overwhelming in scale and emotionally draining, feeling at times like a tripped-out alien transmission from an otherworldly dimension. The story is dense and impenetrable, yet it’s a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience, an abstract pop-art piece wrapped in a blockbuster bow, designed to be seen on the largest screen imaginable, with the loudest, most bowel-rattling sound you’ve ever heard.
All jokes about "living next door to Auschwitz" aside, this is the film that affected me more than any other in 2024. Blurring the line between cinema and gallery installation in its dispassionate approach to the material, its impact comes from the subliminal way in which it gradually reveals its argument. While we observe the eerily normal home life of the Hoss family, writer-director Jonathan Glazer asks us to consider our own complicity in the face of unimaginable horror, and whether we would be more content to ignore what is happening over the fence in order to keep living a comfortable life.
Easily the most debatable entry on this list, Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making dystopian epic deserves a place for sheer audacity. It’s a narrative mess, but I was captivated by this late-career statement from a film-maker who has never shied away from experimentation or willingness to advance the artform. In its story of a maverick architect who can manipulate time, who dreams of transforming his broken city into a utopian paradise, yet is beset by bureaucracy and corruption, Coppola presents his vision for the future of cinema as a realm entirely separate from capitalist aims.
If one film could be said to summarise how many are feeling at this point in history, Romanian auteur Radu Jude’s satirical comedy hits the nail on the head. Following a stressed-out production assistant on a documentary about failed insurance claims, who moonlights as an Uber driver while making TikToks parodying the false masculinity of Andrew Tate, it draws ironic comparisons between the relative security of early-’80s communist Romania with the hopelessness felt by young people in today’s capitalist hellscape, before ending with the shot of the year, a 40-minute static take of a family being interviewed for a corporate safety video in an alleyway! Trust me, it’s hilarious.
Honourable mentions: Poor Things, Civil War, The Holdovers, Terrifier 3, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Amasio Jutel
As it seems is the case every year, the films making the most noise overseas haven’t reached our theatres yet. And although we had Dune: Part Two as 2024’s major release that had a vast cultural impact, many of what I’d call the "great" pictures from this year have been the lesser seen ones. These are my top 5 in alphabetical order.
Director: Arkasha Stevenson
This hypnotic and horrific Catholic horror film is in contention as one of the top horror films of the 21st century. It ruminates on faith and notions of good and evil in the face of Vatican II, an enchanting setting for the film to interrogate the church’s morals and ideas, deftly communicating these themes while making a film that perfectly complicated its originator. While the narrative trajectory isn’t entirely new, it is in the cinematic execution that the film excels. The First Omen is a hypnotic, art-horror film, mesmerising and entirely repulsive. Perspective, close framing, shadows, lighting, camera movements, editing, all to perfection.
Director: Molly Manning Walker
British boys on lads’ trips are maybe the lowest form of life on earth. How to Have Sex is a deeply important, deeply uncomfortable movie about party culture and sexual violence. The film’s strongest feature is its rich, multi-dimensional characters, particularly Tara, in a star-making turn from Mia McKenna-Bruce. How to Have Sex is the most mature film I’ve seen all year — it will make you cry, but more importantly, it will make you think, and, even possibly, give you hope for a new generation of film-makers who diligently unpack difficult subject matter such as this.
Director: Mike Cheslik
Like Looney Toons crossed with Charlie Chaplin, Hundreds of Beavers is the epic, snowy tale of a drunken applejack salesman on his quest to kill (you guessed it) hundreds of beavers. With bedroom-artist video effects, hero’s quest video game logic, Evil Dead slapstick comedy, and animal mascot costumes, the film reinforces the idea that you don’t need millions of dollars to make expansive, epic movies.
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
I Saw the TV Glow eloquently threads the role of media, television, and the suburbs in the production of identity with the tender story of a teen in the ’90s experiencing gender dysphoria. The film speaks to transness and queerness not only in its subject matter, but in its cinematic construction, the calibre of the two central performances — arranged in the frame by Schoenbrun’s distinctive eye — and scored by the transcendent soundtrack. The apt way to describe the themes of TV Glow is almost as a partial object, just as central character Owen feels like someone who isn’t fulfilled by the gender expectations set upon them — an incompleteness that facilitates interpretation, with invigorating puzzle pieces that implant themselves in the viewer.
Directors: Rowan Wernham, Yasha Levine
Based on its impressive cinematic eye and fascinating journalistic pursuit of the truth, you’d never know this documentary was made on a shoestring budget over the course of 10 years by a pair of first-time independent film-makers (one of them from Dunedin). Pistachio Wars is an immersive neo-noir documentary that explores California, capitalism, and ecological and social devastation, Chinatown infused with a bit of Blade Runner 2049-like cinematography and a generous serving of dark humour. The documentarians explore the impact of water hoarding on low-income communities for billionaire philanthropists to produce luxury goods, i.e., pistachios.
Honourable Mentions: Dìdi (弟弟), Dune: Part Two, Ferrari, Trap, The Zone of Interest
