Vu Ngoc Manh and Le Phong Vu in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.
I ended up seeing way more movies in 2024 than in 2023, which I’m rather happy about. However, this year also found me very hard to please. I was cold on a lot of critical darlings. So many of them left me thinking, alright, is that it?
Maybe it’s because I saw my #1 film back in February and proceeded to watch as nothing in the following months succeeded in topping it. That could be. Then again, even if I had seen Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell in December, I have trouble believing it would have made a difference. It’s just that good.
Here’s where I’ll make the obligatory mention of films I didn’t get to see that might have altered this list, those being the massively lauded Nickel Boys and The Brutalist, because film distribution is limited/unfair/undemocratic/art is for everyone and not just the few who live in expensive metropolises/etc., etc. I’m not feeling too cranky about it, though, since this year’s big contenders didn’t really do it for me, anyway. Challengers is where I’m most in agreement with the consensus. It’s a film well worth the hype.
But more worth the hype were all the weird, singular, oftentimes audacious amateur passion projects, many of them debuts, but some of them made by veterans. I’m hoping for more in 2025. There’s power in the underground. We’re going to need it.
Honorable Mentions: Adam Sandler: Love You, Babygirl, Bad Press, Caught By the Tides, Chime, La Chimera, Close Your Eyes, Cuckoo, A Different Man, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Good One, The Grab, The Greatest Night in Pop, Here (the Bas Devos one, not the Robert Zemeckis one), Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, In a Violent Nature, Israelism, Kim’s Video, Longlegs, Love Lies Bleeding, Manjummel Boys, The Old Oak, Rumours, The Settlers, SPERMWORLD, Sugarcane, Trap, Unearth, Le Vourdalak, Will and Harper
20. Rap World
19. Nocturnes
18. Dahomey
17. How to Have Sex
16. Queer
15. Megalopolis
14. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
13. Handling the Undead
12. Evil Does Not Exist
11. Last Summer

10. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
I didn’t expect to have a Christmas movie on my year-end list. Christmas movies today are usually disposable, not quality cinema on their own but agreeable, feel-good filler to get families in the theater and to sell ad space on television. Either that, or they’re not really about Christmas, they just take place around it or get watched during the holiday season. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, A Christmas Story, or any other timeless Holiday classic, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point uses Christmas to stage a legitimate drama with related themes like family, forgiveness, innocence, and generosity, and features wonderfully distinctive direction. The flavor of chaos in the Balsano family, celebrating what may be their last Christmas at the family home, smacks a bit of the “Fishes”episode in season 2 of The Bear. A frenetic, cheeky, sometimes cringe-worthy piece of ensemble work and expressive indie filmmaking, Tyler Taormina’s episodic comedy-drama captures the highs and lows of convening with family, particularly the exhaustion, whiplash moments of hilarity, and unexpected bouts of melancholy.

9. Family Portrait
Funny enough, Family Portrait is another indie ensemble film about a family gathering on Christmas, but it’s the Die Hard example. It takes place during the holiday but isn’t about the holiday. In fact, the time period is easy to miss, as the film is set at a lake house in a warm climate, where a family has convened to take their yearly group photo in 2019, just before the COVID outbreak. Director Lucy Kerr takes the opposite approach to Taormina, submerging the family’s fault lines beneath a surface of annoyed looks and cryptic comments. When the mother vanishes, only daughter Katy seems to notice or care, searching the idyllic grounds and repeatedly asking when the group picture will be taken while the rest of the family lounge around and carry out trivial, sometimes offbeat conversations. Things get mildly surreal as the day dwindles on, perfectly capturing the frustrating and slightly absurd nature of a mundane dream conjured up by an anxious mind. Whether real or not, the stilted conversations, subtly disorienting camerawork, and languorous pace create an alienating atmosphere where Katy is the outsider among her own kind, detached and quietly critical and now pained by residual feelings of affection for a world she no longer knows.

8. The People’s Joker
It’s true that Vera Drew’s Batman parody is partially exciting simply because of its rebelliousness and audacity, poking the corporate intellectual property bear at a high-profile industry festival and basically getting away with it. But it’s the actual, undeniable wit and creativity on display that brings The People’s Joker to life. Drew achieves a synthesis of niche queer alt comedy and a much more universal millennial attitude that looks at nostalgia with both affection and a critical eye, and was raised on a particularly analog style of surreal internet anti-humor. There’s much to appreciate, from the both amateurish but vivid green screen and digital effects, to the Adult-Swim style situation comedy, to the truly moving moments of autofiction. What’s most remarkable about The People’s Joker is that for a piece of confessional, kaleidoscopic genre hybrid, it’s a solid comedy with high rewatch value. And that’s a real feat.

7. Rebel Ridge
It’s been a while since Jeremy Saulnier has made a solid film, so Rebel Ridge, released somewhat quietly to Netflix, is a very welcome surprise. A pitch-perfect and intense Aaron Pierre stars as a former Marine and close-hand combat expert facing off against corrupt cops in a podunk town, and Saulnier is able to use this premise for gritty thematic work and pure action thrills. This is a high-pressure and propulsive story with a winding, ever-shifting narrative that still manages to squeeze in well-drawn political commentary about abusive policing, an extortionate justice system, broken local governments incentivized to maintain dysfunction, and a network of complacent public service workers that play along.

6. Nosferatu
Returning to horror was the right move for Robert Eggers, who notably faced production challenges on The Northman, mainly due to studio intervention, a consequence of its ambitious scale and budget. He’s working with the more charismatic of the Skarsgård sons (Bill) and made the curious choice to cast Lily-Rose Depp in the role one would think Anya Taylor-Joy an obvious fit for. I, myself, assumed this would be a terrible misstep, but I am quite happy to be wrong. The most impressive aspect of Eggers’s mostly faithful adaptation of Murnau’s silent classic is Depp’s inimitable, overtly physical performance, combining unvain, morbid eroticism with exhausting psychological turbulence. Unlike his two predecessors, Eggers teases out the more subversive sexual elements at play between live humans more than some vague, paranoid specter of foreign perversion embodied by the monster. It is the death drive in full force within the characters’ repressed libidos that acts as the engine for this piece of shuddering Gothic horror.

5. About Dry Grasses
It usually takes more than one viewing to fully appreciate any good film, and that’s pretty much always true of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. No small task, since his films tend to run long and move slow, although there’s something a little more propulsive about his work than a lot of slow cinema arthouse. Often this is because, while firmly rooted in the contemplative, durational tendency, he also has a penchant for dramatic subject matter, usually involving some kind of conflict between two parties that gradually escalates. In About Dry Grasses, art teacher Samet is accused of misconduct with one of his very young female students, leading to complications in his personal and professional relationships. What’s interesting is how this inflammatory premise, which would typically comprise the entire drama of other films, acts more of a jumping off point here, setting the stage for a complex character examination. Samet, although technically innocent, is shown to be a deeply childish man with a stubborn expectation of reciprocity in his relationships, and this very self-centeredness is what drives all of his transgressions, as opposed to any kind of more straightforward lechery. Of course the run-time allows for more than just this, creating a scenario that speaks to a malaise that is as cultural as it is personal. The lack of momentum and grating interpersonal encounters speak to general failure of the education system, and more broadly speaking, the sociopolitical fabric. While this has a certain cultural specificity for Turkey that may not totally click with American viewers, myself included, it’s such a familiar situation that its observations are universal.

4. Daughters
I know it’s a bit of a cliché for me to say I don’t usually cry at films, but it does happen to be the case, and equally true is that Daughters brought tears to my eyes in the first five minutes and had me fully weeping by the end. Community activist Angela Patton teams up with documentarian Natalie Rae to film an iteration of one of her programs, where daughters with incarcerated fathers attend a Daddy Daughter Dance in prison. The idea alone is emotionally powerful, but the opening, with its black and white imagery of proud fathers and adoring daughters when they first see each other, all underscored by a palpable sadness at this event’s fleeting temporality—well, I couldn’t have prepared for that. When the film goes back and shows the fathers attending group therapy sessions in preparation for the event, and the daughters and their mothers discussing their circumstances, it instills the moment, when we return to it, with even more weight. But by this time, there’s a greater complexity. We understand how much these fathers love and want to connect with their daughters while also understanding some of the ways the daughters feel failed by them. At the same time, the ever-present knowledge of America’s carceral system and the way it disproportionately targets black men creates a subliminal sense of outrage over the necessity of this program. Some have criticized the film for not delving deeper into the structural issues at the root of the program, but I feel it shouldn’t have to educate people about the reality of systemic racism and the resulting dissolution of black families. There’s so much more to get out of it than that, namely the complex relationships between fathers and daughters and the psychological effect of parental incarceration on their children.

3. Challengers
This year we got not one but two horny romances from incessantly fashionable auteur, Luca Guadagnino. While Queer had a lot to love, it doesn’t hold a candle to Challengers, perhaps both the sweatiest and the most bisexual film ever made. Mike Faist is cute. Josh O’Connor is hot. Zendaya, super hot. The three of them create a supercharged romantic trio, like if you set Jules et Jim in the hypersexual spaces long speculated about in the Olympic village. There’s a certain homoeroticism that often weaves its way through stories of male buddies idolizing the same woman, and Guadagnino exaggerates this to a parodic level. Zendaya’s a coal furnace as devious, manipulative sex pot and star tennis player-turned-coach Tashi Donaldson, volleying between these two simps like a ball of its own accord, while O’Connor and Faist clench every muscle in their body with half-hateful, half-hungry stares during the frame story of their latest, fateful match, the story mimicking the mechanics of the game by zipping back in forth in time to provide piecemeal context to this steamy triangle with playful cruelty. Every frame is filled with the giddy excitement of scandal. In this film, everybody loses and also wins at the same time. Athletes are really something else.

2. Green Border
Agnieszka Holland’s gruelling monochrome refugee drama depicts the humanitarian crisis that occurred at the border between Belarus and Poland in the fall and winter of 2021 with startling immediacy. The crisis, manufactured by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, had Afghan and Syrian refugees, promised asylum by Belarusian propaganda, flooding the feebly guarded forest borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, overwhelming indifferent and sometimes cruel border authorities. Holland devotes much of the narrative to a desperate Syrian family being volleyed between ever more chaotic and brutal checkpoints of the opposing nations, shifting focus in the latter half to a left-leaning local woman finally radicalized to the point of direct action. Interspersed throughout is the gradual moral awakening of a Polish border agent, disturbed by his government’s callousness and increasingly reluctant to carry out his orders. All these elements yield a highly emotional and compelling drama with elements of thriller, but the most powerful bit comes at the end, when Holland pointedly depicts the ease with which Ukrainian (i.e. White) refugees are processed through Poland just a year later. From her classic 1990 Holocaust drama Europa, Europa to today, Holland has remained steadfast as one of the most humanist, compassionate, and egalitarian activist filmmakers. Green Border is an inflammatory and urgent continuation of the mission she’s made of her career.

1. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Phạm Thiên Ân’s stunning debut combines a Tibetan-style, Buddhist ethos with the faint colonial echoes of Vietnam’s Catholic traditions, and this amalgam acts like a broth for the elliptical and tender story of Thien, a spiritually lost, modernity-addled Saigonite, entrusted as the guardian of his 6-year-old nephew, whose mother is killed in a sudden traffic collision and whose father, Thien’s brother, vanished long ago from his home in the countryside. Phạm dwells on several classic dichotomies native to tales of spiritual awakening: urban and rural, modernity and tradition, dreams and reality, Eastern and Western religion, and the ancient dialectic of life and death, rebirth, the cycle of existence, and so on. Lofty themes, to be sure, but never ponderous, always given ample space to promulgate within the film’s serene three-hour runtime. But if all this sounds too stuffy or dry, think again. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell has visual and sonic beauty unmatched by anything else I saw all year—brilliant wide compositions of gargantuan mountains and foggy plains, lush forests, winding paths, and twinkling creeks, and a dynamic sound mix that envelops the viewer completely, not to mention exquisitely virtuosic camera work, the pinnacle of which is a jaw-dropping twenty-minute one-take that weaves with phantom stability through condensed village roads to a darkened window of a small dwelling, and into the living room of said dwelling where a wistful village elder reminisces about his time fighting with the South Vietnamese army. Having premiered in early February 2024, this is the longest any movie has ever maintained its #1 spot in my going-on-ten-years as a film critic. More than any big-budget spectacle, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, in its awe-inspiring and mystical construction, makes the greatest case for the necessity of movie theaters. | Nic Champion