Blog Post
January 10, 2025
January 10, 2025
I didn’t find the time to write a proper end-of-year piece this Christmas, but I did find time to watch Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s “little Christmas movie” (made for $250 million) Red One, which is ostensibly about The Rock rescuing Santa but really just an advertisment for Amazon Prime’s speedy shipping. A strategic win, to be sure, but not a patch on Francis Ford Coppola’s startlingly bonkers, sometimes genius Megalopolis, a film that will go insanely hard at future midnight screenings at the Prince Charles. Not the best film of the year — that would be Alice Rohrwacher’s gorgeous La Chimera — but the most fun I’ve had at a cinema in years.
Anyway, here’s a list of the new films I liked or loved this past year— all of which have, you’ll be reassured to hear, a long shelf life with multiple verticals.
- All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
- Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
- The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)
- Black Box Diaries (Shiori Itō, 2024)
- Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
- La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
- Coma (Bertrand Bonello, 2022)
- Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)
- Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
- Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023)
- Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)
- Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” / Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
- Fossilis (Riar Rizaldi, 2023)
- Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024)
- Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)
- Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2022)
- I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)
- Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2024)
- Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)
- Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023)
- Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024)
- No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, 2024)
- Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
- Red Rooms (Pascal Plante, 2023)
- Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2023)
- Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Brothers Quay, 2024)
- Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)
- Universal Language (Matthew Rankin, 2024)
- Việt and Nam (Minh Quý Trương, 2024)
- xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) (Occitane Lacurie, 2023)
And here’s twenty new-to-me films I loved this year:
- Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
- Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)
- Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978)
- Hellzapoppin’ (H. C. Potter, 1941)
- He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)
- The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1973)
- House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)
- Illegal Tender (Paul Bettell, 1988)
- Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
- Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)
- Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1950)
- Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
- Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974)
- Le Remords (René Vautier, 1974)
- The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)
- Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (Nan Goldin, 2004)
- Street of Crocodiles (Brothers Quay, 1986)
- Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984)
- Tre ipotesi sulla morte di Giuseppe Pinelli (Elio Petri, 1970)
- Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)