Lost Illusions: A Film Snob's Favorites of '24.

Every year I make a list, like most film critics, of my favorite movies from the previous year. I do mine later than just about everyone, because I want the quality films released at the end of the calendar year to have time to make it to my home city. I also need to add that in this age of streaming, the recent foreign language films I’ve watched don’t always officially fall within that calendar. C’est la vie. The great thing about streaming is that there are so many excellent films to see besides all the mediocre Hollywood product. This was a good year for movies.La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher). A thing of beauty. Arthur, a young English archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) is released from an Italian prison, some time in the 1980s, only to again fall in with a gang robbing valuable artifacts from ancient Etruscan tombs. He is a key member of this group because he has access to some kind of psychic power that allows him to find where these tombs are. Yet he’s haunted by memories of a woman he loved, and beguiled by another woman whose wit and self-regard act to pull him away from crime. Leisurely and richly seductive in style, La Chimera depicts the conflict between love and greed with delightful eloquence. Tótem (Lila Avilés). From Mexico, a gorgeous multi-character ensemble piece about family, mortality, and coming of age. At the center is a seven-year-old girl named Sol, played by promising newcomer Naíma Sentíes, whose parents, we gradually realize, are divorced. She is dropped at her grandfather’s house where her extended family is having a birthday celebration for her father. The stark fact behind the story is that her father is dying of cancer. Tótem charts, with a warm and at times humorous understanding, a young girl’s gradual recognition of a painful but unavoidable truth. Petrov’s Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov). This remarkable film has the nerve to metaphorically summarize the last fifty years of Russian history, in a satirical epic about a comic book artist with a permanent case of the flu. Going back and forth in time, we witness Petrov being taken off a bus to serve in a firing squad, as a child talking to a woman playing the Snow Queen in his school pageant, and hiding with someone in the back of a hearse van carrying a coffin. Finally, the film turns black and white, and we get a new main character. In the end, the amazing flamboyant style of Petrov’s Flu serves to reveal the absurd tragedy of Putin’s Russia. Our Body (Claire Simon). A film about women’s relationship to their own bodies, as seen through many stories of patients and doctors in the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital. It might seem odd, after such examples of stylistic brilliance, to mention this 3-hour work of patient, low-key, observational cinema. But non-fiction films have different needs, and Simon’s comprehensive approach is absolutely revelatory. Our Body is an act of freedom, breaking through the customary secrecy and shame around women’s health. Afire (Christian Petzold).Two young German men on a vacation at the shore are surprised to find there is a woman (Paula Beer) renting one of the rooms at their cottage. Set near an environment that is literally on fire, the film turns a critical eye towards the figure of a lonely artist (Thomas Schubert) whose insular ways can’t withstand being challenged by a strong woman. As always, Petzold seamlessly unites the personal and political.Orlando: My Political Biography (Paul Preciado). Preciado, a Spanish philosopher and transgender man, presents the experience of being “nonbinary,” in all facets personal and political. He uses as a template his favorite novel, Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, with over twenty transgender people playing different versions of the main character. Shot on a shoestring, it’s beautifully done, a film of poetry and unexpected insights. Janet Planet (Annie Baker). A quiet little masterwork about a single mom (Julianne Nicholson) living an “alternative” lifestyle in New England, and her relationship to her introverted 11-year-old daughter (Zoey Ziegler). It defies all expectations that we might have about a “family drama,” giving us something utterly fresh and new. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet). An epic about the corruption of postwar American life concerns an Hungarian architect (Adrien Brody) fleeing to the U.S. after surviving a concentration camp, and then locking horns with his rich patron (Guy Pearce) who won’t recognize his own mediocrity. An extraordinary and defiant film discrediting the myth of the artist-hero.

Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citerella).In the titular Argentine city, a young botanist goes missing while investigating a story revealed in some old love letters she’s discovered. Her boyfriend and another man go searching for her, but her search takes a strange new turn. Citerella first explores the mysteries we can solve, then the mysteries that are beyond what we can fully know.Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez).An incisive documentary from Belgium, exposing how the U.S. and the European powers subverted the newly independent nation of Congo in 1960, which resulted in the assassination of its leader, Patrice Lumumba. The “soundtrack” is the American jazz of the period, which reflected the African American civil rights struggle, but was co-opted by the CIA in the name of cultural friendship. A brilliant achievement. And now for the “B-sides”:Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude) Youth {Spring} (Wang Bing) Here (Bas Devos)One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve) The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez) Mami Wata (C.J. “Fiery” Obasi) All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia) Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis) The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols) Origin (Ava DuVernay)Another revolution around the sun. May your year be full of courage, and your movie-watching full of joy.