As we come to the end of another year of film viewing, it’s time once again to take stock of those cinematic experiences that have shaped the past year, fed us spiritually, emotionally, and artistically, and enriched our lives in so many ways. Out of the more than five hundred films I watched in 2024, nearly three-quarters of the movies I saw were released in earlier years. So, I always like to kick off my lists of favorite films with a look back at my favorite discoveries and first-time watches – films that weren’t released in 2024, but were new to me and that I found particularly compelling, moving, or significant.
1. The Films of Nobuhiko Obayashi
My introduction to the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi was through his classic of ”campy horror” – House. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it wasn’t until I watched a collection of his later anti-war films this year that I was able to truly appreciate the pathos underneath the comedy and horror. He’s become one of my favorite Japanese filmmakers – blending a fiery political commentary with high theatricality and playful cinematic experimentation, wrapped up in a warm humanism that allows for deep emotional resonances. I’ve only seen a handful of his films, but the titles I watched this year (Beijing Watermelon, Casting Blossoms to the Sky, Seven Weeks, and Hanagatami) have me eager to see as many of his films as I can track down.
2. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, by Wang Bing
Wang Bing is another filmmaker whose work I’ve only just begun to explore. His first documentary, a nine-hour exploration of an industrial district in Shenyang, China, shot between 1999 and 2001, is difficult to track down (I feel forever grateful to my library’s interlibrary loan system), and shows the plight of workers in one community as their factories are closed, their homes demolished, and their neighborhood slowly becomes emptied. In spending so much time with this community, the magnitude of loss is felt even more acutely by the end. Wang begins his film with an expansive view of the district and begins to narrow his focus ever more sharply in each of the film’s three parts, so that, by the end, the story becomes the personal story of a father and son displaced by the wealthy industrialists who have decimated their homes. It’s a gut-wrenching film that is all too relevant more than twenty years later.
On its surface, it’s a fairly simple short film. A woman speaks into the camera and recalls a story about buying herself a nice dress for an event and subsequently losing it. But as Brandon has her participant tell the story a second time, it unlocks something profoundly moving and heartbreaking in the retelling. It’s an incredible work of short nonfiction filmmaking, a wonderful work of feminist cinema, and a beautiful insight into memory and human nature.
Arnow’s documentary debut is a brisk 56 minutes, but her unflinching self-portrait is filled with a raw and painful honesty that is at times difficult to watch, but she always finds humor in the exploration of her relationship with an abusive boyfriend. The way she additionally layers her filmmaking process into the actual documentary gives the film a meta-textual resonance that I find extraordinarily compelling as well.
5. Ukraine Is Not a Brothel and The Royal Hotel, by Kitty Green
I loved Kitty Green’s The Assistant, so I was excited to catch up with her most recent film, The Royal Hotel, and her debut documentary, Ukraine is Not a Brothel, earlier this year. Both films explore the plight of women living in male-dominated spaces, seeking ways to push back against their oppressors and reclaim their agency. While one is nonfiction and the other is a thriller, both show women attempting to burn down the systems that oppress them.
6. The Heartbreak Kid and Ishtar, by Elaine May
I’ve been slowly working my way through the films of Elaine May, and this year I came up to the delights of her second and her final feature films. She continues to skew masculinity and gender dynamics in both films, showing the delusions and selfishness of American men. While The Heartbreak Kid is an undeniable masterpiece, even within the uneven Ishtar, there are moments that contain some of the funniest bits I’ve seen onscreen this year.
7. The Dead Nation and Short Films by Radu Jude
I’ve been a big admirer of the ways that Radu Jude combines dark Romanian humor with a fierce political bite and documentary passages, so over the last few years, I’ve tried to catch up with as many of his films as possible. This year, more of his short films and documentaries were made available, and I loved everything from the bleak comedy of his early shorts (The Tube with a Hat, Shadow of a Cloud) to his documentaries that use archival materials to explore Romania’s fascist history (The Dead Nation, The Marshall’s Two Executions, Caricaturana) and the brilliant absurdity of Semiotic Plastic. He’s a filmmaker whose work I will continue to seek out whenever I can.
Theo Anthony’s documentaries open up the possibility of what nonfiction filmmaking can be. They take one subject and turn it around from every possible angle – even exploring the filmmakers’ own biases – to craft wholly unique, meditative works that are surprising, thoughtful, and have some unexpected humor throughout. Rat Film takes a rodent infestation in Baltimore and uses it as a jumping-off point to explore segregation, redlining, racism, poverty, and more. It’s a stunning work that draws you in deeper the more you watch.
At 32 minutes, Roberta Cantow’s Clotheslines is a masterpiece in concision, exploring so many facets of women’s labor in such a short runtime, all by looking at women’s relationship to laundry. The documentary footage captured is stunning, drawing us in as we watch an activity that is so often invisible. And the interviews that play out over the footage give us such a range of women’s experiences with clotheslines and the act of washing and drying clothes – from the artistry of arranging the lines to barely suppressed anger over their lot as housekeepers.
10. The First Films of Jean Eustache
I started to explore the films of Jean Eustache this year as many of them finally became more widely accessible. I’ve only just begun to dive into his filmography, but what I’ve seen (Robinson’s Place, Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, The Virgin of Pessac) has me captivated. I love the way that Eustache pokes at many of the archetypes of French New Wave masculinity and shows just how destructive and toxic the traits are that other filmmakers in the movement celebrate. I’m eager to keep working my way through the rest of his filmography.
A five-and-a-half hour Japanese drama about the lives of four friends, each at a crisis point in their lives (their marriages, their careers, their friendships), Happy Hour is a monumental work from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi. The four women at the center of this film embody the challenges that women face in contemporary Japan, but Hamaguchi is such a rich, humanist filmmaker that it never comes across as a polemic or political statement (though the politics are evident throughout the film). The lengthy runtime allows us to settle into a rhythm and fully immerse ourselves in the world with the characters so that we feel the emotional impact of their choices and struggles more fully. It’s a lovely, singular experience.
Before I saw her latest film, I knew I wanted to finally catch up with Rose Glass’s debut feature, Saint Maud, after hearing rave reviews from people I trusted. But nothing could have prepared me for this scathing and deeply unsettling exploration of obsessive piety, religious fanaticism, and loneliness wrapped up in the trappings of psychological horror. The blind certainty of the film’s protagonist and the horrific tragedy that it provokes is something I won’t soon forget.
It’s a film I saw come and go during my years as a video store clerk, one that I had unfairly written off due to trailers and a subject matter that (to my mind) bordered on the absurd. However, as the film’s reputation has grown over the years, I’m happy to have had my prejudices proven wrong. Birth is a stunning film whose mysteries continue to shift in my mind the more I think about it. From the way that Nicole Kidman is gradually drawn to this child over the course of the film, to the humiliating outburst of anger and violence toward the child from Danny Huston and the aching melancholy of the ending – it’s a film that I look forward to revisiting to continue pondering its mysteries.
It’s only 44 minutes long, but the vignettes in the stop-motion animated film This Magnificent Cake!, explore the brutal consequences of colonialism on both the colonized and the colonizers. It’s a searing indictment of indifference and cruelty, of Western nations’ impulse to claim land that isn’t ours. Some sequences are gut-wrenching and awful to watch, others absurd and funny, but there’s a bitterness to the entire film that feels incredibly appropriate.
I’m continuing to work my way through the films of Satoshi Kon, and Paprika is the last of his features I had on my list (I’m still eager to catch up with Paranoia Agent). While this may not ascend to the heights of his other films, it still is a singular experience. I loved the way animation allows Kon to fluidly move between dreams and reality, and while the film traffics in stereotypes and tropes more than his other work, the use of dream and fantasy allows him to undercut these tropes and call them into question.
16. The Films of Rithy Panh
Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh spent part of his childhood in the prison camps of the Khmer Rouge. His work often explores his country’s history, his own memories, and his life growing up during the Cambodian genocide. The two films of Panh’s I watched this year, The Missing Pictrue and Exile, were rich documentaries that employed archival material, miniatures and models to create reenactments, and highly theatrical sets that allowed him to explore a past that has been stolen from him. These are deeply moving films that show just how beautiful and poetic nonfiction filmmaking can be.
Makoto Shinkai’s animated science fiction drama works more on the level of magical realism than most anime sci-fi films – we’re carried along by the characters and their emotional connections to one another, and the fantastic elements here serve to set this profoundly moving story in motion. The tale of two teenagers who wake up one morning inhabiting each other’s body, one living in a rural fishing community and the other in bustling Tokyo. It’s a film that I found charming, incredibly sweet, and with Shinkai’s particular brand of melancholy that causes us all to ponder missed connections and friendships from the past. It’s a lovely film.
I love the films of Masaki Kobayashi, the fierce political anger in his post-war filmmaking and the deep humanism that holds such empathy for those caught up in broken systems. And I love that I still have so many of his films to discover. This tale of corrupt landlords, abusive men, and the insufficiency of good, liberal intentions, feels just as relevant now as it did when it was made nearly seventy years ago. Like so many of his films, it’s a bitter pill, but it’s one that I think still has value for us today.
19. The Documentaries of Christine Choy
I watched a handful of Christine Choy’s more than 20 films over the past year. The films I watched explored the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States (From Spikes to Spindles), the plight of incarcerated women (Inside Women Inside), the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in the United States (Bittersweet Survival), and the families torn apart at the end of the Korean War (Homes Apart: Korea). All of her films are anchored in a rich empathy and desire to tell stories that have often been left untold, and all of her documentaries feel personal and deeply poignant.
Ever since I caught Khalik Allah’s Black Mother at the Portland Film Festival a few years before the pandemic, I’ve been entranced by his poetic approach to documentary filmmaking, and his more than three-hour opus is no exception. Capturing snippets of life from his interactions with the people that most of our society ignores or turns away from, his film gives us a panoramic view of contemporary life on the streets through still photography, asynchronous audio conversations, and lush, humanist images. It’s a rich, moving film that shows how to work within marginalized communities without exploiting them.
