Best of 2024 - End of Year Report

Ho ho, yo yos. Here's my rundown of films in 2024. By my best count I saw 124 films last year, 115 of them new watches (though not necessarily made or released in 2024), and 61 of them at the cinema. Of those cinema trips, 28 were at Luna Leederville, 14 at Palace Raine Square and 10 at the Backlot Perth, with 6 other cinemas making up the numbers. So here are my 10 favourite films from 2024, with a top 5 pod down the bottom...

[Click on the titles for links to full reviews]

10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

George Miller's follow-up to Fury Road tells us the story of how Furiosa got to where that film started. I reckon this was the best blockbuster of the year, certainly the most entertaining, with one epic action sequence and a couple of fine performances from Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. Great fun.

9. The Taste of Things (2023)

Don't go in hungry! This is a foodie's shan-grill-ah, the high culinary masterwork of the last decade or more. Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel are saucy together but it wasn't their relationship that was causing all the moaning in the cinema. Director Tran Ahn Hung knows how to do lush and he pulls it off here with aplomb.

8. There's Still Tomorrow (2023)

The only Italian film in the list, this strong debut from Paola Cortellesi (who also wrote and stars) is about women's rights in post-war Rome and is brilliantly genre-defying. Shot in black and white, it has hints of neo-realism but is also absurdly comic, all the while making weighty statements about patriarchy and domestic violence. The fact that it succeeds in being a fantastic watch is surely its greatest achievement.

7. Nosferatu (2024)

Ok, so technically this open in 2025 in Australia but I saw it late 2024 so let's not squabble when such a stunning looking film is on the table. Robert Eggers' take on the Count Orlok story, first adapted from Stoker's Dracula in 1922. I wasn't taken with his previous film, and so wasn't ready for this beautiful gem (admittedly, his last one also LOOKED very good). Lily-Rose Depp is superb as the object of 'the insufferable one's' desire, as is Bill Skarsgård as the titular old gent. But it's cinematographer Jarin Blaschke who stands supreme here.

6. The Beast (2023)

Another odd combination of genres in Betrand Bonello's AI/time travel/reincarnation/romance, starring the luminous Léa Seydoux and George McKay as her cross-timeline would-be suitor. There's a lot to get into with this film, where personal disasters are juxtaposed with actual events across time. The strangeness, almost inaccessibility is maybe one reason it took me so long to rate this as highly as I now do. A proper sleeper this.

5. Bird (2024)

Andrea Arnold's magic-realism meets the grime of Gravesend on the Thames. It's a story of an angry, disaffected young teenager trying to come to grips with relationships around her. Her chance meeting with an unusual newcomer who's looking for his family, slowly brings her to a sort of equanimity. Barry Keoghan as the young father and Franz Rogowski as the interloper are excellent, but it's Nykiya Adams' debut and she's a brilliant find.

4. Kneecap (2024)

What a blast this is. The Northern Irish hip-hop band of the title have put together an origin story with the help of co-writer/director, Rich Peppiat. The trio of Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and CJ Próvai play themselves with gusto, more than ably supported by Jessica Reynolds and Michael Fassbender. It's vibrant, dynamic and fucking funny, with a suitably high energy score. Top drawer fun.

3. Birdeater (2023)

A young bloke convinces his fiancé to come away with him for his buck's weekend in the Aussie bush. This is clearly a questionable decision and though not exactly a horror film, it certainly plays out like one. It's another debut feature on the list, this time from a pair of writer/directors in Jack Clark and Jim Weir, and a shout out to Revelation Film Festival for screening this belter. Best Aussie film of the year for me.

2. The Teachers' Lounge (2023)

It was very hard to put this in second place - the level of film-making in Ilker Çatak's fourth feature is remarkable. This German drama/thriller is about a high school teacher who makes a decision that threatens her career and well-being. Leonie Benesch is phenomenal as the idealistic young teacher and there are moments of score-enhanced claustrophobia throughout that make this a must watch. An incredible film.

1. The Zone of Interest (2023)

An equally excellent film as the one above, Jonathan Glazer has made an uncomfortable classic with this WW2 suburban family drama. The wrinkle is that the suburb is Auschwitz and the father of the family is the concentration camp commander. Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel play the parents so matter-of-factly that you'd be forgiven for not registering the severity of the situation. Glazer stays resolutely outside the camp but the sounds and sights above the wall are a constant reminder of the horrors occurring. This is essential cinema.

Here are some more thoughts on films I saw in 2024.

Best kids' films: The Goonies, The Croods, Jujutsu Kaisen 0, Ghost Cat Anzu.

Feelgood films: The Fall Guy, One for the Road, Power Alley, The Holdovers, Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself, Merchant Ivory.

Feelbad films (but still good): Killers of the Flower Moon, The Promised Land, 20 Days in Mariupol, Hesitation Wound, Assassins, We Were Children, Memories of Murder.

Weirdest films: Poor Things, The Animal Kingdom, Kinds of Kindness, The Substance.

Best shits and giggles: Speak No Evil, Anora.

Best scenes: The nightclub brawl in Monkey Man; the parent/teacher meeting in The Teachers' Lounge; all the food preparation scenes in The Taste of Things; the 'Stowaway to Nowhere' sequence in Furiosa; the dinner in Birdeater; Margaret Qualley's first appearance in The Substance; another dinner scene, this time in Speak No Evil; Sebastien Stan's one-sided bar 'conversation' in A Different Man; and the stunning crossroads scene in Nosferatu.

Best performances: Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel in The Zone of Interest; Leonie Benesch in The Teachers' Lounge; Frederick Lau in One for the Road; Léa Seydoux in The Beast; Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga; Ben Hunter in Birdeater; Leila George in He Ain't Heavy; Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård in Nosferatu; Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascón in Emilia Pérez.

Best songs: Emily Blunt doing a karaoke version of 'Against All Odds' (Phil Collins) in The Fall Guy; 'Dana-dan' (Bloodywood) in Monkey Man; James MacAvoy singing 'Eternal Flame' (The Bangles) to Scoot McNairy in Speak No Evil; 'To Love Somebody' (The Bee Gees) - a false dawn in Joker: Folie à Deux; 'Dreaming' (Blondie) in Anora; 'The Universal' (Blur) in Bird; 'Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying' (Belle and Sebastien) in Days of the Bagnold Summer. Oh, and absolutely fuck all in Deadpool and Wolverine.

[Like last year, I don't fancy going down the 'Worst 10' route but there are some unmentionables that I'll mention here. Megalopolis and Joker: Folie à Deux were awful but the absolute nadir was a film from 1990 that I had never seen, and now wish I'd kept it that way. This was the much-adored Christmas movie Home Alone. I can't get over how terrible this film is.]

Comments

The Running Man

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The Quiet Girl

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Nouvelle Vague

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One Battle After Another

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The Long Walk

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Hard Truths

It's been six years since Mike Leigh stepped behind the camera for the disappointing Peterloo but this film is a return to tip top form. In fact, by my reckoning, that 2018 historical record was his only career misstep. And in Naked , Secrets and Lies and Happy-Go-Lucky , he has written and directed some of the very best British films of all time. Hard Truths reunites him with one of the stars of Secrets and Lies , Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She plays Pansy, an angry, fearful misery guts who can't help but annoy her family (and members of the public) with her constant, nasty invective. At first, her moaning is quite funny until the realisation that this woman is suffering takes hold. Pansy is married to plumber Curtley (David Webber) and they have a son in his early 20s, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) who doesn't say much and stays in his room playing flight simulator games. Both these guys deal with Pansy in their own way, in quiet despondency. Her only real friend is her sister,...

Sicilian Letters

This Italian Film Festival offering is a post-mafia story from writer/director pair, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. Ex-school principal and local politician, Catello (Toni Servillo) is released from prison in the early 2000s, only to be co-opted by the Italian Secret Service to help apprehend the last Cosa Nostra boss still at large, Matteo Messina Denaro (Elio Germano). Catello is the perfect patsy. He was a good friend of Denaro's father, Don Gaetano, who made Catello the Godfather to young Matteo. I should mention this is based loosely on the life of Denaro, though it's at pains to acknowledge that much of this story is fabricated (a title card reads "Loosely inspired by real events, though the film's characters are the fruits of the authors' imagination.") In this chunk of Denaro's life on the run, Catello is tasked with writing letters to the fugitive, via a bespoke butcher-based post office. Initially, Denaro is moved by Catello's prose a...

Splitsville

This is the second film I've seen in a row where two blokes wrote the film and also starred in it ( see previous review ). This time round the two blokes are Michael Angelo Covino (also directing) and Kyle Marvin. The coup was signing Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona to play the wives, Julie and Ashley. On the face of it, it's hard to believe that these women would be with these two spuds, but the script allows for a suspension of disbelief. Marvin plays Carey, just over a year into marriage with Ashley (Arjona). On the way to a waterfront weekend with Paul and Julie (Covino and Johnson), Ashley explains that she wants a divorce. The trigger may have had something to do with them being part of a road accident death, a darkly amusing opening scene. Carey leaves the car in a panic and eventually finds his way to the beach house. Distraught, he decides to wallow with his friends until a discretion threatens to blow apart the relationship. To be clear, Julie and Paul's open rela...

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