Best of 2024: Movies

Out of all the best-of lists I compile each year, the one for movies is the hardest to narrow down. The problem (which isn’t a problem at all, really) is that I end up seeing so many good movies in the span of a year that it’s nearly impossible to whittle them down and rank them. However, I enjoy the challenge. Before I get to this year’s top ten, some (very) honorable mentions:

• One More Time with Feeling (2016) follows musician Nick Cave as he and his band record an album after the unexpected death of one of Cave’s sons. The film combines two things I’m really fascinated with: creating art and processing grief.

• I thought for sure John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) would be all kinds of problematic, but (surprisingly!) it wasn’t (that much). Kurt Russell’s one-liners are great, and they work because his character is making fun of the situation, not the people.

• I didn’t know what to expect from GOAT documentarian Frederick Wiseman in terms of a narrative feature, but A Couple (2002) feels like it tracks.

• A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One (2023) is an amazing directorial debut and a strong character study. It’s also another worthy addition to the (very long) list of great movies set in New York City.

• Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023) just barely didn’t make the cut. It’s a courtroom drama with interesting commentary on language and storytelling. Sandra Hüller is great in this.

• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) still feels relevant after almost 60 years. The cast is uniformly excellent, and I wished I could stay in the room with characters after the movie had moved on to another scene.

10. All of Us Strangers (2023)

I’ve been a fan of British director Andrew Haigh since I saw Weekend (2011) over ten years ago. In fact, his 2015 film, 45 Years, was an honorable mention on my list last year. So when I found out that he had a new movie coming out — and that Andrew Scott was the lead — I was very excited.

Scott plays a depressed screenwriter who revisits his hometown, only to run into his dead parents when they were the same age he is now. He gets to learn more about them, and they get to learn more about their adult son whom they never lived to see grow up. The scenes filmed in the family home were filmed in Haigh’s own childhood home. It’s very easy to see that this is a deeply personal project for Haigh.

And whereas Haigh’s other movies were heavily grounded in realism, I liked how this one dabbles in the world of dreams. It’s often hard to tell what is real and what is a dream. Talking it over with a couple people after, we each seemed to have slightly different interpretations about what happened, which is pretty cool. It’s open-ended but not ambiguous, which is a hard needle to thread; Haigh does it beautifully.

9. Inherit the Wind (1960)

My first Stanley Kramer, and I loved it. The script — about the famous Scopes trial — is full of pithy one liners, sarcastic zingers, and moments that make you go, “Wait, this was written over 60 years ago???”

It’s kind of amazing that a movie about a trial from the 1920s can act as a parable not only for the time it was written (McCarthyism and the Red Scare) but also today. The townsfolk are the MAGA movement personified, and Matthew Harrison Brady is their messiah. Of course, Trump could never speak as eloquently as Brady, but here is a man who is so set in his beliefs that he rejects facts and logic in the name of imposing said beliefs on others. He also likes eating junk food.

Thoroughly entertaining, if not also depressing in how little some things have changed.

8. Crisis (1939)

This documentary from 1939 was the first American film to cover Hitler’s expansion into — and eventual takeover of — democratic Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. Needless to say, the parallels to today are chilling.

The filmmaker, Herbert Kline, was Jewish, although he could pass for Aryan. He attended Nazi rallies and claimed to sympathize with their cause, thus filming events he never would’ve been allowed to document otherwise. It’s kind of amazing that this film exists at all.

Crisis is a documentary about anxiety over the future. People shop for gas masks like they’re looking for a new hat. Relentless Nazi propaganda targets young men. Hitler uses an economic depression to tarnish the Czech government.

Mostly, though, this is a documentary about how the worst thing you can do is abandon your allies. The main reason Czechoslovakia fell to Nazi Germany was because France and England acquiesced to Hitler. The Czech people were left all on their own, and it didn’t take long for everything to fall apart.

7. Perfect Days (2023)

Wim Wenders crafts a very quiet film — an ode to one of his favorite filmmakers, Yasujirō Ozu. Koji Yakusho plays Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo who lives a very minimal life. He lives alone in a small apartment, he goes to work, he eats dinner, and he reads before going to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a bit like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.

However, what made this film so fascinating to me is how Wenders shows us each repeated action from a slightly different angle. I love this choice because it reflects how each day is different. Even though the events or actions might be the same, there are small variances — small changes in the pattern — that make each day new and unique. That, to me, is the biggest take away from this movie. Regardless of how much or how little Hirayama changes by the end, it doesn’t really matter because change will happen. It’s an inevitability we can’t escape, no matter how strictly we adhere to routine.

6. Dìdi (2024)

This quasi-autobiographical film follows 13-year-old Chris (Izaac Wang) the summer before he begins high school. It takes place in 2008, after I had already graduated college, but there were so many late-2000s touches that made me feel like I was watching my own Perks of Being a Wallflower. It was also wild because I saw similarities to my own high school friends in Chris’ friends. In the movie they were more extreme versions of my friends Dan and Shanif, but there were certain traits in both those characters that really made me connect with them. And, of course, Chris, the awkward kid with acne who doesn’t quite know where he fits in? Yeah, that was me.

I also really appreciated how writer/director Sean Wang respects his young characters enough to make them sound and behave like real people. This is in sharp contrast to Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), which we saw a couple weeks after Dìdi, whose tween/teenage characters sound like stereotypes written by adults who hate teenagers.

As the movie progressed I connected less and less with Chris. However, I was entertained throughout. It’s weird to feel so much nostalgia for someone so similar and yet so different from me. Mostly, though, I’m just glad to never have to go through that phase of life ever again.

5. A.K.A. Don Bonus (1995)

This is why I love the Criterion Channel. I saw this as part of their First-Person Asian American collection, and it’s a movie that I never would have seen or stumbled upon otherwise. The premise is incredibly simple: Sokly Ny (a.k.a Don Bonus) is a Cambodian refugee living in the United States with his largely absent family. He’s a high school senior, and he’s keeping a video diary of the year. Bonus/Ny uses the camera as his therapist. The film is both funny and sad, and I really found myself rooting for him by the end.

I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to these days, but I hope he’s doing okay, wherever he is. A.K.A. Don Bonus is a bit of the real-life version of Dìdi, and it’s really interesting how these two films ended up side-by-side on my list.

4. Boiling Point (2021)

I’m a sucker for movies and music videos shot in one take, so it’s probably not a huge surprise that I loved this film, which follows the staff of a London restaurant over the course of a chaotic night.

The metaphor that comes to mind is an orchestra: Each actor is an instrument, and I appreciate that everyone gets to have a solo. With an ensemble this large most of the characters are always going to remain rather flat, but the actors infuse their parts with so much personality that it feels like you know them even after short glimpses.

Fun fact I learned from one of the bonus features: After extensive planning and rehearsals, they had reserved four days of shooting for a total of eight run-throughs. Day one was considered more or less a dress rehearsal, with the first take involving lots of mistakes. The second take had an issue with the camera running into something. On day two everyone came back only to find out it would be the last day of shooting before COVID lockdowns. The panic and pressure the actors were feeling made their character’s panic and pressure even more palpable. Everyone gave it their all for take three, which is the one used in the movie.

3. Joy Ride (2023)

I feel like Lionsgate’s marketing department didn’t know what to do with Adele Lim’s Joy Ride. The little advertising I saw reduced it to “raunchy comedy with Asian women,” but it’s so much more than that. Also, it’s raunchy without being gross-out, which I appreciate.

There’s a lot of great stuff here about identity, belonging, friendship, community, becoming an adult, and discovering who you are. And it’s also consistently funny — Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu are the real all-stars, although Sherry Cola and Ashley Park were both great as well. (Cola had more room to shine in Shortcomings — a movie that I almost included as an honorable mention — than she did here.)

Anyway, it’s a bummer that this movie didn’t reach a wider audience. I fear it’s “too Asian” for mass appeal, which is exactly what makes it so great. (My biggest laugh was from Wu when they said the line about how we all end up walking around with our hands clasped behind our back. I’ve found myself doing this from time to time, and it’s how I know I’m getting old.)

2. River (2023)

One of my favorite movies from 2022 was Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a low-budget film with long takes and a time loop. Yamaguchi and screenwriter Makoto Ueda teamed up for another time loop film with single takes, River, and it’s another winner. 

Whereas Beyond felt like a very cerebral exercise, River takes the two-minute time loop and focuses on emotion. The characters here feel more real (albeit still rather flat), and the emphasis is less on mind-bending logic than it is on human nature and how we cope with being imprisoned in a time loop.

I also found River to be more profound than Beyond. I like what it says about how we grow and change, how we’re constantly learning and evolving, even if it feels like we’re staying in place. (In that regard, it has a resonance with Perfect Days.) Each loop is an opportunity to do something new, and even if we find ourselves right back at the start, we’re a slightly different person today than we were yesterday by nature of what we did in the time in between.

1. American Fiction (2023)

Cord Jefferson wrote and directed this film (his directorial debut, no less!), which satrises the (white) publishing industry. Jeffrey Wright plays a Black novelist named Monk Ellison who has had some critical acclaim but very little commercial success. Feeling stuck and frustrated, Ellison decides to write a novel under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh, that combines all of the worst stereotypes about Black folks into a massive trauma porn novel called Fuck. Suddenly, publishers are clamoring to purchase the rights.

Now, if American Fiction were only satirising the publishing industry, it would feel pretty flat and likely get old quickly. (Although, I have to say: I enjoyed all of those scenes tremendously.) Thankfully, there’s another story here — a grounded and tender family drama containing all of the depth and dimensionality that Fuck lacks.

This was hands-down the most enjoyable movie I saw all year, and also the bar I judged all other movies against. The fact that we saw this the first week in January and it’s still my number one of the year is a testament to how good American Fiction is.