When you write about movies, you get to experience two lives: the one that happens in the real world and the one that flickers onscreen.
As movies are, at heart, a form of escapism, the latter tends to be more enjoyable. That was certainly the case this year, a cinematic annus mirabilis in which choosing just 10 films to represent the last 12 months was an especially difficult task that required killing several darlings. So while I did indeed compile the usual best-of list, I also selected 14 honorable mentions for an even 24 and commissioned friend of the newsletter, Tim Jones, to make a video featuring all of them. Please do avail yourself of his fine work before reading on:
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Sweet dreams are made of something, but it isn't this. Yorgos Lanthimos returned to his Greek Weird Wave roots with a nearly three-hour triptych co-written by longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou, who was notably absent from the comparatively normal Poor Things and The Favourite. And while there isn’t much kindness on display in these loosely connected fables starring Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau, all of whom appear as different characters in each segment, what does emerge is an oddly moving treatise on what we owe to the people we love. (Hulu)
More than one kind of plot thickens in this curio about shamans, grave robbers, ancestral curses, and what you unleash when you exhume a burial plot in a misbegotten attempt to prevent a dire situation from growing worse. Only five movies have ever been more successful at the South Korean box office, a testament not only to writer/director Jang Jae-hyun's skill at crafting a compelling occult yarn but also to the unexpected mass appeal of a movie so ceaselessly strange it hardly seems commercial. (AMC+)
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Debut features are rarely as accomplished as Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Phạm Thiên Ân’s meditation on family, faith, and the intersection thereof. About a man who goes looking for his missing brother in rural Vietnam after a motorcycle accident leaves the brother’s estranged wife dead and his child without a guardian, the film’s journey, like that of Crossing, is ultimately more spiritual than physical. (Kino Film Collection)
What’s left of the natural world is further encroached upon by civilization in Evil Does Not Exist, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s quietly unnerving follow-up to his Oscar-winning Drive My Car. The film's slow burn leads to one of those inevitable-in-hindsight climaxes that you don’t see coming and then wonder how you missed in the moment — a good reason to watch it again. (The Criterion Channel)
The most heartbreaking exchange of the year:
“Do you wish you could unknow me?”
“I don’t know you.”
Daisy Ridley gives a career-best performance as Fran, who does indeed daydream about dying on occasion — not because she wants to, but because she wonders how it would feel to, say, hang from a piece of heavy machinery she can see from her window. Rachel Lambert’s low-key character study blends that morbidity with musical cues from Snow White to create one of the most quietly moving movies in some time, with each set piece circling back to Ridley’s superlative performance. (Mubi)
Jimmy Fallon could never. If trying to commune with the devil on live television sounds like a bad idea, that's because it is. But it made for the year's best horror movie all the same, aided in large part by David Dastmalchian's energeized turn as a desperate late-night host willing to do anything to pop a rating. (Shudder and Hulu)
Most comedies aren’t 163 minutes long, but then most comedies don’t say nearly as much about the world at this exact moment as Radu Jude’s pitch-black satire. Ilinca Manolache is a revelation as Angela, an underpaid production assistant driving around Bucharest to wrangle would-be actors when she isn’t making hilariously subversive TikToks. She does so as Bobiță, an over-the-top sendup of toxic social-media influencers she brings to life via a hilariously primitive filter that gives her a bald head and bushy eyebrows. Sometimes all you can do is laugh, and Jude’s movie produces an abundance. (Mubi)
Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner is both a feel-good love story and a bittersweet heartbreaker, oscillating between emotional highs and lows as only the best movies — and most intense relationships — can. Mikey Madison is utterly wonderful in the title role, but the real surprise here is Yura Borisov as a hired goon with a heart of gold. (In theaters)
It’s tempting to refer to this architectural drama as “towering” and/or “monumental,” so I will. Brady Corbet’s third feature would be admirable for its ambition alone, but what makes this cinematic scaffolding so remarkable is that its reach never exceeds its grasp. To say that they don’t make them like this anymore would be accurate, but it would also falsely imply that movies like The Brutalist were ever common in the first place. This is a rare object that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible to accommodate its VistaVision cinematography, which even looks impressive during the 15-minute intermission. (In theaters)
To tame a land is also to sap its essence, and to purge that land of its natural inhabitants in the name of nation-building is to write your own history in blood. Chilean filmmaker Felipe Gálvez is unflinching in his depiction of his country’s brutal colonial past, a bloody chapter of history most often relegated to a footnote. He makes it impossible to ignore in his searing debut feature, but The Settlers is no chore. It’s so beautiful to look at that you might even forget how ugly what’s happening is much of the time — a trick, perhaps, to ensure that you never turn away from the urgent images Gálvez has crafted. (Mubi)
