Marya's Favorite Fifteen Films of 2024
It was such an incredibly rich year for this thing we call the movies!
NB: This newsletter is too long for email, so it’s probably best to read on the web or the app.
Every year I say I could easily post a top fifty and they would all be bangers, but this year in particular is the strongest film year for me in recent memory. I attribute this to the many film festivals I have been lucky to attend since shifting to freelance writing in 2021. Attending these festivals and seeing such a large breadth of films from around the world — and experiencing cinephilia in its purest form — has been deeply rewarding. Many of the films on this year’s Favorite Fifteen Films list I saw at film festivals last year and thus was able to watch them multiple times. In fact, there are only a few films on this list that I haven’t watched multiple times, though I suspect when I return to those films I will discover even more to love about them. This year I watched 301 (!) films I’m counting as a 2024 release1 which might be a new record for me. You can see all the films I watched and where they rank here on Letterboxd. There are still nearly 200 films that I saw at festivals over the last few years that sadly remain in release limbo.
Now without further ado, here are my Favorite Fifteen Films2 of 2024.
15. (tie) The Last Showgirl (dir. Gia Coppola)
My cheat this year is two films that I saw on back-to-back days at the Toronto International Film Festival in September that reminded me of some relatives, and therefore I could not bear to leave either film off the list. Both films are also about art and whose art gets lauded, whose gets disrespected, and also who gets the last word on their own stories.
Pamela Anderson gives a stunning performance in Gia Coppola’s elegiac character study The Last Showgirl, where she plays a showgirl named Shelly whose life is pulled out of whack by the news that her long-running revue is going to close within the week. Shelly’s love of her work, and her struggle to be taken seriously as an artist reminded me of my Great Aunt Zay, who was a showgirl herself in the 1950s and has written to me about how our family never understood her or her art. Here’s a bit from what I wrote in my dispatch from the film’s world premiere:
As Shelly, Anderson is a revelation, bringing the same balance of buoyancy and pathos that Judy Holliday brought to each of her roles. Equally as comfortable in the sequins and glitter and gauze of the job as she is going makeup-less on her days off. As with Anderson, Shelly has not been taken seriously as an artist, and sometimes even as a person. When she says, “I’m tired of defending myself” and that she has no regrets about her life’s choices, it’s hard not to see Anderson’s emotional truth shine through Shelly’s words. The Last Showgirl is a film about beauty and truth and love. It broke my heart as much as it uplifted it. Women like Shelly, Pam, and my Great Aunt Zay should never have to defend their existence to anyone.
This film had an Oscar-qualifying in early December and will play in select theaters starting January 10th. I will also have interview with Anderson running on RogerEbert.com that week.
15. (tie) Oh, Canada (dir. Paul Schrader)
The second film that fits this bill is Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, which is based on the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks and stars Richard Gere as an acclaimed documentarian and draft dodger named Leonard Fife who is dying of cancer and wants to set the record straight about his life before the black shroud of death comes for his final breath. This was the first film I saw at TIFF this year and it remained my favorite of the fest. Watching this film, in which Schrader uses various filmic techniques like aspect ratio changes, casting of actors in multiple roles, interchanging Gere and Jacob Elordi in scenes of his younger days, repetition of scenes with slight alterations, and switching between color and crisp black and white in order to grapple with what happens to the brain as it dies, reminded me of sitting with my Grampa during his final week. He told stories I had never heard before, made movements like he was picking fruit or taking tickets (we could never figure out which, or if either movement originated from his childhood). Often he wasn’t sure where he was or what was happening, but he also asked me when I was going to write another book (I had given him a copy of Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector, a book for which I had written the foreword a decade earlier.) It’s a truly transformational experience to witness death as it happens. Schrader’s film gives us that, while also attempting to go inside that brain and navigate its misfires as it heads towards one final semblance of truth. Schrader has always been a very spiritual filmmaker, and here he sets up his whole film as a confessional. The opening shot is a painting in a frame, that is framed by a door, that is framed by Schrader’s camera. As Fife is wheeled into the room where he will record his life’s story, the tape on the floor marking his spot takes the shape of a crooked cross. It’s a rich film that contemplates life as art as prayer as death. I’ve seen it twice and feel as though I have only just begun to understand the depth of its mysteries — and its wisdom.
This film is currently playing select theaters.
14. The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)
Two films this year traced the rot at the heart of the American Dream. In Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, a kitchen in a tourist trap restaurant called The Grill located in Times Square acts as a microcosm for this broken system of work and death. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist uses the form of the American epic film to explore it. Corbet’s film follows Holocaust survivor and visionary architect László Toth (Adrien Brody) as he comes to America after the war. The first half of the film sets up the American Dream. Family takes him in, a rich man sees his brilliance and offers him work, a well-connected lawyer helps him bring his wife and niece across the sea. The second half of the film exposes all the cracks that were visible in the first half, if we had only looked a little closer but didn’t because they were masked by our own desire to believe in the American Dream as something real and pure and good. Ultimately, the dense drama examines everything from the rise of Zionism to the opioid crisis to Christian nationalism to rampant consumerism to red scare post-FDR anti-Socialism to racism to our lack of a social infrastructure for our most vulnerable (especially children and veterans) to our broken medical system to our fatal obsession with bootstrap economics to our hatred of the poor to unchecked capitalist greed to the twisted rich people who run everything according to their whims to xenophobia to suburban isolation to the myth of American exceptionalism to the cruelty of assimilation to our dedication to efficiency over beauty to the rise of anti-art and anti-intellectualism and all-consuming conservatism, all while remaining focused on the emotional and physical toll striving within this broken system takes on Toth.
This film is currently playing in select theaters.
13. All We Imagine as Light (dir. Payal Kapadia)
I saw Payal Kapadia’s gorgeously shot, stridently feminist drama All We Imagine as Light very early one morning at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and there truly are few things better than starting your day with a film that has been made with this much care and thought and craft. Painted with a rich blue haze by cinematographer Ranabir Das, the film follows three women Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who all work together in a hospital in Mumbai. Although Prabha is married, she lives with fellow nurse Anu because her husband from an arranged marriage lives in Germany. Stoic Prabha takes this situation in stride, that is until the arrival of an anonymously-sent fancy rice-cooker causes the feelings she has pushed down to start to rise to the surface. The younger Anu has her own secrets, namely her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), whom she sees on the sly while her parents attempt to set her up with her own arranged marriage. Lastly, the widowed cook Parvaty is about to lose her home because she doesn’t have the proper paperwork to claim that she owns it. As melancholic as it is hopeful, Kapadia’s film shines a light on the importance of women sticking together, the loneliness that so can so easily creep into urban life, and the many ways that societal pressures, and sometimes even policy, so often actively seek to sap independence and agency away from women.
This film is currently playing in select theaters.
12. Woman of the Hour (dir. Anna Kendrick)
I saw Anna Kendrick’s stunning directorial debut Woman of the Hour at its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and it truly haunted me in the year between that screening and its premiere on Netflix. I do wish more people had the chance to see its inventive cinematography on the big screen, but it is so strong it works no matter how you watch it. It received one of only two four-star reviews I wrote for RogerEbert.com this year (the other is also on this list of course). Here’s a bit of what I wrote:
“You’re beautiful,” Alcala says to all of his victims, mostly women on the margins of society. He is a photographer. He knows the power of his gaze, of his camera. Kendrick begins her film with a victim who was murdered in 1977. We hear her off-screen before we see her. The first image of her is framed within Alcala’s lens. “Try to forget there is a camera here,” he tells her. Kendrick then focuses her lens on Alcala’s face, actor Daniel Zovatto’s eyes masquerading as open pools of empathy, the tool with which he lulls women into a false sense of safety. When he shifts to predator mode, an overwhelming cruelty overtakes his eyes. Kendrick holds on his face, allowing the shift to happen before our eyes, placing us directly in the psyche of his victims.
You can stream the film on Netflix.
11. It’s Not Me (dir. Leos Carax)
I originally only saw Leos Carax’s Godardian anti-self-portrait It’s Not Me because it played before the press screening of Pablo Larraín’s Maria at this year’s New York Film Festival and I wanted to make sure I had a seat to see Angelina’s triumphant return to cinema. Little did I know that not only would I love this more than Larraín’s film (which I do very much like and hope Angie gets her third Oscar nomination for her wonderfully oblique performance), but that I would actively seek it out at a second film festival (shout out to Iowa City’s Refocus Film Festival), and then eagerly watch it a third time during Criterion Channel’s one-night-only live premiere of the film a few weeks ago. Every time I’ve watch the film I love it more, and I am not a very big fan of Carax’s films (although quiet frankly the film made me want to give his narrative work another shot). Framing the film as an exercise in automatic writing, Carax uses cinema — sometimes his own, sometimes borrowing from others — to explore his own life, as well as to meditate on the very craft of filmmaking itself. There are two sequences that I particularly love. In one, he explores a notion put forth by Susan Sontag in her essay On Photography, where she writes, “After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed.” This quote is actually spoken by Leonard Fife in one of his lectures in Oh, Canada, joyfully connecting these two pieces of cinema. In Carax’s film he takes this theory, combines it with Godard’s famous quote “The cinema is truth twenty-four times a second,” and confers immortality to one good apple. In the other, he narrates a scene from F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans as he laments the loss of “the gaze of the gods” in cinema. No final line in a film, which I will not spoil here, made me cry harder than the one with which he ends his beautiful, idiosyncratic film.
You can stream the film on Criterion Channel starting January 1st or rent it on Fandango At Home.
10. Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik)
Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews’ silent slapstick wonder Hundreds of Beavers is the kind of audacious filmmaking that all indie filmmakers should be striving for. I am so grateful that I saw it with a midnight crowd at the Music Box Theatre because there is nothing better than watching a silent comedy with an audience. It's one of the last truly pure experiences cinema can offer. Shot in rural Wisconsin and Michigan during the winter of 2019 and 2020, the film’s intricate post-production edit — which included elaborate animation and other hand-crafted special effects — wasn’t completed until 2022, and then the film took a long hard road to its theatrical release, with the filmmakers ultimately choosing to self-release the film. Tews, in one of the year’s greatest, most gonzo performances, stars as a 19th century applejack salesman named Jean Kayak whose beef with the region’s beavers begins when one ruins his orchard and hits a fever pitch when Kayak falls in love with a furrier’s daughter (Olivia Graves) and must win her hand by retrieving hundreds of beaver pelts. The film cleverly borrows visual tropes from a myriad of inspirations, including silent slapstick comedies (and a few winter-set dramatic classics like Ernst Lubitsch’s 1921 film The Wild Cat starring Pola Negri), classic cartoons, and even early video games to craft a film that is wholly its own.
You can stream the film on Prime, Hoopla, and Tubi or rent it on most digital services.
9. Green Border (dir. Agnieszka Holland)
Agnieszka Holland’s refugee drama Green Border was so politically charged in her home country of Poland that the film received harsh criticism from government leaders, was review bombed on popular Polish film websites, and was protested upon its release. Working in collaboration with activists, Holland’s film is split into several chapters, each slowly weaving into the other. These threads and characters include a family of Syrian refugees who are joined by an Afghani woman with ties to Poland, a young border guard in way over his head, a group of activists working through the many hoops created by the government in order to aid the refugees, and a woman named Julia who is radicalized after she witnesses the death of a refugee not far from her secluded home. The film ends with a spark of hope, but also a bleak coda highlighting the stark difference between how refugees from the Global South are treated with violence, while Poland welcomed Ukrainian refugees with open arms. I spoke to Holland about her film for my column at RogerEbert.com. Here’s a bit from out converstation:
The four-part structure came first. Early on, the concept was that we would not focus on one particular place, moment, or character. Instead, we will try to give different perspectives on the story through different points of view through the most people involved in the drama and give them each voice and face. This was important because the refugees have been dehumanized by the propaganda. All refugees have been presented as violent terrorists, pedophiles, and even zoophiles.
The activists have been presented as traitors and Putin’s useful idiots, so I wanted to give them space. The propaganda presented the border guards as heroes, superheroes even defending our borders, and also by the others as very cruel and sadistic people. But in reality, they are neither. They are just uniformed forces suddenly put into a situation they have not been trained or prepared for, a situation that broke some of them.
You can stream the film on Kino Film Collection or rent it on most digital services.
8. Sometimes I Think About Dying (dir. Rachel Lambert)
Usually at film festivals you only get to see a few movies just for you and sometimes those choices you made for yourself end up disappointing. One of my few “for me” movies at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival was Rachel Lambert’s romantic dramedy Sometimes I Think About Dying, which film follows a socially awkward office drone named Fran (Daisy Ridley) as she strives to make a connection with a new co-worker named Robert (Dave Merheje). I could only make it to the very last screening and by then it had not been received well, but it seemed like it would be my vibe so I got up super early that morning and made it to the screening. I was not disappointed. I watched the film a second time when
watched a screener when we got back into Chicago and I loved it even more on that watch. I watched it a third time before writing my review for IGN and once again the film spoke to me on a deep level. Here’s a bit from my review:Fran, it seems, escapes into her gruesome dreamscapes because she does not have the tools to engage with people. Maybe she's always been this way; maybe it's rooted in an abusive childhood (an ignored call from her mother early on hints at this possibility). Certainly growing up on the “quiet side” of a rural town hasn’t set Fran up for success when it comes to the suffocating Petri dish that is a small office.
Her daydreams often take place in reflections of Sometimes I Think About Dying’s coastal Oregon shooting locations: a cold beach covered in driftwood, or the decaying floor of a forest. While the small communities that make up this region are linked via lonesome highways and bridges that connect them to bigger cities like Portland, residents are mostly left alone in an insular peace that can sometimes be anything but. Like the forest in her dreams, these towns are often marked by both their beauty and their decay. For Fran, this tension is at the core of her anxiety
You can stream the film on Mubi and Kanopy or rent it on most digital services.
7. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (dir. Elene Naveriani)
I really love attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic because it is one of the few international film festivals that regularly highlights films from Eastern Europe. I saw Georgian filmmaker Elene Naveriani’s beautiful romantic drama Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry at the 2023 edition of the festival and was swept up by its warmth and texture. The film sadly did not receive a proper release in the United States (it did release in the U.K. where I was quoted on the poster!) Thankfully the good people at Mubi licensed the film for their streaming service and thus I am counting this wonderful film as part of this year’s releases. Here’s a bit from my review that I wrote out of the festival for The Playlist:
In a way, Etero is the flip side of the coin from Manana (Ia Shughliashvili), the 50-year-old protagonist of Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß’s 2017 Georgian drama My Happy Family. Unlike Etero, Manana has spent her entire life caring for others, and as she reaches middle age, she decides she needs time for herself and secretly rents out a flat for herself. She finds the same pleasures of solitude as Etero, including the joy of making and eating a cake solely for herself.
Both films don’t outright condemn traditional family life but rather criticize a structure that pressures girls to grow up and become women who only live for others. To clean and cook and be emotionally available for everyone else first. To bury their own needs and desires deep inside themselves. As they enter the second half of their lives, Etero and Manana seek to live for free of these pressures, and centering themselves in their lives becomes a radical act.
You can stream the film on Mubi.
6. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (dir. Radu Jude)
Romanian writer-director Radu Jude’s latest dark comedy Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a sharp satirical examination of the bleak realities of average people living under neoliberal capitalism and the gig economy, takes its title from an aphorism by Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec. The film mostly follows a day in the life of an overworked and underpaid production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she drives around Bucharest working on a corporate workplace safety video. Her day is inter-spliced with scenes from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela merge mai departe, which follows a taxi driver, also named Angela (Dorina Lazăr), as she navigates life in pre-revolution Bucharest. The film ends with one long, unbroken take of Angela and the production company as they attempt to film the work safety video. This is another film I’ve seen three times, and I am here to tell you, do not be scared away by its length. It earns every minute of its three-hour run time and you will be thoroughly engrossed for each of its delectable minutes. I was also lucky enough to interview Jude for RogerEbert.com. Here’s a bit from our conversation:
I wanted, in the film, to have a little bit of rumination about cinema, cameras, along these lines, and also to offer them for analysis and for interpretation. And, I don’t know if I succeeded. I can just speak about my intentions to make viewers aware of what the image is. The problem with images is that they are so easy to grasp, apparently. You see a photo, let’s say, and in a second, you don’t need anything more to understand it in such a brief moment. You have a film and everybody, when they see a film, they really have no reservations to offer their opinions, you know? While for other things, like contemporary music or contemporary painting, people will sometimes have more reservations.
I think this is not only because cinema is popular, which I think is great. But also because the images seem so easy to grasp. But actually, they are not that easy at all, if you start thinking about them — when you try to understand them from a philosophical point of view, from a historical point of view, from an ethical point of view, from sociological point of view, they are extremely difficult to grasp. Nowadays, actually, I honestly don’t know how to understand the images around me in a certain way because the relationships they have, or they used to have with reality, doesn’t exist.
You can stream the film on Mubi or rent it on most digital services.
5. Slow (dir. Marija Kavtaradzė)
Another film I was blessed to see multiple times was Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradzė’s romance Slow, which explores asexuality and romance rooted in friendship, rather than sexual connection. Here’s a bit of what I wrote out of the film’s world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival:
Awash in Laurynas Bareiša’s gorgeous, warm cinematography, Marija Kavtaradze’s deeply felt romance “Slow” unfolds like the memory of a faded romance, where even the worst fights are perpetually wrapped in hopeful rays of sunlight. But even that false sunshine can’t hide the bittersweet undercurrent of regret that tends to linger in these kinds of memories.
Intensely passionate contemporary dancer Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė) uses her body to express her emotions and internalized trauma on the dance floor, but also in her interpersonal relationships. She gets off from the charge of electricity shared by two people in the middle of a heavy flirtation. The more ruminative interpreter Dovyda (Kęstutis Cicėnas) on the other hand expresses himself through conversation and small, thoughtful gestures. Yet, the two fall for each other almost instantaneously. The immediate, intimate chemistry between Grinevičiūtė and Cicėnas, and Kavtaradze’s careful use of close-ups, reminds us what it looks like when two perfectly matched stars ignite cinematic magic.
I saw the film a second time at the 2023 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where Bareiša’s cinematography and the intense chemistry between the actors was even more beguiling. I then saw the film a third time as I prepared to speak with writer-director Kavtaradzė for my column at RogerEbert.com. Here’s a bit from that conversation:
I totally agree that the even more intimate scenes are not the ones we had to film with the coordinator, or because the most intimate scenes for me were the ones where they’re just laying down in bed and touching their cheeks. I think those scenes bring more romance and more actual intimacy. In the sex scenes that we have, the characters are not connected during that. They’re way more separated.
And actually, even filming these very, very tender scenes that are not sexual at all, for me, it was, in some ways even a bit harder because we did need even more vulnerability from me and the actors. When filming sex scenes, it’s a closed set, and there are fewer people, but filming these intimate scenes, everyone is there while we’re trying to focus. And for these scenes, you have to be very, very open because nothing is happening; they’re just very tender. In some ways, it feels like you need more courage to do that.
You can rent the film on Prime.
4. Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)
There is just too much to say about RaMell Ross’ watershed film Nickel Boys, which adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two boys (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) trying to survive life at an abusive reformatory school in 1960s Florida. This is a film that takes everything we think we know about how the art of film can tell stories and turns it delightfully on its head, finding new ways to show images as archives, express emotional memory, and explore how we as people — and as filmgoers — experience time. All of this is achieved through Ross’ collaboration with cinematographer Jomo Fray, who also lensed my favorite film of last year, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. I wrote about Fray’s innovation work for RogerEbert.com:
Shot almost completely in first-person from the point-of-view of its two protagonists – Elwood and Turner – Fray’s cinematography is almost a character in itself. Actors Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor emote directly into the camera’s gaze, their eyes deep pools of pain and joy and hope and love. Shots of Christmas tinsel and crisp white sheets, fragrant oranges and thick cake frosting add more layers to the rich world these characters inhabit, which Fray’s camera wraps in the hazy glow of memories lost and found. Thanks to Fray’s singular artistry, Nickel Boys remains the year’s most visually evocative and emotionally haunting cinematic experience.
This film is currently playing in select theaters.
3. The Monk and the Gun (dir. Pawo Choyning Dorji)
I first saw The Monk and the Gun, Pawo Choyning Dorji’s charming political satire about the coming of democracy to Bhutan at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023. It was one of the few films I got to watch purely for myself and it was so much fun. I got to watch it a second time that same week when
watched a screener of it when we got back home to Chicago. I watched it a third time before penning my only other four-star review for RogerEbert.com and I imagine I will be watching it many more times for years to come. Here’s a bit from my review:Dorji weaves these storylines together in an Altman-esque manner. Characters come in and out of each other’s lives seamlessly, sometimes without even realizing it. Like Nashville, not all of the characters are given equal screen time, yet each is imperative for the tapestry of life Dorji wishes to present. The Bhutanese countryside itself is also a character, with many scenes filmed in wide shots, centering Tashi and others within a bucolic tableau of flowers and animals held harmoniously all together in Dorji’s frame.
You can stream the film on Hulu, Kanopy, and Hoopla or rent it on most digital services.
2. Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)
I saw Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ animated odyssey Flow at a press screening during the Chicago International Film Festival and I was absolutely not prepared for the journey. I saw the film a second time at the Music Box Theatre with a packed house (including several children who loudly interacted with the film; you love to see it). I am truly in awe of the animators, who have rendered the most fully life-like (despite still clearly being animation, not some uncanny valley attempt at photorealism) cinematic cat I've ever seen. Same goes for the sound design, which incorporates dozens of different cat "mews" to communicate what the feline is feeling at any given moment. I have probably spent more time with cats in my life than humans, so I had a visceral reaction to everything the Cat was going through and was touched on some primal level of my existence that words cannot fully describe. I love the way the film uses the curiosity and generosity of the Cat to explores themes of community and empathy and survival. This is such a beautiful and melancholic and ultimately hopeful film, both in terms of life on this planet, but also what the art of cinema can achieve.
This film is currently playing in select theaters.
1. No Other Land (dir. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor)
One final shout out to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which is where I was able to see the two-time Berlin Film Festival award-winning documentary No Other Land. I have written about this film on this newsletter a few times now — along with 77 other Palestinian films over the last fifteen months — and spoke about the film at length on the end of the year episode of Filmspotting. It’s a powerful film that uses the camera as both a form of witness and resistance. Here’s a bit from my review, which I wrote immediately after I first screened the film at KVIFF:
If you've been reading this newsletter for awhile, you probably have read about a lot of Palestinian films over the last few months. If you haven't watched any of the films I have recommended, then No Other Land will likely come as a shock to your system. "How can this be happening?!" you might ask yourself. Especially with so much video documentation of these horrific events. Yet, if you have been watching the films I have been recommending you will likely feel an altogether different emotion. "How can this still be happening?" For nearly sixty years there have been documentaries showing footage of this state sanctioned violence, sometimes the exact same violent acts, over and over and over.
I think back to My Neighborhood, a short documentary from 2012 which follows a young boy's fight to save his home in East Jerusalem after his family is similarly expelled due to a legal system that has been rigged against them. I think of The Place that is Ours, in which the filmmaker traces how Palestinian villages have been systematically destroyed both in person and on maps in order erase even their history. I think of Bye Bye Tiberias, in which its clear one's connection to one’s land never leaves them, even if they must in order to live out their dreams.
This film is still currently seeking distribution in the United States, but it had an Academy qualifying run in New York City earlier this year, is playing in select theaters now, and will screen in Chicago at the Music Box Theater in February.
Films that count as a 2024 release are films that had a U.S. theatrical (or Academy qualifying runs in the U.S.), VOD, or streaming release in the 2024 calendar year. I also want to remind everyone that I counted Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera as a 2023 release because of its Academy qualifying run in December of 2023.
Yes I cheated again this year to include sixteen films. I make my own rules!
also thank you for your taste and service. an actually interesting list! i've been wanting to watch Slow since you last wrote about it too.
thanks for letting me know i could now rent hundreds of beavers!! excited to check it out.