A never-miss holiday classic in my house is the film scholar Elena Gorfinkel’s polemic “Against Lists,” which was published in the journal Another Gaze in November 2019. This piece—part prose poem, part dark prayer—reminds us in its first line that “Lists will not save you.” “Lists will not enshrine your hallowed taste.” Instead, lists “are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry” that “consolidate power.” They are instruments “of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture.” A best-movies list “consolidates all that its lister failed to learn, to see, to know.”
Publications, websites, SoundCloud accounts, whatever, now begin asking writers for best-of-the-year lists two weeks before Thanksgiving, a point in the year when it is impossible to have seen enough movies to make a list, unless somehow the list-maker attends every international film festival or torrents everything. Social media sites (I mean Letterboxd) promote a constant, never-ending, ant-like list-making lifestyle, so that at the end of the year, the list-maker will be ready. I try to resist these calls, but despite Gorfinkel I get sucked in. I take the wrong lesson from her piece.
The right lesson is to be inclusive of all kinds of cinema without making lists and without having the desire to make inclusive lists. Lists that make a dutiful attempt to encompass every kind of film production become checklists, with spots assigned in a transparent display of socially acceptable hierarchy.
I’m making my list this year to say how much I don’t like qualifying runs, how qualifying runs—like so much else in film distribution—try to force critics into doing publicity when all they are trying to do is be comprehensive and accurate in their yearly best-of lists, to keep up. The idea is that week-long qualifying runs will get these movies great reviews that might lead to end-of-year recognition from critics, which will then pay off in awards season. Nominations and wins will then grow the audience for the wider release early the next year. To me, it’s a deceptive practice, and annoying. I can’t scramble around at the end of the year to see all of those movies. But I still see some, in some haphazard way. So my list is really a list of the best films of part of 2023, much of 2024, and some of 2025.
The years since the 21st century started have gotten worse and harder, a continuing process. Another year ends and then, in addition to every other horror, you’re asked to read five-paragraph introductions to best-movies lists, not just the lists themselves. Do you have to read long introductions in which listers explain things, tell you why this or that white-elephant film is not there? No. Go back to Gorfinkel: metrics are the enemy, torch this list.
About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Dramatically complete and perfect like a Chekhov story, masterfully written and acted, and more formally daring than Bergman or Tarkovsky because that one scene that takes it all apart is so utterly unexpected and quotidian. An unhappy, provincial Jules and Jim set in Turkish Kurdistan in winter, glorious and painful in its melancholy.
The Beast and Coma (Bertrand Bonello)
His plots remain enigmatic, his worldview continues to rattle, and he accomplishes so much without seeming to expend a lot of effort. In The Beast Bonello presents a tragic three-tiered future world, in which he mixes a Henry James novella with the rantings of a California incel serial killer. In Coma, a teenage girl self-confined in her bedroom during the pandemic enacts a digitized ghost story with Barbies. Both movies investigate free will in the coming AI age, and the desire to confront fear, to not be dead, and to go elsewhere when there’s nowhere else to go.
The Becomers (Zach Clark)
A low-budget meditation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that works as straight-up sci-fi, believes in eternal love across space and time, and realizes that if you’re looking to inhabit a new body, maybe planet Earth is not the best place to start (or maybe just not Illinois).
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Life and longing among the tombaroli in Italy in a 1980s that’s indistinguishable from this moment or any other bad point in the past hundred years, by one of the three greatest directors who released films in 2024, or late 2023 (the others are Ceylan and Radu Jude).
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (Tyler Taormina)
In a recent newsletter holiday piece, the writer Sarah Miller described Christmas this way: “Once a beautiful candle in a window, now an aluminum clamp light in a garage.” Such is this film, but in a good way, a kaleidoscopic, Long Island–set ensemble piece that has found a new way to use an Altman-style large cast, with everyone talking over everyone else, in a poignant potential disaster movie.
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
A complex, satisfying persona-swap comedy with Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson in excellent dual performances that also involve masks, A Different Man adds emotional depth to a form of screenwriting I associate with Charlie Kaufman and the Ari Aster of Beau Is Afraid, but with a lighter, more compassionate touch that’s more rigorous and wittier. Schimberg’s movie never goes overboard into cutesy, inhumane bitterness, and it has an ending worthy of Elaine May.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
A film that contains in its first three quarters the whole of filmmaking-as-job, with unexpected excursions into Zoom meetings, TikToks, an older movie also with driving, an interview with Uwe Boll. Jude then puts a daring hard stop to all that, with a long, unbroken take of the pathetic, dishonorable product all this mayhem was for.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso)
Set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and featuring Native actors Alonso met there (and Chiara Mastroianni, briefly), the middle section of the three-part Eureka is seventy-one minutes long, and considered as a standalone feature is one of the best films of year. Things apparently went wrong during the shoot, the cinematographer had to be replaced, there were snowstorms that stopped work, the main actor (Alaina Clifford as a police officer) departed, and the film’s story was taken over by another character, a high school basketball coach played by Sadie Lapointe in one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in a movie. Sometimes when things go wrong, cinema creeps in to show up the paucity of an overarching plan.
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryosuke Hamaguchi)
A film of misdirection that starts off with Thoreau-ish life in the woods, turns into an anti-glamping, anti-corporate series of town meetings, then gets darker, without ever losing sight of its attachment to presenting Nagano in autumn. It’s kind of a combination of Rohmer’s The Tree, the Mayor, and the Mediatheque and Pialat’s Under the Sun of Satan.
Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr)
An elliptical, dreamy, dangerous study of a family that has gathered in the springtime Texas countryside to take a Christmas-card photo together. The opposite of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point but just as original in the way it imagines the deadly strangeness of family dynamics.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)
Arnow deploys her innate anti-charisma with such skill and control that the deep discomfort created by her mise-en-scene, with its Substance-levels of copious nudity, starts to fully explain romance today, at least from this one perspective that leaves so little out.
Furiosa (George Miller)
In The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum, sitting in the audience at a burlesque house, ruefully says to himself “There are too many of them. You can’t kill a world.” Furiosa counters this, asking the audience “Who killed the world?” then showing how it was done, ten crashes at a time.
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit?” at the end of sentences that are aren’t questions but insults. What is going on over there? Mike Leigh presents a meta-answer, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the performance of the year as the meanest of all, a depressed, grieving wife and mother ruining everyone’s day in supermarket lines, car parks, living rooms, graveyards, etc.
Here (Bas Devos)
An insomniac Romanian construction worker wanders the byways of Brussels and about fifty minutes into this eighty-minute film meets a Chinese woman at work studying plants in nature. The two have brief conversations and part, knowing that their fleeting encounter will never turn into a trilogy in which they meet every five years in some other European capital. Not to be confused with the Robert Zemeckis Here that features Tom Hanks, the primordial ooze, and Ben Franklin’s brother, and is set in a living room in New Jersey.
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thien An)
It was compared to the work of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it is like Evil Does Not Exist in its travel from city to countryside, but this film is entirely its own thing. In this debut feature, Phạm and his cinematographer Dinh Duy Hung have created a new way of looking at the world, which they describe in long, complicated camera moves that maintain an uncanny level of serenity while also filling frames with messy city life and encroaching greenery. The film is involving and contains a very unexpected discussion of It’s a Wonderful Life that matches the conversation about They Live in the not dissimilar (but much shorter) Family Portrait.
Janet Planet (Annie Baker)
First-time director/playwright Baker creates a complete portrait of life in part of the Berkshires in 1991 with great subtlety, unlimited patience, bitter humor, the barest of means.
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
The whole lost world of good-guy liberalism exposed in a car accident. Did Eastwood say this was his last movie, or was it just reported that way? If so, he’s ended his directing career with an unexpected, anomalous studio thriller, the same way he started it in 1971 with Play Misty for Me.
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
A Southwestern lesbian noir as close to a Jim Thompson novel as movies get, Love Lies Bleeding contains a third act weirder than any other, in this year of bizarre third acts.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
An insane supergiant/black hole of a movie that can compete with its silent-era inspirations without shame, it exists to irk the following: the Hollywood studio system, the Penske press, and architecture critics. In that it succeeded admirably. Every performance in it is marked with absurdity and freedom.
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
A semi-double-personality-swap movie about a model (Juliette Gariépy) obsessed with the trial of a serial killer, and a runaway (Laurie Babin) who becomes her fan, Red Rooms presents parasocial life as a dangerous, expensive, twisted hell of alienation that when escaped only leads to an appearance on TV. Sick and frightening all the way.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson)
Wine o’clock at the last G7, with bog people present. Maddin’s style has now evolved into a deadpan beyond deadpan, free from any normal desire to let people in on the joke.
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez)
Epic in scope and execution, this Argentine-Chilean revisionist western follows a mestizo guide (Camilo Arancibia) forced to accompany a fake British army officer (Mark Stanley) working for a Spanish land baron in the genocide of the native Onas in Tierra del Fuego. The brutal history of European mass murder in the New World encapsulated in ninety-seven minutes, with scenes worthy of Melville (Herman) or Conrad, and of all these films the one most likely to be neglected or forgotten in the US market.
Snack Shack (Adam Rehmeier)
The teenage dirtbag Challengers that is better than Challengers and has an actual ending.
Stress Positions (Theda Hammel)
The comings and goings in a queer group house during the pandemic force the question “How did Brooklyn survive Covid?” In the only truly Renoiresque film of the year, director Hammel plays the worst best person in a film where the best worst character is the only one who dies. A comedy.
This Closeness (Kit Zauhar)
ASMR meets Airbnb in this chamber drama about a weekend rental in someone else’s apartment where the occupant would be better left alone.
Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)
This movie is a miracle, something totally new. Rankin ascends into the empyrean by combining the humane bleakness of Iranian neorealism with the chilly niceness of Canadian bureaucracy. Inventing a Winnipeg where the population is Persian and Farsi is Canada’s main language, with French still its second, the movie becomes a search for lost identity in a beige city. Also an architecture film.
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