Year Ender: Joshua Polanski's Top Ten Films of 2024

The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, whose newest title grabs a spot on this list, recently observed that “I find [the crisis of modern cinema] exhilarating in a certain way. Of course, I regret many things … but I think we live now in the most interesting time regarding cinema, regarding images. I don’t even have this feeling that many people have that the best films were made in the past… it’s pessimistic on one hand, but at the same time, I really think we are forced to take advantage of that or disappear.”

2024, more than any other year of the century, corroborates his claim. There is no denying big big-budget cinema is in a hard place with the pressures of commercial success, algorithmic green lighting processes (that come up with “success” equations like The Rock + talking combat-ready polar bears = big bags of cash), and artificial intelligence. Even other traditional harbingers of cinematic flourishing like the festival-styled art-house drama show signs of decline. Some of this is the natural outcome of new production barriers via streaming where lower-budget productions are now being held closer to the standards of easy-consumption entertainment as the average $150,000,000 four-quadrant crowd-pleaser than ever before. But light slips into even the darkest of cracks, as Leonard Cohen observed. The superheroes look dead as a doorknob and it’s clear to even the dumbest of executives that films based on known IP are not the same thing as printing money. The landscape is changing, one way or another, whether we like it or not, and it’s from this creative purgatory that innovation emerges. (More to come on light blasting through dark cracks later in this list.) That’s what purgatory is in a classical sense anyhow: a purging or cleansing before one meets the Divine — a bath to get rid of the dirt one last time and not a hedonistic deluge of sin and despair as it is usually depicted. To get to heaven, we first need a good cleansing.

To keep the theology going for a minute, Hans Urs von Balthasar, an influential 20th-century Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher, re-ordered the classic philosophical transcendentals from the good, the true, and the beautiful to the beautiful, the good, and the true. Without getting too far into the weeds of something you surely don’t care about, it will suffice to say this: to Balthasar, the philosophical ideal of beauty had lost its meaning as a way to see the source of true Beauty (to Balthasar, a good Catholic, that was God) and to even reach back at the source. He believed the beautiful emanated from God. Only by giving beauty a proper place in aesthetic thought and our evaluation of the aesthetics of culture can we move from a commercial and ephemeral appreciation of beauty to a higher-order beauty of love, hope, grand emotion, freedom, and mystery.

More than the other two transcendentals, beauty also captivates and grips the year’s best films. For a few of them — The Brutalist and All We Imagine As Light —  there is even an air of spiritualism to the task of capturing, defining, and recreating true beauty. For others, The Beast and Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to name a few, it is about a beauty lost in our world and the quest to re-enlighten life with the beautiful. For still others, such as Black Velvet or Lyd, it’s about a beauty never seen — a place that can only be dreamed about. The Substance, a film I didn’t particularly love, probably dealt with this the most directly from a thematic standpoint, as did Anora, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and a dozen other prominent titles in their own ways. In a year darkened by ethnic cleansing, global conflict, and hopeless elections, it’s beautiful that beauty, more than depravity, captivates the minds of our best artists.

The best films I saw this year come from all over the world, though perhaps less so than in previous years.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.