Here are picks for the best movies of 2024:
Was this a great year for movies? The consensus seems to be no, and that may be true. But it did produce some stone-cold masterpieces, none more so than Payal Kapadia’s sublime tale of three women in modern Mumbai. It’s a grittily real movie graced, in equally parts, by keen-eyed documentary and dreamy poetry. Beguilingly, “All We Imagine As Light” grows more profound as it cleaves further from reality. In theaters.
Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature — a dramatic leap forward for filmmaker and a transfixing trans parable — is a chilling 1990s coming of age in which a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like series called “The Pink Opaque” offers a possible portal out of drab suburban life and other suffocations. It feels chillingly, beautifully ripped out of Schoenbrun’s soul — and it’s got a killer soundtrack. Streaming on Max, available for digital rental.
The fury of Agnieszka Holland’s searing migrant drama is suitably calibrated to the crisis. Along the Poland-Belarus border, a small band of migrants from Syria and Afghanistan are sent back and forth across a wooded borderland — sometimes they’re even literally tossed — in a grim game of “not in my backyard.” It’s not an easy movie to watch, nor should it be. To keep up with the times, more uncomfortable movies like this may be needed. Streaming on Kino Film Collection, available for digital rental.
We had not one but two movies this year that captured the therapeutic properties of theater. Each, almost unbelievably, deftly eludes tipping into cliche thanks to abiding compassion and authenticity in the performances. Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s “Ghostlight” is about a grieving father, a construction worker (an exceptional Keith Kupferer), who reluctantly joins a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.” “Sing Sing” dramatizes a real rehabilitation prison program. Its screening at Sing Sing Correctional, where many of its performers were once incarcerated, was easily the most moving moviegoing experience of the year for me. “Ghostlight” is available for digital rental. “Sing Sing” returns to theaters Jan. 17.
MDT/AP
