Gothams and Top Tens

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, the winner of the Best Feature award at the Gothams, shows up on exactly none of these lists. 2024 is shaping up to be that sort of year. At least in these early days of the awards season marathon, there are few clear-cut critical favorites, never mind front-runners in the Oscars race. Only with a little historical perspective will we be able to determine whether such scattered diversity is a sign that the year has been a particularly strong or weak one for the movies.

In A Different Man, Sebastian Stan, who won a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance in Berlin, plays Edward, a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder responsible for the tumors on his face. After he undergoes a procedure that allows him to look like Sebastian Stan, Edward finds that the acceptance and affection he was seeking is, in his eyes, being stolen by Oswald, played by Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis.

Schimberg “has ingeniously structured A Different Man around a theme of mutability, with switchblade twists, droll reversals of tone, and a fluid sense of genre,” writes Justin Chang in the New Yorker. “At every turn, Schimberg unleashes a nervy fusillade of ideas: about the unequal distribution of physical beauty, the social privilege that such beauty commands, the challenge of trying to probe these inequities through art.”

RaMell Ross won the Gotham for Best Director for Nickel Boys, which also scored the Breakthrough Performer award for Brandon Wilson, who plays one of two friends sent to an abusive reform school in the Jim Crow South. Placing Nickel Boys at the top of her list, Alissa Wilkinson writes that Ross and cowriter Joslyn Barnes’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is “boldly radical, transforming the text into a mostly first-person film that captures the spirit of the source material—a meditation on how trauma shapes a person’s sense of self—by harnessing the visual and aural tools that cinema provides.”

Best International Feature went to Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Manohla Dargis’s #1. “This delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy is an example of the same,” writes Dargis. All We Imagine as Light “centers on two female nurses and a cook, friends who work at the same hospital in Mumbai. Over the course of the movie, Kapadia shifts between these caregivers who together and separately experience ordinary pleasures, face painful difficulties and find comfort, support and companionship in one another.”

J. Hoberman tops his ten with the film that wound up winning Best Documentary. “An explication of forced expulsion on the occupied West Bank made mostly on amateur digital video by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli activists,” he writes, “No Other Land is more than a film—it’s a film whose right to exist is contested throughout by Israeli authority. The subject is injustice.”

Azazel Jacobs won Best Screenplay for His Three Daughters, starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as sisters reuniting in the apartment of their dying father. “But His Three Daughters is not a gloomy film,” writes Amy Taubin in the introduction to her interview with Jacobs for Filmmaker. “Rather, it is filled with small and sometimes hilarious revelations, topped by a shift into the realm of magical realism as in the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and best left for you, dear readers, to discover on your own.”

Vera Drew won the Gotham for Breakthrough Director for The People’s Joker, which premiered in Toronto back in 2022. That’s where and when Chloe Lizotte first saw this unauthorized parody that ran through a legal briar patch before finally seeing a limited release in April. “Over the course of the pandemic, Drew reworked the narrative of Joker—riffing mainly on the 2019 Todd Phillips film and David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (2016)—into a trans coming-of-age tale, a graphic-novel-style funhouse mirror of events in her own life,” wrote Lizotte in a dispatch to the Notebook. “Stitching together real-world actors, green-screen backdrops, and a dizzying array of animated vignettes, The People’s Joker has an infectious visual anarchy.”

Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing scooped up the two acting Gothams, with Colman Domingo winning Outstanding Lead Performance and Clarence Maclin taking Outstanding Supporting Performance. Domingo plays John Whitfield, a prisoner in New York’s Sing Sing who helps run the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program and aims to recruit Divine Eye (Maclin, himself a formerly incarcerated participant in the program) into the cast of RTA’s next theater production. “In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle,” writes Greg Nussen at Slant, “Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.”