It’s Not Them
Share
We opened last week’s “Did You See This?” with news that contributors to Sight and Sound had voted Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light to the top of their list of the best films of 2024. On Thursday evening, Film Comment editors announced that their contributors have too. “Kapadia crafts a contemporary portrait of independent South Asian women in the city, navigating work, loneliness, and desire,” writes Imogen Sara Smith. “The three protagonists, from different generations and classes, all work at a Mumbai hospital. Their stories are fluidly told through mundane details that blossom into everyday poetry, and illuminate the strains of migration, gentrification, and Hindu-Muslim tensions, along with the conflicting pulls of tradition and modernity.”
The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips and the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney and Lovia Gyarkye top their tens with All We Imagine as Light, too, and over the past week, we’ve also seen best-of-2024 lists from Sean Burns and Erin Trahan at WBUR, Ty Burr in the Washington Post, Variety’s Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman,Adam Nayman at the Ringer, Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic’s David Sims, and Slate’s Dana Stevens.
At Screen Slate, Nicolas Rapold has overseen the fourth annual poll of contributors “along with filmmakers, critics, performers, programmers, cinema workers, and other friends.” With A Different Man (#1), director Aaron Schimberg “provokes our anxiety at the impossibility of the coherent self, and the further impossibility of recreating these selves,” writes Patrick Dahl. Stacked on a separate mile-long page are favorite first viewings and discoveries of the year sent in from dozens and dozens of “special guests”—and it is an impressive roster.
The staff at the Film Stage tops its list of fifty with Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, the team at Slant goes for Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist comes in at #1 at the Playlist and RogerEbert.com. For even more lists, see BBC Culture, the Austin Chronicle, and Polygon.
Sight and Sound, in the meantime, has been filling out its end-of-the-year package with essays such as Jonathan Romney’s on late style in 2024 and Nick Bradshaw’s on the standout documentaries. And then there are the Christmas movies. Thomas Flew asks twelve filmmakers about their favorites, giving us, for example, Guillermo del Toro on It’s a Wonderful Life, Dea Kulumbegashvili on Fanny and Alexander, Guy Maddin on Blast of Silence, Luca Guadagnino on The Godfather Part III, Wes Anderson on Meet Me in St. Louis, and Athina Rachel Tsangari on A Charlie Brown Christmas.
This week’s highlights:
- When Elaine May took questions last week about editing Mikey and Nicky (1976), Frank Falisi was there, and he’s got a terrific piece at the Film Stage about how much we dare to believe directors when they discuss their own work, the degree to which it actually matters, and of course, Mikey and Nicky. Starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as low-level gangsters, May’s film is “the story of two characters constantly editing their behavior,” writes Falisi, “meting out half-truths and full lies to out-betray each other while simultaneously adhering to their friend like Peter and his separated shadow. That the two men reserve their most bilious behavior for the women and world around them is May’s crucial grace note; even (or especially) when they’re actively involved in offing the other, Mikey and Nicky still communicate best with Mikey and Nicky.”
- The series Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary is on at Film at Lincoln Center in New York through Thursday, and at the A.V. Club, Jesse Hassenger writes about the four films the German immigrant director made with Ella Raines, including their first and possibly finest collaboration, Phantom Lady (1944). Many of Siodmak’s films have an “unpredictable, shapeshifting quality: well-crafted B-pictures that seem like they can snap into a noirish fugue state at any time,” writes Hassenger, and Raines had “a face, and a vibe, made for mystery. She seems too sophisticated to play a supplicant love interest, yet not quite forbidding enough to scare anyone away. It only makes sense to place her into noir’s shadows, like a beacon.”
- Marking its tenth anniversary, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was back in IMAX theaters last week, prompting Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Slate’s Sam Adams, and Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson to give it another look. “What makes the film so fascinating,” writes Ebiri, “and why it endures to this day, is precisely the thing so many wags pegged as its fatal flaw back in 2014: its unabashed, teary emotionality. There’s a real tension running throughout between high-minded sci-fi and outright melodrama. Interstellar is filled with long stretches of silence and awe and scenes of characters explaining dizzying facts about astrophysics . . . but it’s also a movie in which Anne Hathaway gives a speech suggesting that love can transcend time and space.”
- The latest issue of New Left Review features the essay that Erika Balsom mentioned she was working on last month when she took part in a discussion of the work of Robert Kramer on the Film Comment Podcast. “It was,” writes Balsom, “by listening intently to the ‘rumble of the world’—to borrow the title of Serge Daney’s review of Route One/USA (1989), perhaps Kramer’s greatest film—that the director would make more than thirty films that take little heed of the documentary/fiction divide, some as short as four minutes and others over four hours long. Across them, no consistent stylistic signature emerges, yet they are united by something more fundamental: the encounter, cruel and beautiful, between subjectivity and history. As Kramer suggested, ‘all the movies put together make one movie of a life.’”
- “Love poem, restless dream, troubled history, alchemist’s scrapbook,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times, “Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is pure cinema as it dances through its dense forty-two minutes.” Nick Newman, for whom the film is “perhaps Carax’s single greatest work and some of the closest any recent film’s come to representing a perfect object,” recently spoke with the filmmaker for IndieWire. “I walked through Times Square the other day,” says Carax, “and I thought, ‘I don’t think I’d ever seen so much light in my life.’ Even twenty years ago it was not that strong, not that many. And not that flashy. It’s amazing. I guess the film, this little film talks about that at the end. How will we be able to keep on seeing, watching, looking at things—at people, everything?”
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
