As a critic, I'm sometimes asked about my note-taking habits: Do you take a lot of notes? (Almost always; my memory can get fuzzy fast.) How do you do this in a dark theater? (Absolutely no phone screens! I scribble furiously with a pen and paper and hope for the best.) What do you usually take notes about?
To that last question, it truly varies, but I can say that I'm consistently being pulled in by words, spoken and unspoken. The profound, the funny, the relatable, the subtext-laden; the lines that reveal some kind of truth about the world on screen and thus the world we're existing in now. When I think of some of my most memorable film-going experiences of 2024 – a great year for movies! – these are some of the moments and performances that have moved me, and stuck even many months later.
"I'm a little sick of the fluff." — Girls State
Gendered inequities become glaringly obvious very quickly in Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine's fascinating documentary about the long-running high school program known as Girls State. Like many before them, the ambitious civic-minded teens profiled here set out to build their own government from the ground up. But the film was shot in 2022, the first time the Missouri chapter hosted both the girls and boys programs on the same campus at the same time, and the girls spend much of their time observing how much attention is paid to the enforcement of dress codes and how little is given to discussing more substantial and urgent political issues. (Meanwhile, there's ample evidence the boys' ambitions are taken far more seriously. Among their advantages: being "sworn in" to "office" by the state governor.)
In one scene some of the girls commiserate over their disappointment with the tenor of the program, with one of them calling it out as distracting "fluff." The moment speaks to the obstacles that still persist for women in politics and is a sobering depiction of young hopefuls getting an early taste of political disillusionment.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry about before. I'm sorry about that before." — I Saw the TV Glow
The final lines of Jane Schoenbrun's challenging and mesmerizing transgender allegory are a wallop of a denouement, proffering both sadness and hope. The sadness comes from everything we've learned about the meek protagonist Owen (Justice Smith) to this point – how, out of paralyzing fear, they've made a deliberate choice to deny their true self, and live a depressing and unfulfilling life. Now working at the kind of job that can only be described as the stuff of nightmares – a Chuck E. Cheese-like amusement center – the crushing weight of their denial finally hits, and sends them into a panic attack in the middle of a child's birthday celebration.
But Schoenbrun leaves room for hope when Owen collects themselves in the bathroom and in a visually stunning sequence, realizes that who they are is still very much a part of them no matter how much they try to ignore it. They crack a slight smile that suggests some relief and then return to work, ambling past patrons and colleagues while mumbling apologies for their outburst. In a way Owen is still shrinking themselves, apologizing for being who they are. And yet: There's a sense there's finally been an existential breakthrough, and perhaps a less painful way forward.
"What the f***? Did you honestly think you were going to be married and have multiple kids and your dream job by the time you were 40?…Oh, you did. OK." — My Old Ass
The beauty of Megan Park's coming-of-age dramedy is that it never attempts to explain how 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) comes to encounter her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), beyond a hallucinogenic mushroom trip the first time she appears. The obvious and more pressing question then is, What does my future hold? When older Elliott delivers the sobering news to younger Elliott – that life rarely plays out exactly as planned – the reality of many millennials and Gen Zers the world over is succinctly and wittily acknowledged. Own a house? Work a fulfilling job that also pays at least a living wage? LOL.
Park's film mercifully doesn't dwell on such cynicism, but it is all the better for those little nuggets of pointed commentary peppered throughout, blending a healthy dose of lived wisdom with the energy of youthful optimism.
"I love you so much more than me, and this is your life. And from now on, we're gonna do what's best for you." — Tuesday
Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Zora is unquestionably relatable — what person wouldn't do everything in their power to ward off a loved one's impending death, especially their child's? But ultimately, Zora's impulses are more harmful than good for her terminally ill daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), who's already come to terms with her own fate. It takes several extreme attempts at "killing" Death, imagined here as a majestically baritone macaw voiced by Arinzé Kene, before Zora understands she must set aside her own fears of what's to come and live in the present.
When that epiphany arrives, their mother-daughter relationship begins to heal; Tuesday no longer has to worry about how her mother will fare once she's gone, and Zora can cherish and appreciate what little time they have left together.
"Why didn't they call me by my real name? Don't they know it?" — Dahomey
Twenty-six pillaged artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey were returned by France to the Republic of Benin in 2021. One of those objects, No. 26, is given a literal voice in Mati Diop's stunning documentary, composed from a mix of male and female voices blended to create what she describes as "genderless vocal texture in deep, metallic frequencies." As Diop's camera captures the meticulous process of preparing them for transportation, that voice poetically ponders what it means to go back to a home you no longer recognize, through lines written by Haitian author and poet Makenzy Orcel. It's a poignant reminder that even well-intentioned correctives to historical blights are insufficient in making up for what's often lost — memories, names, and above all, a sense of self.
"You have a kind of — a forthrightness, you have a kind of aggressive quality. It sounds like a criticism; I don't mean it as one. I've just always worried — I've just always wondered how that would work with a man. I've wondered if it might be easier for you to be with a woman." — Janet Planet
One night, inquisitive tween Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks her mom Janet (Julianne Nicholson) if she'd be "disappointed" if she dated a girl when she's older. Janet, an acupuncturist and total hippie, admits she'd be neither disappointed nor shocked if that came to pass. The clarity of the observation about her daughter reveals that Janet sees a quality in Lacy that doesn't exist within herself, namely that "forthrightness," a lack of interest in tamping down any part of who she is.
This plays out throughout writer and director Annie Baker's quiet drama, as Janet slips in and out of relationships with men who are no good for her, and as Lacy looks on skeptically. But the mother-daughter divide is made most honestly plain in this scene, which is both tender and (metaphorically) loud in the way it speaks to how women are traditionally conditioned to act and think about themselves. There's care in Nicholson's delivery, along with a tinge of regret.
"I need you, because I hate myself." — The Substance
There is nothing subtle about this movie, but in a sparse script overflowing with bluntly obvious points about the horrors of sexism and misogyny, this line is the most apt thesis statement. What makes Coralie Fargeat's astounding, seismic body horror so unique is that the external forces – men, the patriarchy writ large — are on the periphery. Instead, Fargeat is preoccupied with what those forces stir within Elisabeth (Demi Moore), a TV aerobics star resorting to the most desperate of measures to regain her youth, and Sue (Margaret Qualley), the other, younger half she gruesomely expels from her body with the aid of "the substance."
As Elisabeth's experiment goes awry, she begins to regret what she's done and attempts to kill Sue, but can't bring herself to go through with it. Now haggard and pitiful, Elisabeth says the not-quiet-at-all part even louder: "… I hate myself." The film is a testament to how corrosive that hate can be.
"I'm taking such good care of my little white boys." — Challengers
There's so much narrative possibility packed into this throwaway line, spoken by tennis star-turned-coach Tashi (Zendaya). She's a ruthless striver wedged in the middle of a homoerotic love triangle because she married Art (Mike Faist) after first having dated his best friend Patrick (Josh O'Connor). Does she love either of them as much, if not more, than she loves the thrill of a little green ball connecting with a swinging racket in a game of "good tennis"? Doubtful. But she's dedicated her life to making sure Art does what she wasn't able to accomplish on her own after a career-ending injury, and she'll be damned if she'll let Patrick humiliate him on the court.
Zendaya, of course, is a Black woman playing an athlete in a predominantly white and occasionally racist sport. Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes mostly ignore this reality, arguably to a fault; the movie's avoidance of Tashi's perspective in this regard keeps it from having any true thematic heft. But what little it does give us is in the form of this brief acknowledgment from Tashi that she's hitched herself to these two pathetic "little white boys" who've squandered all their privilege and talent right before her eyes.
"Reminding everyone, visual markers. Surveillance footage from area of where victims were found recorded men of various builds: A redheaded male; two African-American males, above-average height; a male with white hair in his 60s; a white male in his 30s with a tattoo of a rabbit or animal on his right arm. A white male with a scar on his lower jaw." — Trap
Look, I never said this was a list of the best movies of 2024. M. Night Shyamalan's nepo-baby project starring Josh Hartnett as a hot and doting dad who's also a serial killer is truly one of the dumbest, most nonsensical things to come out of Hollywood in recent memory. But it's fun as hell, and the commitment to such a ridiculous premise is weirdly audacious: The F.B.I., led by a serial killer "profiler" played by Haley Mills, has trapped thousands of people at a pop star's concert to catch a guy who could be literally anyone. (That pop star is played by Shyamalan's daughter Saleka.)
What does this killer look like? Who knows! Except if you've seen this movie and made it through to the end, you eventually realize that everyone hunting this guy down should've absolutely known. It makes no sense. The plot holes are abundant. This is cinema.
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