2024 was THE year of absurdity and women.
Here are my best and worst of the year (with trailers):
Best
The Substance
Top of my list and possibly everyone else’s. What an experience. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is about an aging actress who subscribes to a supplement service that splits her into two selves, current and much younger. Her efforts to stay young and beautiful make her age even faster. Real.
Lisa Frankenstein
Zelda Williams’ Lisa Frankenstein is the coming of age movie all the tumblr girls needed. A hot outcast teams up with a ballsy Victorian corpse to kill everyone around them who sucks. This is a film that cares to actually investigate girlhood rather than just aestheticizing it. It’s a lighthearted Heathers, this time with morals.
Babygirl
Oh yes. Halina Reijn gives us a new Nicole Kidman psychosexual thriller, this time led entirely by her, entirely for us (hers). At its base, this is a movie about having it all and still needing more. I think a blockbuster about a woman who has a successful marriage with a successful man, two kids, a van and a Burberry coat, still being unsatisfied is exactly what we needed. What is the point of having it all without some tension and strife? What is an affair for and is it always wrong to have one?
Paying for It
Sook Yin Lee’s Paying for It is an adaptation of her ex-boyfriend Chester Brown’s, comic book about his experience as a john during the dissolution of their relationship. This is a feel-good film for its unique perspective and thoughtful yet nonchalant perspective on endings. In the world of this film, moments blend into the next, relationships fluctuate naturally and things only change for the better. Jealousy is a passing thought, a waste of time. A very funny and heartfelt story about a series of interconnected relationships happening sometime in the 90s somewhere in Toronto. Really great.
Union
Brett Story and Stephen Miang’s Union showcases the process of the first unionization of an Amazon warehouse in the US. The film has only had an independent release and is being shown around the country in an effort to encourage other warehouse workers to do the same. A very important film about the importance of standing in solidarity against corporate powers like Amazon who are looking to exploit workers so a handful of executives can profit.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is an exquisite contemplation about anti-colonial author and activist Suzanne Césaire. This is the kind of movie that you just get lost in; a place that you visit to think and breathe and watch and be. Namely not a biopic but a ballad with endless depth.
The People’s Joker
Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker both does and does not belong on this list. It does because its official release was in 2024. It doesn’t because I remember getting a ticket for it at TIFF 2022 and then being refunded when DC sued. It’s a movie with a years and years long pending release, and it was well worth the wait. Certainly the best Joker movie released since 2019 by a long shot.
Universal Language
Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is a Canadian surrealist comedy that takes place in a Winnipeg where everyone speaks only Farsi and French. This is smart, playful and truly, deeply gut wrenching. Intriguing concept, beautifully executed. I loved this.
Don’t Cry Butterfly
Duong Dieu Linh’s Don’t Cry Butterfly follows a wedding planner who tries to voodoo her cheating husband into loving her again. This blend of elevated body horror, e-spells and excess longing makes for a fun little femme horror comedy that begs the best question to beg: do I really need him after all?
Rumours
The general premise of Guy Maddin’s Rumours is great: the G7 leaders meet in a gazebo to talk about rumours as the world ends in a blaze all around them. It’s a movie with balls, highlighting the incompetence and arrogance central to being a G7 leader, this idea that when the world is ending the people meant to save us will be busy playing futile games. And they are.
Trap
Trap is the recent M Night B-movie where a man takes his teenage daughter to a concert that turns out to be a set up meant to capture a murderer. The twist? He’s the murderer. It’s a lot of fun and very apparently shot in Toronto.
Challengers
This is tension in a bottle, a chaotic bisexual wet dream. I am lukewarm on Luca Guadagnino but Challengers had me. It’s a movie where nothing is finished, not a game, not a rivalry, not a relationship, not even a scene really. Everything is open and ongoing. The premise is straightforward but effective: a hot woman gets inbetween a lifelong bromance, and the two guys fight each other while she watches.
Worst
Megalopolis
I really didn’t like this, but even still there’s something that feels complicated about writing about it in an entirely negative light. It’s possible that somewhere down the line, I was made to subscribe to Francis Ford Coppola incorporated. Him, his kids and his nephew, a haunting constellation nearly impossible to escape if you do anything in film. Sofia Coppola is the Lana Del Rey of directors. We can say what we want, stand against her as an enterprise, but at the end of the day she is an institution for sad women everywhere. And then there’s her father, the great king of cinema himself, Francis Ford Coppola. If you ever had to study art in any way, you were expected to sit through the Godfather and compare it to something like Shakespeare’s Richard III to appease that professor of yours who studied literature but cared more about power. I’ve had a complicated feeling about Coppola since I first saw the Godfather. I didn’t understand his work then and I don’t understand it now. I might never understand the magic he brings to the screen. When that door closes at the end of the Godfather, it closes on me too as the only other woman in the room. So before I usher in this critique in a long line of critiques, I need to say that I am not a fan of Coppola. I have no way into romanticizing this film. To me, Copolla is just a man who used 120 million dollars of his own money to make one of the most out of touch films I’ve ever seen. If you love him, and disagree, I get it.
It is worth mentioning that during TIFF this year, Megalopolis wasn’t available as a press screening likely due to its incredibly poor critical reception following its May release at Cannes. During the height of festival season, Coppola tried to do some damage control by making his own Letterboxd account to give his own film a five star review. It was not the power move he anticipated it to be. This is all to say that I saw this in a rush seat, 3 feet from the screen. The film itself is a true hodge podge of ideas; it was as if someone had overheard someone else talking about world events, and then decided to use whatever they remembered hearing to make a movie.
There was also a live performance portion: a press event, where cameras flash in the theatre and a reporter rushes in, notepad in hand to interview a recording of Adam Driver up on the screen. I remember thinking to myself that he’d wanted so badly for this film to deem him as a transcendent figure, someone who blends film with life, the real with the screen, someone who sees the world’s problems and uses the silver screen to dream up an antidote. Even without any loyalty to Coppola, I kind of wished it had worked out for him, for his sake but also for ours. I would love it if somebody could make a movie that would teach us all how to be better, but all this does is teach us that eccentric billionaires can rule the world, and that women can’t be trusted…
Blink Twice
I shouldn’t have gone to see this but I did so I at least have to say that this is as feminist as Barbie and somehow worse.
Longlegs
This was uninspired slop from start to finish. Why did any of it even happen? Why did I have to sit through it? Was it scary? I’ve gotten into the habit of blacking out at the end of movies that I hate this much. I go into a rage where all I can really think about is the cost of my ticket, a bill on fire in my mind and all of the time wasted doing something slightly better than doom scrolling but infinitely worse than anything else. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t ever write about A24 movies because I already know that this new arthouse isn’t for me.
Nosferatu
This would make an excellent double feature with Longlegs. First off, my first inclination to bash this strangely comes from its astounding success, especially in comparison to Megalopolis? In Megalopolis there is at least some visual stimulation. Nosferatu is visually deadening and not in a good way. For context, I have a complicated relationship with Robert Eggers. Seeing The Lighthouse was painful but somehow rewarding? When I left the theatre, I was proud of myself for going through the mania with those two men, like it somehow bettered me to sit there watching them drink and sing and drink and sing for two whole hours. I do sort of appreciate how Eggers fuses absurdity into horror, and I understand the intentionality behind the kinds of space he builds from a shadow, a window, an enclosed space. I just found this incredibly obtuse, meant more to be an aesthetic than a film, more a pinterest board than a narrativization of a part of life. A lot of the scenes were TikTokable but otherwise meaningless which just made me very sad at what art has to be for.
The End
This was the movie I was most disappointed by because out of everything I saw, it was meant to be the most promising. You’re telling me that Joshua Oppenheimer’s fictional debut, which was a musical following the family who caused the world to end as they navigated the apocalypse, was… tedious? Even still, this was at least productively imaginative by getting the audience to confront the idea that those most responsible for destruction will always outlive it.
Couldn’t get through these…
I haven’t seen these in their entirety so I won’t speak to any ethical qualms directly but I certainly wouldn’t recommend them.
Conclave
Emilia Pérez
The Brutalist
Honorable 2023 Mentions
These are movies I wasn’t able to get to until 2024 but they would’ve made my list from last year a thousand times over.
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is an alluring masterpiece, a captivating journey through longing and meaninglessness. I think about this movie all the time, whenever I have a thought of a person that feels to be slipping away, off an edge of a place in my mind, into some kind of abyss. I think about it when I pull that thought back from the edge with what feels like a string, wishing it would stay, dreaming I could get back to whatever once was. Also, Josh O’Connor is a total babe in this, and in everything…
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is such a weighty critique of the way that things are. This is the I Am CuriousYellow of the digital age… a movie that barrels forward and truly contemplates the things we have to do and the way we have to do them.
By: Sara Abdul
Pink Asparagus 
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