In her effortless pithy way, Mae West phrased it best: “It’s better to be looked over than overlooked.” Of the hundreds of films released during any given year, most of them are inevitably overlooked.
Beyond the lifeboat of major film festivals, which still assist a handful of buzzy international and independent films in their treacherous journey to release, such entities as the self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Oscars have seemingly abandoned the inclusion of riskier, daring films.
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In short, the industry continues to be a hindrance to the underdog.
In retrospect nearly every year of film releases seems better than it was in the moment. Neglected masterpieces sometimes find their audiences thanks to devoted cult followings. And 2024 had more than its fair share of cinematic excellence.
Here are 5 great movies you should have seen this year.
5. We Grown Now (Dir. Minhal Baig)
Premiering at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and amassing a handful of awards on its festival circuit journey, Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now experienced a quiet limited release. Set in the Cabrini-Green housing complex in the early 1990s, a boyhood friendship dissolves beneath the economic realities of their environment. Newcomer Blake Cameron James plays a boy named Malik, whose family, cared for by single mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) finds their stability drastically altered by law enforcement’s brutal response to the occupants of the housing project as an ineffective attempt to quell rising gun violence. S. Epatha Merkerson is his live-in grandmother and her sequences with Smollett provide a quiet but powerful portrait of resilient Black women who have no other choice but to do what needs to be done, which usually means obliterating the comfort zone which has kept them afloat.
4. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Dir. Radu Jude)
Romanian director Radu Jude emerged during the Romanian New Wave of the 2000s. Having won Berlin’s Golden Bear for 2020’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which is perhaps the most tantalizing cinematic time capsule of an ornery world trapped by a pandemic, he followed this up with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which took home the Special Jury Prize of the Locarno Film Festival. To be fair, it’s a hard sell for the American public, clocking in at over two-and-a-half-hours and dealing with an unhappy production assistant who drives around Bucharest, location scouting for the filming of a workplace safety video while distracting herself endlessly on TikTok with her politically incorrect filter-generated alter ego. Jude splices her journey with footage from a 1981 film by Lucian Bratu about a female taxi cab driver. Stealing the show is German actor Nina Hoss as the CEO of the company, leering over Zoom work meetings like a god phoning in from Mount Olympus, coolly detached and formidably out of touch as a corporate messiah.
3. The Devil’s Bath (Dir. Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala)
With their third feature, the Austrian directing duo return to agonized religious Austrian history with a dark, desolate period piece, The Devil’s Bath. Invoking the energies of folk horror in this 18th century tale which depicts turmoils experienced by peasant women whose agency, it would seem, was only possible in the after life. The film is exceptionally headlined by alternative music artist Anja Plaschg (aka Soap&Skin) as Agnes, a young, beautiful woman married off to a man from a nearby village who also happens to be a closeted homosexual. Agnes discovers a loophole which will allow her to leave her current miseries and make it to heaven. Murdering an infant, she’s imprisoned and allowed to ask forgiveness before her execution, her corpse, like other women in her situation, torn asunder by the morbid masses.
2. Problemista (Dir. Julio Torres)
In 2024, Tilda Swinton hearkened back to being the muse of queer artistry, and somehow outdoes herself in Julio Torres’ debut Problemista as the toxic, self-absorbed Elizabeth, a New York art critic who is paying to keep her dead husband Bobby (an amusing RZA), who specialized in painting eggs, cryogenically frozen. Her paths cross with Alejandro (Torres), a struggling toy maker who must quickly find work sponsorship in a month’s time or risk being deported to El Salvador. A master manipulator and expert time thief, Elizabeth strings Torres along until it seems all will be lost for the young artist. In an increasingly disconnected world, the film upholds not only the importance of dreams (and what they’re made of), but also the inescapable darkness which rests in the sediment of their crystallization.
1.The Beast (Dir. Bertrand Bonello)
Based on Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, French auteur Bertrand Bonello achieves cinematic sublimity. James’ novella concerns a self-fulfilling prophecy about a paralyzed existence ending tragically with a protagonist realizing he’s wasted his life away due to fear of the unknown. It’s a perfectly realized example of how our comfort zones can kill us. Bonello positions Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as a pair of unrequited lovers existing in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and finally, what appears to be a dystopic 2044, in a world run by AI entities diligently set on scrubbing surviving humans’ DNA, and therefore ridding them of the emotional baggage which makes them unpredictable. An exercise in the folly of masochistically tying oneself to the journey rather than embracing the necessary compromises involved in reaching the destination, Seydoux brings this climax to a savage howl of dismay. The beast is in ourselves, and, as Bonello posits, the realization of our desires also involves their dissipation.
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