Talkhouse Film contributors voted on their favorite movies of 2024. The results of the Talkhouse Film poll are below, showing all the titles that received multiple votes; a selection of individual ballots will be posted tomorrow. Ten points were awarded to first-place films, 9 points were given to second place, etc.
Thanks to all who voted, and to the following contributors, whose wonderful written and graphic responses to the Top 10 films are featured below: Rodney Ascher, Nikole Beckwith, Bernardo Britto, Zach Clark, Megan Griffiths, Ian Harnarine, Chad Hartigan, Danny Madden, James Marsh, Adam Egypt Mortimer, Sheridan O’Donnell, Kent Osborne, Diana Peralta, Cosmo Salovaara, Leah Shore, Chelsea Stardust, Jim Strouse, Sandi Tan, Colleen Trundy and Onur Tukel.
1. Anora 272
For a 140-minute Palme d’Or winner, it’s worth saying that Anora is a whole lot of fun to watch. The movie runs headlong and gleefully into a bunch of genres, as Ani, a feisty Brooklyn sex worker gets entangled with the feckless offspring of a Russian oligarch whom she meets in a lap dance club. It plays first as a romantic comedy (essentially a fucked-up Cinderella fairy tale), it threatens to become a Russian mob film (but the heavies are too hapless and useless to be scary) before it tumbles into an uproarious farce of physical comedy (of which Buster Keaton would be proud), it then becomes a road movie (but one that only manages to cover just a few miles in the course of a night) and its penultimate act is a satire on the spoilt, vile rich who always win in life – but here we’re offered the consoling thought that these dreadful people will now have to live and bicker with each other from hereon.
However, this seamless glide through genres only gets us to its extended final scene and it is here that the film establishes its own unique identity in a singular episode that plays out in a single static take in a shabby car, as snow swirls around and the rhythmic wash of the windscreen wipers creates a hypnotic spell.
Every viewer of the film will have a different interpretation of the scene’s import, and so here’s mine: In a world of purely transactional relationships, how does Ani, our sex worker, react to a genuine act of kindness from a man? Well, it’s so outside of her experience that she figures that an act of kindness creates a debt that needs to be repaid – which she attempts to do so in the currency she knows best. But as she hitches up her dress and clambers upon the soulful Armenian heavy, Ani breaks. Maybe she realizes that what is actually on offer in this scene is a shoulder to cry on? And that is how we leave her – sobbing on the shoulder of a man who has given her something (actually, a wedding ring) and wants nothing in return. It’s both heartbreaking and perversely optimistic.
In its final moments, the film opens up a whole new story and for all its wit and exuberance, it’s this ending that lingers in the mind and prompts us to imagine a future for these characters. Maybe a better one, maybe a terrible one. And that’s where everyone who sees this film will have a different opinion. (James Marsh)
Image by Colleen Trundy
2. The Substance 196
I’m a big fan of Coralie Fargeat. Her first feature, Revenge, was one of my favorite films of 2017, so when the trailer for The Substance dropped, I was hooked. You get an idea of what it’s about (generally) from the trailer; aging and the role it plays with women in the public eye, relevance, legacy, etc., but Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s stunning performances make this something truly special. And an inspired Dennis Quaid turns eating shrimp into one of the grossest moments of a gross-out movie. Also, I loved the excess and spectacle of the close-up body shots. Frankly, the whole film celebrates excess and spectacle, and I’m here for it. However, the third act of the film is what left me gagged and gooped. Trying not to spoil it for readers who haven’t seen it, but the Elisabeth Sue “creation” threw my mouth to the floor. I was in such awe. How amazing it is to live in a world where a film like The Substance gets financing, reaches a wide audience and gets critical acclaim today (as opposed to some of the riskier, wilder horror films in the 1980s, like Brian Yuzna’s Society). Gives all of us weirdos hope. (Chelsea Stardust)
Image by Onur Tukel
3. Challengers 135
I only get to direct a movie on average every four years or so, and 2024 was one of those years. When you’re fresh from a set or deep in the editing room, you watch movies a little differently. At least, I do. More acutely aware of what each scene or shot requires and how its logistics could potentially send a day spiraling or even swallow it whole. Watching Challengers in that mindset left me gobsmacked. I’m sure he had plenty of money and time, but even still, Luca Guadagnino got out of bed every morning ready to go to work! Everything was shot as if it were the centerpiece scene or moment of the film, which sounds like it should dull the impact of every scene, but the camera and the editing are always finding new ways to keep it fresh and inspired. To say nothing of the score. Like The Third Man or Chariots of Fire, the instrumentation is so incongruous to the images and milieu that it loops back around to making perfect sense and becomes iconic. The performances are magnetic, the writing is rich and the whole thing just throbs with energy and life! Too few movies have a pulse at all, let alone one that beats as fast as this one.
I have no interest in tennis and I learned after seeing the movie that Guadagnino doesn’t really, either. I don’t know if this actually applies to his decision-making, but it reminds me of my favorite quote about filmmaking: “You shouldn’t make a film about what you know, you should make a film about what you want to learn more about.” (Insert joke here about my new movie being called The Threesome.) What a gift to us all that he took things he clearly does know a lot about – desire, passion, jealousy, ambition – and applied them to this story about the New Rochelle Phil’s Tire Town Challenger Men’s Singles Championship, 2019. (Chad Hartigan)
Image by Kent Osborne
4. A Different Man 118
A Different Man is an anomaly in American cinema today: it’s defiantly original, open to interpretation and essentially genre-less. It starts simple and beautifully unfolds, like one of those blooming tea flowers – each petal a new vantage point to view the film’s complicated themes. With respect to other predecessors, I would argue it’s the first important film involving disability, because it isn’t “about” disability. It’s about identity and self-perception, universal concepts that are underneath the disabled experience (and why we need more stories from disabled filmmakers). There’s not a lick of tragedy or inspiration to be found here, because writer-director Aaron Schimberg isn’t interested in sentimental polarities, he’s interested in the messy middle – the zone Edward (Sebastian Stan) finds himself in throughout most of the film. The same zone we all live in. The film isn’t perfect, and I love that it isn’t. Because it means it’s taking chances – narratively and creatively. And over time, its imperfections will bake in and only enhance it – proof it was made by a living person – like recording fuzz or a vocal crack on a great record. In a landscape of overly manicured, committee-made films, it’s beautifully unique – just like its pre-procedure protagonist. (Sheridan O’Donnell)
Image by Nikole Beckwith
5. A Real Pain 115
A Real Pain is a movie about generational trauma, the ways in which we each reconcile our personal pain in the context of historic pain, and the importance of confronting our pain rather than numbing it, burying it or distancing ourselves from it. But also it is a film that illustrates the value in trying to understand people who process and react to the world differently than we do. The script wrestles with what it is to be both enthralled by someone and embarrassed for them, to judge them but also in the same moment judge oneself for having the gall to think our version of doing life is any better.
David (Jesse Eisenberg) is reserved, polite, and easily embarrassed, while Benji (Kieran Culkin) is charming, emotional and unpredictable. The fact that these characters are traveling together presents a fraught dynamic which is only heightened by the fact that they are experiencing it while touring a series of Holocaust sites with a group of strangers. Benji has all the charisma in the world, but his instability and inability to read a room makes spending time with him a nerve-wracking endeavor, even as his often-inappropriate inquiries allow David (and the audience) to more fully understand those around them. Meanwhile, David is frustratingly pent up, buried in stifling layers of guilt and self-criticism. Benji’s constant abandonment of social norms is torture for David, yet he can’t help his deep envy of Benji’s seemingly effortless ability to forge connections with others.
The two actors navigate their roles with deftness, specificity and sometimes excruciating authenticity. As a writer and director, Eisenberg places these two characters in the context of elements bigger than they are, acknowledging the role the pain of the past plays in who they are, understanding both the inherited and self-imposed challenges they face, and giving them – and by extension, all of us – empathy and grace to find their way through. (Megan Griffiths)
Image by Jim Strouse
6. I Saw the TV Glow 108
I Saw the TV Glow uses a jarringly slow pace that lets emotions emerge from the darkness, squeezing dread and nightmare from the creaks in between each word of dialogue. Its very aesthetic is threatening, consuming, itself a monstrous thing. Like Lost Highway, each stretch of silence seems to bring an unseen terror closer. And like Lynch’s film, Schoenbrun’s operates as a dream – the dream of an alien consciousness who would watch a human stare silently at a screen and wrestle with what that experience could possibly be. We’re forced to feel alienated while also identifying with Owen, experiencing time as it would be in hell, where a single moment distends torturously but then a decade suddenly ticks by. Even time in agony is time lost. In TV Glow, time is the monster, the great betrayer of our fleshy mortal form, revealing Owen’s stuckness of identity and life. It’s a kind of anti-Nolan film, where the chaotic glueiness of time spills out like melting ice cream. What consumes Owen, what suffocates him, is mistrust – of his own selfhood, of his perceptions, of everyone in his life. Are they trying to set him free or bury him alive, pull him out of hell or drown him, spur him forward with the symbols of his youth or mock him with chintzy distortions of the same? As he succumbs to a fear of betrayal, the film’s aesthetics of paralysis become unbearable (though beautiful). If your identity is what you do, who are you when you’re doing nothing, emptied of action and absorbing the glow? (Adam Egypt Mortimer)
Image by Leah Shore
7. The Brutalist 106
Brady Corbet has said in interviews that The Brutalist is at its heart an immigrant story, and I appreciate this because maybe it’ll alert more people to his film’s most powerful qualities. Alongside its portrait of the agonizing tug-of-war between Hungarian refugee architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his WASP patron played by Guy Pearce, the film contains the most vividly realized depictions of the educated immigrant’s experience from a psychological perspective that I’ve ever seen. Most movies made by Americans about immigrants aren’t intellectually or emotionally generous enough to grapple with the emigre’s ambivalence (about everything!), or nimble enough to notice the conditional quality of the welcome, or witty enough to acknowledge the exhaustion (plus, quiet rage) of the newcomer who is expected to recite or justify their credentials, often to people less sophisticated — and how, as a consequence, all of this can result in behavior that might be misread as prickly or arrogant. These scenarios may seem simple — because so commonplace — but I have yet to see them deployed in any other movie with such a confident grasp of realism. Corbet and his co-writer/partner Monica Fastvold don’t pull any punches. To this day, immigrant stories made by American and immigrant filmmakers alike sit mostly on the cuddly end of the spectrum. Whether the tone is aw-shucks or hardscrabble, the end game tends to be the same: the seeker (even if he cheats, or steals) is a saint. Over and over, immigrant characters are denied complexity, and are defined purely by their migrant status or “trauma,” rather than the unique talents, peeves and peculiarities that make them fully human. I cheered every time László Tóth sneered. (Sandi Tan)
Image by Rodney Ascher
8. La Chimera 97
La Chimera is one of those films that lingers long after you have left its world behind. Alice Rohrwacher’s mesmerizing story follows Arthur, a British looter with an uncanny gift: the ability to detect ancient Etruscan artifacts buried deep in the earth. Arthur’s gift, which he uses to rob the land of its hallowed treasures with the help of a motley crew of charming tomb raiders, becomes a painful metaphor for his own emotional dislocation. Haunted by the memory of his lost love, Beniamina, Arthur is adrift, a dead man walking in an endless search to find her and feel whole again. He’s stuck with one foot in the past and the other in the present he can barely recognize.
It’s this tragic irony – the man who desecrates the sacred history he’s pillaging yet is consumed by a desperate desire to reconnect with his own past – that resonates so deeply. Arthur’s search for meaning in the dirt becomes a meditation on the impossibility of reclaiming what’s already lost. The Portuguese word saudade kept echoing in my mind as I watched. That untranslatable word captures the bittersweet yearning and melancholy, the hurts-so-good feeling that writer Mira T. Lee describes as “longing for something that cannot exist again, or perhaps never existed.”
I could live forever in the ethereal, Fellini-esque landscape of La Chimera – a world where the past and present blur together in a beautiful, haunting exploration of loss and longing that stays with you long after the film ends. It was a dream I didn’t want to wake up from. (Diana Peralta)
Image by Bernardo Britto
=9. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World 94
Few can mix media with the kind of aplomb Radu Jude exhibits in his latest satire, Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World. The discursive camera pans of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) find a counterpart in this film’s usage of archival and TikTok footage. Both interweave the quotidian trials of the eminently watchable Ilinca Manolache who stars as a brash and beleaguered production assistant during the pre-production phase of a bit of corporate propaganda. This brand of anticapitalist critique could be considered low-hanging fruit on paper, but Jude delights in the humanity of the parties involved more than in the hypocrisy of the powers that be. Nina Hoss is characteristically pitch-perfect as the client, and the shooting of the commercial itself — a single, half-hour long set-up — is a tour de force. (Cosmo Salovaara)
Image by Zach Clark
=9. Nickel Boys 94
I remember when Hale County This Morning, This Evening was released and it was lauded by the industry. It was so different from anything else that usually reaches those heights of success. That film felt like such a simple film. It felt like it was within my grasp. I was wrong about all of that. None of that film is repeatable by anyone other than RaMell Ross. Then comes along Nickel Boys; after watching it a few times, I am glad to live in a world and in a time when it exists simultaneously to my own existence. To have a (relative) newcomer completely change the way I look, hear and feel cinema is a gift. The moments created and captured by the filmmakers are some of the most glorious I have ever experienced, many of which still now replay in my mind when I close my eyes.
I am big on learning about the filmmaker and filmmaking process – how things go from mind to script to screen is fascinating and is part of my education as a filmmaker. I am sure Nickel Boys was very hard to make. I am sure there was behind the scenes drama. There must have been some hard decisions to be made. Guaranteed budget concerns. Always battling time issues. Location problems always arise. But I just don’t care about that stuff. Not on this one. Not on Nickel Boys. I am just grateful for the opportunity to sit in a theater and genuinely feel something within me in each scene and know that I will never be able to make something like it. (Ian Harnarine)
Image by Danny Madden
11. Hard Truths 74
12. The Seed of the Sacred Fig 71
=13. Love Lies Bleeding 70
=13. Janet Planet 70
15. Civil War 69
16. Emilia Perez 68
=17. The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed 63
=17. All We Imagine As Light 61
19. The Wild Robot 59
20. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga 52
=21. Dune Part Two 47
=21. Sing Sing 47
23. Dahomey 46
24. No Other Land 42
=25. Conclave 41
=25. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat 41
=27. Between the Temples 40
=27. Last Summer 40
29. Longlegs 39
30. Dìdi 38
31. My First Film 37
32. Wicked 36
=33. His Three Daughters 35
=33. My Old Ass 35
=33. Red Rooms 35
=33. The Apprentice 35
=37. The Beast 33
=37. Thelma 33
=39. Alien Romulus 32
=39. Evil Does Not Exist 32
=39. Femme 32
=39. Sasquatch Sunset 32
43. Flow 30
=44. Green Border 29
=44. Strange Darling 29
=46. Kinds of Kindness 28
=46. Universal Language 28
=48. A Complete Unknown 27
=48. Will & Harper 27
50. Rebel Ridge 26
=51. Good One 25
=51. The People’s Joker 25
=53. I’m Still Here 24
=53. Megalopolis 24
=53. Perfect Days 24
=53. Trap 24
57. Robot Dreams 23
=58. Eno 22
=58. The Outrun 22
60. Small Things Like These 21
=61. How to Have Sex 20
=61. Hundreds of Beavers 20
=63. Aggro Dr1ft 19
=63. Ghostlight 19
=63. Heretic 19
=63. MaXXXine 19
=63. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin 19
=63. Zone of Interest 19
=63. The First Omen 18
=70. Bird 17
=70. Crossing 17
=70. Eureka 17
=70. Late Night With the Devil 17
=70. Problemista 17
=75. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point 16
=75. Inside Out 2 16
=75. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl 16
=78. Dad & Step-Dad 15
=78. Frida 15
=78. Kneecap 15
=78. Nocturnes 15
=78. On the Adamant 15
83. Smile 2 14
=84. Here (DeVos) 13
=84. La Cocina 13
=84. Look into My Eyes 13
=84. Queer 13
=84. The Bikeriders 13
=89. Joker: Folie à Deux 12
=89. September 5 12
=89. Society of the Snow 12
=89. Terrifier 3 12
=89. The Fall Guy 12
=89. Union 12
=89. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 12
=96. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell 11
=96. Juror #2 11
=96. This Closeness 11
=99. Free Time 10
=99. Nosferatu 10
101. Sam’s World 9
=102. Hit Man 8
=102. Memoir of a Snail 8
=102. Stress Positions 8
=102. The Last Showgirl 8
=106. Dogleg 7
=106. Oddity 7
=108. Gladiator II 6
=108. Monkey Man 6
=108. Snack Shack 6
=108. The Featherweight 6
=108. The Girl with the Needle 6
=113. Asphalt City 5
=113. Blink Twice 5
=113. Darla in Space 5
=113. In a Violent Nature 5
=113. Saturday Night 5
=113. Sugarcane 5
=113. Twisters 5
=120. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 4
=120. Deadpool & Wolverine 4
=120. Rap World 4
