This year has been a difficult one, for me and millions of other people around the world. A fascist president-elect. Another genocide. Job insecurity. Family illness. One of the few positive aspects of 2024 are the many great new movies released, as well as dozens of great films I’ve watched from earlier eras. In 2023, I struggled to make a list of five good new releases I saw. This year, the first five I can name could all potentially be The Best. With the help of my convenient Letterboxd statistics, let’s briefly look back at some of these titles.
The best movie of 2024 is probably by Jane Shoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. It is a work of cinema that relies on subtlety, which is a skill long forgotten by most working in the field. My personal connection to the film is very much about scopophilia and voyeurism. Anyone who has ever felt an obsessive attachment to a piece of media, as literally a life-saving force, will understand this movie.
The best is not always my favorite. In a year with many pleasurable new releases, Anora is probably my personal fave. The vivacious energy brought to it by Mikey Madison and everyone else in the cast and crew is a reminder of how fun movies can be, but director Sean Baker also shows us how he is fully adept at tonal shifts.
There are two other movies I liked nearly as much, Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. I wasn’t expecting to see two movies directed by European women about American women, which both include scenes of a lead character on stage surreally vomiting in front of a large crowd. In a generalized way, it says a lot about how women are reacting to cultural shifts in 2024. These scenes are just minor parts of two far more complex films.
I had trouble getting into Drive-Away Dolls just because sex comedies aren’t really my thing. I prefer sex genres that are serious and kind of scary like in real life. But I am happy that this movie by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke exists because it is the sort of humor our culture needs right about now.
For the sake of time, I will only dedicate one sentence to some of my favorite first-time-watches of older movies this year.
The Cassandra Cat (aka When the Cat Comes, 1963) is a Czech movie about a cat who wears sunglasses that allows them to see the chromatic essence of humans, and compels the people to protest against injustice and authoritarianism.
I didn’t realize that Eli Roth’s Knock Knock (2015) is a remake, and am happy to find out that the original, Peter S Traynor’s Death Game (1977) is superior in every way.
The Swimmer (1968) is one of the most savage and surreal takedowns of masculinity that I have ever seen.
Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999) gives us Natasha Lyonne at her youthful best, and Vincent Gallo as you’ve never seen him before!
Mystére (aka Dagger Eyes, 1983) from Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli Volume 7 set turns out to be top tier, and then the special features told me that makes sense because Beineix’s Diva (1981) was the defining influence.
Thanks again to all the subscribers and followers of The Left-Hand Path. Looking back I am kind of surprised at how good so much of the writing I did in the last year turned out to be. If I am not challenging myself, there is really no point in writing film criticism. For various reasons I did not get around to podcasting as much as I was planning to in the fall. In 2025 I hope to record a few essential podcast conversations about certain subjects, but it will not be a consistent feature. I will continue to publish capsule reviews of new movies playing in theaters, because I know a large part of my readership watches contemporary cinema. January will once again serve as a winter vacation, and then I’ll be back with more writing on monthly subjects from February to June. The subjects aren’t set in stone yet, but the short list includes: movies from the attic, abuses of power, the Krimi cycle, The French Revolution, beatniks on film, train pictures, Japanese pink films, hotel pictures, Greenwich Village, movies from the basement, etc. Let me know if any of those sound particularly good to you!
As usual, I encourage all free subscribers to upgrade to paid subscriptions, as that goes towards the cost of the research, technology, and time involved in putting this substack together. As I’ve consistently been publishing on here for a year and a half, I plan on paywalling some of my new writing and many of the old articles in 2025.
Happy New Year and Good Luck.
