As we trudge into 2025 and the national onslaught that awaits us, let us remember that our art will hopefully outlast this current struggle. And 2024 was indeed a great year for cinema, with independent, offbeat, and otherwise refreshing films finding their way to audiences as much if not more so than the dying breed of blockbuster that ruled yester-decade. In particular, 2024 highlighted a movement in popular American cinema that is changing how the police are portrayed in movies: no longer are they the force for good, with an occasional bad apple. Rather, ACAB applies, because cops either enact or are complicit in violence against the citizens they supposedly serve. This writer, regrettably, has merely seen some 80-some of last year’s pictures — but in that crop are many beautiful works. Here, organized into double and triple features, are my ten most precious films from 2024:

*Intelligent* Hollywood Fun – “Dune: Part Two” and “Hit Man”

Now that we’ve reached the mid-point of the decade, a couple things are becoming clear: 1) the cinematic legacy of the 2010s will largely be found in the billion-dollar, wall-to-wall VFX genre spectaculars, and 2) most of them had nothing on their mind beyond appealing to as wide a market as possible. There were technical achievements and amusements aplenty, sure, and we can’t say they didn’t make a lot of money for some big corporations (mostly Disney). My mind, however, goes to, of all things, the end of PIXAR’s “Cars” with Chick Hicks winning the race and coveted ‘Piston Cup’ trophy but losing the day: “It’s just an empty cup.” Precious little genuine thought managed to be conveyed to huge, eager audiences through these focus-grouped monstrosities, films that effectively killed off the mid-budget, adult drama/comedy/romance/thriller/anything-that’s-not-a-superhero-story.

As such, going to a theater and beholding “Dune: Part Two” was a thrilling, and immensely encouraging experience. Denis Villeneuve’s star-studded, sci-fi action epic was preceded by a 150-minute “Dune: Part One” that had all the grandeur of a new “The Ten Commandments” and just enough substance for a half-hour of ‘Keeping Up with the Sad Space Kardashians’. Picking up right where ‘Part One’ left off, we follow Timothée Chalamet and Rebbeca Ferguson’s Duke Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica as they are taken under the wing of the native Fremen population after surviving the Harkonnen’s hostile takeover of Arrakis. Gradually, they begin to manipulate the Fremen’s desire for Arrakis’ decolonization to their own ends.

With no further tedious setting up of lore burdening its momentum, “Dune: Part Two” finally lets things get interesting. Paul Atreides and Jessica make for rich, unconventional protagonists who, to varying degrees and for different reasons, are or become comfortable exploiting religious extremism in the name of their ultimately fascist imperialism. Zendaya’s Chani, in a role dramatically expanded and altered from the source material, anchors these chilling descents with her steadfast, earnest agency that refuses to bow to any expected arc.

Of course, there’s the action itself, which is awesome in the original sense of the word. And it’s not mere spectacle: Villeneuve’s imagery, of an occupied desert land being mercilessly bombed (regardless of whether soldiers or civilians are the targets), by a force propped up by the most powerful governing body around, directly evokes the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and our nation’s support of its continuation. Throw in the best orchestral score of the year, and “Dune: Part Two” truly marks itself as so much more than an impeccably-crafted piece of blockbuster cinema.

And it turns out that quality, adult Hollywood fare might still be kicking after all. Richard Linklater has a history of oscillating between experimental indie joints and slick mainstream dramedies, to varying degrees of success. In “Hit Man”, he takes a real-life premise — a college professor going undercover for the police — and mines intellectual gold. Glen Powell, most known for his star-making roles of the last couple years and who real ones remember from Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” gives a movie star performance in the Golden-Age sense as a mild-mannered psychology/philosophy professor who turns out to be fantastic at posing as a fake hit man. Paired with him is Adria Arjona, a mark-turned-lover — together they are so smart, so funny, and so, so sexy.

Throughout “Hit Man,” Linklater demonstrates his willingness to wade through dark thematic territory: in any responsible tale about cops, the racist elephant must be addressed. And yet, somehow, everyone manages the balancing act of maintaining a light tone without it feeling uncomfortable or forced. In the end, everything builds to a climax that legitimately and philosophically challenges the audience while playing totally fair — an exciting thing for a rom-com to pull off. Also, ACAB.

Political Rage, Simmering – “Evil Does Not Exist,” “Rebel Ridge” and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

Whether we like it or not, all art is political because all art is in conversation with the status-quo by either critiquing or upholding it. That said, some films go about their commentary subtly, and some don’t. These films don’t; they are, to put it mildly, not happy with the present state of our affairs.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi made it big in the U.S. with his 2021 feature “Drive My Car,” a 3-hour talkie about the nature of theater, language, and complex sexual relationships. He immediately followed it with a blink-and-you’d-miss-it release of “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” an anthology film that also rules. In 2024, Hamaguchi returned big time with a complete departure from these dialogue-heavy pieces, entitled “Evil Does Not Exist.” In a rural mountain community, a widower and daughter (Hitushi Omika and Ryo Nishikawa) collect water from a forest spring for their village. Life is quiet, work-laden, and presumably fine. Two corporate executives show up to announce the building of a ‘glamping’ site, complete with an inadequate septic tank. Somewhere in the distance, a rifle shot echoes.

“Evil Does Not Exist” reserves words for just a few of its scenes, nonetheless speaking volumes to the fragile ecological balance humans have with their surroundings, and what may be necessary to maintain it. Do not be fooled by that which seems to be the characters’, or the film’s, docility. This is not slow cinema; rather, it is seething Thanks to Hamaguchi’s firm, deft hand, no audience will perceive the fable’s ultimate motives ahead of time, nor soon forget the unsettling final frames.

Many may remember “Green Room,” the A24 neo-nazi horror flick from Jeremy Saulnier. Well, Saulnier, too, came back last year with “Rebel Ridge,” a similarly riveting investigation of White Supremacy in contemporary America. We open with Aaron Pierre’s Terry Richmond being legally assaulted and robbed by cops for biking while Black. Unfortunately for the cops, Terry Richmond is not to be messed with, especially when he’s working with a literal deadline.

First of all, Aaron Pierre is absolutely riveting in this — his titanium gaze will put the fear of God in anyone who knows what’s good for them. In similarly peak form is everyone around him as they dance the dance of a thriller filled to the brim with high tension and even higher stakes. Watching the screenplay unfold is a terrifying and beautiful task, as all parties continuously make the smart choices, the unexpected choices, the gut-wrenching choices in the name of diametrically opposed beliefs, goals.

There is probably only one film from last year with more righteous anger aimed at The Man than “Rebel Ridge” (hint: it’s next up on this list). The target for Saulnier’s condemnation is the very real practice of civil forfeiture, aka where the police claim your money is possibly drug-related, seize it, and then can use it for whatever purpose they want. Until the film’s third act, when things really go off the rails, everything we see in “Rebel Ridge” is pretty much par for the course in terms of the corruption and brutality this country allows from its law enforcement. It’s appalling, it’s outrageous, and at the same time, it’s nothing new. Seriously, ACAB.

And then we have the film, made in secret under an authoritarian regime, that had to be smuggled out of the country along with its director. Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” stars Missagh Zareh as a newly-promoted judge, eager to serve his country in the pursuit of justice. What he discovers is that Iran prefers unquestioned loyalty to the regime, and death to those who oppose it, to justice. Meanwhile, his wife and daughters (Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) are forced to confront the student protest movement, as well as its violent suppression.

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” uses its modest, but by no means unambitious scale (this movie, to reiterate, had to be made in total secrecy and has *a car chase* for crying out loud) to focus the issues faced by Iranians down to a frightening intensity, with a single family home serving as a microcosm for all of Iran’s conflicting ideals. Where is the line between survival, safekeeping, and complicity, and the mutilation of one’s integrity? How, and why, did you become willing to cross that line?

Throughout the film, Rasoulof cuts from the melodrama, which is played to perfection by all, to real-life footage from protests. You will see blood, spilt by police forces. You will see the bodies they leave behind. It will be horrifying. Why did this violence happen? It happened because some women didn’t want to wear their headscarves. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” will leave no room for its characters or its audiences to feign ignorance. A reckoning is due. It must come due. This must stop — if it doesn’t, we will all be running in circles until the ground itself swallows us into oblivion.

Trans Imagery, Thriving – “Monkey Man,” “The People’s Joker” and “I Saw the TV Glow”

My biggest and happiest takeaway from last year was that the New New Queer Cinema is fully here, as there were so many spectacular films about the trans experience, and from trans filmmakers no less (no, “Emilia Pérez” does not count among them). No longer need we settle for miserablist tragedies like “Boys Don’t Cry” or garbage like “The Danish Girl,” for we have these gems, and more:

Dev Patel may not be trans, but boy howdy is he the kind of ally I want in life. Patel produces, writes, directs and stars in “Monkey Man,” a John Wick-like revenge picture in which Patel’s nameless protagonist’s wrath is directed not only at the cop who murdered his mother, but an entire nationalist government that persecutes religious and gender minorities. “Monkey Man” would fit right alongside the films I just mentioned in the previous section but for the subplot wherein Patel is taken under the wing and aided to self-actualize by an army of hijra trans women.

When Werner Herzog says society needs new images, and that the purpose of cinema is to create them, this is what he’s talking about. Patel, who had complete creative control over this project, created the images of powerful trans women teaching a man to fight on behalf of all the marginalized, cheering when he punches a punching bag so hard it splits and rice scatters and gets stuck to his bare, chiseled chest, and then having these women fighting alongside him in the climax. It is a truly ecstatic thing to see in a mainstream action picture.

And the whole rest of the film is just as great! The fights are choreographed and filmed to resemble the barely-coherent rage Patel is succumbing to. The final images have such heavy symbolic implications, it’s no wonder some studio interference attempted to lessen the overt calling-out of the current reigning party in India. While not reinventing the action genre, “Monkey Man” is infused with more purpose than most studio products would ever bother to attempt.

I know I’ve given a lot of comic book movies grief in recent years, despite them having brought me into liking movies in the first place over a decade ago. Thankfully, I can say that a movie about the Joker came out in 2024 that finally pushed the genre forward, and I’m not talking about the Todd Phillips joint — Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker” miraculously made it to theaters despite a cease and desist order from Warner Brothers. One can see why they were so afraid of it: it puts their recent superhero swill to shame. In a punk-rock, patched-together artistic hellscape that is Gotham City, a young trans woman (Drew) begins a journey to free the world from the capitalist nightmare that is Batman, and also SNL, by literally just being herself — being fully herself, as it turns out, is hard as frick.

“The People’s Joker” is the perfect example of why giant corporations should not have iron-clad grips on intellectual property — when we let outsider artists get ahold of them, *that* is when the genuine innovation happens. Vera Drew’s interpretation of the Batman iconography we all know and are tired of explicitly articulates the Dark Knight’s inherently problematic power dynamics, while creating her own world that is overflowing with the exact kind of alt, anti-establishment art that the Joker would actually be into. There is so much love clearly present in this piece, and without any hint of commercial boot-licking. It’s tender, subversive, very funny, and just what the daring doctor ordered. One more time, for the people in the back: ACAB.

No one is doing it like Jane Schoenbrun is doing it. If their first narrative feature, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” from 2022, is terrifying in its silent, screaming melancholy, “I Saw the TV Glow” tears open terror (and cinema) itself in pursuit of a most transgressive, and necessary, resurrection. Justice Smith’s Owen and Jack Haven’s Maddy are ’90s kids who bond over a TV show and shared trauma — but is that all? And that’s everything I’m going to say plot-wise.

There’s no other way to put it, and I write it with total sincerity: “I Saw the TV Glow” will probably be one of the most important films to have ever been made. The way it dissects its characters and world, the way it comments on media past and present, the way it forges a path for cinema to develop going forward. There are cues clearly taken from other things like “Twin Peaks” and “The Matrix”, and yet one is wholly comfortable saying that there is nothing like this film, as it is that trans-cendant. If there is one film you see from this list based on my recommendation, please let it be this one.

Best of the Best – “The Peasants” and “Origin”

Both of these films are fantastic investigations of how and why political power structures seek to offload blame and consequence onto undeserving parties – even more than that, though, they are the two motion pictures that fully blew me away in 2024.

“Loving Vincent” made waves in 2017 for being a rotoscoped animated film in which, literally, every single frame is a painting. Hugh and DK Welchman pulled the feat off again with “The Peasants”, which got much less buzz but deserves every flower available. For their subject, the Welchmans take Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning tome, which tells of one year in a 19th-century Polish village. Divided into four season-set parts is the story of Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska), a young woman who finds herself at the center of the town’s fascination and scorn.

The most readily-apparent thing about “The Peasants” is obviously that it’s gorgeous visually. The ever-moving oil painting is endlessly engrossing to watch ripple and swirl as these farmers go about their labours. And as staggering as the film is to look at, it is also sonically rich, with a score that time and again likewise mesmerizes with strong, confrontational choral, and folk-instrument-based pieces.

And then there’s the text of the film, which fully takes advantage, and translates the literary breadth, of the source material. In scene after scene, class and gender and sex all clash in this storm sung in the name of preserving The Land. With each collision, new nuances reveal themselves between the many men and women, carving a near-dozen distinct, memorable characters all serving different political functions in this specific, and utterly allegorical tale. By the end of the film, the cauldron of misery and toil has boiled to a fever-pitch, and spills over to enact tragic, and revelatory devastation — perhaps the salvation of the outcast lies where we dare not consider. “The Peasants” is handily the most entrancing cinematic experience of the year.

Ava DuVernay is easily one of the most important U.S. filmmakers of this century, having already given us such masterworks as “Selma”, “When They See Us” and “13th.” In “Origin,” an adaptation of the nonfiction book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” we find her most ambitious, most experimental work yet. DuVernay chooses to realize this research piece by telling the story of its writing: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Pulitzer-winning author Isabel Wilkerson, who searches for her next thesis as she and her nation endure successive tragedies. What she uncovers is a global history of societies implementing caste structures, which artificially and systemically devalue certain populations, to concentrate power under the already-powerful.

It is a rejuvenating thing, seeing the life of a scholar told in this way — learning is living is learning. The things we study and resultingly learn are as important, as immediate as the day-to-day. To use the old adage: one knows that the past is alive, that it’s not even past. DuVernay literalizes this by blending historical recreation with Wilkerson’s intensely personal travel-log, and is unafraid to get deeply didactic as hypotheses and emotions blend.

The scholarly spirit that fuels “Origin” fills the heart of its viewers, fills it with the truth of the function of history: that we must confront our whole past, just as we confront the trials of the everyday. It’s a difficult truth, because that past is so wrought with bloodshed and pain and sorrow, and all inextricably mixed in, in often uncomfortable ways, with the joys, loves, and connections. What a cathartic thing to confront this reality, to process it, to begin to move forward anew. Now imagine that catharsis, but as a movie. “Origin” is the best film of 2024.

Honorable Mentions

For good measure, here’s a list of other great movies from 2024 that I didn’t feel good about leaving unmentioned:

“Blitz” dir. Steve McQueen

“The Brutalist” dir. Brady Corbet

“Challengers” dir. Luca Guadagnino

“La Chimera” dir. Alice Rohrwacher

“Chris Grace As Scarlett Johansson” dir. Jonah Ray Rodrigues

“Close to You” dir. Dominic Savage

“Conclave” dir. Edward Berger “Dahomey” dir. Mati Diop

“Drive-Away Dykes” dir. Ethan Coen

“His Three Daughters” dir. Azazel Jacobs

“Hundreds of Beavers” dir. Mike Cheslik

“Me” dir. Don Hertzfeldt

“National Anthem” dir. Luke Gibson

“Over Inking” dir. Molly Mignano

“A Quiet Place: Day One” dir. Michael Sarnoski

“A Real Pain” dir. Jesse Eisenberg

“The Way We Speak” dir. Ian Ebright

Best of luck to all in 2025. And, to all my fellow trans folks: please survive. We won’t make it without us (and neither will they).