Volume 5, Issue 51: Commendatori

"What, are you gonna call Coppola with ideas on how to fix it?"

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Every year, I wrap up this newsletter season with two clip shows, to give myself a little bit of a break down the stretch. The final one, next week’s, looks back at the year, month-by-month, with the best pieces and newsletters I wrote all year. The penultimate one, this one, is my Top Ten Movies of the Year list, as released on the Grierson & Leitch podcast earlier this week. You can listen to that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Tim and I have been revealing our top 10 movies of the year to each other every year since 1991. The only difference now is that we record it. (You can find all our Top Tens, for decades, right here.)

But here you can get the words, straight on tap.

Thus: The Ten Best Films of 2024.

10. Kinds of Kindness, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. (Available on Disney Plus.)
    After achieving mainstream (relatively speaking, anyway) success with Poor Things and The Favourite, weirdo Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos got back to his surreal, absurdist roots with this anthology film featuring three different stories starring actors like Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley playing different roles (alongside some very awesome dogs). The movie is aggressively weird and eager (almost too eager) to be off-putting, but it is also hilarious and disturbing in equal measure, from start to finish. Stone (who legitimately might be my favorite actress working right now, and is also a producer of increasing power; she actually produced two other movies in my top 10 this year) and Plemons are fantastic—deadpan, deeply invested, absolutely fearless. And the payoff to the “can we watch the video again?” bit provided my biggest laugh of the year. You gotta be willing to play along with this one, but if you do, you’ll have a blast.

    

    9. A Real Pain, directed by Jesse Eisenberg. (Available for rental on December 31)
    Are you a Benji, or are you a David? Eisenberg’s second film is a huge step forward from his first, a story of two cousins (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, whose about to become the first Culkin to ever get nominated for an Oscar) who visit Poland to see their grandmother’s childhood home, reconnect with their Judaism and figure themselves out. Eisenberg’s David is buttoned-up, serious and aloof; he tries to do the right thing all the time, whatever that even means, and ends up spending most of his time lost in his own head. Culkin’s Benji wears every emotion on his sleeve and makes a constant, often irritating spectacle of himself; he ends up being beloved, while still miserable. Their journey is moving, emotional and consistently funny; this movie features a series of terrific one-liners. You’ll find plenty of yourself in both of these guys. And the ending is deceptively subtle, just up in the air enough to land perfectly.

8. Red Rooms, directed by Pascal Plante (available for rental)
   The images delivered to us through our phones and our computers demand a certain disassociation, a stowing of our humanity: We send a cat video one minute, watch a hospital blow up halfway across the world the next … and then go back to work like nothing happened. This fundamental psychological schism is explored brilliantly in Red Rooms, which follows a fashion model (Juliette Gariepy) who becomes obsessed with the trial of a man accused of broadcasting the murder of teenager girls to the dark web, to the point that she attends the trial every day, sitting silently, waiting for … something. Why is she doing this? What is her connection to the case? Why does she want to find these videos … and watch them? The mystery of the movie becomes less about plot and more about what this online disassociation does to our souls, how it can turn us into something we no longer even recognize.

   

   7. Anora, directed by Sean Baker (available for rental)
   I’ve loved all of Baker’s films—I still think Red Rocket is one of the definitive chronicles of what it has felt like to live through the Trump era—and this is his most crowd-pleasing, accessible film, which is a strange thing to say about a movie that is mostly about exhausted people driving around Brighton Beach. For all the talk about how it’s a more “realistic” Pretty Woman, more than anything, it’s a vivid parable about how the ultra-wealthy can essentially get away with whatever they want, and how the rest of us have to scramble just to get by in their wake. Also: Anyone who loved Better Things as much as I did will be absolutely thrilled by how fantastic Mikey Madison is here.

6. Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers (in theaters Christmas Day)

   The way Eggers is able to make movies feel like so organically low-fi that it seems like they were filmed during the actual eras they take place in—The Northman is about Vikings, for Vikings?—works masterfully in this retelling of Dracula, told only the way he can. It’s scary, but in a way that’s vivid and raw: Eggers tells the Dracula story like no one has ever heard it before. Also, this has to be the most disgusting, but also realistic, way anyone has ever seen Dracula suck blood. And wow, what an ending. Eggers is a madman in the best possible way.

5. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, directed by Radu Jude (available for rental)
   That existential sense that everything is falling apart, that nothing works right, that the world is helplessly stacked against you—and that that world is also getting aggressively stupid—has never been portrayed in more despairingly hilarious fashion than in this Romanian comedy. It has a Uwe Boll cameo, a 10-minute montage of memorials to traffic accidents and a whole bunch of Andrew Tate jokes. The world really might be falling apart, and while this movie won’t make you feel better about it, it will leave you laughing all the way to Armageddon.

4. Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino (available on Amazon Prime)
Pure entertainment, but with a terrific, layered script featuring characters with clear motivations and relatable backstories: What a concept! I don’t know if I saw a more truly enjoyable movie this year, and hey, it even gets the tennis right. And the Trent Reznor score is terrific background writing music. The way The Holdovers was last year, this is my default “recommend to casual movie watchers to remind them how much they used to love movies” movie.

3. The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet (in theaters on Christmas Day)
Nearly four hours—with a much-appreciated intermission that features a countdown clock in which audiences have been collectively and vocally ticking down the final seconds of—but with a momentum and passion that makes every second fly by, Corbet’s epic tale of America’s opportunities and failings is caustic and ambitious in equal measure, a movie that sees the Land of Opportunity in a searingly clear-eyed fashion. Adrian Brody is on screen nearly every second, and riveting every second. Also, congratulations to Guy Pearce, who is about to become the first-ever guest of “The Will Leitch Show” to get nominated for an Oscar.

Congrats, Guy: You’re next, Jason Gay.

2. I Saw the TV Glow, directed by Jane Schoenbrun (available on Max)
The movie apparently works as (and is some ways meant as) a metaphor for the trans experience, but I think expands far beyond just that canvas. I Saw the TV Glow is about, more than anything else, that inability to separate our own personalities from the popular culture that infused them and in many ways made us who we are. You have become you, more than perhaps any of us realize, in large part because what you consumed during your most formative years, what you valued, and who you shared that pop culture with. I Saw the TV Glow understands how what can save us when we are younger can doom us when we are grown, how memory plays tricks on us, and how we can never, ever go back. This movie absolutely kills me.

1. Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross (in theaters now)
Not just a devastating movie experience—while also being uplifting and even life-affirming—but a whole new way of actually thinking about movies, Nickel Boys adapts Colson Whitehead’s novel by shooting the entire film from the first-person perspective, which might sound like a conceit, or even a gimmick. But Ross has thought through every shot so carefully that it becomes entirely immersive; you truly see the world through someone else’s eyes … though they of course become your own. This is the second straight year—after The Zone of Interest—that my No. 1 film is a formal exercise that ends up becoming so, so much more than that. (It’s Grierson’s No. 1 too.) See this in a theater. You won’t be the same afterward.

We actually rank our runners-up, so if you’re curious:

11. Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater

12. Juror No. 2, directed by Clint Eastwood

13. Evil Does Not Exist, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

14. Sasquatch Sunset, directed by David and Nathan Zellner

15. In the Summers, directed by Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio

16. Separated, directed by Errol Morris

17. His Three Daughters, directed by Azazel Jacobs

18. Janet Planet, directed by Annie Baker

19. Dune: Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve

20. Girls State, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss

21. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

22. September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum

23. All We Imagine As Light, directed by Payal Kapadia

24. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller

25. Rebel Ridge, directed by Jeremy Saulnier

26. The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders

I love writing about movies almost as much as I love watching them. And remember, one of the Grierson & Leitch podcast’s avid listeners has that a massive Excel spreadsheet with the grades and links for every movie we’ve ever talked about. Sometimes, when I need a break, I’ll just flip through that spreadsheet. I find it a perfect document.

Anyway, please see all those movies, they’re all great. You’re home all week, most people aren’t working, or at least not working all that hard, go watch some movies.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. It’s OK, Hardcore Dylan Fans: You’ll Actually Like the New Dylan Movie, The Washington Post. I made the case for the movie honoring Dylan by allowing him to try to escape his own film.

2. Your Breakout Stars of 2024, MLB.com. Every year, we meet people whose names we’ll know for the rest of our lives.

3. Veteran Free Agents Still Available, Still Old, MLB.com. Pour one out for the old guys. I actually talked about this one on MLB Network here.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, as mentioned: It was Dorkfest week. It’s our most popular show of the year, by far.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, later on today, we will preview the Georgia-Notre Dame, it’ll be up this afternoon.

Morning Lineup, I did Friday’s show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Eat What You Kill,” J. David McSwane, ProPublica. This is an incredible story about a Montana doctor so entrenched in the medical financial complex that he made millions giving chemo to patients who did not, in fact, have cancer.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! (Got some more of these out this week, stand by.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Let’s Go Crazy,” Prince. Much to my embarrassment, I discovered this week that I had no Prince songs on the Newsletter playlist. Let’s rectify that with what might still my favorite Prince song. If I were a professional athlete, I do think this is what would be in my headphones when I ran on the field.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Santa is coming.

Be very afraid.

Best,
Will