Marjane Satrapi passed away this on June 4, 2026—a year after the death of her husband—at the age of 56. I interviewed Ms. Satrapi at the end of 2007, while she was promoting the animated feature Persepolis, based on her autobiographical graphic novel.
Born and raised in Iran but educated in Vienna, Marjane Satrapi grew up in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, where she watched the idealism in the wake of freedom from the Shah’s rule give way to an increasingly oppressive and intolerant culture of religious extremism. She left for Paris in 1994 and has been an exile from her home ever since. “You become a stranger everywhere,” is how she described the feeling of exile, “but in a way you are also an insider everywhere.” Satrapi first told her story in the autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, sharing experiences and feelings at once culturally specific and universally human. Now she brings her story to the screen in the richly realized and evocatively told animated feature Persepolis, which she adapted and directed with Vincent Paronnaud. She talked about her novel, her film, and her life in a December visit to Seattle.
I read your graphic novels about a year ago and saw the film at Toronto. I thought it was remarkable how faithful the movie is to the character of the art and style of the original novels, and yet so fluid and creative in its use of the animation medium. What was the biggest challenge in moving from the static panel of the graphic novel to the medium of animation?
The first thing was to understand is that it is not the same narration, so we had to forget about the book and really start to make a new narration but with the same material. And that’s why, as you say, the book and the movie, they are very similar and at the same time they are very different and that is the whole paradox. In the relationship that reader, as with the comic books, and the viewer with the movie, to start with that, is not the same. Unlike literature, when you read a comic book, you are very active as a reader because between two frames you have to imagine the movement yourself. When you are watching a movie you are passive because you see the images. We’ll start with that. Then you have things like the sound, the music, etc., so if there is a feeling that I have to describe with one word or draw something in a comic, for example, I can count on the music to get this feeling. So it’s not the same medium. The whole danger of this project was to do exactly what everybody thought I would do, to take a camera and take it from the frame, one after the other, and think that we will get a movie. Since we knew this danger, we tried to avoid it as much as possible. And we thought about it as a movie, not even as an animated movie. We made it like a movie, the only thing is that it was drawn. People talk about animated movies as if it was a style. It’s not a style, it’s just a technique. It’s like comics. “Comics” is not a style, it’s not just superhero stories, it’s a medium. Animation is the same thing. So we approached it this way and just tried to make a movie.
On May 6, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returned to its longtime home: the Castro, which closed for renovations in 2024 and reopened in early 2026. The theatrical experience is a little different—the seats were removed to create a concert venue, with modular risers and rows of lightweight padded seats brought in for the festival—but the restoration of the frescoes and interior designs is beautiful, the sight lines improved with the increased rake, and the atmosphere…well, let’s just say that it’s good to be home.
This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment, plus a special presentation of Japanese films produced on paper strips, and the annual “Amazing Tales from the Archives” program. Among the new restorations of films both legendary and forgotten were early features by Carl Theodor Dreyer and William Wyler, as well as revelatory German and Polish productions previously unseen stateside.
Opening night offered the new restoration of the famously unfinished Queen Kelly, Erich von Stroheim’s notorious 1929 production starring Gloria Swanson as an innocent corrupted. Von Stroheim’s overruns and excesses proved too much for Swanson and producer Joseph Kennedy (yes, the paterfamilas of the political dynasty), with production shutting down with less than half of his script in the can. Now, still photos and descriptions drawn from the complete script suggest Stroheim’s vision for the film’s missing sequences.
The oft-quoted cliché about Yasujirō Ozu is that he is the most “Japanese” of Japanese directors, a somewhat problematic claim (is there really a single ideal expression of Japanese character?) that nonetheless strives to describe a style and sensibility that rejected the cinematic influences of the West. His evolution is all the more fascinating given his love of Hollywood films as a voracious young film buff. His film career began in the early 1920s as an assistant cameraman at Shochiku, Japan’s biggest film studio. He remained at Shochiku his entire career, working his way up to assistant to director Tadamoto Okubo before making his directorial debut in 1927. The film, the only period piece of his career, has not survived. Ozu made every type of genre in those early years, from lighthearted college comedies to crime dramas and romantic melodramas to social dramas, turning out as many as six features a year. But, he really found his voice in shomin-geki, which translates to “home drama,” stories that explore the everyday lives of middle and lower middle-class citizens.
Where so many of his contemporaries delved into adventures and elegant period dramas, Ozu’s films are contemporary to his times. From his silent films in the early 1920s to his final film in 1962, An Autumn Afternoon, he set his quietly understated family dramas and modest comedies in the homes and workplaces of everyday citizens trying to make a life for themselves and their children. His films are a veritable survey of Japanese society from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, exploring themes of social expectations, familial responsibility, sacrifice and the collision of traditional culture and modern life, from The Depression through The War to the transition of a new democracy and Western-style economy.
TCM celebrates the legacy of Yasujirō Ozu, proclaimed by film critic and historian David Bordwell as “the greatest director ever to work in the history of cinema,” with 20 features plus the TV premiere of a new documentary on the legendary filmmaker.
Roger Corman left behind a legacy unmatched by filmmakers of his (or, for that matter, any) generation when he passed away in 2024 at the age of 98. In addition to directing over 50 films, he produced almost 500 features, created and ran two production companies and hired young talent in all facets of the business, both in front of and behind the cameras. He was dubbed “King of the B-movies” for his cheap productions and cost-cutting tricks, but he had an eye for talent and provided invaluable practical experience to hungry young artists willing to work long hours for small paychecks. Among the graduates of the “Corman School” are such luminaries as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Robert Towne, John Sayles, Gale Anne Hurd and Jonathan Demme. TCM celebrates the magnate with four nights spanning his career. The first two nights feature films directed by Corman, and the following two highlight the directors who came up under his tutelage.
Friday, April 3
Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, and Ron Howard are among the filmmakers who share their stories in Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema (2021), a French documentary that sketches out the defining contradictions of the ambitious young director who gave up on the studios and created his own career as an independent filmmaker. The rest of the night dives into a sampling of his early career as director, including a pair of films that have become cult classics.
Most of us at Parallax View are no longer actively reviewing new films but we still try to keep up with them. And after decades of making lists like this, it’s still part of our routine. So while, even a week into January 2026, we are still catching up on some of the most celebrated films of 2025, we can’t help ourselves. Though far from definitive, these are snapshots of what we have been able to see, and what impressed us, over the last year.
Contributors in reverse alphabetical order. Films list in preferential order (unless otherwise noted).
Jeffrey Overstreet
This list of my favorite films of the year comprises only titles that opened on big screens or on streaming services in Seattle before the end of the calendar year. Thus, a lot of titles you see on other 2025 lists are missing here because they reached Seattle moviegoers after January 1, 2026, and some titles were popular on 2024 lists but didn’t reach Seattle until early 2025.
You’ll find reviews of some of these films at jeffreyoverstreet.com, my new website (under construction). More reviews of these titles are coming soon.
THE TOP NINE Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh) Eephus (Carson Lund) It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi) No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor) On Becoming A Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson) Seven Walks With Mark Brown (Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton) Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson)
ELEVEN RUNNERS-UP I’m still arguing with myself, so any of these could climb into the top ten in the coming weeks: A Little Prayer (Angus MacLachlan) Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang) Bono: Songs Of Surrender (Andrew Dominik) Hard Truths (Mike Leigh) Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari) Hedda (Nia DaCosta) Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou) Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk (Sepideh Farsi) The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
Richard T. Jameson
From the top: Sinners One Battle after Another It Was Just an Accident The Secret Agent Sentimental Value Train Dreams Blue Moon Sorry, Baby Sirāt A House of Dynamite
Continuing more or less in order: The Mastermind, Die My Love, Nouvelle Vague, No Other Choice, 28 Years Later, Weapons, Bugonia, After the Hunt, Nuremberg, Freaky Tales, Superman
Have yet to see Hamnet, Marty Supreme, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Materialists
Robert Horton
First Tier: Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) One Battle After Another(Paul Thomas Anderson) The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendoça Filho)
Second Tier: Sirat (Oliver Laxe) Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay) When Fall Is Coming (Francois Ozon) Marty Supreme(Josh Safdie) Weapons (Zach Cregger) Sound of Falling (Mascha Schiliniski) Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) House of Dynamite(Kathryn Bigelow)
Not-Inconsiderable-Pleasure Tier: No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater) Friendship (Andrew DeYoung) Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths) 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)
Michael B. Jordan and cast in Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners.’ Photo credit: Warner Bros.
Kathy Fennessy
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) 2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) 3. The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto (Kleber Mendonça Filho) 4. Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland) 5. 40 Acres (R.T. Thorne) 6. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe) 7. Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang) 8. Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) 9. It Was Just an Accident / Un Simple Accident(Jafar Panahi) 10. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
1. Sinners, Ryan Coogler 2. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson 3. Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke 4. It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi 5. Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine 6. Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof 7. I’m Still Here, Walter Salles 8. Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs 9. The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt 10. Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke.
Honorable Mentions: The Featherweight, Robert Kolodny; Grand Theft Hamlet, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane
A Baker’s Dozen (plus one, because I just won’t be constrained by the whole number thing) of my favorites for 2025, in ascending order: 14. Merrily We Roll Along (Maria Friedman) 13. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt) 12. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni) 11. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) 10. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor) 9. Wake Up, Dead Man (Rian Johnson) 8. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) 7. Eephus (Carson Lund) 6. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh) 5. La Grazia (Paolo Sorrentino) 4. The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan) 3. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) 2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) and finally, pure catnip… 1. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
I also liked: Becoming Led Zeppelin (Bernard Macmahon), Chain Reactions (Alexandre O. Philippe), Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein), KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Applehans, Maggie Kang), The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence), The Monkey (Osgood Perkins), One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson), Superman (James Gunn), 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle), Weapons (Zach Cregger)
I have not yet had a chance to see either No Other Choice (Park Chan-Wook), Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) or The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho), three movies I fully expect would stir this baker’s dozen list up a bit, but so be it— as a wise candyman once said, so little time, so much to do. Others I have yet to experience include The Ugly Stepsister, The Shrouds, A House of Dynamite, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Misericordia, Dust Bunny, After the Hunt, Eddington, Jay Kelly, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Naked Gun, Splitsville and Father Mother Sister Brother, among many others. I’ll get to them in 2026, along with other non-movie-related matters. Maybe.
Sean Axmaker
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) 2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) 3. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley) 4. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) 5. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) 6. The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) 7. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) 8. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater) 9. Hamnet (Chloe Zhao) 10. A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
Runners-up (and on another day may have made the list): Cloud (Japan), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (Embeth Davidtz), The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt), No Other Choice (South Korea), Sirāt (Oliver Laxe), Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor).
Honorable mentions and memorable cinematic experiences: Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh), Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos), Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky), Dust Bunny (Bryan Fuller), Eephus (Carson Lund), Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro), Reflections in a Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani), Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson), Weapons (Zach Cregger).
There are, sadly, some significant films I have not yet seen (among them Blue Moon, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Sound of Falling, Father Mother Sister Brother and Peter Hujar’s Day) and hope to catch up with them soon, but as of publication this is where they stand.
Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in Joachim Trier’s ‘Sentimental Value.’ Photo credit: Neon
As the San Francisco Silent Film Festival awaits the much-anticipated reopening of a newly renovated Castro Theater, it temporarily pushed its traditional spring dates to late fall and relocated across the bridge to the beautiful Orinda Theater. A jewel of an independent theater that embraces its movie palace past with plush seats, Art Deco flourishes, and classic posters and memorabilia displayed throughout the building, it was a lovely choice for the largest silent film festival in the U.S. This year, the five-day event boasted 19 feature films, 11 shorts, and a fragment of an otherwise lost film, along the usual introductions, presentations on some of the restorations featured at the festival, and live music for every single screening.
SFSFF 2025 opened with a centenary screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. A massive hit in 1925 and one of Chaplin’s most beloved films, the epic comedy sends the Tramp into the Klondike equipped with little more than his bowler, cane, and baggy pants. It’s the little guy versus greed, hunger, and the fury of nature, his romantic idealism overcoming the cynicism and violence of the culture that (as we see later in the festival) destroyed so many.
David Lynch, the once boyish maverick of such dark, demanding, and confounding films as Blue Velvet and Lost Highway (not to mention the gentle, G-rated slice of slightly askew Americana, The Straight Story), is 60 now. You can see his age in has face and his graying hair (still wildly brushed as if trying to escape his head), but his output is, if anything, even greater now. He’s producing short films for his website, painting, even marketing his own signature coffee.
And he’s still making films the only way he knows how: his way. He made heady and dreamy three hour drama Inland Empire, shot totally on digital video (his first feature made in that format), with such Hollywood pros as Laura Dern and Jeremy Irons, yet financed and produced completely outside of Hollywood.
“It’s mostly common sense making films,” he insists. “You don’t need a studio. You need some money and you need ideas and then you go make your film.” He even bypassed the studio system to distribute the film independently. “There are many, many, many great theaters available to people and that’s the place where people see films,” he explains. “So if you can get your film into a theater, that’s all you need. And now you can make your own DVDs. If you have a conduit to stores, you put them down that conduit. Again, it’s a lot of common sense.”
Lynch came to Seattle in January 2007 to appear at a special preview screening of Inland Empire and talk at Town Hall on Transcendental Meditation and granted a few select interviews. Dressed in his trademark neat white shirt and simple black suit, he sat back for the interview with a cup of coffee within reach and an occasional cigarette between his fingers. Soft-spoken and pleasant, calm and confident, answering most questions with simple and succinct answers, he comes off as a gentle but eccentric elementary school teacher patiently trying to explain filmmaking and the creative process as if it were nothing more than basic addition and subtraction.
You wrote in your book, “Catching the Big Fish,” that you spent a lot of time in the woods while you were growing up. Is that where the settings and atmosphere of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks came from?
Wood is an influence, but it wasn’t… I always pictured Blue Velvet as having lumber around it, but it was shot in North Carolina. But there’s a lot of lumber around in North Carolina, too, so it worked out. But I pictured it more as a Northwestern kind of town. Then when Twin Peaks came out, yeah, there’s things, but I wrote it with Mark Frost, he’s not from the Northwest. There’s always things about our childhood that ideas come from. So it was an influence for sure. The woods. Wood and woods.
Blue Velvet captured something I’d never seen any other movie do at that time. It presented what should be a simple and peaceful rural community and revealed this dark layer underneath the surface, not simply a criminal underworld but a moral underworld. And I had lived for a year in La Grande, Oregon, which Blue Velvet‘s Lumberton evoked perfectly for me.
There’s a dark layer underneath every community. Looking back, people made a big deal about Blue Velvet showing the surface and then something under the surface. Since then, if you see TV and newspapers, more and more has been revealed that was hiding there all along. I say the sickness is being revealed and people are dealing with it, which I guess is a good thing. So it’s not just La Grande, or it’s not just in Twin Peaks or Lumberton, it’s everywhere.
Back in 2007, in conjunction with the release of Inland Empire, I had the opportunity to interview David Lynch twice in the same year. This is the second of the two interviews, conducted over the phone and focused on the DVD release of Inland Empire, which he produced and distributed independently through his company Absurda.An edited version was published on MSN, as part of the “What’s in Your DVD Player” series. Here is a longer version of that interview. Lynch talks about movies and DVDs, what his favorite movie is and why commentary is “the worst possible thing a person can do.” – SAx
What’s the last DVD that you’ve seen?
I saw The Hustler last week, with Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott. It’s a great film. It’s black and white and it really sets a place and a time and a world and I really enjoyed watching it again.
I love the photography by Eugene Shuftan, and all the great poolroom footage with the haze and the smoke.
It’s really, really a well made film. Really tight and great performances, really good writing. It’s a very interesting film.
Do you have a favorite DVD?
Sunset Boulevard. Tonight we’re going to the Billy Wilder Theater, and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is maybe my favorite world to go into, for sure in the top ten worlds to go into.
Do you ever check out the DVD supplements?
Hardly ever. But I gotta say, on the Inland Empire DVD, they’re worth checking out.
You have of course never done a commentary track, but you do load up the Inland Empire disc with a lot of interesting extras and the “Stories” section could almost be a stand-alone commentary because you talk about so many things around the film.
I believe talking is okay separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever. Things are rounded if they’re separate. Stories surrounding a film or things surrounding it, that’s a different kind a thing and I think those things are okay.
While it’s become a kind of Hollywood exercise for directors to re-edit and extend films for home video, David Lynch has never succumbed to the temptation. The film that arrives in theaters is, for better or worse, the film that will live on.
In terms of Blue Velvet, it is definitely for better. After the frustrations of Dune, producer Dino De Laurentiis gave Lynch a free hand and creative control over Blue Velvet and Lynch released the film that he intended.
Blue Velvet debuts on Blu-ray from MGM this week with a newly remastered edition of the film, but it also features a unique peak into the creative process of Lynch with a collection of recently rediscovered deleted scenes: 50 minutes of visions, both lovely and horrible, human and hellish.
Peeking in on the hidden world of ‘Blue Velvet’
These pieces were pared away in the editing, like a sculptor chiseling away to get to the perfect form, but they are full of visual delights and offbeat humor, narrative sidetrips and character embellishments. Some scenes simply cast a mood of unease or anxiety over the proceedings. Yet all are glimpses into the inspiration and explorations of Lynch as a filmmaker and marvelous addenda to the finished film, a look into roads not taken and details whittled away to reach the narrative focus and tonal balance of the final piece.
Lynch oversaw the editing of this collection of scenes and his simple construction gives the supplement a unity. As presented on the disc, with the scenes edited into a loose narrative of their own, it’s like a companion film focusing on the life of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) at college and at home, full of suggestions of Jeffrey’s dark side long before Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) enter his life. There is more with Sandy and her football quarterback boyfriend, many more scenes with Hope Lange as Jeffrey’s mother and a deleted storyline around the termite infestation investigated by Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay), dramatized with a slowly creeping camera and ominous chords, as if it’s more evidence of the rot of evil under the facade of the town.
While Lynch is never one to revise a finished film, he’s clearly proud of the work in these deleted scenes. “It was too much of a good thing,” is how he once explained cutting a favorite scene, but he’s happy to share those good things with us. He personally supervised the editing of these clips into a 50-minute supplement on the new Blu-ray. (For more on the search for the footage, see Cath Clark’s article in The Guardian.)
A belated welcome to 2025 with one last look at the best releases of 2024
Most of us at parallax View are no longer actively reviewing new films but we still try to keep up with them. And after decades of making lists like this, it’s still part of our routine. So while, even halfway through January 2025, we are still catching up on some of the most celebrated films of 2024, we can’t help ourselves. Though far from definitive, please enjoy our picks for the best films of 2024.
Contributors in alphabetical order. Films list in preferential order (unless otherwise noted).
Sean Axmaker
1. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet) 2. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia) 3. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs) 4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammed Rasoulof) 5. Anora (Sean Baker) 6. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold) 7. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis) 8. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland) 9. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass) 10. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
Runners-up: Challengers (Luca Guadagnino), Cuckoo (Tilman Singer), The Dead Don’t Hurt (Viggo Mortensen), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude), Hit Man (Richard Linklater), Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood), A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg), Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier), Strange Darling (JT Mollner), Woman of the Hour (Anna Kendrick)
Adrien Brody in ‘The Brutalist.’ Photo credit: A24
Dennis Cozzalio
My usual baker’s dozen of end-of-the-year picks features an actual Baker this year, so what a way to start! I have not yet had the opportunity to see such highly touted year-end powerhouses as All We Imagine as Light, Nickel Boys, The Brutalist or Hard Truths, though Sing Sing and The Room Next Door are both on my dance card for this weekend, a couple days after the deadline to submit this list. As with every year’s list, this one seems to change from moment to moment, so it only seems like business as usual, with those six in mind as possible spoilers for the ones that did make my list of 13 Favorites of 2024, that this list might look entirely different at the end of the coming weekend, or a week or from now. But this is what it looks like at 6:44 a.m. on Thursday, January 16, 2025. I have attempted to rank them, but in all honesty, only the top three are in any way carved in granite as far as their placement on the list goes. The remaining ten could be reshuffled in as many ways mathematically as they could be reshuffled. What matters is that they are all there.
My Baker’s Dozen Favorites of 2025 1. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello) 2. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis) 3. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher) 4. Anora (Sean Baker) 5. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs) 6. Hundreds Of Beavers (Mike Cheslik) 7. The Old Oak (Ken Loach) 8. Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants) 9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller) 10. Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos) 11. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat) 12. September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum) 13. Ghostlight (Alex Thompson, Kelly O’Sullivan)
In so many ways 2024 has been a terror, but as far as movies go it has good enough that another list of ten easily populates the world of my honorable mentions. In any other less bountiful year, any of these (listed alphabetically) might have made my baker’s dozen.
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold), A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg), Challengers (Luca Guadagnino), Conclave (Edward Berger), Daddio (Christy Hall), The First Omen (Arkasha Stevenson), Heretic (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods), Hit Man (Richard Linklater), Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood), My Old Ass (Megan Park)
Documentaries I Enjoyed Most: The Disappearance Of Shere Hite (2023) (Nicole Newnham), Ghost: Rite Here Rite Now (Tobias Forge, Alex Ross Perry), Made In England: The Films of Powell And Pressburger (David Hinton), Rainier: A Beer Odyssey (Isaac Olsen), Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (Garret Price)
And Every Year Has Its Dregs (In Descending Order From Best-Worst To Worst-Worst): Gladiator 2 (Ridley Scott) Tired, dull and pointless. Denzel ashington is, as widely reported, the best thing in it, and he’s still not very good. Trap (M. Night Shyamalan) Substitute “C” for “T.” The movie that answers the question, “What would it be like to see Hayley Mills taser a shirtless serial killer nearly half her age. Answer: not as enticing as it might sound, which is a reasonable response to the whole dumb movie itself. Joker: Folie A Deux (Todd Phillips) A “fuck you” to the same audience Phillips courted all the way to the Oscars before, but it has no passion for its own conceits, especially the musical numbers. The Front Room (Max Eggers, Sam Eggers) Ugliest display of fear of the elderly I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time. And Brandy Norwood can’t act. Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy) Marvel eats itself.
Flow. Photo credit: Janus Films
David Coursen
1. The Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) 2. Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof) 3. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland) 4. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia) 5. Evil Does Not Exist (Ruyusuke Hamaguchi) 6. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh) 7. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) 8. Dahomey (Mati Diop) 9. Fire Within, A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (Werner Herzog) 10. (tie) The People’s Joker (Vera Drew) Witches (Elizabeth Sankey)
Top tier: Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Last Summer (Catherine Breillat) Green Border (Agnieska Holland) All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia) His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
Veteran Virtuosity tier: Hard Truths (Mike Leigh) Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood) Hit Man (Richard Linklater) Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
Wild + Crazy Virtuosity tier: Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude) Anora (Sean Baker) The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Strong Enough to Honor tier: A Complete Unknown (James Mangold) Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos) Sing Sing (Greg Kweder) Nightbitch (Marielle Heller)
Sam Malone and Ethan Herisse in ‘Nickel Boys.’ Photo credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Richard T. Jameson
Not for the first time, I spent the greater part of a film year with a Netflix miniseries poised ahead of everything else on a potential “best things seen on screen” list: Steven Zaillian’s mesmerizing Ripley. In spirit, it’s still there. As for mere movies, here’s an alphabetical Ten (or so) Best.
All We Imagine as Light Anora The Brutalist Evil Does Not Exist Flow His Three Daughters Juror No. 2 Last Summer… Nickel Boys Strange Darling The Substance
Least celebrated also-rans: The Animal Kingdom, The Dead Don’t Hurt, Handling the Undead, Horizon (part one), Monkey Man, Rebel Ridge
Moira Macdonald
Favorite Films of 2024, listed alphabetically (as published in The Seattle Times): The Crime Is Mine Evil Does Not Exist His Three Daughters Hit Man Nickel Boys A Real Pain Sweetheart Deal The Taste of Things Wicked
Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in ‘All We Imagine as Light.’ Photo credit: Janus Films
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30 minutes after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
Marketing cookies are used to follow visitors to websites. The intention is to show ads that are relevant and engaging to the individual user.
A video-sharing platform for users to upload, view, and share videos across various genres and topics.
Registers a unique ID on mobile devices to enable tracking based on geographical GPS location.
1 day
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with integrated YouTube videos. Also used for marketing
179 days
PREF
This cookie stores your preferences and other information, in particular preferred language, how many search results you wish to be shown on your page, and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
10 years from set/ update
YSC
Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
Session
DEVICE_INFO
Used to detect if the visitor has accepted the marketing category in the cookie banner. This cookie is necessary for GDPR-compliance of the website.
179 days
LOGIN_INFO
This cookie is used to play YouTube videos embedded on the website.
