With 2024 having drawn to a close, Rating Frames is looking back at the past twelve months of cinema and streaming releases that have come our way. In the second of our series of articles, Darcy is taking a look at his ten favourite films of the year that was.
With a dense collection of titles with no clear standout, 2024 was the hardest year to rank recent releases in a long time. With a collection of new voices and revered personal icons, 2024 had a wide mixture of films that went head-on in tackling modern life, something that has felt lacking in the last few years. The only key omission to this list upon release is Ramell Ross’ Nickel Boys, a book I love from an exciting new artistic voice in the medium I’ve been desperate to see all year, which is releasing via Amazon at the end of the month. With that being said, I’m happy with how this list came together and hope these rankings get someone to check out a new exciting film.
10. Chime
I struggled with whether to include this short film by one of my favourite filmmakers Kiyoshi Kurosawa ahead of more ambitious titles (like The Brutalist 2024), but ultimately this sinister snapshot of reality was impossible to shake. In a year, and what’s shaping as a decade defined by crucial filmmakers reflecting on their lives and creative work, Kurosawa used multiple 2024 projects to open a dialogue with his early and defining work, even going as far as remaking his 1998 film Serpent’s Path with the same name but in the French language.
In Chime, Kurosawa continues his pursuit into modern perceptions of evil and the malice of life through a brief lens into a culinary school, with a student seemingly driven mad by a noise no one else can hear. What happens next is a remarkable level of cinematic dread that burrows deep into your skin, taking up space in your soul. Kurosawa’s ability to communicate complicated ideas within the short film format is astounding, making this film a must-watch whenever it becomes more widely available.
9. Perfect Days
In a year stacked with esteemed filmmakers returning with a work deep in reflection of their first works, none felt as complete as Wim Wenders’ Japanese-language quotidian reflection piece Perfect Days. Centring on a Shibuya public toilet cleaner, Hirayama, performed by screen legend Kôji Yakusho, Wenders’ film reflects his global curiosity and evolving perspective on humanity through humour and grace. It will be a film I return to often in the coming years.
8. Janet Planet
Janet Planet is a film that knows the smell and crunch of autumn leaves outside a family home that can define a childhood. Annie Baker’s debut work in the cinema space (after years as one of Broadway’s great unsung playwrights), inhabits the in-between with an honest curiosity.
Centring on a wonderful child performance by Zoe Ziegler as the 11-year-old Lacy and her mother Janet (a gravity-altering Julianne Nicholson), Janet Planet is keenly aware of the way a child can refract the adults around them, revealing new parts of a parent and child that is rare in its respect for both sides.
7. Red Rooms
No film crawled under my skin more in 2024, where it continues to remain. While Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms contains no violence, it is the most violently confrontational film you’ll encounter from the last year. At once a spiritual successor to David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and a keenly modern devolution of how the internet has isolated and festered our worst impulses, Red Rooms is one of the great underground discoveries of the year, a chilling interrogation into modern life through the lens of true crime, dark web violence, and modern voyeur culture.
At the front of the lens of the film is Kelly-Anne, portrayed by Juliette Gariépy as an all-time thriller character on the level of Patrick Bateman. A statuette beauty who spends her time modelling, crushing people in online poker, and obsessively attending the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a serial killer of adolescent girls who uploads his extreme violence to the dark web for those who wish to see, can. With Vincent Biron’s dexterous and compelling camera, we are intoxicated by a mesmerising oscillation between extreme unwatchability and an engrossing thriller, caught in a spiderweb where escape is too late. Achieves a lot from very little.
6. Evil Does Not Exist
The best score of the year can be found in Ryuichi Hamaguchi’s follow-up to this decade’s best film Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist (more than halfway through the decade these lists should be beginning to solidify), with its elegiac jazz progressions that evolve into a haunting rapture from Eiko Ishibashi.
As a tale of eco-modernism that leaves room for the farcical ways contemporary metropolitan life seeks to corrupt what remains of the natural world which displays Hamaguchi’s breadth and quality as a writer. When consultants for a work retreat glamping company seek to operate within the small village of Mizubiki, they are confronted by an uncooperative community.
Like its overwhelming musical compositions, Evil Does Not Exist climaxes in a confounding but engrossing final moment that lingers and provokes long after you leave. Ishibashi and Hamaguchi are carving out a place as the composer-filmmaker collaboration which the industry should be measured up against.
5. Anora
The unexpected hit out of Cannes, making it the first American film to win the Palme d’Or since Tree of Life (2011) on top of being a Best Picture contender, Sean Baker’s eighth feature Anora is larger and broader than any film he’s made before while still capturing his uptempo yet sobering look into the contemporary American underbelly.
The modern chronicler of contemporary fringe America maintains his scepticism-bordering-on-cynicism about his homeland throughout his filmography, which is stretched to a compelling breaking point here. The internet has explained the film as a modern-day Pretty Woman (1990) by way of Uncut Gems (2019) with a Goodfellas (1990) like structure, but Sean Baker and star Mikey Madison are more interested in exploring how Ani is placed within different worlds than how the world changes her. Anora is a fully realised character that still carves out space to surprise us in moving and memorable ways.
4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A film with a backstory as compelling as its on-screen drama (filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, the cast and creatives were forced to flee during production due to a warrant out for their arrest in Iran for filmmaking that goes against the regime), Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig speaks generationally about the modern Iranian moment through the language of family drama and genre filmmaking.
Through the use of social media footage from a recent student protest that turned violent—surprisingly a late addition in the editing process once they had fled the country—Rasoulof creates a certain surreality that arrives through this directness. This allows the simmering political drama to expand past the confines of the narrative into an explosive condemnation of authoritarian rule. While its final tonal shift won’t be for all audiences, it complicates and transforms the film into something larger and more elliptical than its humble and understated beginnings.
3. I Saw the TV Glow
In the days since the passing of the great David Lynch, much has been made about how modern cinema has increasingly lacked this effervescent feeling come to be known as ‘Lynchian’. But with the emergence of Jane Schoenberg and their second feature, I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, that essential Lynchian sensation that has defined indie filmmaking for 40 years has returned to breathe new life into our contemporary world.
With a close kinship to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) — in contention for best film of the 90s — I Saw the TV Glow ties 90s television fan nostalgia with the dissociative world of the adolescent trans experience that is willing to go to some deeply uncomfortable depths of the soul. Schoenberg’s modern reflection of the trans experience as a Lynchian world won’t place it within the awards season conversation, but alongside the extraordinary documentary No Other Land (2024), I Saw the TV Glow is the only essential film to arrive in theatres this year.
2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
The funniest film of the year is also the hardest to wrestle with. Rade Jude is indie cinema’s great punk rocker, throwing rotten fruit at those that need it. After releasing what will eventually be seen as the definitive Covid satire, 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Romanian satirist Jude returns to take aim at the capitalistic infrastructure of modern Bucharest, the gig economy, and the iron claw multinational corporations hold over even small production companies just trying to get by.
With Ilinca Manolache at the centre of his film as production assistant and part-time TikTok satirist Angela, Jude has the perfect muse for life in the Romanian capital, strained in every direction to get by, all for the financial security of a soulless multinational corporation, personified by a great cameo by Nina Hoss.
With its expansive 163-minute runtime, Jude holds many feet to the fire, concluding with a virtuosic yet simple long take for a workplace safety video which will prevent the families from suing the company for culpability, that both cements and brushes off its themes and frustrations like a poetic middle finger to the ruling class.
By culminating this long-form screed on modernity with a capitalistic nightmare version of Bob Dylan’s iconic music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues, with the family of a worker injured at work told to hold up blank pages meant to express their side of the story but will be written in post instead of in their own voice, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World cements Jude as the modern satirist to compare all others to. No one is doing it like him, but I wish more tried.
1. All We Imagine as Light
In a deep movie year with no real standouts like previous years have had, picking a number one was exceedingly difficult. That being said, no film expanded and deepened in my mind on rewatch as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. I was recently able to review this film properly since its showing at MIFF left me staggered. Kapadia’s soulful rendering of modern-day Mumbai is gorgeous and a must-see while it remains in theatres.
With a refined hand through documentary work, Kapadia flourishes in small moments. Whether it’s the embrace of a rice cooker given by a distant-slash-estranged husband working in Germany, or the small gesture of helping an older colleague move her things back to her old home after being wrongfully evicted, All We Imagine as Light embraces the aching emotionality of the quotidian, knowing these fleeting moments create a mosaic that reflects the light of human experience.
Honourable mentions: The Brutalist, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, Challengers, No Other Land.
“I’ve lived here maybe 23 years. But I feel afraid to call it home. There’s always the feeling that I’ll have to leave.” These opening words, by a nameless individual, ring out throughout Payal Kapadia’s extraordinary film All We Imagine as Light (2024), shot against the backdrop of Mumbai, focusing on the women who inhabit it.
The most soulful film in years is also perhaps the best feature of the year, documentarian turned fiction filmmaker Kapadia exploding onto the scene with an honest and poetic portrait of humanity in modern India. A powerful blend of personal womanhood inside the political sprawled across modern Mumbai, Kapadia’s gorgeous and lyrical film centres on three multigenerational nurses navigating a world unwilling to accommodate their lives.
Centring on a pair of nurses, seasoned veteran Prabha (Kani Kusruti), and the youthful and expressive Anu (Divya Prabha), navigate an economically and politically uncertain time in Mumbai, along with older nurse Parvarty (Chhaya Kadam), who is facing eviction after the death of her husband. Prabha is dealing with the extended absence of her husband. This arranged marriage almost immediately left Mumbai to work in Germany, sending gestures to her home like a European rice cooker that only highlights the void he has left. On the other hand, Anu is attempting to balance her life while forming an interfaith romance with Muslim boy Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), an increasingly contentious issue in current-day India.
Kani Kusruti as Prabha in All We Imagine as Light.
We first see Anu and Prabha on public transport on their way to work, inside the lyrical six-minute opening sequence that guides you immediately into the world Kapadia is sharing with us. Anu is asleep on her side on a train seat, demonstrating her naive sense of safety in her position while also telling the audience her level of preparedness to arrive at work. In the immediate next shot, we see Prabha, gracefully shown in a medium closeup holding onto the pole of the same train for stability (seen above). By only showing Prabha from the shoulders up here, Cinematographer and frequent collaborator Ranabir Das portrays the battle-hardened nurse in grace with the world around her, yet never settled into one place.
There is a fear this remarkable film will be lost in the awards race shuffle due to India’s increasingly conservative film body and government not submitting it for the Academy Awards, even with the film winning the Grand Prix at Cannes. This is a sad but unsurprising occurrence after Kapadia emerged onto the film scene with her 2021 documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also critical of India’s patriarchal system.
The sweet centre of the film lies in the blossoming romance between Anu and Shiaz, a relationship that blends religion and the modern political moment in the city. In a series of push-pull romantic moments which includes a heartbreaking yet comedic booty call where Anu must purchase a hijab to visit him in the Muslim district where he lives. Kapadia avoids easy exits with this romance, concluding powerfully with an honest and poetic moment of acceptance and beauty, tied into an honest moment of private security.
In contrast to this romance, Prabha and her complicated relationship with her absent husband fills the remaining emotional bandwidth. Born of an arranged marriage that ties her to the city she does not call her own. In the opening prologue, a resident tells us, “That’s life. You better get used to the impermanence”. In a film centred on the relationship between people and the places they inhabit, this line pangs with an honest awareness.
Divya Prabha as Anu in All We Imagine as Light.
A film that comes to mind while watching Kapadia’s film is Steve McQueen’s Lover’s Rock (2020) from his Small Axe series, and not just because composers Dhritiman Das and Topshe’s playful piano score could’ve fallen out of one of his films. The short and sweet feature is in contention for the film of the decade, a complicated work of desire and connection inside a wealth of sumptuous visual storytelling and guile that simply overwhelms you. Both films use colour and vivid travelogue-styled cinematography to embrace the human connection of place. What separates the two films is Kapadia’s deceptively critical eye when depicting modern Mumbai, especially the three women’s place within it.
The slow, simmering drama underneath the film’s central pair is the wrongful eviction of a third nurse at the hospital, the older woman Parvaty. Her husband has died, removing her right to live in her own home. The potency of the feminist politics that simmer underneath All We Imagine as Light is in the grounded reality of the characters’ situation, one they are helpless to improve, finding solace in their own uneasy but accepting companionship.
The film operates within two acts, the first within the city that flows downstream into its latter half as the trio of women go to the beachside village that Parvaty grew up in. Kapadia, through her documentary lens, views characters as people who have been steeped in a certain place like tea, becoming more like a place the longer you inhabit it. While Mumbai is described as a place of impermanence and instability for the characters we meet, it is only in venturing out of the rapid city do they begin to view their life and their wants more clearly. In its final moments, would Anu and Shiaz ever have the courage to meet Prabha without this opportunity outside the city? And would Prabha’s spiritual exchange with her husband which opened her eyes to what she is holding onto and what she needs to give up to change have occurred in the melancholy that followed her throughout Mumbai?
Kapadia, with a refined hand through documentary work, flourishes in small moments. Whether it’s the embrace of a rice cooker given by a distant-slash-estranged husband working in Germany, or the small gesture of helping an older colleague move her things back to her old home after being wrongfully evicted, All We Imagine as Light embraces the aching emotionality of the quotidian, knowing these fleeting moments create a mosaic that reflects the light of human experience.
All We Imagine as Light is in select theatres now.
The Room Next Door preview screening provided by Sony Pictures.
The blurred lines between long-term friends, and lovers, and the rapid progression of time once a career begins to slow have become legendary Spanish auteur, Pedro Almodóvar’s, chief fascination in recent years, percolating and expanding in unique ways that complicate his melodramatic stories. With an extensive filmography of Spanish melodramas and knotty adult dramas spanning almost 50 years, Almodóvar is exploring a new world of cinema with his new Golden Lion-winning feature The Room Next Door (2024); his first English-language feature film and only his third work of adaptation.
After learning of a recent cancer diagnosis from an old friend, novelist Ingrid (Julliane Moore) rekindles the relationship from her youthful days at a magazine with war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton). In light of this diagnosis, the rekindled friendship forms a compelling inseparability, tying the melodrama to some probing ideas on the connection between relationships of all kinds and the presence of death. This friendship is immediately pressurised as Martha decides she doesn’t want to continue treatment, instead acquiring illegal medication to end her life on her own terms, in a secluded house in Upstate New York, with Ingrid accompanying her in the room next door. While not always effective as a knotty dramedy, The Room Next Door is a worthy modern entry in this new phase of Almodóvar, a singular voice in cinema.
Merging a cinematic melodrama inside of an Edward Hopper-influenced (including a centrally placed painting for maximum impact) backdrop shouldn’t sing this harmoniously, but Almodóvar makes it look like breathing. In his first non-Spanish-language feature (after his uneven but charming short Strange Way of Life from last year), Almodóvar’s passion for American literature is evident. However, the chasm between his Spanish lyricism and his English translations flitters haphazardly throughout the film. Like panning for gold in a murky riverbed, The Room Next Door contains beautifully poetic moments of humanity in the face of the end, while many other lines and whole scenes fall flat.
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in The Room Next Door.
Luckily, the film is kept afloat by two of the best working actors and the best candidates to shepherd the Spanish auteur’s unique form of melodrama into the English language. Moore and Swinton are extraordinary together, quickly adapting to the certain quirks and manners that make Almodóvar’s style stand out in modern cinema. While the film relaxes into its story slower than his previous films, no doubt a complication from this being his first feature in English, its unique blend of offbeat humour and all-encompassing melodrama creates a luscious bedrock to lay in the sun with.
Even with the film adapted from the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door is a spiritual sequel to Almodóvar’s brilliant and tangly Pain and Glory (2019). While not as successful as the Antonio Banderas-led dramedy that operates achingly close to the auteur’s own life, The Room Next Door still excels in exploring contemporary ideas of loss and death in an increasingly uncertain world. In the second half of the film, fluttering between climate change doomsday scenarios brought on by John Turturro’s character Damian — an environmental academic and a previous lover of both Martha and Ingrid — and the criminal coverup necessary to keep Ingrid legally protected from Martha’s assisted suicide plan, is a rush of blood to the head, expanding this seemingly intimate story about two friends into a wider conversation about modern living. While unsuccessful in bridging this gap between late-stage friendship scenarios and the crushing weight of contemporary concerns, Almodóvar’s style still makes for an engaging and breezy ride through Upstate New York.
A final poetic choice involving Swinton’s daughter Michelle will be divisive, simultaneously poking holes at the film’s clear eyed look at death while also exploring notions of interpersonal legacy in moments of tragedy. Much like Pain and Glory, Almodóvar has given audiences a full meal to chew on for years to come.
The Room Next Door is in select theatres Boxing Day.
Nosferatu preview screening provided by Universal Pictures.
When you enter the world of Robert Eggers’ films, you are immediately placed within a space through a remarkable tactility. The old wooden walls of an estate have a smell, the dim candlelight dining halls have an air of repression and melancholy, and none of the performers carry with them the weight of modern knowledge (his actors rarely display an awareness of what an iPhone is which derails many modern period films). When you enter the world of Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024), you succumb to his whims just as the characters succumb to the enticements of the ghoulish Count Orlok (a never better Bill Skarsgård).
Adapting a 100-year-old film that defined all horror storytelling that came afterwards shouldn’t feel as comfortable as it does for Eggers and his creative team (highlighted by the extraordinary cinematographer Jarin Blaschke), but after three successful features steeped in immense period accuracy and style (2015’s The Witch, 2019’s The Lighthouse, 2021’s The Northman), Nosferatu feels like an inevitable next step for one of America’s most unique cinematic voices.
For those not up to speed on the Nosferatu story, originally an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel in 1922, we follow newlyweds Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), in 1838 Germany. Thomas is sent on a journey to Transylvania to secure the signature of the elusive Count Orlok, who is keen to purchase an old estate in town. Ellen pleads with her husband not to leave, sensing doom is quickly approaching them, a foreboding presence that she has carried with her most of her life. From the beginning of this updated version of the story, Ellen’s dark connection to Orlok is apparent, working as the film’s greatest strength. This key narrative propulsion is born from the silent era film’s greatest weakness, a focus on Thomas’ journey, eclipsing Ellen’s more internal struggle with the Count.
Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu. Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
This focus on Ellen’s perspective and melancholy is felt even as the film shifts to Thomas’s trek to find the castle, an extraordinary sequence, propelled by both what he seeks and what has been left behind. Depp is incredible in the difficult role of Ellen, balancing her temperament seemingly as both possessor and possessed, with deep references to the genre-defining performances of Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981) and Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973). A performance of writhing spectacle that administers an impressive restraint when needed, wielding Eggers’ impressive ability to pen alluring scenes with no simple destination as well previous muses Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) and Robert Pattinson (The Lighthouse).
At the heart of this adaptation which is wholly absent from the previous two Nosferatu films is the seductive lure of the abyss that would have Nietzsche bursting out of his crypt like the Count. While the central tenet of the Nosferatu story is the psychic seduction that gives the Count power over those susceptible, a transformation is always an integral component, something Eggers removes here in place of Skarsgård’s increasingly terrifying presence.
The tightly held secret of Bill Skarsgård’s appearance as Nosferatu will not be spoiled here, just know it is worth the lock and key. Leave it to the obsessive Eggers to design a memorable and period-accurate depiction of Count Olak that expands on the original and Werner Herzog’s adaptation in 1979. Skarsgård’s count is slowly demystified across the film, creating a surprisingly destabilising experience. As an audience, we are so accustomed to the legendary character hiding and weaponising the shadows, which does occur in several key sequences in the film. Still, here, Count Orlok is brought more and more into the crisp moonlight, revealing the humanity underneath the creature of the night.
Nicholas Hoult in Nosferatu. Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
Where the original film exploded the medium while also speaking to the modern reality of the Spanish Flu of 1918, Eggers opts instead to entrench himself in the imagery of the past. More than any of his other works, Nosferatu is a work of pure escapism, cementing the auteur as a formalist filmmaker whose worldview is tightly withheld from the work.
A filmmaking collaboration that extends environs into a three-dimensional cinematic space, Eggers and Blaschke evoke the very smells and textures that transform a text from period-accurate to fully inhabited. The film’s guiding light is Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), a masterpiece in gothic literature adaptation that evokes a spellbinding atmosphere through its mixture of production design and cinematography. With its flowing curtains and long candlestick-lit hallways that invite a menacing darkness, Eggers’ Nosferatu is bringing the tentpoles of gothic storytelling to a new generation.
Gothic horror is deeply connected with the Gothic romance genres, and while the faithfulness to the original texts is admirable, it is in this expansion into other forms of gothic storytelling that Eggers’ iteration breathes new life. Through Depp’s singular performance at the heart of the film, we are compelled through the romance and horror that lurks in the shadows of every room, arriving at a near-operatic finale that never loses the wry humour that permeates through the filmmaker’s work.
However, it’s hard not to feel Eggers playing it safe across every moment of Nosferatu. Masked beneath the comfortable walls of period storytelling that rarely escapes the snowglobe-like structures he crafts in his work, it is difficult for the pangs of concern to creep in that one of America’s great craftsmen avoids the contemporary human moment like the plague. Whether it is fair to critique this absence or not, the feeling lingers.
It is perhaps too much to ask of a filmmaker so equipped in transportational genre storytelling that allows you to smell the musk of an old library or the menace of an encroaching evil in your very marrow. Still, there is a level of artistic safety that is palpable throughout the film, leaving one aching for a little more dare and bite.
For horror season, the Criterion Channel has crafted an eclectic and bountiful collection of iconic Japanese Horror films to immerse yourself in. From ’60s cult classics to the ’90s and early ’00s staples that exploded the country’s unique horror classics onto the world stage, this collection has something for both the cinephile horror fan and those looking for an entry point.
The genre is defined by old folklore and urban legends about Oni, invisible demons that potentially bring disaster and disease with them. A key form of Oni is Yūrei, or vengeful spirits, which we can see spread across almost all Japanese horror cinema. Perhaps the most well-known story of Yūrei is of Okiku, a young maid who was thrown down a well by a samurai after she refused his advances, returning as a vengeful spirit. Okiku is defined by her long black hair and hushed whisper, iconography burned into the celluloid of the country’s horror storytelling for generations, forming the immortal image that spreads across this entire collection.
Japanese horror storytelling thrives when these legends of Yūrei and other Oni are weaved into their contemporary settings, from post-civil war anxiety (Onibaba) to suburban anxiety and community suspicions (Creepy) and the encroaching dominance of technology in our world (Ring, Pulse, Tetsuo: The Iron Man). This creates a consistent cultural imprint that makes the genre so satisfying to engage with and return to.
So what better way to spend October than to binge through these and craft a ranking list from this well-curated list of classics from the fine folks at Criterion.
13. Ichi the Killer (2001) – Takashi Miike
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
Extremist hyperviolence for the incels, industry legend Takashi Miike’s bizarre and underbaked screed Ichi the Killer, made two years after his brilliant film Audition (which will arrive later in this list), was banned in multiple countries for its approach to sexual violence and sadomasochism. Centring on the titular Ichi (Nao Ômori), an emotionally disturbed man who is just as likely to weep uncontrollably in the corner of a room as he is to violently murder those around him, most likely with a blade hidden in his boot. Pursuing Ichi is a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), known for his brutality and Joker-like scars along his cheeks, who is impressed and tantalised by Ichi’s level of violence.
If that reads like a teenage boy fantasia of hyper-violence and extremity at the expense of taste and storytelling, that’s because it is. The only skippable film on this list, Ichi the Killer sees the chaotic filmmaker indulge in all his worst impulses which were weaved in more creatively in his other films.
While the film and the manga it is faithfully adapting has clearly influenced a generation of filmmakers, particularly in manga and anime circles, its haphazard approach to storytelling centred on a hyper-violent incel creates an instant callous so thick, the proceeding depravity sparks little to no emotion.
12. Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003) – Takashi Shimizu
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
Even as the lesser of the films in the franchise selected by Criterion, Ju-On: The Grudge 2 is not without its iconic moments that each film in the franchise achieves. Operating in a surprisingly quieter, more atmospheric horror register, Ju-On: The Grudge 2 centres its plot on a TV crew working on a reality show about ghosts set in the house of the original film.
The Yūrei at the heart of the franchise stems from a murdered housewife, cursing all those who enter the house to an inevitable demise. The horror set pieces in the film and the franchise grow repetitive in a hurry, but still manage a psychological stickiness through some impressive genre flourishes. The ghost’s death rattle sound remains one of the great noises in the horror canon that ratchets up tension faster than any convoluted plot.
Following the similar trajectory of the previous film with its nonlinear narratives inside character (read, next victim) focused chapters, Ju-On: The Grudge 2 has a more menacing air of inevitability that never feels oppressive. Instead, it makes for an easier watch than the first film, albeit with the same issues.
The time-skipping narrative in this film is more potent and evocatively tied to the whole story than the original, making its climactic final act wash over you in waves of sadness and melancholy, even with its bizarre final ten minutes.
11. Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) – Takashi Shimizu
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
The all-time ‘just leave the house’ franchise, Ju-On: The Grudge thrives in the unknown. The horror is a tightly contained, well-chosen horror house, a small collection of characters and a looming presence we are desperate to learn more about, even if the resolution ultimately lessens the experience in the film’s uneven conclusion.
Ju-On: The Grudge’s keen focus on sound design with its wall scratching, cat screeches, and the iconic death rattle heightens an unfocused plot, held together by its terrific horror set pieces, Hitomi’s (Misaki Itô) chapter especially. Japanese horror, and especially those centred on yūrei have these unexpected and often moving notes of sadness at the heart of the curse, something that can be felt even within the iconic stair scene at the climax of the film, largely through Takako Fuji’s performance as the ghost Kayako.
Ju-On thrives in its limitations as a micro-budget film shot in a tremendous house for a horror, which Shimizu puts great attention to laying out, but is bogged down by a serious lack of characterisation, opting instead for time skipping and short chapters that prevent the inventive filmmaking to thrive. Ultimately, these films have such aggressively passive characters stuck in these doom loops that while tepidly compelling, never excel as an overall experience.
10. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) – Shinya Tsukamoto
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Pure heavy metal cinema that some have deemed ‘migraine cinema’, the wildly feverish Tetsuo The Iron Man leaves a crater in the medium we can only hope to mine for future resources. With the self-awareness to hit the ejector seat after 67 minutes, Shinya Tsukamoto’s manic sci-fi nightmare about a self-professed ‘metal fetishist’ (Tomorô Taguchi) is driven mad (or already was), creating a sequence of events which include a graphic and hysterical sex scene, an incredibly tactile chase sequence, all culminating in a transcendent moment of mania you’ll be coming down for days after.
This Japanese Eraserhead (1977) crushes your skull with a relentless pace and style, truly fitting its design aesthetic of violent machinery bursting from limbs like the chest burster in Alien (1979). There is no Crash (1996) or Titane (2021) (and to a certain extent The Substance, 2024) without Tetsuo, placing it violently at the top of the heap of the cinema of extremity, even if its ideas arrive with a blunted edge.
9. Dark Water (2002) – Hideo Nakata
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
A tense and poignant drama of a family going through a divorce wrapped up in a ghost story, Dark Water is a melancholic look at childhood neglect and trauma with a beautiful and unexpected third act.
Directed by Hideo Nakata who thrust the Japanese horror genre onto the world stage with Ring (1998) —appearing later in this list— based on a short story collection by Koji Suzuki (who also wrote the Ring novels), Dark Water centres on a young mother in the process of divorcing her husband and rebuilding a life for herself and her young daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno). The mother, Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki), rents a rundown apartment for her and her daughter where strange occurrences happen, localising around the water in the building.
Four years after his enormous success with Ring, Nakata is driven to a more potent emotional story of childhood neglect and a fracturing family, lowering the temperature of the horror, using the genre instead to heighten the dramatic storytelling rather than as a means to an end. The film succeeds as a sombre piece of atmospheric storytelling that weaves two unique stories together, the family divorce drama that gives remarkable attention to the young child’s feelings throughout, and the ghost story in the apartment.
Held together by a pair of fantastic performances by Kuroki and Kanno, with the latter giving an all-time child performance in a horror film, Dark Water sneaks up on you with its deceptively poignant storytelling and characters, culminating in the most emotionally resonant final act on this list. The horror genre, and especially ghost stories, excel in articulating a sense of longing and lost time, with those we love and those that need to be loved.
8. Creepy (2016) – Kiyoshi Kurosawa
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
It is no mistake that Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds himself on this list three times, as the great master formalist makes a case for the most important voice in horror storytelling since John Carpenter. A film that understands the anxiety an audience gets from a whisper in a stressful situation, or a quiet interview in a frame full of people, Creepy brings Kurosawa’s doom scenario milieu to the suburbs, tracking an ex-detective Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) forced to retire from the force and move with his young wife Yasuko (Yūko Takeuchi).
With a clear itching to return to detective work, as well as a heightened sense of danger and menace behind every door, influenced by a level of unresolved PTSD, Koichi becomes obsessed with a local cold case brought on by an ex-colleague, as well as being unnerved and suspicious of his neighbours.
Kurosawa’s formalism is well suited to the obsessive detective narrative, with the modern suburbia setting slowly pierced by the auteur’s signature sense of overwhelming dread and suspicion. His measured camera movements, at times unsettlingly ahead of the action, heighten the anxiety of any given moment, binding us to the experiences of his characters.
The legendary auteur is at his best when he can place the audience, alongside his characters, in situations where anything is possible. Like reality, not every moment is cause and effect, where potentially horrifying incidents can occur seemingly without motive or reason. This troubling, anxiety-fuelled sensation is where Kurosawa is more keenly tapped into than perhaps any living filmmaker, allowing his seemingly mundane character dramas to glide into some of the greatest horror moments of the past 30 years.
A bold perspective gearshift in the film’s second half almost derails the drama and tension Kurosawa so brilliantly establishes for over an hour, held together only by the filmmaker’s ability to reignite the dramatic flame for a memorable closing moment. While not in the highest tier of works, Kurosawa’s Creepy is as satisfying an unsettling portrait of suburban anxiety and destabilisation as you will find.
7. Ring (1998) – Hideo Nakata
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The quintessential Japanese horror film, Hideo Nakata’s Ring is probably the most iconic film on the list, defined by its Yūrei antagonist Sadako (Rie Ino’o), clearly based on the Okiku legend, down to her horrific murder of being thrown down a well. It’s also the film that sparked a Western fever over the Japanese horror industry, rapidly adapting them into American versions of middling success (four films on this list have American adaptations), the best of the lot being Gore Verbinski’s impressive adaptation The Ring in 2002.
To catch those up to speed with the story of this blockbuster from Japan, Hideo Nakata’s Ring has the all-time horror premise of a mysterious VHS tape that, once watched, will have you scared into an early grave seven days after watching. Wonderfully blending Japanese folklore with modern society’s relationship with physical media and storytelling, all wrapped up in a moody yet propulsive journalism procedural centred on the brilliant Nanako Matsushima and Hiroyuki Sanada as ex-wife and husband pair Reiko and Ryūji.
Where Ju-On falters by being solely driven by its formula and inventive kills, Ringu thrives in its deep fascination with the looming spectre of Sadako, using the framework of the journalism procedural to uncover the reality that she is less a hostile ghost and more of an enraged victim.
The film elevates itself with an emotionally overwhelming moment in the climax, with Reiko warmly embracing the skeleton of Sadako, a graceful note in a film that until this moment thrived in its procedural meticulous storytelling. In a genre defined by outcasts reaping revenge on the world, this moment of tenderness pierces through the shroud of menace and cynicism, leaving behind a desperate mother letting her tormentor know it will be okay. Even though this moment is followed by a scene with the franchise’s most iconic imagery of Sadako crawling out of the television, it’s without question the film would be stronger for ending at this place (the TV crawl scene could happen at any point), perhaps moving it higher up this list.
6. House (1977) – Hideo Nakata
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
A destabilising horror experience, unlike anything you’ve seen before. With a feverish energy and imagination that removes an audience’s ability to anticipate an inch in front of their face —a crucial component of any great horror— Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s House, playfully referred to as a psychedelic comedy horror, is the most unique film on this list that quickly became a global cult object.
A tremendously enjoyable film, House follows seven schoolgirls with names like Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) and Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo, MVP of the group once the mania starts), played by mostly amateur actors, who go on a summer vacation to a country estate owned by Gorgeous’ aunt (Yōko Minamida), an eccentric older woman. Strange occurrences and violent episodes begin to plague the girls at the house, shifting the film from a glossily bizarre romp into a clear ur-text for Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films while never losing its internal style and spirit.
Ôbayashi has made a film on such a different frequency to the rest of cinema, a feat that forces you to realign your senses to get onto its wavelength. But once you’re there, the results will astonish you. You’ll be so overwhelmed with a sense of dysphoria, oscillating rapidly between genuine glee and anxiety with its feverish editing style and use of stop motion and simple animations. In a secluded cabin where anything is possible, even a cat can become a nightmare.
5. Onibaba (1964) – Kaneto Shindō
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The demonic nature of war and conflict which sows its violence into the very earth, Kaneto Shindô’s atmospheric and captivating 14th-century folk tale has perhaps the loosest attachment to the horror genre as anything on this list, earning its place through its deep connection to post-war anxiety, reflected through the prism of Japanese samurai cinema.
With her son, Kichi, away at war as a samurai, a woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) struggle to survive on their own in the outskirts of Kyoto, resorting to killing solitary samurai and stealing their swords and clothes to a local merchant for food. Upon the return of a neighbour, Hatchi (Kei Satô), who tells them of the death of the son, the trio begin a dance of seduction and connection fuelled by loneliness, jealousy, and desire.
Onibaba lives in the sound of nature in conflict with human violence, the aggressive rustling of grain and reeds, the coarse splashing of water on a riverbed as two nameless men fight, tying notions of human violence and horror to the very earth, better than almost any film has since. As the oldest film on this list, it is as crucial a watch as any in understanding the genre as a whole.
4. Kuroneko (1968) – Kaneto Shindō
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Such a wonderful companion to his previous film Onibaba it’s impossible to separate the pair, with its casting of Nobuko Otowa in near identical roles, mirrored visual motifs and narrative of the women left behind and left to rot in the burnt ruins of a world left by feeble men.
Opening with the brutal murder of a woman, Shige (Kiwako Taichi), and her mother-in-law Yone (Otowa), at the hand of a band of samurai that sets the tone for the rest of this haunted revenge thriller as the pair return to the world as cat formed Onryō, a more vengeful form of yūrei.
In many ways, this is the more overtly horrific film of the pair, but where Kuroneko really excels and where Shindō clearly improves as a writer is in the dramatic storytelling that is unlocked in the centre of the film with the return of Gintoki (Nakamura Kichiemon II), Yone’s son, Shige’s husband, and crucially, a samurai. This return creates a compelling internal battle for Shige and Yone, who have returned to the mortal world to seek vengeance on the samurai plaguing and overwhelming the land, but still harbour a great love and longing for the man who left them.
At its core, Kuroneko is a story of vengeance against the inhumanity of male violence, with its beautiful knots of human longing and connection in the face of great pain piercing the heart more powerfully than any fang.
3. Audition (2001) – Takashi Miike
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Recently ranked the 7th best horror film of all time by Variety, Takashi Miike’s second and much more successful entry on this list, Audition, moves as an anglerfish, enrapturing you in its romantic light, masking the dark monster lurking in the shadows.
Beginning with a beautiful three-minute prologue of a young family losing their mother in a hospital, Miike’s Audition blooms from a place of empathy and loss, creating a lush bed to destabilise us. Set seven years after this, Shigeharu’s (Ryo Ishibashi) son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) presses him to find a wife. Shigeharu’s friend Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, devises a plan to hold an audition for a fake film project with the goal of Shigeharu choosing a wife out of the cohort.
Immediately, Shigeharu is enchanted, bordering on obsessed with one prospect, the quiet Asami (Eihi Shiina), and pursues her, even though Yasuhisa urges him to reconsider as he believes something is off about her. Miike uses his chaotic approach to editing and story structure that tipped over Ichi the Killer here as a piercing needle into the skin of this Vaseline-covered pulpy romance. It is in this needling contrast that the film thrives.
Miike has a profound eye for composition and lighting, transcending the material into a consistent wave of tangible emotion, never letting its characters or the audience off the hook he so delicately dangles. This lush style is wrapped in a discordant editing style once we meet Asami, reshaping any notion of the type of film we are watching from moment to moment, culminating in a wild final act that made the film legendary to horror fans.
2. Pulse (2001) – Kiyoshi Kurosawa
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
The year is 2001 and the legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa is deeply sceptical about the internet’s promise to connect the global population more deeply with each other. In Pulse, at the turn of the millennium with the internet burgeoning into being, a creeping loneliness epidemic appears to be bleeding into people’s lives through their computer screens, leaving its victims in a fate worse than death.
In conversation with Hideo Nakata’s Ring with their relationships to media and technology’s place as the medium to our new folk stories, Pulse elicits a similar feeling the VHS tape has with its steadily increasing number of apparent ghosts taking form inside the internet, desperate to escape for reasons that become clearer at the film’s remarkably evocative climax.
Viewing the relationship between a rapidly isolating city and life through the lens of a small group of young people retreating into their own worlds via the internet is eminently recognisable in 2024. With a steady march towards depression tied to the oblivion of disconnection that Kurosawa achieves better than almost any living filmmaker, we are forced into the role of both protagonist and camera operator, refracting our modern life into this 23-year-old film. For this reason, alongside its depressive but uncynical atmosphere, Pulse is potentially the definitive work of cinema for our online, modern age.
The miracle of Kurosawa’s films is their ability to form a compellingly bleak drama without an overwhelmingly cynical worldview. While the film is defined by suicide and internet-driven malaise, Pulse is never driven by a contempt for the ghostly presences or the young victims like in the Ju On films. Even in the final, apocalyptic moments, the audience, with Kurosawa by our side, is hopeful for a potential step forward.
With all that said, what supercharges these ideas and propels them into a plane few films achieve is their ability to operate as a truly terrifying work of horror. Even in a horror collection that boasts iconic horror scenes like the ones in Ring or Ju-On, nothing is as bone-chilling and skin-crawling as the slow-moving ghost sequence, perfectly calibrated to destabilise our ideas of how our fears can be provoked in such a simple scene.
The unveiling of the Big Bang event at the film’s core as a deeply personal, isolating act of exposed self-annihilation is overwhelmingly emotional. The best horror films root themselves in empathetic moments of anguish that birth a larger malice to those in its orbit, which Pulse achieves better than anything on this list and in almost any other film in the genre.
1. Cure (1997) – Kiyoshi Kurosawa
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Perhaps the film I’ve thought about the most since watching it on a gloomy night in 2020, sliding ever higher up my all-time list, making its ultimate landing spot at the top here felt inevitable but still celebratory. Kurosawa’s best film, Cure, is the perfect blend of his obsessions of ingrained human anxiety and potential for violence, with his filmmaking influences, equal parts Andrei Tarkovsky and Tobe Hooper, flourishing at every turn.
Centring on obsessive detective Takabe (a colossal performance by Kōji Yakusho), with a deteriorating home life due to his wife’s (Anna Nakagawa) failing mental health, who is tasked with solving a series of seemingly random murders connected only by the assailants having carved an ‘X’ into the neck or chest of the victim. We are shown these violent attacks in Kurosawa’s familiar smooth camera movements, creating an unnerving balance that stems from the potential violence of everyday life.
Much like David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), a film deeply tied to Cure, our burgeoning obsession with true crime storytelling is being reflected back at us, forcing us to contend with our own impulses towards viewing violence in this way. Cure excels because Kurosawa is keenly aware of these impulses and genre conventions, understanding when to subvert them or allow them to play out at his own deliberate pace.
Cure’s greatest act of subversion comes from the crafting of perhaps the best horror character of the past 30 years, the black hole known as Mamiya, the man seemingly hypnotising people into performing these murders. Portrayed with a compelling aloofness by Masato Hagiwara that disarms both the audience and other characters, while also flooding the air with a palpable sense of tension and dread. Mamiya’s hypnotism scenes are extraordinary set pieces in magnetic genre filmmaking, focusing on elemental connections like the flame of a lighter or the meditative quality of washing over you like a steadily rising tide. The film transcends past its terrific villain and set-pieces due to our near-instant tethering to Takabe’s obsession with understanding these murders, propelling us deeper and deeper into the world and ultimately, Mamiya’s spell.
Takabe’s ultimate decision to give his ailing wife over to an asylum creates an absence inside him that allows him to reach the precipice of defeating Mamiya but directly asks us the cost of this sacrifice. In a world void of something to fight for, how does one look into the abyss and see anything but themselves? In a genre of scares and nightmarish atmospheres, these lasting questions and closing moments will have you questioning how you view humanity itself.
A year of avoiding the larger titles in favour of more independent films, my MIFF experience in 2024 went from the battleground of Gaza to the quiet family dramas in modern Seoul, with a unifying theme of perseverance and defiance throughout. Much like 2023, the curatorial efforts of the festival directors are its greatest gift, ensuring a high baseline of quality that guarantees a thoughtful and compelling time at the movies no matter your interest set.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) – Raven Jackson
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
A powerful combination of photographic and sonic qualities propels Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt to incredible heights. Becoming larger than the sum of its modest parts, Jackson announced herself immediately as an important American artist to follow moving forward.
Flowing like a seasonal river with its rises and falls, the narrative follows Mack, portrayed seamlessly by Kaylee Nicole Johnson and Charlean McClure, as she journeys through 1960s Mississippi onwards, with all the love and difficulty that comes with staying in her hometown through a challenging time.
Squeezing every fleeting moment of thematic and emotional juice, this essayistic ode to womanhood, home, and the shared experience will wash over you if you let it, feeling reborn in the gleaning sunlight.
All We Imagine as Light (2024) – Payal Kapadia
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
The most soulful film of the festival, documentarian turned fiction filmmaker Payal Kapadia explodes onto the scene with the remarkable All We Imagine as Light. A powerful blend of personal womanhood inside the political in modern Mumbai, Kapadia’s gorgeous and lyrical film centres on three multigenerational nurses navigating a world unable and unwilling to accommodate their lives.
Kapadia, with a refined hand through documentary work, flourishes in small moments. Whether it’s the embrace of a rice cooker given by a distant-slash-estranged husband working in Germany, or the small gesture of helping an older colleague move her things back to her old home after being wrongfully evicted, All We Imagine as Light embraces the aching emotionality of the quotidian, knowing these fleeting moments create a mosaic that reflects the light of human experience.
Brief History of a Family (2024) – Jianjie Lin
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
The one-child policy of China casts a long shadow across Brief History of a Family, a taut and beguiling debut feature from Jianjie Lin. After an incident at school sparks an unlikely connection, the shy and reserved teen Shuo (Sun Xilun) begins to spend more and more time at his more confident classmate Wei’s (Lin Muran) upper-middle-class house.
Lin’s debut is atmospheric and tense and while its decision to bunt with its bases loaded, the film still demonstrates a skill set to operate in the genre world of modern thriller, a drought-stricken place with fans desperate for new, exciting voices. Went long on the film here.
Didi (2024)- Sean Wang
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
In what is sure to be the beginning of a wave in late 00s coming-of-age stories that will have those in their late 20s questioning all life experiences as being unique, Sean Wang’s terrific and humbling Didi shows you screwing up is an integral part of growing up.
Telling the story of a Californian skater and potential filmmaker Chris (Izaac Wang), on summer break (a bizarre theme across several MIFF releases) as he navigates girls, friends, and his family. With integral sequences playing out over AIM and MySpace (finally, a film captures the adolescent psychological torture device of the top friends section on film) that had the audience in raptures, Wang is an exciting new filmmaker that can deftly translate the modern malaise of youth into compelling cinematic storytelling.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024) – Jane Schoenbrun
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
A truly expansive cinematic experience that will define the year in movies, Jane Schoenbrun’s miraculous and tangly I Saw the TV Glow, is the best film I saw at MIFF and will no doubt contend with my film of the year. A film that explodes ideas of what a teenage coming-of-age story can be as it explores the push and pull between stagnation and liberation, ending on a unique note that seemingly has a different taste depending on the individual audience member’s life experience. That is no small feat.
I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen, a suburban teen protracted by Justice Smith in an outrageously good performance of youthful dysphoria and I will not hear arguments otherwise. Stuck in a liminal space outside of life, Owen finds solace in a fictional 90s too-adult-but-still-for-kids show The Pink Opaque, unlocked by fellow disenchanted teen Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who invited him into the world via burned VHS recordings of the show. The film is too dense to capture in a couple sentences, and the weight of Schoenbrun’s storytelling is in its ability to envelop a whole audience in the liminal world Owen feels locked within. Where most trans texts follow an embrace of transitioning, Schoenbrun’s film instead lingers and interrogates the suffocating space of dysphoria surrounding that place, a more evocative and unique lens to capture on film.
That Schoenbrun can bring a crowd down the psychological rabbit hole of dysphoria through a trans lens is a testament to their remarkable filmmaking powers. This is not just a film for ‘Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is an 18-hour film’ Film Twitter folks (I am sometimes in the crowd), but for anyone who has felt lost in the liminal space that can be found along the path of life.
Janet Planet (2023) – Annie Baker
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The smell of Autumn on a warm breeze as you stare, half bored and half awake at the misshapen clouds above, playwright Annie Baker’s filmmaking debut Janet Planet is the emergence of a major new voice in cinema, with all the confidence and assurance of an established artist.
Capturing a fascinating and enthralling pair in the owlish 11-year-old Lacy (a revelatory Zoe Ziegler) and her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) over a summer break, Baker’s precise use of silence and seasonal boredom is a beautiful ode to human connection, with the push and pull that can only come from someone you’ve known your whole life.
La Cocina (2024) – Alfonso Ruizpalacios
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
A frenetic, seething diorama of modern America through the lens of a Times Square super diner kitchen, Alfonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina blends the modern and the old-fashioned in this long but never tiring hospitality nightmare. Starring Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones, La Cocina wears its metaphors of American white supremacy and immigration inside the kitchen proudly, with Ruizpalacios’s impressive filmmaking style and farcical tendencies buoying these weighty ideas.
My Sunshine (2024) – Hiroshi Okuyama
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Like the enchanting mist of a crisp winter morning, Hiroshi Okuyama’s My Sunshine captures a personal tale of adolescent passion and direction with a nourishing blend of nostalgia and honesty.
My Sunshine has the trappings of a film about childhood love and coming of age, but shines through as a potent story about the importance of teachers and the connection that is made through a shared passion. While the uplifting story of Takuya’s (Keitatsu Koshiyama) journey with figure skating and growing into himself is universal and soul-nourishing, the journey of Arakawa (Sôsuke Ikematsu) rediscovering his love through his pupil’s childhood enthusiasm shows the connection with a mentor and mentee shines both ways.
No Other Land (2024) – Basel Adra, Hamden Ballal, and Yuval Abraham
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The only documentary I caught at the festival, No Other Land is a breathtaking on-the-ground experience in Gaza, with filmmaking collective Basel Adra, Hamden Ballal, and Yuval Abraham giving us a visceral document of the horrible situation in the Palestinian West Bank. Capturing Adra and his family’s village in Masafer Yatta in real-time slowly erodes any feeling of optimism in the region will hollow you out and leave you seething in rage.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) – Rungano Nyoni
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Despite our IMAX screening needing to be restarted 30 minutes in due to a lack of subtitles, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl had cast a cinematic spell that proved impossible to break. A compelling and seething portrait of the friction between community repression and warmth in modern-day Zambia, Guinea Fowl is a difficult but necessary watch with its honest telling of the ways sexual violence permeates global communities in incalculable ways.
Anchored by a truly star-making performance by Susan Chardy as the modern Shula returning home to her community in Zambia only to come across the bizarrely dead body of Uncle Fred in the middle of the street, Nyoni’s strong filmmaking chops are in full force, beautifully balancing evocative and compelling characters in an awful situation. One of the leading new voices to watch coming out of MIFF.
Pepe (2024) – Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
The story of Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippo told through poetic voiceover by the impossibly gorgeous baritone of Jhon Narváez, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’s Pepe has one of the loglines of the year but is a film that dives compelling depths in this potential silly tale of animal personhood.
An infinitely charming and divisive story of losing a home never seen, Pepe bites off more than it can chew but has more meat on its bones than the majority of films you’ll see this year. With some truly mind-blowing filmmaking inside its modest frame, Pepe will sneak up on you and leave you surprisingly emotional about these hippos.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig: (2024) – Mohammad Rasoulof
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
An enthralling family drama that devolves into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig deservedly earned second place at Cannes and easily finds itself in the conversation for film of the year.
Grounding itself in the reality of student protests in Iran, potently displayed through real phone footage, Rasoulof’s film about how politics and repression are bound to its people is at times overwhelming, but never melodramatic. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is one of the most impressive screenplays of the decade due to its difficulty and focused expression, moving slowly but confidently to its unexpected climax.
Through an emotionally overwhelming use of real social media videos of Iranian political protests and violence, Razoulof risked his life making this remarkable film that so of the moment it’s hard to believe. Brilliantly blending metaphors of family dynamics as stand-ins for the regime, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a remarkable, must-see film that may be the most crucial piece of cinema to emerge from 2024.
Sing Sing (2024) – Greg Kwedar
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The most emotionally overwhelming film of the festival, we are sure to be hearing a lot about Greg Kwedar and his incredible prison rehabilitation drama Sing Sing come awards season at year’s end.
Exploring the real theatre-based prison rehabilitation program at Sing Sing Maximum Security prison (RTA), with an open heart and boundless compassion, Kwedar and his collaborators have given audiences one of the year’s best and most open-hearted portrayals of the American prison system that will break your heart and put it back together.
Perfectly blending reality and fiction, with an awards-worthy pair of performances by Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin (an alum of the program), Sing Sing avoids any missteps into gratuity and gawking through an endless stream of humanity and humble decisions that is inspiring. A true miracle of a film.
The Shrouds (2024) – David Cronenberg
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
A beguiling and disarmingly funny inward look at grief by a living legend, 81-year-old David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is a film only he could make. While not on the level of Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg’s outward display of grief for his late wife Carolyn Ziefman in 2017 here is poignant and more emotional than you’d expect.
With a deliberate caricature of the auteur in the lead with a white-haired and sunglasses Vincent Cassel as a cemetery-owning video content producer with a physical obsession with the deceased, The Shrouds bizarre humour reminds one of the late Argento, but with a framework and personality that only the Canadian legend can achieve. While feeling more like a sketch than a fully realised project, in the long arc of Cronenberg’s work, this still feels like a critical late tentpole.
Sweet Dreams (2024) – Ena Sendijarevic
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
A charmingly eccentric but slight look at the doomed Dutch colonialism of Indonesia, Ena Sendijarevic’s Sweet Dreams lives in the shadow of Yorgos Lanthimos and other Euro eccentric filmmakers, but still effectively skewers a worthy target.
As the death of a Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) plunges the land into financial turmoil, the arrival of a daffy married couple Josefien (Lisa Zweerman and Cornelis (Florian Myjer) threatens to sell off the depreciating land, much to the behest of Jan’s widow Agathe (the scene-stealing Reneé Soutendijk).
The demise of a certain vein of European colonialism shot evocatively through natural lighting with Barry Lyndon (1975) as a touchstone, Sweet Dreams is a minor work compared to the rest of this list of MIFF films but is an entertaining enough ride to enjoy.
Universal Language (2024) – Matthew Rankin
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
A poignant picaresque of Winnipeg through the language of 80s Iranian cinema, Matthew Rankin’s evocative film Universal Language charmed its way into the MIFF grand prize, the Bright Horizons award, and deservedly so.
A farcical tour through a Farsi-speaking imagined world of modern-yet-timeless Winnipeg, Rankin’s creative world-building leaves evocative nuggets around every corner, including one of the best locations in cinema this year with an Iranian-styled Tim Hortons.
One of the most rewarding and enchanting experiences in a wonderful suite of films, Rankin’s Universal Language is an idiosyncratic depiction of one’s home and cinematic loves combined, morphing into a must-see.
A charming, off-kilter adventure story that stakes a claim as a story for all ages, Ant Timpson’s Bookworm (2024) offers a lot to an audience crying out for live-action family films made with care and respect. With a wry Kiwi humour that buoys the more rote storytelling choices to get to its uplifting finale, the film has the charm and enough evocative imagery to enthral both kids and parents.
After a tragic electrical accident leaves her mother Dotty (Nikki Si’ulepa) in a coma, 11-year-old Mildred’s (a spark plug Nell Fisher) world gets turned upside down as her estranged father, the washed-up illusionist Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood) returns from America to New Zealand to take care of her, whether she likes it or not. Eager to please a child he has avoided his whole life, Strawn agrees to go camping with Mildred, who is driven to dive into the forest to track down the fabled Canterbury Panther, a real New Zealand urban legend. Mildred is keen to capture proof of the fabled panther, which has a reward of $50,000 on its head, money we learn she and Dotty are desperate for.
The opening sequence, shot in a boxed aspect ratio, reflects the overprotectiveness Dotty had on Mildred, a cage she was desperate to prove herself larger than. As the unlikely pair emerge from the car into the glorious New Zealand landscape, the film expands into widescreen, a simple but effective nod towards the adventure we are about to embark on.
Mildred is not like other kids, a voracious book reader who is keen to show how mature and knowledgeable she is on all matters. Whereas Strawn is a down on his luck but an overconfident magician who only knows as much as he needs to to make a living in Vegas. The duo could not be more mismatched, creating friction that these two equally charming performers wield to delightful effect from beginning to end.
Elijah Wood and Nell Fisher in Bookworm.
The charm of seeing Elijah Wood back in the New Zealand mountains is never lost on this adventure story, and while Strawn is no Frodo, Fishers’ Mildred has all the heartful energy and tenacity of the legendary Hobbit. While the storytelling lacks cohesion, particularly in the back end that offers little thread between points, Timpson’s inventive and creative filmmaking carries us through the New Zealand countryside. While the gorgeous scenery certainly has no bad side for the camera, Timpson and cinematographer Daniel Katz’s charming use of camera setups gives us a fresh perspective on the space that easily could’ve fallen into being a tourism ad.
Surprisingly, the film arrives at the panther footage capturing sequence like it took a wrong turn. While the scene is charming and engaging, it leaves little room to continue on from, a decision it never recovers from, sputtering to invent a new take to continue on the story, with every plot exploration afterwards becoming increasingly bizarre. The off-kilter nature of the story and characters does assist the unbalancing impact of seemingly finishing our quest so early, but the film never arrives back on solid ground.
Ultimately, Timpson’s exploration into the dense, murky marshes of family entertainment is a unique trajectory for an indie filmmaker from our neck of the woods and should be celebrated. While not every piece falls into place, the chemistry between Fisher and Wood, on top of an enchanting visual palette, means Bookworm is creatively leagues ahead in a genre crying out for original voices.
Lean, grimy, and seemingly unkillable, Fede Álvarez’s instalment in the enduring Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus (2024) is for the fans crying out for the return of true horror in a world that has moved towards epic myth-making with the return of creator Ridley Scott in recent years. Álvarez focuses on a smaller story, wedged aggressively between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) to cater to the ever-hungry IP crowd, over the wider original stories of Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) that many audiences dismissed despite its impressive scale and profound ideas on the totality of the human experiment, for better and for worse.
Our entry point into the instalment is Rain (emerging star Cailey Spaeny) and her out-of-date android helper, lovingly referred to as her brother Andy (Industry’s David Jonsson). Rain is an overworked colony worker desperate to get off-world and see the sun again, something impossible to do in their small hellhole of corporate dystopia. When some old acquaintances show up telling Rain and Andy of a plan to take over an eerily decommissioned ship out in space, one with enough fuel to get to a planet with more opportunity and the chance to be in the sun’s rays again, they jump at it. Chaos ensues, as is always the case with those eerily decommissioned ships floating in space, isn’t it?
Cailey Spaeny and David Jonsson are brought in to reinforce the sparse dramatic moments of a film almost solely focused on its sci-fi horror architecture. In Álvarez, the franchise has looked to a true horror filmmaker to re-establish its roots as a lean, tin-box-floating-in-space creature horror, and to that extent, the film easily clears the bar. However, the film’s limited scope does mean its final swing of a final act (which will not be spoiled here) does not land with the energy and propulsion of earlier, more effective horror set pieces.
Cailey Spaeny in Alien: Romulus.
Cinematographer Galo Olivares is driven to capture the natural eeriness of vacant space stations, with its distressing orange and red warning lights a stark contrast to the stale greys seemingly close to being subsumed by the encroaching blackness. Through its committed cinematography and sound design, Alien Romulus feels at times like a more direct sequel to Don’t Breathe (2016) — Fede Álvarez’s breakout hit — than its actual sequel. While some key dramatic moments are undercut by a simple inability to see in crucial corners of the frame, the atmosphere created by these choices is the impressive engine that powers the entire ship.
The Alien franchise is maybe the best for creatives to work within as it operates as a sandbox for compelling filmmakers to experiment with the genre, a place where Álvarez thrives. The Alien films have excelled in its close quarters suspense, but styled in unique ways that have made each instalment feel fresh and alive. With Álvarez, Romulus returns to a more strictly low-fi haunted house in space space-style horror film, weaponising the claustrophobia that made the original film an instant classic.
However, by tying itself in many ways to Alien, Romulus falls between a rock and a hard place separating itself as its own work. While the script is lean and efficient in getting to the action, we are given sparing amounts of meat on the bone which becomes an issue for many horror films. Spaeny and Jonsson are terrific young actors who can do a lot with a little, but here even their most triumphant moments come through direct Ripley echoes, leaving no room to stand on their own.
Cailey Spaeny in Alien Romulus.
Fans of the deep lore of the long-spanning franchise will enjoy brief moments of service to the wider canon while never cratering its own narrative momentum, an issue more recent franchise stories have self-inflicted on their work. For fans of Roman history and mythology, the name Romulus can be used as its own entry point into the wider Alien mythos, as Prometheus (2012) did before it.
In a franchise that usually probes the depth of space to discover compelling ideas of humanity and our place within the wider universe, writing partners Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues instead delve into compelling depths of the inherent amorality of the mega-corporations that dictate the movements of humanity, and how AI is deeply entrenched in the amorality. These ideas are present throughout each Alien film, but with Romulus, they are highlighted and focused on as its primary directive. While not as emotionally enriching as the primal stories of motherhood and survival that were the heart of the Ripley story, Rain and Andy’s story is more than enough to compel us through this sci-fi horror, even if it won’t be enough to stand apart in the franchise.
Where the film attempts to stand apart, however, is in its wild swing of a final act, where Álvarez and Sayagues recall the much-maligned Alien Resurrection (1997) that will have audiences cheering and laughing in equal measure. Where the final of the strange 90s entry in the franchise leant of decades of emotional world-building of the Ripley character to a beguiling climatic choice, Romulus goes for a similar event but remains in the more core horror genre ideals that tie it closer to the original film. Álvarez’s horror roots were perfectly suited for this continuation of the original Alien, with its palpable tension rattling around a floating tin box in the vast emptiness of space.
The one-child policy of China casts a long shadow across Brief History of a Family (2024), a taut and beguiling debut feature from Jianjie Lin. After an incident at school sparks an unlikely connection, the shy and reserved teen Shuo (Sun Xilun) begins to spend more and more time at his more confident classmate Wei’s (Lin Muran) upper-middle-class house.
The first time Shuo enters Wei’s family home, he is immediately drawn to the large tree garden blooming out of the back window, his envy and wonder emanating off the well contained screen. In a mannered film like Brief History of a Family, where emotions and intentions are tightly contained, this moment shines brightly, working as a core grounding point the rest of the film is built upon.
As Shuo encroaches further and further into Wei’s family, the suspense and sinister undertones simmer at a low frequency, creating a palpable atmosphere that propels the story. The young boy quickly becomes the flower of affection for both of Wei’s parents, who are not given names in the film but are played wonderfully by Guo Keyu and Zu Feng. Their care and desire to help this teenager plays against the thriller style that Lin is seeping into every moment of the story, creating a wonderful contrast that makes for great tension.
Sun Xilun as Shuo in Brief History of a Family.
Lin’s camera and blocking choices are meticulously observed, wielded with a stern combination of remove and suspense that all the best modern thrillers embrace. However, when a filmmaker decides to withhold so much, an audience will begin to intensely scrutinise every morsel of information within a frame. The best thrillers can withstand this level of keen audience awareness, but most often the absence is felt.
With Shuo as the black hole at the centre of the frame, the film is barely able to support its own weight. The cinematography by Jiahao Zhang is deliberate and tense, accompanied appropriately by an abstract score by Toke Brorson Odin, which heightens the strong opening half of the film. However, all too often with indie thrillers that operate mostly on mood, style, and oppressive visual metaphors, the climax and resolution rarely reward the experience. The emotionality that Lin plays towards the conclusion of the film feels tepid and unrewarding, given the propulsive momentum and eerie suspense that takes up the majority of screen time. This is a delicate tightrope Lin is trying to execute in a debut feature, one that I’m sure will be more artfully handled in future projects.
That being said, Brief History of a Family’s conclusion does savvily leave you with more compelling ideas about the cost of oppressive government mandates like the one-child policy, and the impact it has on a family, from both the parents and the child. With a combination of strong performances and meticulous attention to suspenseful detail, Jianjie Lin’s debut feature will have you on the edge of your seat and questioning the next friend your kid brings home.
Beginning with a burn-chilling opening sequence that operates on a high level of performance, composition, and editing in only a few short minutes, Oz Perkins’ Longlegs (2024) creates an all-encompassing feeling of dread and paranoia from which there is no escape. With a claustrophobic boxed aspect ratio wielded with true maliciousness, the opening frames are the shocking jolt of electric current that flows through the rest of the film, which operates in a thrilling liminal space that will keep you destabilised.
In blending serial killer procedurals with the existential dread of an unexplainable nightmare, Perkins’ internal genre mashup will surely frustrate and bewilder those on both sides of the horror spectrum. With its uncompromising vision and style, Longlegs opens up into a compelling exploration of familial abuse that will catch up to you in the days and weeks after in ways all too rare in modern horror. As a young FBI upstart, agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), put on the case of a serial killer who goes by (Nicolas Cage, weaponised to incredible effect), an unidentifiable killer of young families who has operated for decades. With her new partner Carter (the terrific and unheralded Blair Underwood), Lee must uncover and decrypt a series of seemingly occult clues, some seemingly linked to her life, to catch Longlegs before he targets another family.
For the crime procedural lovers, all the serial killer staple moments are here: suspenseful walks through suburbia, a tense microfiche scene in a library, and deep dives into the cult and religiosity, Longlegs has everything you could want from a modern-day homage to Silence of the Lambs (1991) inside the overused ‘elevated horror’ branding that infers hyper-considered compositions and atmosphere over ideas.
Maika Monroe in Longlegs.
This has been Perkins’ issue in the past, with the son of legend Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson putting image over story and script in his previous work, Gretel and Hansel (2020) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), but has broken through with easily his best script in Longlegs. The film is wider ranging and more compelling than recent entries in this new wave of American horror. Films that want to explore deep rooted causes of horror like child abuse and extreme religiosity but have no appetite to get into the true heart of this evil, something Perkins is keenly focused on conveying honestly and potently.
On the dread-inducing serial killer axis, Longlegs finds itself tightly drawn to David Fincher’s Seven (1995), with its internal focus on our central characters’ world and the encroaching evil building up around them. While his presence, and particularly his face is often obscured by the frame, Longlegs lingers in the psyche of its characters and the audience. Played with his customary intensity and ferociousness, Cage excels in limited time like Darth Vader’s limited but outsized presence in Star Wars (1977).
Lee is a fascinating character, played brilliantly — although is sure to be divisive, similar to how the performance of Justice Smith in I Saw the TV Glow (2024) has been judged — by modern horror stalwart Maika Monroe, who has as much anxiety meeting her partner’s daughter as encountering a horrific murder scene. The world weighs heavy on her mind, and Monroe gives her a level of dissociative tendencies that are incredibly difficult to portray on screen and in lesser hands would’ve derailed the film. This makes Longlegs‘ true beguiling mystery, and the beauty of the script comes from its ability to strip away Longlegs himself, leaving us compelled by the mystery of her story, the true engine of the film.
Longlegs as a film lingers in the corners of frames with the patient tension of a spider, as Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi revel in having an audience’s eyes dart from every inch of their considered and restrained frame that stretches out into eternity. Even in tense, quick-motion sequences, we cannot help but peer over the shoulder of Lee (which takes up two-thirds of the frame), expecting the worst in every moment.
Maika Monroe in Longlegs.
Weaponising its extreme wide lens to a chilling effect, the film sucks Lee into the frame, increasing the opportunities for the menace and dread to creep in and linger. In modern horror, a tight perspective is often given to our protagonist, heightening the tension by playing with the fantasies of the audience of what lurks beyond the frame. In Longlegs, by extending the frame outwards, in both tense scenes and in standard dialogue moments, we are instead led to explore our fears head on, even as the film plays out in a more elegiac and liminal way.
With a work of mounting dread, the inevitable climax is unique but crucial to the final impact that can be felt days and weeks later. The greatest work of insidious evil and its unexplainable nature is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure (1997), which operates in plain sight but questions what is capable within the banality of human life. With Longlegs, Perkins decides instead to spend the final moments explaining the hows and whys of the story, turning all the lights in a house we’ve been too scared to walk around at night, believing that the true lasting impact will be felt after these capital R revelations, not prior.
The closing 10 minutes are overwhelming, and the tensest you’ll feel in a theatre all year, but one can’t help but feel a more ambiguous ending with a tight grip of evil that propelled the entire experience would’ve lingered longer in the memory of its audience. This decision to enlighten that which was kept in the dark, while removing a juicy level of elusion to reward feverish rewatches, does allow the true meaning of the film in the case of Lee’s familial story and how Longlegs operates as an outsized metaphor within it. The fact this sharp decision can easily be argued on either side shows how evocative a story Perkins has been able to tell.
What we are left with is a deeply fascinating work of modern horror from an emerging artist, one that can work both inside and outside the trappings of where the genre finds itself in the 2020s. Flanked by a great ensemble of Monroe, Cage, Alicia Witt, and Underwood, with quality craftspeople across the production, Longlegs is a nightmare born into reality, with a level of tension that is overwhelming, adding to the top of what is shaping to be an excellent year in horror.
Rating Frames 