Top 10 - 2024

 

There's no two ways about it: as a year, on the global scale, 2024 was a real annus horribilis. It was also an exceedingly strange film year, due at least in part to the lingering effects of the 2023 writers' strike. I saw plenty of movies I liked, but far fewer than normal that I really loved, and for the second year in a row, I had deep ambivalences about many of the most critically lauded titles, including the Palme d'Or and Oscar Best Picture recipient Anora. As a result, my list arguably looks more idiosyncratic than ever, with a flavorful array of (largely underrated) American and international independents flanking one bonafide Hollywood blockbuster. 

Find my top ten films of 2024 after the jump!

Misericordia

MISERICORDIA   ***

Alain Guiraudie

2024

IDEA:  Returning to his provincial hometown upon the death of his mentor, a man awakens dormant lust and yearning among the townsfolk.

BLURB:  A small-town thriller in a commensurately minor key, Misericordia mostly exchanges lurid suspense and sensationalism for a series of tender negotiations of desire. Unlike Guiraudie’s international breakthrough, Stranger by the Lake, the film’s erotics take place primarily on the textual level, in the form of crisscrossing longings that are as innocent as they are potentially transgressive. Here, the handful of characters discreetly and openly yearn for each other in a myriad of configurations bound up in sexual lust, envy, and filial affection. At the center of this web is Félix Kysyl’s deceptively angel-faced Jérémie, whose protean, varyingly carnal relationships with his dead mentor, the mentor’s widowed wife and son, a local farmer, and a Catholic priest reflect an undiscriminating array of desiring positions. Ironically, the film is less subversive for how these relationships poke through traditional social boundaries than for how nonchalantly they’re treated within the story. Even in the wake of a murder - something that would typically and destructively drag the community’s dirty laundry into the light - no character, not even the gendarme on his tail, bats an eyelash at Jérémie sleeping with the priest! Framed by misty autumn woods, where a buried body fertilizes a generous crop of phallic morels, Misericordia presents a sardonic pastoral in which morality, religion, and even death itself are putty in the hands of eros.