10 Best Films 2024: Joseph Wade
5. Anora
The 2024 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora is a rollercoaster ride that barely lets up for its entire 149-minute runtime – it’s like watching a new version of Uncut Gems that seeks to uncover an arguably deeper well of meaning.
Mikey Madison is unmissable as the quick-tongued big mouth erotic dancer Ani who becomes the subject of affection for a son of a Russian billionaire (Mark Eidelstein) and is whisked into a new life of luxury, complete with sable fur coat. When the brand new couple take things too far, it is up to a gang of the billionaire’s favourite henchmen (led by regular Sean Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian) to resolve the issue. Arguments and fights take place in mansions, penthouses, cars and cafes, as the circumstances just keep getting weirder and wilder.
What is most remarkable about Anora is how Baker is able to… bake… so many interesting contemplations into such a thrill ride of a story. Ani is, of course, a woman, and one sought primarily for her body (in her place of work), which brings about issues of gender and the ways in which objectification results in the oppression of women at the bottom of the financial ladder. But it is this financial ladder that becomes the central ingredient to Baker’s… baking… as his work constantly puts the characters we follow at odds with the billionaires present in the story but largely left off screen. The billionaires rule the world compared to everyone in the film, and this sad and depressing reality of oppression melds itself to the oppression Ani feels as a woman used for her body, ensuring a powerful and emotive journey as well as an entertaining and ultra modern one.
4. Alien: Romulus
Fede Álvarez breathed new life into the stuttering Alien franchise when he made Alien: Romulus, a new space horror that feels every bit as much of a Star Wars film in its opening moments as anything put to screen in recent years, and is all the Alien horror you’d expect and then some.
Cailee Spaeny, in the final of her trio of exceptional leading turns, is Rain Carradine, a human enslaved to work under the banner of the Weyland-Yutani corporation on a distant planet. When Archie Renaux’s Tyler offers Rain and her defective robot Andy (David Jonsson) a way to escape the planet via a passing space ship, she takes it, not knowing what alien abominations await in the deep, dark silence of space.
Romulus hits a lot of legacy sequel checkpoints, including some nonsensical revisitations of famous lines that come with nods and winks about as large as the Nostromo spaceship, but the scares genuinely do scare, the final act really does feel like a level up in terms of threat, and the whole story is tied to an allegory for disability acceptance that deserves to be celebrated.
Sometimes, the big and brash movies are meaningful too. And when the “big” and the “brash” is this damn good, then the movie becomes the type of rewatchable classic that brings groups of friends back to it time and time again.
Recommended for you: Alien: Romulus and How We Don’t Want Our Disadvantaged Loved Ones to Be Fixed
3. The Holdovers
Alexander Payne’s long-running streak of successful character-first feature films – the kind of American independents that offer elements of dark comedy through the lens of ultra-cinematic film stock – continued with his instant Christmas classic, The Holdovers.
Paul Giamatti plays the disgruntled private school teacher Paul Hunham, who is forced to stay at school over the Christmas holidays to take care of Dominic Sessa’s ungrateful and challenging teenager Angus Tully. Along with Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph as kitchen staff member Mary Lamb, the unlikely heroes of this less-than-typical story learn to appreciate each other and care for each other, reminding each of us of the true spirit of Christmas: love.
The dialogue in this memorable modern fable is amongst the best you’ll find in any film released in the 2020s so far, and the performances from Randolph, the always overlooked Giamatti, and particularly the debuting Dominic Sessa, wow and astonish in how real they feel, and how subtly they put big emotional beats across. Such an actor’s movie, complete with huge career-defining arcs and memorable scenes, wouldn’t usually be something you’d print out stills from and pin to your wall, but The Holdovers has the type of cold but homely visual tapestry that breathes the often unseen warmth of the winter season into your lungs.
