10 Best Films 2024: Sam Sewell-Peterson
2. The Teachers’ Lounge
We’ve seen just about every genre reconfigured in a school setting over the years, but The Teachers’ Lounge is one of the first twisty-turny mysteries set in an education setting.
An accusation of theft in a German secondary school causes reprisals and serious professional implications for Miss Nowak (Leonie Benesch) who attempts to get to the bottom of the matter, clashing with her colleagues, pupils and parents in the process.
Who’d have thought that the most tense, suspenseful film of the year would be set in and around a staff room?
Ilker Çatak’s film achieves a lot with what is very little on paper. A single location, a small cast of characters, naturalistic acting and dialogue, realistically petty and harmful human behaviour. Between Leonie Benesch’s raw and increasingly exasperated central performance and the way you’re kept guessing right up until the final moments, this becomes an unexpectedly compelling small-scale thriller that will put you off teacher training for life.
1. Poor Things
Between the awards success of this and the memorable bewilderment of anthology film Kinds of Kindness, weird and wonderful arthouse favourite Yorgos Lanthimos had one hell of a 2024, and shows no sign of slowing down with his fourth collaboration with Emma Stone already in the can.
Artificially resurrected, child-minded Bella (Emma Stone) broadens her horizons and gradually emancipates and sexually liberates herself on a trip around the world.
Stone deservedly received acclaim for her committed, layered and constantly evolving performance, and she was surrounded by such colourful supporting players as Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom inhabited Lanthimos’ exaggerated, highly theatrical pseudo-Victorian world that nonetheless said a troubling amount that is still true today about repression and oppression of anyone who doesn’t conform. This is fearless, filthy and funny, and manages to be at once a gorgeously-appointed fantasy period piece with surreal Gothic horror turns, and probably the most mainstream and enjoyable film Lanthimos has made to date. You still wouldn’t want to watch it with your parents in the room though.
Recommended for you: 10 Best Films 2023: Sam Sewell-Peterson
Cinema as an art form is alive and kicking as we head into 2025, and it still has the power to surprise and to affect change in the right circumstances. Because of the kind of content that garners the most views and clicks, it has become nigh-on impossible to curate a well-informed feed of useful and insightful film criticism, and so only the largest outlets are guaranteed to survive without debasing themselves. It therefore falls to us, committed cinephiles, to keep our passion for film alive. Talk to people about your favourite movies, recommend the under-seen, curate a watchlist, broaden your horizons and influence others to do the same. Wherever the discussion happens, as long as we are watching and learning from films past and present, cinema lives.
