Illustrations by Stephanie Lane Gage.
The results of our seventeenth annual writers poll are in! Every year, we ask our contributors to program a fantasy double feature, placing one new release and one older film back to back, coaxing out subtle resonances or following a thread—of theme, genre, performance—through the years.
We invite you to test out some of these inspired combinations for yourself over the holidays. (And see if you can spot the pairing that three of our contributors recommended, independently of each other.) If journalism is the first draft of history, maybe this feature can be the first draft of film culture to come. Here’s to another year of great cinema.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) + Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)
From the nowhere-shore of the mind to the nowhere-horizon of the future, a boat casts off, possessed of a clarity of purpose that will be reserved from our view. Shaking off the accumulated dust of two thousand years of human culture, one of these films looks much better than the other.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) + Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934)
Two titans of narrative cinema self-fund their dream projects: both reckonings with the fantasy of American utopia, both box-office bellyflops, both sagas of charismatic figureheads—Men of the People—buckling beneath their ego and vice. Dreams of a collective future, burdens of individualist desire: Cesar Catilina, John Sims, Francis Ford Coppola, King Vidor.
Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, 2024) + The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010)
In her short Slow Shift, Kaul films the rocks of Hampi, India—both the ruins of the ancient capital of Vijayanagara and the boulder-strewn hills that surround it. The traces of a long-lost history, observed in Kaul's long takes and by a population of chattering monkeys, emphasize nonhuman time scales: the geological, the evolutionary, the cinematic. Is the film's vision prehuman or posthuman? Either way, the nine-minute Slow Shift is the opposite of the 24-hour The Clock, back at the Museum of Modern Art this winter, a supercut bound absolutely to the rhythms of industrial modernity.
Carroll Gardens (Ernie Gehr, 2024) + Time Being (Andrew Noren, 2001)
Definitive proof that old dogs can learn new tricks.
La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2024) + Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Flying and Driving: My pairing has less to do with similarities between two films (both are stone-cold masterpieces) and more to do with movie thoughts while in motion. My third viewing of Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera was on an airplane. I didn’t want to use the airline headphones and forgot the cord for mine, so I watched with no sound. It was observing the adroit framing and movement isolated from plot and performances that confirmed to me it’s an all-time classic. One of the best films this year, decade, century.
The night after seeing Heat introduced by Michael Mann—my first time watching it since moving to LA—I found myself driving an unusual route and ended up exactly where the final shootout was filmed, planes flying close overhead, Waingro’s Hilton hideout in sight. Mann’s film is one of the best LA films precisely for its emphasis on driving, both traffic on freeways and alternate routes. Heat helped me better see my own surroundings.
Castration Movie (Louise Weard, 2024) + The Plug Lady (Anthony Saladino, 2004)
If it were possible to force every single trans person to watch both of these life-changing movies, I would. Saladino's work is an abject monstrosity; arguably one of the most misguided “trans films” to ever be made, and yet one I couldn’t look away from. You may very well spend weeks—nay, months—leaving your friends voicemails saying “This is the pluuuuuuuuuuug lady.” On the flip side: Louise Weard's Castration Movie is four and a half hours of what I believe trans cinema should look like. Genuinely lived-in from top to bottom, from cis to trans, it's a true “slice of life” (not unlike Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada). Perhaps the characters will be off-putting, but they are painfully (and hilariously) real, and it's impossible not to feel at home around people joking about transmaxxing and how it's ableism to expect someone to read Dune. Also, only one of these two movies features a castration. Can you guess which one?
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) + Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
A shared fascination with bathrooms and their functions.
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024) + Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)
Two otherwise minor directors, two laughably showy works of beautiful artifice, two ecstatically sad treatises on the sublimation of the self in the name of desire.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) + The Palace (Roman Polanski, 2023)
New Hollywood heaven and hell. Coppola tries to save humanity by harkening back to the classics and our sense of democratic purpose; Polanski pisses all over the entire Western world and shits the bed one last time. Two anti-masterpieces that straddle the line between incoherent and overly simplistic. The two movies that had me most questioning my own sanity and taste this year. At first glance, they both seem laughably bad from a technical standpoint, yet their staying power is immense.
Coppola believes in a future where scientific progress and technocratic elites are capable of redeeming humanity. His vision of utopia looks like a cross between an Apple store, an erector set, and the plot of a 75-year-old dime-store paperback. Polanski depicts a decadent pre-Y2K past populated by gross elites farcically killing and fucking each other into the dawning of the new millennium. He ends the movie on a vulgar non sequitur, a throwaway bestiality joke that’s impressive far more for its bad taste than comedic value. The fact that it’s delivered by a man as repulsive as those he’s lampooning only increases the bad vibes and sleazoid factor. It was hard to find two other films that felt as startlingly contemporary this year, in no large part because of their many inanities and provocations. Yet in a year that felt dominated by depression, repulsion, and outrage you can guess which one felt more honest.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, 2024) + Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)
Surreal, goofy swan songs (of the modern world and the Monkees) packed with stars utilizing and fighting tech and their pasts, traipsing toward each one’s only possible ending. Delightsome.
Pollinator (Tourmaline, 2024) + The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2019)
Both films are impressionistic reads of history, illness, and love—though not always in the way one might expect. Ghosts hang heavy over gardens, fiction and archive become one. Both films are about historical Black figures and the way they creep into the present. Tourmaline invokes Marsha P. Johnson in a beautiful, kaleidoscopic short film that premiered at this year’s Whitney Biennial, perhaps one of the best things on view at the time. Gary’s film originated a few years earlier, though it also screened at the Museum of Modern Art this past spring. It's a staggering testament to Gary’s strength as a filmmaker—combining the gardens of Monet and Nina Simone with interviews with Black women on the street in Harlem about whether or not they feel safe. Who is allowed the fantasy of security? Of hope? Glitchy experimentation and surreal images of flowers overtake both films; by the end, one wakes from a dream. A warning, a talisman, a hypnotic spell.
Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) + The Black Marble (Harold Becker, 1980)
Two touching films about all the beauty and tenderness Russians have brought to America in the doomed quest to humanize it.
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) + Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
—Jean Genet, Funeral Rites
“How dark do you want to go?”
“Anton Bruckner,” from Cycle XV of Eniaios (Gregory Markopoulos, 1947–91/2004–ongoing) + Overture (Stan Douglas, 1986)
There are plenty of points of comparison and contrast—both involve cycles; both are built from alternations of light and dark (the photographic imagery in the “Bruckner” reels is sparse even in comparison to the rest of Eniaios, and its passages of clear leader are the longest I’ve seen in the eleven cycles so far, while Douglas appropriates Edison Film Co. footage of trains passing through Rocky Mountain tunnels); one concerns itself with an artist at the dawn of artistic modernism (Bruckner), the other with an artist from the apex of artistic modernism (Proust); one comes from the height of postmodernism, the other, when its decades-long premiere concludes the summer after next, might be taken as the end of cinematic modernism—but it was a line from Douglas that clicked things into place for me: “In a way my intention was to show European culture arriving in North America but not being able to deal with this new situation.” I suppose Eniaios is the grandest, the most gorgeous and deranged monument anyone has managed to build in the name of that “not being able to deal.”
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2024) + Someone’s Watching Me! (John Carpenter, 1978)
John Carpenter’s 1978 made-for-TV thriller (the best old film I saw for the first time this year) would pair nicely with one of my very favorite new films, or at least its central section. In both, a beautiful, gap-toothed blonde (Lauren Hutton in one, Léa Seydoux in the other), newly arrived in Los Angeles, lives alone in a place with too many windows and is stalked by a murderous stranger. The older film channels Hitchcock while the newer channels Henry James, but the similarities make you wonder if Bonello had the Carpenter film in mind.
Sometimes I Think about Dying (Rachel Lambert, 2024) + The Slender Thread (Sydney Pollack, 1965)
It’s unfortunate that Rachel Lambert’s ruminative character study went largely unnoticed this year. As Fran, a lonely, socially awkward office worker whose suicidal ideations are beginning to get the best of her, Daisy Ridley is uniquely aching, especially when the unassuming Robert (Dave Merheje) arrives. Fran and Robert do go on a few cute, low-key dates. But Fran’s insecurities—intensified by the gloomy, remote Oregon surroundings—disrupt her potential happiness. In Sydney Pollack’s San Francisco–set directorial debut, Anne Bancroft is Inga, an unmoored mother in a marriage disrupted by a secret. In a dim motel room Inga ingests a bottle of pills and then calls a crisis helpline manned by an inexperienced student named Alan (Sidney Poitier). Like Lambert’s picture, The Slender Thread is about the overwhelming desire to feel a connection, and the power recognition can bring to those who feel invisible.
The Firing Squad (Timothy A. Chey, 2024) + Shadow: Dead Riot (Derek Wan Man-Kit, 2006)
Twenty years apart, two four-walled, low-budget films shot on garish HD video in abandoned prisons, one by born-again Christians, the other by likely Satanists. What Shadow: Dead Riot lacks in The Firing Squad’s star power (Sorbo, Gooding Jr., Roberts) it makes up for with the late Tony Todd–summoning hordes of undead criminals rising up against their former jailers.
Direct Action (Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, 2024) + Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975)
A double-sided portrait of political struggle in the galvanizing heat of the moment and in its bitter, disillusioned aftermath. Writing this while Romania, my home country, is smack in the middle between the two, in the midst of an election cycle that seems to have set everything on fire (and has prompted the largest anti-fascist protests in the past century!) feels providential.
Cent Mille Milliards (Virgil Vernier, 2024) + Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)
Unexpected familial connections are found between a tween girl and a desensitized man-child idly questioning his life choices in cities so immensely luxurious they consequently become alienating. In lieu of traditional plot structures, Coppola and Vernier both employ colorful flourishes, carefully arranged compositions, and fleeting snapshots to effectively capture existential disaffection with a surprising lightness.
An Odd Turn (Francisco Lezama, 2024) + Mahjong (Edward Yang, 1996)
Two studies of two cities—Taipei, Buenos Aires—almost 30 years apart, but with the same concern: the value of the dollar. Where Edward Yang gives us Hard Rock Cafe, Francisco Lezama skips straight to the currency exchange center. Two invitations to attempt materialist history by way of comic form.
Foragers (Jumana Manna, 2024) + A Letter From Beirut (Jocelyne Saab, 1978)
Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2024) + Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024) + La Maladie de Sachs (Michel Deville, 1999)
Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) + Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
As the credits rolled, I immediately wanted to rewatch Anora. Ani’s gesture of gratitude transformed into despair, and something resembling hope, and I was in tears. I savored the film’s aesthetic shifts between neorealism and Godfather-esque mafia movies. The home-invasion sequence is now part of film history; the search scenes reminded me of another Palme d’Or winner from the US, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction—the car shooting, Winston Wolfe’s cleanup, the diner visit. Time flows so realistically in both films despite the outrageous plot twists and the artificiality of the worlds they depict. These are films to get lost in and enjoy as the world falls into darkness and madness in 2025.
A Traveler's Needs (Hong Sang-soo, 2024) + Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024) + Last Night at the Alamo (Eagle Pennell, 1983)
A gang of middle-aged amateur baseball players meet for one last match before their beloved field will be paved over and replaced with a new middle school. A crew of drifters and inveterate tipplers join forces for a final night of drinking before their favorite Houston dive will be torn down. These snapshots of soon-to-be-shuttered hangouts aren’t (just) tributes to some brick-and-mortar buildings, but to a certain way of being among others and looking at the world. Similarly receptive to the surreal and the unexpected, they show that wonder can exist within the claustrophobic tedium of small-town America—and the epiphany is nothing short of riveting. If either has escaped your radar, be sure to catch them—and while you’re at it, watch Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978), too.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) + Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)
City films can be kinetic, symphonic, elegiac, poetic, epistolary. It’s rarer that they express the unnerving feeling of living in a world under construction. Coppola and Rivette take opposite approaches to the problem: give the city ever more elaborate dimensions or flatten it into a claustrophobic surface. Megalopolis is a work of unbalanced maximalism, bulldozing the senses by building ever larger in its search for a vague, tantalizing urban harmony. Romantic, autocratic Cesar looks down from on high, determined to tame not just space but time. Rivette’s method is horizontal, turning the city into a dangerous game. His heroines are marginal, thrown out of place by Paris’s centrifugal energy. They move through the city like tunnelers, not supposed to look at it from above. For them, someone else’s vision is a threat. The only answer is to tear out their eyes and keep moving.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2024) + A Feast of Man (Caroline Golum, 2017)
Right before showtime I ran into fellow Spectacle comrade Zachary Fleming, who played James, the butler, in and was the assistant director of my first feature, A Feast of Man. Must’ve been kismet! Imagine my utter shock when I watched the final act of Conann, wherein (SPOILER ALERT!) our titular heroine informs a motley crew of artists that in order to inherit her fortune, they must agree to eat her dead body. If this sounds familiar, you may be one of twelve people who've seen my movie, in which a recently deceased playboy’s will stipulates that his closest friends do the same. Somewhere in the dark of the Courthouse theater, Zachary and I locked eyes. Was Mandico a secret Feast head? Or was this simply confirmation from the universe that microbudget filmmaking will always surf the avant-garde? We may never solve this mystery definitively, but I spent the better part of the next week feeling very “seen.”
Background (Khaled Abdulwahed, 2024) + Blessed Blessed Oblivion (Jumana Manna, 2010)
When I initially watched Background, I found its minimalism too austere to connect with. But now I recognize in its deceptive simplicity the same tenderness and tension openly displayed in a film like Blessed Blessed Oblivion. Abdulwahed can’t hold his father’s hand, so he carefully cuts it out in Photoshop, lifting it from one photo to another. It’s an obsessive gesture against the dominion of the border and the time of captivity, like those performed by the hands on which Manna’s film fixates as they wash windows and pump iron. She depicts not only masculinity but also the objects it works over and through. In both films, the intensity of this attachment, and its ability to “transcend materiality” (Walid Daqqa), does not come automatically: it is cultivated through discipline. It’s fitting that the film that grew on me most this year, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, taught me this.
Melody Electronics (Albert Birney, 2024) + Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987)
You're watching the “VCR” section of Albert Birney’s walkthrough of an imaginary video game called Melody Electronics. Soft and snowy synths fall on the soundtrack while a selection screen displays VHS covers from around 1988: Beetlejuice, Big.… And it’s Moonstruck that you (the player) pick to watch. “Good choice,” Melody says; then, pixelated Cher and Cage kiss on screen. During the credits, the NES-style moon rounds above (like a big pizza pie…). Both films are snowglobes: they orbit specific moments, to preserve the prettiness of a season. Moonstruck considers ancestry, lineage, ending on a portrait of family members from before the film’s story time, whilst Birney’s homely render of 1988 logs the ancestors of today’s electronics. To burrow, even to the near past, is a festive practice that celebrates the passing day; at the end of 2024, I was warmed by these two a lot.
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024) + The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
Sometimes truth is not justice. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Melting Fire Iceman (Heesue Kwon, 2024) + The Dante Quartet (Stan Brakhage, 1987)
Hellfire is the impetus for the meeting of these films. Consumed by Dante’s lyrics at a point of personal upheaval, Brakhage had come to see visions of hell. He applied them to 70mm film stock, using the aspect ratio of filmic epics past and present.
If Brakhage directly expresses the traces of human intervention on the medium of film, Kwon's Melting Fire Iceman fuses analogue and generative AI technology to assert that the presence of the human is essential to facilitate the cinematic experience. As a cinema goes up in flames and the audience leaves, she turns her attention to the custodian workers of the theater who are left behind. In this emptiness, Kwon hauls her cinematic apparatus—projectors, Nipkow disks, a live camera, and an image-diffusion model appearing to hallucinate and dream—and herself as projectionist in front of the audience. While Kwon fiddles, manipulates, and operates the equipment, the hallucinations of AI reveal themselves as reflections, not of a sentient artificial intelligence but of the conductor of images herself.
Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024) + The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)
Films that are fully—formally and aesthetically—committed to the subjective points of view of adolescent protagonists who've been orphaned or abandoned. Spectral visions appear to both Francie and Bailey, each a divine witness summoned to redress the children’s invisibility.
Bye Bye Tiberias (Lina Soualem, 203) + Alexandria...Again and Forever (Youssef Chahine, 1989)
Lina Soualem and her mother, Hiam Abbass, return to the latter’s village, Deir Hanna in occupied Palestine, to trace the stories of the women in their family: their expulsion from Tiberias, their lives in Deir Hanna, and their dreams of return. Set in 1987 during the Egyptian Actors’ Union strike, Youssef Chahine's autofictive Alexandria...Again and Forever follows his self-insert, Yehia, as he navigates a changing film industry, visions of the past, and dreams of the future. Motivated by their love of film, both Abbass and Chahine left home to pursue careers abroad—Abbass for Europe, Chahine for the United States. As they look back, nostalgia and sweetness intertwine with longing and regret: Abbass remarks again and again, “Don't open the gate to past sorrows,” and Chahine writes an elegy of a city that has become unfamiliar. To be Arab, in diaspora or exile, is to recount the past, again and forever.
The Curse S01E10: “Green Queen” (Nathan Fielder, 2024) + Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983)
When I watched The Curse earlier this year, and especially this insane last episode, all I could think was: nothing has ever looked and felt like this. But then I gave it a thought and remembered my experience discovering all of the Jerry Lewis features during lockdown. They were just as surreal, strange, hilarious and awkward. They share a lot—not only this idiosyncratic “cringiness,” but something related to an altered experience of reality; a feeling of not belonging anywhere; a melancholy of slapstick; a radical, almost anarchic aesthetic; a strange relationship to Judaism and Jewish humor. For a double feature, I could only pick Cracking Up, Lewis’s final feature film, and probably his saddest.
In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024) + Amer (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009)
Inverted slasher/giallo. In a Violent Nature invokes Jason Voorhees’s lakeside rampages, but here the camera closely tracks the mute killer as he lumbers through tranquil woodland, butchering hapless campers. Background becomes foreground; instead of residing largely offscreen and in the shadows per slasher tradition, the undead monster is the film’s enigmatic visual anchor. With Amer, an experimental remix of giallo iconography, texture and subtext become text. The roughness of fabric, the dampness of skin, the hotness of breath, the coldness of metal, the eroticism that emerges through this orgy of sensation—such aspects are visually and sonically amplified, igniting the senses and decentering more conventional plot beats and genre trappings.
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024) + BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism (Michelle Handelman, 1995)
Two films about alternative forms of care and social reproduction against cis male domination and the medical industrial complex. Meditations on the liberatory potential of kink and the necessity of Sapphic violence. Body hacking. Bodies rendered illegible to hegemony. Killer music syncs. Pheromone-soaked deviations from homonormativity. People, places, and things that could be categorized as “bodacious.”
La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2024) + Crumbs (Miguel Llansó, 2015)
Melancholic, vaguely edged quests across landscapes animated by marginal living situations, busted train stations, and relics of negotiated value. Unseen forces distinctly at work, above and below—what good are human eyes?
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2024) + Auschwitz (Uwe Boll, 2011)
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024) + The Spy in Black (Michael Powell, 1939)
Murderers among us.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow, 2024) + Bad Girl (Frank Borzage, 1931)
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.
—Gillian Rose, Love’s Work
The Exploding Girl (Jonathan Vinel and Caroline Poggi, 2024) + Notre-Dame de la Croisette (Daniel Schmid, 1981)
Women longing for connection—each so distinctly tied to her era. From the 1980s to 2024, Candice erupts into her surroundings, her emotions imprisoned within her body, while Betty physically imposes herself on spaces where she is not allowed. Both stories use physical spaces to mirror their emotional turmoil.
The Periphery of the Base (Zhou Tao, 2024) + Coal Money (Wang Bing, 2009)
With no discernible superstructure in sight, these two films must stick to the material(istic) world at hand: Zhou observes from afar how construction workers get lost in the dusty beige of the vast Gobi Desert (as the light fades, the camera joins in by disappearing into the grainy shadows); Wang, of course, stays much closer to his subjects to witness the heated price negotiations between fatigued lorry drivers who move coal from the Shanxi mines to the port of Tianjin. Coincidentally, both have a 53-minute runtime, which almost calls for them to be shown side by side, intensifying the already inherent layering effects.
Hors du temps (Olivier Assayas, 2024) + La chambre (Chantal Akerman, 1972)
December's chill provides a nice excuse to find oneself in familiar interiors. Make room for nostalgia. Settle in. A double feature best seen at home.
The Devil's Bath (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2024) + The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
Granted, this would be one of the most depressing double bills of all time. But besides their shared general theme (which I won’t spoil here), these two wonderful films are united by the unusual way they go about unveiling that theme, to stunning and devastating effect. Movies that find ingenious ways of revealing their hand—or, to put it more grossly, of dispensing information—are rare these days, but they’re the ones that tend to stay with me the most.
About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023) + Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983)
Two wonderful films about proud men having to move to an unfamiliar environment for work and hating the place initially, but then going through a humbling experience as their sense of self and their morality get challenged.
Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (The Quay Brothers, 2024) + Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, 1969)
What do puppets dream of when they go to sleep? In the Quay Brothers’ latest, puppets, stop-motion animation, and live-action vignettes form an unearthly journey of reveries and nightmares. Among the various repetitions, the emphasis on capricious time devices suggests a temporal limbo and the futility of cheating fate. This sense of inevitability also looms in Masahiro Shinoda’s film, which reinterprets an eighteenth-century puppet play with live actors and expressionistic sets. As the walls close in on the doomed lovers—figuratively and literally—the film retains the tradition of kuroko, black-clad stagehands who silently reposition the scenery and stage props. Their reflexive movements absorb the invisible societal forces that animate the illicit romance. Like the traveler in Sanatorium, the unhappy couple in Double Suicide also head toward a predestined end. Through optical illusions rich in artifice, these films reveal the souls of their characters, using both traditional and modernist techniques.
A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sang-soo, 2024) + Haru (Morita Yoshimitsu, 1996)
Idiots struggling to communicate is my favorite genre in cinema, as in life. Two films about language, love, and cinema, obsessed with communication on a formal level: the language of love, the language of cinema; love for language, love for cinema. About half of Haru’s runtime consists of written text on screen, and the best instance of zoom within Morita’s cinema deserves to be paired with a Hong. I also liked...the melodies....
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2024) + I.K.U. (Shu Lea Cheang, 2000)
Horny at the end of the world and at the beginning.
Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath, 2024) + Film Emigration from Nazi Germany (Günter Peter Straschek, 1975)
Non-Americans viewing America, making America, becoming America.
Black Dog (Guan Hu, 2024) + John Wick (Chad Stahelski, 2014)
Taciturn local man with a troubled past gets a new lease of life with a canine companion; mess with it at your peril.
Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024) + Crank (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2006)
Do everything. Slow down with Ben Rivers and Jake Williams in the Scottish Highlands: revel in the stillness and majesty of the natural world, trace the contours of Williams’s everyday routine, observe the delicate textures of light and natural fabrics, note a poignant rhyme between the decaying film grain and the ephemeral nature of mortality. Literally watch an uninterrupted take of Williams falling asleep in the woods, which prompted walkouts from the weak at the film’s Locarno premiere. Once you have the resting pulse of a marathon runner, Crank it back up to normal—then to dangerous. Jason Statham has been poisoned, and if he doesn’t want to die in an hour, he has to keep adrenaline coursing through his body, whatever it takes. He snorts loose cocaine off the ground. He shuts his hand in a hot waffle iron. He rapidly inhales and discards dozens of bottles of nasal spray while running around a hospital. In a sequence set to Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (the rest of the film sounds like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater), he jumps on top of the seat of his speeding motorcycle and spreads his arms wide, Christ-like, as he bombs down the streets of LA. If all of this weren't strange enough, Dwight Yoakam and Glenn Howerton both appear in supporting roles. Across a double-feature running time just one minute shy of three hours, you will feel like you have lived several lives and seen everything that the body can do. I hope you live to tell the tale.
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) + Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)
The displaced traverse the desert in search of a miraculous escape. Sex, violence, politics, secularization, and modernity: the thematic correspondences between Pasolini’s second historical epic and George Miller’s 1980s sci-fi dystopia are clear. Rex and Max, two tight-lipped anti-heroes, two scorched landscapes and the mobs struggling within them. I wasn’t a fan of George Miller’s Mad Max reboot. Like a video game, the logic was simple enough to hang a visual language around—but gimmicks prioritized franchise over storytelling. They go somewhere. They come back. So what? The passing of Fredric Jameson saw a handwritten list for his course “World Film: The Road Movie” circulating on social media. I was surprised, then, to see Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) at the bottom, after Godard’s Weekend (1967). Miller’s sequel to his original is fantastic. The thematics of displacement and threat are conjured beautifully in a desert without direction. The wanderers are lost. The acts of theft and murder, ritual and prayer, in these wide-angled landscapes of skirmish reminded me of Pasolini’s Moroccan shots. Two films about sovereignty in the desert: the shift from a world of kings to one of leadership without authority. Ecocide and mob rule, road movies for when we’re rapidly running out of road.
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023) + The Bed You Sleep In (Jon Jost, 1993)
Having seen these two films within a week of one another by chance, I was struck by their remarkable similarities to the point of speculating on the possibility that Hamaguchi—a newly crowned Oscar winner who’s quite clearly ambivalent about the honor—might have found direct influence from a fellow filmmaker in voluntary exile from the fanfare of the United States. Set in an Oregon logging community, Jost’s earlier film is a rumination on rape in its environmental and human forms, a caustic and angry work that recognizes that tackling the complexity of such uncomfortable topics cannot be approached from a single expressive mode, and correspondingly vacillates between rigorous documentary observation, Bergmanesque chamber drama, scenes of stilted monologuing that recall the work of Straub-Huillet, and passages of psychedelically inflected structuralist cinema. Threading it all together is a plaintively beautiful modern classical score by Erling Wold that seems to exist on a plane above the action. In a moment of escalating tension near the film’s end, Jost layers a Wold piece over the duration of an image of trees reflected on the windshield of a moving car, a shot that runs long enough to achieve drone-like intensity, redirecting the mounting dramatic stakes toward an attentiveness to the indifferent, but nonetheless vulnerable, natural world.
A similar shot functions as a prelude to Hamaguchi’s thorny follow-up to Drive My Car (2021), another formally shape-shifting parable about the deleterious effects of human actions on the land we occupy. In this case, Eiko Ishibashi’s taut, string-laced music overscores a protracted dolly shot focused on the tops of trees in a forest outside Tokyo, the site of both a small rural community and a cynical startup company’s planned glamping business. The shot is echoed at the end of the film when the film’s hitherto muted conflicts unexpectedly explode to a point of violent catharsis—a dramatic pattern discernible in Jost’s film as well. In resorting to such extravagant narrative crescendos, both filmmakers argue that the latent but omnipresent tensions in our modern landscape between nature and human actions—simmering for the most part below the surface to all but the most conscientious ecologists and artists—may only achieve a semblance of resolution suddenly and brutally. At first, I was taken aback by gestures that appeared to be out of tune with the overarching contemplation of both films, and in hindsight, I’m in awe of the political gravity faced head-on by Jost and Hamaguchi. Both films are like boulders hurled into the placid surface of a pond.
Stress Positions (Theda Hammel, 2024) + Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976)
Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt, 2024) + American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016)
Kneecap (Rich Peppiatt, 2024) + Song of Granite (Pat Collins, 2017)
Kneecap begins at breakneck speed, with narrator Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (known by his stage name Mo Chara, as member of the titular hip-hop group) declaring: “You know what? Every fucking story about Belfast starts like this.” Cue a montage of car bombs and gunfire, emblematic images of the Troubles. It was tempting, of course, to pair Kneecap with such a film—In the Name of the Father (1993) came to mind, as well as Hunger (2008), with Steve McQueen’s latest currently in awards consideration. However, I’ve gone with Pat Collins’s Song of Granite (2017), about the Connemara-born folk musician Joe Heaney who specialized in traditional sean-nós singing. The films are aesthetic opposites—where Kneecap is explosive and orgiastic, Song of Granite is patient and unassuming—yet both are concerned with the preservation of Irish language through music, as much as the respective protagonists’ own complicated relationships to the land of their fathers.
April (Déa Kulumbegashvili, 2024) + Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Both feature women who spend a lot of time driving, luring strange men into their car with the suggestion of an anonymous sexual encounter, as well as (spoiler alert) a strange alien-human life-form wandering the liminal space of an inky black pool. However, I was more struck by the unique sense of dread I felt watching these movies. While their protagonists are very different—an extraterrestrial who entraps men in Scotland and delivers them to her home planet vs. an OBGYN trying to provide safe abortions in rural Georgia—both films articulate a kind of female isolation, and the vulnerability that comes from inhabiting a body that is banal one moment and a site of intense danger the next; danger that can come from pregnancy and childbirth, at the hands of violent men, or with punishment by the state.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) + Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979)
Young idealist against an unfeeling world (featuring old man yells at cloud).
Merman (Ana Lungu, 2024) + Alix's Pictures (Jean Eustache, 1980)
On the abusive tenderness of showing someone an image.
Longlegs (Oz Perkins, 2024) + In the Dark (Clifton Holmes, 2000)
Cryptic missives left lying around in envelopes are a staple of horror movies, but not all correspondence is created equal. Where the letters in Longlegs prove to be red herrings (the only item on Oz Perkins’s conceptual menu) the anonymous instructions guiding cash-strapped Kim Garrett through Clifton Holmes’s millennial SOV masterwork In the Dark (now available on YouTube) communicate the sadistic, Simon-says sensibility of a gig economy predicated on a willing and profit-motivated enslavement.
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024) + Neige (Juliet Berto and Jean-Henri Roger, 1983)
The Land at Night (Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, 2024) + Razor Blades (Paul Sharits, 1968)
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024) + The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941)
When gobs of Edward’s misshapen flesh melt away to reveal Sebastian Stan, he fakes his death and becomes a real estate agent. Peter Lorre’s Janos has a better excuse for turning to a life of crime: he’s saving up for a new face of his own. Both films wind their way through the parks, theaters, and doctor’s offices of Manhattan toward deliciously tragicomic conclusions about the specious appeal of hopes and dreams.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Wes Ball, 2024) + Bye Bye Monkey (Marco Ferreri, 1978)
There’s nothing surprising about the fact that people are drawn to the myths, ideas, and architecture surrounding the Roman Empire as the world embraces militarism, machismo, and authoritarianism. Before Trump issued the “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” Hitler promoted “Starved Classicism.” The attention Wes Ball awards to the Roman Empire is curious for a film that takes place beyond human history; it suggests that the Planet of the Apes will mirror the Planet of the Humans—a tragedy. In Bye Bye Monkey, an electrician who works at a Roman-themed waxwork museum adopts a baby chimpanzee. The museum, with all its classical idols, goes up in flames. After Ferreri showed 1970s audiences that historical paradigms were meant to burn so primates could fashion new futures for themselves, it’s sad to see Ball regress.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024) + India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
Two films about the impossibility of representation performed self-consciously, reflexively, and delicately by their respective lead actresses: Zita Hanrot and Delphine Seyrig. Both contend with the impossibilities of bringing back the past in very different colonial contexts—for Duras, it was impossible to represent her memory of Indochina through a “political film,” a form and framework that she detested. She questioned how a film about a factory worker could possibly show the horror and the disorienting otherness at the same time. Suzanne Césaire destroyed her own writing. As Hanrot proclaims, “We are making a film about someone who does not want to be remembered.” Both filmmakers reject the premise of simply “rediscovering” these women. Instead, they play with forms of opacity and question the obfuscating power of the visible. The splendor of the luscious gardens in Hunt-Ehrlich’s film and the opulent mansion in Duras’s slowly but seductively reveal the disastrous implications of such beauty.
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024) + Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (Marguerite Duras, 1976)
With its icy Milanese bourgeois family undone by Terence Stamp’s divine sex appeal, Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) would obviously make a great double bill with Guiraudie’s erotic pastoral thriller, but the restoration of a rarely screened, almost mythical film by Duras rouses corresponding sensations involving ghosts, trespasses, longing and desire, dampness, uncertain returns, and invocations. Tonally like night and day, yet both unearth yearning as irrepressible energy transcending death.
Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024) + Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)
Both Zemeckis and Noé are known for their elaborate technical experiments that act as their own kind of ballyhoo, but I think these examples of their work are actually wrestling with parallel and seemingly personal anxieties through similar formal gambles. They’re both exercises in fixed perspectives, duration, and non-traditional editing techniques that meditate on displacement, death, and bitterness. You gotta take the shot with the chaser, but I’ll leave it up to the viewers to decide which is which.
Toxic (Saulė Bliuvaitė, 2024) + Naissance des pieuvres (Céline Sciamma, 2007)
One grimy summer, two teen girls out of place for different reasons. A codependent girlhood friendship runs amok in these distinct films with fascinatingly similar elements: body dysmorphia, compulsory heterosexuality and its dire overarching consequences, riding two-up on a bicycle, teen bodies injuriously sized up, a sloppy exploratory kiss, uncomfortable moments in locker rooms, underwater swimming sequences, taking public transit together toward an inevitably grim encounter with a much older man, an electronic score, overly stylized intercut dance scenes, mostly absent adults.
The Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt, 2024) + Blue Black Permanent (Margaret Tait, 1992)
A woman gazes out to sea as a storm brews, a dot amongst craggy rocks, waves crashing, winds howling…. The Outrun and Blue Black Permanent are two cine-poems which (largely) sidestep romantic stereotypes to offer rugged but still magical portraits of the Orkney Islands. Both are abstracted autobiographies authored by women with strong ties to the archipelago (Tait, who made her feature film debut at 74 with Blue Black Permanent, and Amy Liptrot, who wrote the book and cowrote the screenplay for The Outrun). Subsequently, both films are rooted by a local’s eye for specificities, channeling the wild majesty of this unique terrain to illustrate the turbulent subjectivities of complicated heroines. These are also two films about generational trauma and an inheritance that may run deeper than human bloodlines—into the birds, into the sea creatures, into the rocks of that brutal coastline, into the vast emptiness of the pitch-black Orcadian night.
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) + An Empty Dream (Yu Hyun-mok, 1965)
The erotics of the dental surgery.
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) + The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)
That empty signifier—“spiritual sequel”—might actually apply here. Two films united by their exploration of death through the driving impulse of cinema: to give an image to the imageless. But both have shots at the end—each a kind of fleeing away—that suggest the impossibility of death being caught alive by film. Rather, these shots both express the sense that perhaps all cinema can offer (following Jean-Luc Nancy’s belief) is evidence that life goes on.
Solo qu3r3mos un poco de amor (Raúl Perrone, 2024) + Breve cielo (David José Kohon, 1969)
For me, it’s always “boy meets girl.” It doesn’t, but if that formula lacked something, it would be the third presence of the most uncontrollable scenario there is: a city. Cities allow us to create a world within the world, to escape from ourselves, to become strangers, while simultaneously forcing us to let our bodies be affected by the other. Fifty-five years set these two Argentinian films apart, but not much has changed about how to make the city one’s own, whether it’s Buenos Aires or Ituzaingó. Through walking, feeling, and asking questions, even for those who have little or nothing, there is still a way to create a world of its own: by falling in love.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024) + Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, 1937)
It makes sense to pair another soundstage spectacular with my Movie of the Year, and thanks to recent restorations, it’s Capra season. I actually haven’t seen Lost Horizon yet—one of his few big ones I haven't gotten to—so this is a note to myself on how to finish the year. Hopefully the pairing works!
exergue - on documenta 14 (Dimitris Athiridis, 2024) + The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci, 2005–12)
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024) + Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)
The death of a world as a death of the world. Nothing persists, everything flows, but (for a few hours) art can bring it back.
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024) + A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
Similar elements don't necessarily yield similar results. Shyamalan’s work opens out onto a host of different cinematic influences and parallels, and various elements of Trap reminded me of a range of serial-killer/family dramas. In the end, I found myself going back to A History of Violence for the way its common threads with Trap are inverted: The patriarch who leads a double life, in one film embracing his violent nature and in the other trying as hard as possible to hide it. The family destroyed yet paradoxically united by the consequences of the father’s terrible actions. Too, aesthetically, Shyamalan tempers his serial killer’s violence into a matter of narrative backstory rather than rampant onscreen brutality, a thwarted expectation juxtaposed with Cronenberg’s shocking, realistic gore in this early-aughts period that, inclusive of Eastern Promises (2007), utilizes Viggo Mortensen as a reluctant cipher.
A Want in Her (Myrid Carten, 2024) + No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
Mothers and daughters and tentative kitchen conversations.
Direct Action (Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, 2024) + Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975)
There is another world, but it is in this one.
—Paul Éluard
Coreys (Dan Streit, 2024) + Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Within the bewildering miasma of modern life, the distance between yourself and a performed persona becomes negligible. Is that other self even a performance, or your dream? Which one is the real you? Is either? Everything solid melts into data, while data congeals into reality.
Between the Temples (Nathan Silver, 2024) + Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975)
Carol Kane's filmography is currently bookended by two wonderful, mordantly funny films about what it means to retain or rediscover your Jewishness in America in the 2020s and 1890s, respectively. Both, coincidentally, by directors with the surname Silver.
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) + Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916)
Grand artistic statements and time-hopping historical spectacles whose genius directors spared no expense, Griffith’s Intolerance was released during the Great War, and Coppola’s years-in-the-dreaming Megalopolis emerged during our present apocalypse. This exhilarating and mind-numbing double feature is not exactly a fantasy; real-life time-and-space hopping presented it to me this May, when I traveled from Cannes—where Coppola’s eagerly anticipated film opened and fizzled—to Rochester, where Intolerance was the opening-night film at the Nitrate Picture Show. Though there was much to admire and enjoy in Megalopolis, its sheer inanity and caricatured characters were deflating. Not only did Griffith’s film hold up much better, it was also much more interesting, especially in its depiction of women. Coppola gave us Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum, but Griffith offered a multitude of complex and contradictory women (“the inhumane spinster, the perverse old queen, the bereft mother, the charity girl, the adulteress, and the prostitute,” as Miriam Hansen listed in a Film Comment essay), and they are the key players in all of the film’s pivotal moments—to the extent that even Jesus Christ feels like a marginal character. As Hansen wrote in 1989, “Intolerance remains Griffith’s most modern film, a film that projects its contradictions forward into our time.” Wow indeed.
Direct Action (Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, 2024) + Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975)
Jacques Rivette wrote about Nicholas Ray’s work as follows: “And the real struggle takes place in only one of them, against the interior demon of violence, or of a more secret sin, which seems linked to man and his solitude.” Serge Daney said this about Milestones: “Nothing to see (as said to a crowd to move them away from an accident: there is nothing to see)—nothing in common—nothing to look at. The heterogeneity of the images disregards suture, and off-screen space, that reserve fund of perceptions. An omnipresent camera, continuous speaking, are there for real, and from this—the pattern woven from them—there is no way out. Likewise for the collective, there is nothing to see, nothing to meet. No one sees it and it sees no one.” These texts not only speak about the films they were written for but also resonate deeply with their counterparts. These masterpieces are about heritage, radicality...but more importantly about beauty and despair.
Chicken for Linda! (Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, 2024) + Windy Day (Faith & John Hubley, 1968)
Two bright, bouncy, airy cartoons with voice performances that are a breath of fresh air. Voices so real and refreshing in contrast to the shouty, annoying voice acting heard in most animations. Both are made by couples. Love!
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, 2024) + The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972)
Both films play out their dire disaster narratives inside little worlds. In Rumours, the nighttime forestscape where its action is set is psychically insular, created with light and darkness and the knowledge that everyone else has seemingly disappeared. In The Poseidon Adventure, Hackman and his gang of survivors traverse an obstacle course-cum-“Wonderland” in the bowels of a capsized cruise ship. Dream logic (or at least dream scenarios) prevails explicitly and implicitly in both. They are true and strong works of fantasy cinema in that they approach their imaginative and surreal conceits with the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other pragmatism that photographic art makes possible. Superficially, Rumours appears to riff on Poseidon, essentially parodying Irwin Allen’s blockbuster disaster film formula, but at their core, their missions are the same. The limited horizons their chosen scenarios impose serve to only heighten the intensity of their emotional drama. Their settings become a jungle gym for children at play as we watch them create a collective fantasy.
Eight Postcards from Utopia (Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz, 2024) + Kubasa in a Glass: The Strange World of the Winnipeg Television Commercial (1975–1993) (Matthew Rankin and Walter Forburg, 2006)
You can look at these two films as different volumes from the same essential project: a cultural history derived from a close analysis of industrial media detritus. The more distance we gain from these artifacts, the more painfully the reveal a nation's neuroses. See also: An Image (Harun Farocki, 1983); Poetry and Truth (Peter Kubelka, 2003); The Exquisite Corpus (Peter Tscherkassky, 2015).
I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024) + A Snake of June (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002)
There is still time to become the person you're afraid to reveal.
Jawan (Atlee Kumar, 2023) + Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
Now that I’ve been submitting these double-feature ballots for more than a decade, I hope I’ve earned enough credit from you, dear reader, to forgive the indulgence of this year’s pairing. The two movies I have picked simply stand in for the year’s most significant cine-events for me personally. First, Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s latest gonzo mega-hit, for spending a day and a half in the presence of the man himself in Locarno, going from a photoshoot to a lunch to the introduction to Devdas (2002). For the other SRK-heads out there, you can perhaps imagine how mind-blowing that whole experience was, also for seeing the workings of unimaginable fame up close. And second, Miyazaki's masterpiece, for my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Yakushima, the island off the coast of Japan that inspired it. Both movies—Atlee’s and Miyazaki’s—are audience-friendly, left-ish political epics involving peasant uprisings, about heroic figures partnering with mythic forces to do battle against the extractive elites whose power ensnares a population. Miyazaki’s is certainly the more artful of the two, his totalizing vision bringing every flutter of an arrow, every quiver of a blade of grass, every chirp of a forest creature to life (and it was the first Studio Ghibli film to blend hand-drawn animation with computer-generated imagery). As I hiked and drove through the forests of Yakushima, these images were with me in my mind’s eye, as Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack was in my ear. The landscape was freighted with extra significance as I imagined Miyazaki making the same treks, conceiving of Mononoke’s images. Jawan is, let’s say, complementary to Miyazaki’s exacting artistry in that it has little time for niceties of form or craft. Unusually for SRK, it was directed by a Tamil filmmaker, Atlee, who brings a welcome vulgarian-populist madness to the proceedings. As with all the best Indian blockbusters, Jawan is six or seven movies smushed into one, each with its own moral philosophy and genre conventions to play with: the fun is in seeing all of them rub shoulders in such gloriously entertaining fashion.
Emit a Beam, See a Light (Amy Halpern, 2022) + The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (Margaret Tait, 1955)
I kept thinking about a book by Anahid Nersessian this year, often returning to what she has to say about beauty in times of misery. She writes that “finding things to call beautiful” in these times “is indefensible,” but we do, all the same, because that is living. And I found things to call beautiful in these two films by Amy Halpern and Margaret Tait. Images of women’s faces, illuminated in warm sunlight—yet seeming, simultaneously, to emit a beam entirely of their own—left me rhapsodic, despite everything.
Queer (Luca Guadaganino, 2024) + Love Is The Devil (John Maybury, 1998)
Transactional romance, artistic license, queerness, addiction—and Daniel Craig as the beating, drug-addled heart of it all.
Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus, 2024) + End of Night (Keith McNally, 1990)
Savage meditations on the realities and pressures of fatherhood. Juvenile regression as a means to avoid responsibility.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024) + Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, 1933)
Depression era fables, tough guys, tomboys, bad cops, lost limbs. “There’s no hope here!” The past and the future caught up to each other. Drag race over, no winners.
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024) + Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983)
“Warren, when did you first notice you were…a misfit?” the psychiatrist asks Jerry Lewis’s depressed putz in Cracking Up. He might ask the same of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, the rancorous centre of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. Here’s a pair of films that seem to literalize Edward Said’s characterization of late style as being suffused with intransigence and difficulty: two venomous comedies—in the oldest sense of the term—that revolve around the parade of self-manifested indignities suffered by their respective protagonists. Lewis’s film begins with a thwarted suicide attempt and ends with him dousing himself in gasoline. A running joke sees him repeatedly punched in the face. For the irredeemably paranoid Pansy, even the affections of her nearest and dearest are weaponized and booby-trapped. If Leigh counterpoints the chaos of Pansy’s worldview with the gentle empathy of his camera, such separation is impossible for Lewis’s masochistically ungovernable director-star. A discordant symphony of self-flagellation, Lewis’s final masterwork flips the bird to Chaplin’s wounded suggestion in Limelight (1952) that the world might be through with clowns.
Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) + Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
In which we follow sex workers navigating the monotony of their daily lives, desperate to escape the routines that both define and constrain them.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024) + Lumumba (Raoul Peck, 2000)
Werckmeister Capybaras (@bartlebooth45, 2024) + Capybaras Walking (Eadweard Muybridge, 1887)
An Electro Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024) + The Moment of Truth (Francesco Rosi, 1965)
In 1960s Spain there was a subgenre of movies akin to those made for rockstars (like The Beatles’ HELP!, 1965) but about bullfighters because they were the rockstars of Francoist Spain. Most of these films were insufferable propaganda vehicles but The Moment of Truth got away with a grittier neorealist style due to the fact that it was a foreign production. While both films follow real matadors, The Moment of Truth shows us the historical context of a bullfight, the backstory of its protagonist and the behind the scenes of an industry run by greedy managers, while Afternoons of Solitude is an intimate portrait of both the bull and the matador in the arena during the nerve-wracking moments directly before, during, and after a corrida.
Marianne (Michael Rozek, 2023) + Abigail's Party (Mike Leigh, 1977)
Two anti-Hollywood masterpieces in which a living room opens up as a space for a new possible relation between the self and his family, the self and her society. Leigh has been a major, unfurling discovery for me this year, particularly his BBC work, and this bitter-couples-fighting chamber piece (better than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966) keeps finding thrilling ways to show how our convenience devices, our passive-aggression, our unhappiness with the way things are (in 1970s England or today) has kept us frighteningly limited in our thinking. Under Rozek's direction, Isabelle Huppert provides a possible expansion to that thinking; she gives, alongside her other equally stunning performance in Hong Sang-soo's A Traveler’s Needs (2024), probably her quintessential performance. And in Marianne—a fresh-feeling, sly, lovely single-hander—she cheerfully sends up the very notion of characters, narrative propulsion, and relatability that Hollywood convinces us is necessary. I feel closer to people after seeing Leigh's work and Marianne.
Lázaro at Night (Nicolás Pereda, 2024) + Isabella (Matías Piñeiro, 2020)
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2024) + Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of War (Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu, 1971)
Not a particularly inspired pairing, but it's not been an inspiring year. Maybe next year, God willing.
Ricky Stanicky (Peter Farrelly, 2024) + Switch (Blake Edwards, 1991)
High-concept hijinks, high art.
Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024) + cinéma concret (Takashi Makino, 2015)
Two expansions of cinema, in 4DX (Chung) and Pulfrich 3D (Makino), both signaling a return to a primal cinema, both resulting in a dimensional vortex of whirling matter, memories, and mayhem that asks us to feel as though we’re inside the movie while implicitly reminding us of the great relief and tragedy that we'll never be in it for real.
www.RachelOrmont.com (Peter Vack, 2024) + Analife (Goda Kenji, 2005)
A glib summary may leave one with the impression that these makers are antisocial edgelords, and that this pairing is the work of yet another. But both works confronted me with surprising emotional reckonings that, while bleakly reflecting and exaggerating the ways in which media environments capitalize on the lossy compression of emotions into data, also offer visions of escape. That may sound like a Black Mirror episode with a cathartic finale, but Vack and Goda are perceptive enough to understand that, in terms of form, degenerate times call for degenerate measures. If Analife is like getting locked inside the fetish porn room at a sex shop in which an array of screens are stuck on looping DVD menus, www.RachelOrmont.com is like getting airdropped into a memelord's phone. Both offer ways out—Goda leads his trio into the forest, while Vack releases his protagonist (played brilliantly by his sister, Betsey Brown) onto the street. What's so profound about Vack's film is the aesthetic and emotional expansion that unfurls once Rachel is decoupled from the dopamine machine, and what's so heartbreaking is that she can't fathom anything beyond jacking back into it.
Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) + Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)
Two very different sex-work sagas in two very different New Yorks, both of which somehow manage to dodge the bullet of overt moralization. Watch in chronological order for cinematic gentle-giant progression: from Donald Sutherland's Klute, to Yura Borisov's Igor.
Coreys (Dan Streit, 2024) + Dream a Little Dream (Marc Rocco, 1989)
Two tales of two Coreys, a dissociation double feature.
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) + Mediums (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2017)
Pick me: being chosen can feel like the hand of fate (Elisabeth’s car crash and subsequent encounter with a Substanced nurse) or getting caught in the rusty gears of democracy (potential jurors milling outside a courthouse). In both cases, there’s much to learn, and even more instruction on offer: at-home medical procedures, ass-boosting squats, franchising a Dunkin’ Donuts, French cooking, selecting an insurance plan. After what happens for the sake of, let’s face it, a pretty dull and repetitive job in The Substance, jury duty doesn’t seem so bad after all.
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024) + A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
I feel as though this is obvious for many reasons, haha! I was pretty obsessed with A Man Escaped in college after watching it in a film class, and was also pretty obsessed with Trap after seeing it in Philly in the old Ritz Theatre with a mouse scuttling around that scared the bejesus out of me every few seconds. I just find watching a character work through the epiphany of an escape plan in real time so deeply satisfying, so why not do it twice? At their cores, these movies are about the journey, not the destination.
