Seasons Greetings, FITI readers!

Tis the time for lists — I’ve already seen a few, including ones by the sadly deranged folks who believe Megalopolis deserves some kind of special mention. But that’s the great thing about this highly subjective game critics play, people see value in vastly different work. If you don’t feel like my picks line up with your taste, that’s cool — feel free to go elsewhere and enjoy the many other cultural commentators and their lists. Or make your own!

I usually I make a list of 10 Under-The-Radar movies at this time of year as an alternative to my Top 10 — you could consider them my numbers 11-to-20. But, this year I’m finding it a struggle to say what’s under the radar — between a plethora of streaming services, the frequently empty screening rooms at the multiplex, and my work as artistic director at Carbon Arc Cinema in Halifax where we sell out movies like Flow and Candy Mountain, there are so many places to see movies of different stripes for different audiences, I’m not sure I could accurately say what is mainstream and what isn’t, culturally speaking — beyond the wildly popular animated movies Hollywood keeps producing for family audiences.

(Also different this year: I’ve decided to do a list of the 10 Best Documentaries.)

I offer this post as a bit of an experiment. Please consider this a live document, a way I can highlight many of the best movies of the year during the holidays when many folks will have time to catch up on the ones they missed in 2024 — I might add more movies once it’s posted. I hope it’s useful while it also gives me a little more time to assemble my Top 10 of the year. I’m hoping to see, amongst other films, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2.

So, here’s a collection of excellent films I saw this year, presented alphabetically. Click the title to read the original review, when available.  In parentheses I’ll suggest where you can watch the film in Canada, also when available.

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This year Zoë Kravitz went from serious actor and movie star to director with the fantastic Blink Twice, a confident, gory thriller that relishes driving nails into the billionaire’s boys club, which feels especially apt in 2024. (VOD)

For two or three weeks in April this year Alex Garland’s Civil War was the only movie anyone could talk about, and it seemed to confound as many as liked it for how it avoided commenting on American political realities during an election year, instead offering a portrait of journalism in a fictional war zone — with reporters who never seemed to file. It’s not a perfect movie, but it tells a chilling yarn with an impressive kinetic intensity that stayed with me long after I left the cinema. (Prime, VOD)

This summer horror fans were really geeking out over Longlegs. I thought it was fine, but it was the lesser-seen horror-thriller-sci-fi amalgam Cuckoo that I ended up recommending to people for its outrageous plotting, star turn from Hunter Schafer, and overall weirdness. It probably won’t be for everyone, but it was for me. (Prime, VOD)

This summer I took in the fantastic coming-of-age picture, Didi, which as I said in my review might be the first millennial nostalgia piece. It’s got the genuine flavour of memoir — about an Asian teen in 2008 America looking to be cool and make friends while also managing the casual racism around him. (Prime, VOD)

It’s hard to argue against the idea that Denis Villeneuve is Hollywood’s prime universe builder right now, and there’s a whole lot to admire in his enormous, multi-part adaptation of the Frank Herbert saga, Dune: Part Two, not the least of which is his casting of a number of the hottest young stars in Hollywood — Zendaya, Chalamet, Butler, Pugh, and Taylor-Joy — in roles that push them to some of their best work. (Crave, VOD)

When we screened Flow at Carbon Arc Cinema I noticed it had parallels with two other solid animated films this year, Robot Dreams and The Wild Robot, but there’s something even more special about Flow, from Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis. It’s the story of a cat, and his friends, who have to work together to survive an apocalyptic flood that comes after all the people have vanished from the landscape. It achieves a dreamlike beauty that’s all its own. (coming soon)

Though I haven’t yet seen Nosferatu, it will have to be especially grim to out-goth the pitch-black The Girl With The Needle, a terrific Danish historical thriller based on the true story of a young mother struggling to survive in Copenhagen after the First World War. (coming soon)

An acting clinic, His Three Daughters features Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon as sisters brought together by familial responsibility over a dying parent and stuck in a New York apartment. (Netflix)

The brilliant new film from Brazilian auteur Walter Salles, I’m Still Here dramatizes the true story of a family in Rio in the 1970s where Dad is a former left wing politician, which is enough for the totalitarian authorities to take him away. How the kids of various ages and their mother (a luminous Fernanda Torres) manage in his absence is the moving heart of the story. (coming soon)

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow is further evidence that American indie studio A24 is doing the best work in American movies right now — see also Civil War, Babygirl, We Live In Time, and Love Lies Bleeding. This is maybe the most unique picture of the year, a lo-fi portrait of alienated suburban teens bonding over a shared passion for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer-type late-’90s TV series. (Hoopla, Crave, VOD)

Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard give fantastic performances in Memory, a beautiful but harrowing  love story between two deeply damaged people in New York City. (Hoopla, VOD)

One of the best of what I saw at #TIFF24, Nightbitch is Marielle Heller’s comedy/drama about a frustrated suburban mother (Amy Adams in a career-best performance) who’s having an identity crisis while also suspecting she might be turning into a dog. Peculiar, hilarious, but also making a serious point about how women sacrifice more than men when children come into the picture. What I don’t understand is why it’s been buried on streaming when it should be opening wide right now. (on Disney+ in January)

Another fantastic, reserved performance from Mads Mikkelsen anchors the epic Danish period western The Promised Land, which never got a theatrical release but is very much worth seeing . (Hoopla, Crave)

Sing Sing is a moving story of a theatre project taking place behind the walls of an American penitentiary where men doing hard time get to experience the healing power of performance, and where most of the actors are former or current inmates. Coleman Domingo shines in the lead. (plex)

In my review I called Touch “the quintessential Sunday afternoon movie,” in that there’s something comfortingly familiar in its dramatic literary beats, a romantic, intergenerational story told largely in flashback in Iceland, the UK, and Japan. (Prime, VOD)

I may have laughed more at Wicked Little Letters than any other movie this year, a lovely British period comedy crammed with ribald humour about how an Irish lady (Jessie Buckley) with a sailor’s vocabulary gets blamed for writing a series of letters that scandalize the tweedy folks in the English town where she lives, including her neighbour (Olivia Colman). The film hides a feminist theme beneath its storytelling skirts — come for the laughs, stay for what it says about women’s rights. (Crave, VOD)

If you’d like a preview of some of my Top 10 list, I shared five films with the CBC Information Morning audience on Friday’s edition of The Knox Office, and here, finally, is my list of the Top 10 movies of 2024.