BEST OF 2024
by
OJO
Our picks for the best films of 2024
January, 2025
The fire is burning the bad weeds, but they’ll rise up again. How can you doubt the power of the fire (desert) even when your life has been torned apart and not even the rain can cover you from it? A past self is what you wrongly reckon of yourself today. What you long for is just a memory. What does your laugh says about your sadness? Time never stops, and you start to fade. Dreams, expectations, ideas, hopes… all of them are lost. Not even your nightmares can be hidden beneath concrete slabs and stone mines. Not even your intent of progression can get you out of your own hole, because you’re still a foreigner. You found a prize and wanted revenge, but what have you learned? You can’t break traditions, even if a prophecy is the burden of others. How do you see the world? Do you still want the future to be different? Can you see the beauty that once was, or do you see the memories behind what your eyes see? You care for them, but who cares for you? The trails of brightness are buried beneth sheets of dust, waiting to be uncovered, but you’re buried in time, longing for a moment that you still regret you’d had done differently.
If time can heal your past, what does it matter if it can’t cure your sadness?
These are our picks for the best films of 2024
Pathé ©
X
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
Alexandre de La Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte
An epic story. Like a desperate love poem. Action, adventure, a revenge fable interrupted by a love story. Innocent in its romantic qualities, as the great classics have always been. It’s not disruptive, nor original, but it is extremely refreshing.
Run Way Pictures ©
IX
THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG
Mohammad Rasoulof
If they give us guns, who are we to use them?
Change doesn’t exist if it’s not written, even if they carved the paper with ink and feathers, even if the air is waving differently. As it was and as it will be. Years under shadows of prosecution is the story of today, because it’s not judgmental, simply silencer, and it reaches everywhere, and not even family is different. Or should it be?
A24 ©
VIII
A DIFFERENT MAN
Aaron Schimberg
A desire turned into a nightmare, or was it the other way around? Broken pieces of an incomplete puzzle, of a ceiling with holes. Masks and ideas that are shed, a lie behind a lie. A foreigner of his own skin. But how can you know that your wishes will work out? In the search for change, for normality, he just lost himself. Two lives separated by self perception, a creature of aspirations and regrets, ashes that are the only remainder of a perfect fire.
Fifth Season ©
VII
LA COCINA
ALONSO RUIZPALACIOS
In the midst of chaos, we share the noise, the unbearable stress, aggression, insults, the love that is not said, the camaraderie, hope, and more importantly, the fact that behind the american dream, we have a dream, much more important, deeper, more innocent, even if it is just being abducted by a green light to disappear completely.
Searchlight Pictures ©
VI
KINDS OF KINDNESS
YORGOS LANTHIMOS
A series of fables about the absurd lengths we can go to to please others. The inexplicable reason for our unwavering service. The end justifying the means.
-Yes sir! – The dreamer exclaimed.
We all dream, so which master do we serve? What acts of kindness define our absurd quality of humanity?
A24 ©
V
THE BRUTALIST
Brady Corbet
It’s about the destination, not the journey. But all we see is the journey, perhaps because the destination, in its peaceful and restful quality, is neither so important, nor so interesting, nor so grand, nor does it have any meaning. Passion turns into obsession, like a drug of the heart that the body screams for until the meaning is lost, and the destiny you had set for yourself is erased. Maybe your stop was back there, but that’s okay, only the crazy ones, or the geniuses, or the dreamers have stayed on board.
Keplerfilm ©
IV
ARMAND
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
If someone saw it, does it really matter?
What does their eyes say about her that their mouths don’t dare to express? The embraces feel so suffocating and gazes start turning into rumours. She is just hanging beneath the rain.
The light will start to dim as they see that their time between classrooms and corridors wasn’t just because of the kid.
Fremantle ©
III
PARTHENOPE
PAOLO SORRENTINO
What if beauty was a young woman, dancing in the middle of a beautiful beach, what if it was a set of dirty alleys full of stories, if it was a romance, a tragedy, a distinguished man crying or stumbling on a cobblestone street, what if it was a being made of salt, like the sea itself, like sadness?
Maybe beauty is the feeling that the best in life has escaped us because the future is always hopeless, boring, meaningless, monotonous and that nostalgia weighs a lot and will weigh more as the years go by. Or maybe not…
Warner Bros. Pictures ©
II
DUNE: PART TWO
Denis Villeneuve
The unending heat never felt so refreshing, and plain sand never felt so rich. Rich in space, time, sound and craft, the perfect representation of a true cinematic experience and a vision fulfilled to its fullest. A film carved in history, just as it is written. Among classics, maybe a new member of science fiction milestones. A realm of myth and dreams, a way towards the future that reminds us the immense potential and power of the desert (cinema).
XSTREAM Pictures ©
I
CAUGHT BY THE TIDES
Jia Zhang-ke
A story that is born as a thread discovered little by little, almost unintentionally, like a journey to a past that has been kept secret, between ruins and memories, passages of forgotten lives, between change and lack of change, in looking at new horizons and forgetting old loves. In politics, always changing, always the same, in sadness and the lack of it, in technology and in the fact that just as we are, so insignificant in the midst of this changing world, we may end up finding that what makes us human is much less interesting than we imagine.
Our pick for the best film of the year.
by
OJO
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