Another year, another list of cherished film discoveries. The usual pace and quantity I typically take in movies at was rather unusual this year, starting off hot towards the beginning, climaxing around my attendance at the TCM Classic Film Festival (a blog which I've yet to publish my musings about), then taking a noticeable cliff dive into fatigue around production of my upcoming film The Miracle and since then never really recovering to my normal pace up until the very end of December. For those like myself who like to regularly follow Steven Soderbergh's annual list of film & TV viewings, its perplexing to consider how he manages his regular cinephilia in the midst of often multiple productions a year. It boggles the mind. Movies can be quite taxing if one views them with full absorption, even more so when trying to do it while making one as well. There's plenty more I had originally planned to get to this year that's just gonna have to wait til next. However, this is by no means any form of complaint by me considering what I did manage to see in the past year, which truly ranks up among as one of the best year for film discoveries in my cinephilic journey so far. Of the 108 non-2024 films I watched in the past year (according to Letterboxd statistics), these are my treasures.
10) SUMMERTIME
(David Lean, 1955)
A leisurely paced travelogue spent in the company of a myriad of unalloyed pleasures, including Katharine Hepburn's many faces and moods. As if David Lean directed a narrative insert into one of James A. Fitzpatrick's wonderful Traveltalks shorts. Beautiful people filmed in beautiful locations wearing beautiful clothes. The easiest, but among the most pleasurable, cinema.
9) CLAIRE'S KNEE
(Eric Rohmer, 1970)
When the dilemma of Jean-Claude Brialy's Jerome finally clicked for me, I couldn't help but be so painfully amused at the rollicking sundry of his own rose tinted debauchery, completely severed from the reality before him yet given some approximate judgement from Rohmer's slight removal. So much so, that this registers more or less as comedy to me. Dryly conjured portrait of privileged, chauvinistic insipidity on full display. In an alternate dimension, this is the movie young men would be hanging up posters of in their dorm rooms over Fight Club & Taxi Driver.
8) THINGS TO COME
(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016)
Haven't seen anything like this before - a forward accumulation of loose dramatic strata which suggests a greater arc but simply never unmoors from its establishing features. At times while watching I noticed trace fragments of Hansen-Løve's priors: Pialat, Rohmer, Naruse - but alas, her canvas here remains too ambiguously sprawling versus the minimality of her fiction. Huppert quite literally acts as the glue that holds everything here together and the dynamism of her plights, whose range of implications and consequences never spells outright tragedy, still manages to imbue a difficult tension between free spirited independence and entrapment that shrouds her navigation with a strong tinge of quiet melancholy.
7) A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE
(John Cassavetes, 1974)
A harrowing chronicle of life that I'm sure will only grow more potent & acute in future viewings. Adults trying, trying and struggling to try. Because what else.
RIP Gena Rowlands. <3
6) THE LUSTY MEN
(Nicholas Ray, 1952)
Traditional masculinity as a cult of death. That's the American way.
5) THE GOOD FAIRY
(William Wyler, 1935)
A full injection of jubilation and comic mischief with Margaret Sullavan deploying the fullest of her acting range, and screen charm. Enters shiningly into my personal canon of "pick me ups."
4) BACKSTAGE
(Emmanuelle Bercot, 2005)
Longing so hard, so passionately, so agonizingly for the idealized form - that the sensible world rips open into a blistered euphoria of lustful ecstasy and spiritual transcendence.
3) SCARFACE
(Howard Hawks, 1932)
Paul Muni's Tony Comante as the human incarnate of death itself chasing calamity over any material gain as the ultimate pleasure. Scored by the endless rattling of machine gun fire to orchestrate the lawless American apocalypse of the Gilded Age.
2) LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER
(Olivier Assayas, 1998)
Pretty much everything I'm predisposed to in a contemporary French drama distributed nimbly across multiple chapters. I've always found Assayas' more quaint works (Summer Hours, Non-Fiction) as equally if not more pleasing than his greatest hits (Irma Vep, Personal Shopper), and this perfectly harmonizes the application of his modernistic, transgressive camera work & textures (rendered beautifully as always by Denis Lenoir) with the deep affection he clearly displays for his characters in these minimal portraits. Each passage breezes with a poetic clarity between its subjects unadorned by fictive stratagems that'd otherwise play out as contrived in less deft hands. Assayas simply dissolves the shapes of fiction and leaves us with nothing else but life in front of the camera.
1) ESTHER KAHN
(Arnaud Desplechin, 2000)
A symphonic reverie of one lyrical passage overflowing to the next, with its protagonist galvanizing towards a burst of personal & seraphic rapture. Phoenix's Khan projects an unusual behavioral autonomy, as she navigates through the world and the film's dimensions with a dynamic latitude untethered from any set destiny. A swelling performance of rareified desire and artistic ascendance unobstructed by the impediments of narrative fiction and the fiction of real life social mores. Gestures enacted towards ghostly preservation of one's self to be memorialized forever in an abstract heaven.
