In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2024, Bilge Ebiri, K. Austin Collins, Alison Willmore, and Odie Henderson—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Salutations, fellow denizens of Megalopolis!

Glide with me into the Slate Movie Club on this garishly lit walkway that cost $120 million worth of grapes. Let us chat, Aaron Sorkin–style, about how Francis Ford Coppola got a pass for making a movie that was total garbage simply because he also made The Godfather. Some of the reviews I read featured writers twisting themselves into pretzels to justify the logic of praising a movie they didn’t think was that good.

“To be honest, it’s a piece of shit! But … FOUR STARS ANYWAY! Coppola RULES!!”

Truthfully, I have to hand it to Mr. Coppola. The hood rat in me stands here in awe, because I’m fully on board with the adage of hating the game, not the player. He finally made the dream movie project he wanted to make, on his terms and with his money. And he had the nerve to make it look like that monstrosity I saw on IMAX at a critics screening in the AMC Lincoln Square attended by nine other people. Even the guy who came out to do the live interview scene looked as if he’d rather be giving a lap dance to Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu than “talking” to Adam Driver. (And the gimmick didn’t even sync properly—thanks, Nicole Kidman’s theater chain!)

As much as I hated Megalopolis, part of me admired that it felt like a big middle finger from the filmmaker to paying customers, much like Eyes Wide Shut did when it came out. I’m all for pissing off the audience, even if I’m in that audience. Considering the way things are going right now, I think the world is Megalopolis and we’re just squirrels trying to get a glowing nut.

Dana, thank you for that Joan Didion quote about film criticism. I hadn’t heard that one before. It’s my kind of petty, but please allow me to retort: La Didion, this is why your version of A Star Is Born is the worst one! You didn’t think I was gonna walk in here like a beacon of choirboy goodness, did you?!

But I digress. Isn’t it odd that Adam Driver and Adrien Brody are the cinematic architects of 2024, a duo of designing men trying to scope out territory for themselves? I don’t know if either of them fits the description, though Brody’s performance in The Brutalist is his best since The Pianist.

Though I liked the first half of The Brutalist more than the second (yes, I know, how stereotypical of me), I’m with you, Bilge, on not loving it enough for it to make my Top 20. Your story about interviewing Brady Corbet reminded me that I sat next to him at a dinner held for the talent during the Off Camera film festival in Krakow, Poland, back in 2013. I programmed a nine-movie sidebar on Black American cinema; he was there because Simon Killer was in competition. He held out his hand and introduced himself, and I recall that our conversation was quite pleasant. Who could have predicted he’d be helming a three-and-a-half-hour critical darling in 2024?

Here’s my Top 20.

1. Nickel Boys

2. Hundreds of Beavers

3. Hard Truths

4. Flow

5. Sing Sing

6. The Wild Robot

7. Thelma

8. Hit Man

9. Conclave

10. A Real Pain

11. The Room Next Door

12. Dahomey

13. His Three Daughters

14. Blitz

15. The Fall Guy

16. Music by John Williams

17. Nowhere Special

18. Evil Does Not Exist

19. The Fire Inside

20. Ghostlight

Bilge, we both have Hit Man and The Fall Guy in our Top 20. To me, those seem more like “Bilge movies” than The Brutalist, perhaps because I once sat in front of Bilge at a screening of The Mask of Zorro. As a bona fide noirista, Hit Man was right up my alley. And as a lover of all those car-crash movies from the 1970s, The Fall Guy was also my speed. I’d be afraid to ask what people think constitutes an “Odie movie.” Folks would probably say M3gan.

To dig back into Dana’s commentary on criticism: 2024 worried me. In the introduction to my 10-best list at the Globe, I asked, “Am I broken?” The pandemic and this election did me in, to be honest. I’m angrier, sadder, more cynical. I considered whether that affected me as a critic, as I’d given more zero and half-star reviews this year than I’d ever given in one year.

But I also gave nine four-star reviews—also more than I’d ever given in a year. So if I am broken, and I believe I am, I’m cracked in equal parts.

But it’s really all about perception, isn’t it? And though Nickel Boys topped my list, my initial viewing of it presented a problem for me that I had to work out on my own. The perspective in which it is shot—that is, RaMell Ross makes us see the film through its characters’ eyes—felt for me a bit like putting a hat on a hat. I’m a Black man, and I’m being given a perspective I already have. The level of redundancy made me feel profoundly uncomfortable, and I’m smart enough to realize that this is a “me” problem, not a flaw of the film.

It’s one of those times I was glad I had a few weeks before I needed to turn in my review. I sat with the movie—and mind you, I’d read the book before I saw the film—and I turned it around in my head. I remembered how, when Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s character leans in to hug Turner (Brandon Wilson), I subconsciously leaned forward in my seat. I could feel the arms of my late aunties who passed enveloping me. And I started to weep.

I may be broken, but at least I can still feel.

Now, somebody yell at me for giving Anora the “polite three-star review.”

Megalopoly yours,

Odie

This post was originally published on here