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.

To my fellow celluloid-based life-forms,

Dana, I do indeed appear to have developed a reputation for liking big, sprawling movies. When I went to see Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist at the New York Film Festival this year, I ran into several friends and colleagues who assumed I was there to see it again. (I have also, it should be noted, developed a reputation for watching movies multiple times.) When I asked why my pals thought I had already seen it, one of them replied, “Because it’s such a you movie.”

I’m still not sure what that means, but I think I know what it means. So it’s perhaps odd that I liked but did not love The Brutalist. (Hello, hi, I’m the lone weirdo who thinks that film’s second half is better and crazier and more interesting than its first.) But I do like Brady Corbet’s work in general, and it’s been fun watching him go from relatively little-known actor to niche director to, now, potential Oscar contender. I remember, years ago, interviewing him and Mati Diop at Sundance when they were both actors co-starring in Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer. I met them at a restaurant, right after they had come out of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena, a decidedly austere and un-Sundance-y picture that had somehow made its way to Park City that year. I had just heard about the death of the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos earlier that day and broke the news to them; they were both devastated. We began our interview with a toast to Angelopoulos (whose works, by the way, occasionally clocked in three hours long, or longer), and I remember thinking, These are my people. So it’s been exciting to see them both become acclaimed filmmakers. Diop, of course, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 for the wonderful Atlantics, and then won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale this year for the excellent Dahomey—a mesmerizingly spectral, 68-minute documentary about the return to Benin of 26 looted royal artifacts—which was also at this year’s New York Film Festival, premiering on the same day as The Brutalist! Two very different artists, with very different styles, who were both forged in the nexus between the elliptical and the ambitious.

So, The Brutalist didn’t entirely do it for me (though I’m sure I’ll watch it again at some point, heh), but there were certainly some big-swing epics this year that did. First off, here is my Top 20 list, because I no longer believe in mere Top 10s:

1. Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice)

2. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

3. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)

4. The Fall Guy (David Leitch)

5. Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

6. Girls Will Be Girls (Shuchi Talati)

7. Horizon: An American Saga (Kevin Costner)

8. No Other Land (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor)

9. Ghostlight (Kelly O’Sullivan, Alex Thompson)

10. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)

11. The Wild Robot (Christopher Sanders)

12. The Order (Justin Kurzel)

13. Daughters (Angela Patton, Natalie Rae)

14. Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson)

15. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Benjamin Ree)

16. Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)

17. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)

18. Anora (Sean Baker)

19. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)

20. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

When I look at this list, one thing really jumps out: Many of my favorite films this year were about the way we see each other—how much our identity, our very existence, depends on the way others perceive us. Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada is about a dying filmmaker who has been revered as a counterculture hero but is convinced his life has been a lie and feels he must confess it to his wife, in her presence, before he passes away. In Sean Baker’s Anora (which I imagine we’ll be talking about more as the Movie Club proceeds), we see how Ani (Mikey Madison), the stripper who elopes with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the vape-happy son of a Russian oligarch, is not so different from the various attendants and servants and maître d’s surrounding this irresponsible princeling. Baker’s cutting and framing turn what starts off as subtext into text: Ani ignores all these underlings at first—a better life means never having to worry about those in the Beneath ever again—until circumstances force her into solidarity with a trio of hired goons who’ve come to end her marriage.

Meanwhile, in Richard Linklater’s marvelous Hit Man, Glen Powell’s nebbishy, jorts-wearing philosophy lecturer/audio-tech guy poses as a hired killer for a series of police sting operations, and soon adopts the persona of an outlaw badass as his own, especially once he falls in love with a prospective client who continues to believe that he’s actually a freelance murderer. (He even gets better at sex.) In Benjamin Ree’s utterly crushing documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, we learn about Mats Steen, a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (a debilitating, progressive, ultimately fatal disease), who spent most of his final years playing World of Warcraft from a wheelchair in his basement. After he dies, his parents discover that in this virtual world, he was Ibelin Redmoore, a brave, wise, muscle-bound private investigator who had a genuinely positive impact on the real lives of his fellow players, none of whom knew he was dying and in extraordinary pain. (I get teary-eyed just trying to type out the premise of this movie.)

Ultimately, that’s what really got me about my favorite film of the year, Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes (which actually premiered at Cannes last year, so a lot of people who should have it on their Top 10 lists probably didn’t even consider it). It’s the story of Miguel (Manolo Soto), a filmmaker searching for his best friend, Julio (José Coronado), an actor who walked off the set of one of their movies three decades ago and hasn’t been heard from since. In the final act, Miguel finds Julio living at a retirement home run by a convent of nuns. Julio has lost his memory and has no idea of his past as a famous actor. He lives in a shack at the convent, doing odd jobs. The nuns love him, and he seems content. Miguel’s struggle now becomes trying to spark this man’s lost memory using images from the picture they were shooting when he disappeared, hoping that something will make him remember who he once was. But as we watch Miguel’s efforts, we realize: He needs Julio’s memory more than Julio does. Miguel’s career as a filmmaker, along with a huge part of his life, ended with Julio’s disappearance. He’s lost his family and has spent the past however many years living off the grid, growing tomatoes by the beach. He needs Julio’s redeeming gaze so he can recover his own identity, to recognize that he himself exists—not the other way around.

Coming from an 84-year-old legend of Spanish cinema, a director who has, sadly, made only four features over more than 50 years (all of them masterpieces), Close Your Eyes is one of those movies that make me perceive the whole world differently after each viewing, even though the truth it ultimately expresses is universal and obvious, if often unspoken.

This is the point where I should launch into an extended riff on RaMell Ross’ stunning, stunning, stunning Nickel Boys, my other favorite film of the year. Adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about horrific abuse at a Jim Crow–era “reform school,” Ross employs a first-person point-of-view camera—which has traditionally been a very gimmicky device, but he makes it work by crossbreeding it with a fragmented, elliptical editing style, then intercutting between the points of view of his two protagonists. Talk about a movie that’s all about seeing!

But really, I’ve gone on too long, and I know there are other big fans of Nickel Boys here. So I’m really just setting it up, to pass the baton.

Take it away, folks,

Bilge

This post was originally published on here