14 pieces
Kristoffer Borgli's A24 feature used Nicolas Cage as the vehicle for a media satire that landed in late 2023 and has aged, through 2024 and into 2025, into a specifically sharper object than the reviews initially registered.
John Crowley's third collaboration with A24 runs the ten-year relationship in a non-linear shuffle, and the shuffle is what makes the film survive its cancer-drama premise. Just barely, but it does.
Rose Glass's second feature dragged the lesbian bodybuilder noir into A24 territory and got reviewed as a tonal mess. The case I want to make is that the tonal mess is the movie, and the movie earns it.
Eva Victor's Sundance-premiering debut is the early breakout of the 2025 indie year, and a specifically careful film about a specifically difficult subject.
Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland's second collaboration rebuilds a 2006 Ramadi engagement from the memories of the men who survived it, and the film's claim on attention is its specific refusal to shape.
Julio Torres's 2024 debut feature is a specifically strange American indie about a Salvadoran immigrant, a specifically difficult art-world widow, and a specifically failing visa petition. It is also, quietly, great.
There was a specific mid-budget horror economy that functioned across the 2010s. It does not function anymore. An essay on what was lost.
Alex Garland made a film about an American civil war and deliberately stripped out the politics. A year and a half later, the emptiness in the middle of Civil War is not a choice to respect. It is the thing that breaks the film.
Aaron Schimberg's 2024 comedy about an actor who gets a medical procedure and regrets it is the year's strangest mid-budget indie, and the one whose specific comic machinery I keep returning to.
Ti West closed his X/Pearl/MaXXXine trilogy in July 2024 with a film that tries to be several kinds of movie at once. A year later, only some of them worked.
Halina Reijn's erotic drama returned a genre the American studios had given up on, and gave Nicole Kidman the kind of role the mid-budget adult film had stopped being able to produce.
Annie Baker's film debut is the rare coming-of-age film that refuses every coming-of-age convention. Just a specific eleven-year-old and her specific mother, one summer in western Massachusetts, 1991.
Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore feature played small in theatres, spoke loudly to the audience it was made for, and kept speaking afterwards. A year later, it is still teaching viewers how to be seen.
A24 has closed a funding round at a $3.5 billion valuation, roughly two and a half times its previous round. The number is the story. What the number implies is the longer story.