35 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.
Chris Nash's debut takes the slasher apart from the killer's point of view, and the radical formal choice is also the reason the film divides its audience. I want to argue for 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.
Damian McCarthy's second feature is the best pure-horror indie of 2024, and the clearest argument going for what micro-budget Irish genre cinema can do when it commits to a single effect and doesn't blink.
Tim Mielants's adaptation of the Claire Keegan novella was reviewed as a modest Cillian Murphy vehicle. The careful reading is that the film's restraint is the indictment, and the restraint is harder to film than the indictment would have been.
Adam Elliot's second stop-motion feature took eight years to make and collected festival prizes from Annecy to Annapurna. The Australian argument is that his particular strain of misery-claymation is one of the country's more unusual exports.
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.
Mike Leigh's first film since 2018 reunited him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste for a character study of sustained anger. The argument is that the film is one of his best, and the conditions that produced it are the ones his method has been waiting to find.
Nathan Silver's improvisational comedy about a grieving cantor and his retired music teacher is the specifically strangest American indie comedy in years. I keep coming back to it.
Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson's 2024 indie is the specific small American film about grief that the specific small American film is specifically built to make. And rarely does this well.
Andrea Arnold's fifth feature split the reviews, and the split was real. The retrospective argument is that the film's unexpected magical turn is not a failure of the social-realist grammar, it's what the grammar was always walking toward.
Bertrand Bonello's 2023 film, released in the US in April 2024, is the strangest and most formally ambitious film I saw in either year. An argument for the specific dread of being alive in multiple decades at once.
RaMell Ross adapted Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel through a first-person camera almost continuously across two hours. The argument is that the formal gamble is the adaptation, and the adaptation is, so far, the film of the awards year.
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.
Gints Zilbalodis made a dialogue-free animated feature in Blender with a team of a dozen, won the Oscar, and put the Latvian film industry on the global animation map. The patient argument is that the form, not the novelty, is the achievement.
Sean Wang's 2024 debut feature is one of the best American coming-of-age films in years. Specifically about being thirteen, Taiwanese-American, and on MySpace in 2008.
Jesse Eisenberg's second feature as director-writer is a specifically small, specifically patient Polish heritage-tour film, and the film it most resembles is a Broadway play that someone has somehow filmed correctly.
Colin and Cameron Cairnes's Australian indie horror, shot as a 1977 late-night TV broadcast gone wrong, is the rare genre exercise whose formal commitment pays off at every level.
Mohammad Rasoulof shot the film in secret, fled Iran during post-production, and arrived at Cannes with a three-hour domestic thriller about a judiciary father and his protesting daughters. The retrospective argument is that the long cut is the cut.
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.
Payal Kapadia's Cannes Grand Prix winner was received, on its US release, as the decade's strongest import from Indian indie cinema. The re-reading is that the film is even stranger, and more formally considered, than the initial reception allowed.
Mike Cheslik's 108-minute silent slapstick about a 19th-century fur trapper fighting mascot beavers is one of the strangest American indie films of the decade. It is also one of the funniest.
Mk.gee's debut full-length is the strangest guitar record a twenty-something American songwriter released in 2024, and nine months in it is still rewiring what popular guitar is allowed to sound like.
I took my younger sister to see Megan Park's second feature thinking it would be a throwaway, and we walked out crying. The retrospective case is that it is the sharpest coming-of-age indie of the year, and I'll fight about it.
Alice Rohrwacher's 2023 film about a British grave-robber in 1980s Italy is the kind of quiet, strange, specifically rewarding film that the American art-house circuit was once built to deliver. It still can.
Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2023 film, released in the US in late 2023 and on streaming through 2024, is a specifically disciplined three-act structural experiment. Also, quietly, one of the most important queer films of recent cinema.
Katie Crutchfield's follow-up to Saint Cloud did not need to do anything except be good. It is good in specific, deliberate ways, and those ways are the record's argument for itself.
Aki Kaurismäki's 2023 film, out of retirement and better for it, is one of the shortest great films of the decade. An 81-minute case for the romantic comedy as serious cinema.
Tran Anh Hung's 2023 film, released theatrically in February 2024, is the best film about food and cooking since Babette's Feast. It is also a deeply disciplined romance in disguise.
Raine Allen-Miller's 2023 debut is the rare contemporary British romantic comedy that actually commits to its register. Specifically a London film in a way very few London films are.
Azazel Jacobs built a three-hander around a Manhattan apartment, three sisters, and a dying father in the next room. The film is much better than Netflix's release pattern suggested.
Justin Vernon's Bon Iver returned in October 2024 with a three-track EP after a five-year studio silence. The short form is the point, and the record argues for it specifically.
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.