Overstreet's Favorite Films of 2024 — The Top Twelve

Gradually, I'm posting my list tonight. Because it sounded like fun. Who knows if anyone will be monitoring this while the Oscar show unfolds...

This year, I’m going to post my picks differently than I have before.

Since tonight is Oscar night, I’m going to count down my top twelve favorite films of 2024 here, and then, later this week, I’ll post a follow-up with a secondary list of twelve more. Finally, I’ll add a third post with Honorable Mentions.

I’m going to reveal these one by one over the course of the evening. If you don’t see a complete list of twelve here, just keep checking back!

Also… over the course of the week, I’m going to post videos with each entry so that I can talk to you directly about why these films are meaningful to me. (That’s tough to do while watching a show, so I’m not doing that tonight!)

Remember: Art is not a competition.

The Oscars are largely a popularity contest, prone to whims and trends and agendas contrary to artistry. So I make no claims about what might qualify as the “Best Films” of any year. Our experiences of art are personal and largely subjective, so when I share my favorites, I am telling you what I think is excellent, what moved me, and what has become meaningful to me — but I’m also revealing things about myself. Our experience of art is about what happens between us — our questions, our dreams, our fears, our longings — and the mysterious work itself. Thus, there is no “objective” conclusion about a work of art.

That’s why so many Oscar choices and omissions of the past look ridiculous to us now.

So, for those who are interested, here are my top twelve favorite films of 2024. Will the list change over time? Almost undoubtedly. But here’s how I would rank them today…

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12.

All We Imagine as Light

director and writer: Payal Kapadia

My synopsis: Mumbai nurse Prabha is married, bu ther husband works in Germany and she hasn’t seen him in over a year. A kind doctor she works with at the hospital has taken a liking to her, but she is too traditional and principled to compromise her marriage. Her roommate Anu, however — younger, bolder, and more independent — is already compromising: She’s giddy about her affair with Shiaz, an infatuated Muslim man. When a hospital cook, Pavarty, finds out developers are going to demolish her residence, she decides to move out of the big city and back to her childhood home in Ratnagiri, and Prabha and Anu, furious at the injustice of her predicament, sign on to help her move. Before long, they’re in what feels like another world, far from the frantic pace of the city. Here, it’s hard to keep anything hidden, including a tabooo relationship, or repressed anger toward a spouse. When a drowning man needs the urgent attention of a visiting nurse, worlds collide in mysterious ways.

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11.

Close Your Eyes

director: Víctor Erice | writer: Michel Gaztambide

Preliminary engagements 2023; wide release 2024.¹

My synopsis: It’s 2012, and the Spanish film director Miguel Garay is tormented by a mystery that left his great film The Farewell Gaze unfinished: Did his head actor, the great Julio Arenas, who disappeared from the production, really die by falling off a cliff? Or might he still be alive somewhere? When he gets a chance to revisit the question on an “unsolved mysteries,” Garay learns troubling new details that leads him on an investigation. And that journey will bring him, the actor’s daughter, The Farewell Gaze’s editor and archivist, and the woman both Miguel and Julio loved into discoveries about the fragility of memory, and how, in its ability to bring the past to life, cinema carries tremendous power both to harm and to heal.

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10.

His Three Daughters

director and writer: Azazel Jacobs

Preliminary engagements 2023; wide release 2024.²

My synopsis: Three daughters of dying man—Katie, Christina, and Rachel—must suffer stormy conversations and painful silences as they decide how to manage his last days in his New York apartment. Katie struggles with her anxieties as she returns to the apartment after a long absence and, as the oldest sister, strives to assert control over these tenuous matters. But that brings her into direct confrontations with Rachel, her weed-smoking stepsister. Rachel has lived with their father for several years, growing very close to him even as she has felt ignored and unvalued by her sisters. Christina, who has been busy as a wife and mother, pays the price for trying to play the reconciler. And as they navigate work out their grudges and misunderstandings, the heart monitor goes on beeping from the other room, where their father suffers, unseen by the film’s audience but very much on our minds in every moment.

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