A movie is made of moments. When I think of a great movie, let’s say Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese 1990), I’m not thinking of the entire story. I’m thinking of the “Funny how?” scene, Spider’s death, Karen pointing a gun at Herny’s head. This feels certainly true for 2024, with a surfeit of great scenes that are sure to live long in the memory even as the plot becomes more and more fuzzy over time. The mirror scene in The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). The fight scene in Anora (Sean Baker, 2024). Adam Driver saying “cluuuuuuuub” in Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024). The climax in Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024). We didn’t pick any of those scenes (too basic, probably), but we do have a great selection of fantastic moments that you need to check out, stat.
Hopes and Dreams in By The Stream (Hong Sangsoo, 2024)
Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream stands apart for its captivating climax. Hong’s pointed inflection of the zoom spotlights four girls from the drama troupe as they discuss their hopes and fears for the future. The sequence’s harsh simplicity commands an adamant sympathy in the way it portrays the girls’ common uncertainty about what lies ahead. I found myself welling up, as did a fellow critic, who outside the cinema told me that, in the flow of tears, he had muttered darkly to himself: “Grow up.”
Joseph Owen
The Opening Scene of An Unfinished Film (Lou Ye, 2024)
If you ever stumbled upon old photos or recordings of whatever kind, material of which you might not know much more than the fact that you are its originator, then you have likely felt the strange, perhaps even troublesome sensation of self-alienation to which our memory increasingly relegates us as we age.
Of such nature is Lou Ye’s eponymous Unfinished Film, the embedded, never-completed picture the protagonistic filmmaker and Lou Ye stand-in tries to unearth in the opening scene of the Chinese auteur’s daring genre-hybrid. As we see the film crew unpack the old Mac Pro tower that somehow has already transformed into this relic of a different era, causing first worries about its willingness to start before finally, and frenetically, cheering upon its compliance, it invariably prompts us to reflect on our relationship to time.
Patrick Fey
The ending of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)
The fascist despots of the world are working desperately to maintain a hegemonic narrative around whatever inequity they’re wreaking. But in the final moments of George Miller’s underseen epic, a wickedly satisfying fairy tale ending has nature and matriarchal rage harmoniously conjoin in a vengeful flourish, one whose generative connotations outpace anything cooked up by the creative luddites currently running Hollywood.
The State of AI in Me (Don Hertzfeldt, 2024)
A half-formed mass of nerves and organs fuelling the myriad screens inuring the human race to its own destruction sings deep beneath the earth an aria for a memory it’s never experienced. With equal absurdism and poignancy, Don Hertzfeldt sneakily gives us the most resonant image for our AI-addled moment since Spielberg’s A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001).
Nick Kouhi
Baby Annette dances to “Modern Love” (1983) in It’s Not Me (Leos Carax, 2024)
David Bowie may have written “Modern Love,” but it’s Leos Carax’s property now. And whilst not all recorded music is intended to have a visual component, something is undeniably completed when that song is paired with someone sprinting across a screen from left to right.
In It’s Not Me, a 40-minute featurette that seeks pleasure in discourse and dialectics, Carax finds a more transparent form of enjoyment by combining memorable aspects from several of his features at its climax. Baby Annette, from his 2021 musical, takes the place of Denis Lavant’s Alex in Mauvais Sang (1986), run-dancing to the Bowie song against a Holy Motors (2012) mo-cap background. Its obviousness as a final flourish is happily eclipsed by its ecstatic impact.
David Katz
The Bobita scene where the filter doesn’t want to properly latch onto the face from Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023)
Definitely, the scene I laughed at most in any film this year — the film as a whole, in fact. More to the point, it’s the vulgarity, ridiculousness and sheer ‘TikTokiness’ — all amplified when it suddenly doesn’t work. Radu Jude has spoken of TikTok and IG being the new cinema, and whilst I think that’s a truly terrifying future, he’s probably right. Oh, what’s that, this is technically a 2023 film? OK, I’ll chuck in the gag from Juror #2(Clint Eastwood, 2024) where JK Simmons’ sharp-minded juror is replaced by a true-crime mom — media truly does rot your brain
Fedor Tot
A Neighbour Comes to Pay His Respects in Good Children (Filip Peruzović, 2024)
Two unnamed middle-aged siblings clear out their deceased mother’s house. A neighbour kindly comes to pay his respects. Shot all in one long, awkward take, Peruzović slowly peels back his ulterior motive: the return of a borrowed item. The perfect blend of passive-aggression and comic timing.
Riga??? in Sterben (Mathias Glasner, 2024)
That feeling when you get so drunk you wake up in Latvia. One of the all-time character introductions to the difficult alcoholic Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg). Bonus points to the conducting-scene-gone-wrong and the worst mother-son Kaffee und Kuchen of all time.
Using Google in Juror #2
Toni Collette straight up Googling the killer in Juror #2 (feature) is simply the perfect metaphor for Clint Eastwood’s late style. Let’s be honest: this is how most crimes are solved.
Redmond Bacon
