The results are now in for our 2024 poll of Film Comment ’s contributors! On this page, you’ll find our list of the 20 best films that were released either theatrically or virtually in 2024 in the United States, with original appreciations from our critics, as well as links to features, reviews, and interviews about these films and directors from throughout the year.

Founded in 1962, Film Comment magazine features reviews and analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world.

Oct 7, 2024 · This article appeared in the October 4, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024). Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s first fiction feature in six years, is among the 54-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to ...

Dec 13, 2024 · This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2024 coverage. Read all the lists here.. On December 12, 2024, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish led a panel of special guests—Molly Haskell (critic, author), and Michael Koresky (critic, founding editor of Reverse Shot)—for a live countdown of the films topping our year-end ...

Dec 20, 2024 · Speaking in Tongues: Take One (Christopher Harris, U.S.). Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo serves as the jumping-off point for a rhythmic collision of dance, riot, and 20th-century American cultural detritus, marking the first iteration of an evolving project from one of the most vital voices in contemporary film. (Listen to a Film Comment Podcast conversation with Christopher Harris here.)

In the hands of a different director, Showing Up might have played like yet another Sundance-style indie: a film packed with quirky characters (including an injured pigeon) and snappy, self-lacerating one-liners about the bougie artists of Portland, Oregon. But, as expected, Kelly Reichardt finds a way to complicate and enrich this premise, crafting …

Nov 5, 2024 · This article appeared in the November 1, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024). To make a movie is to appropriate—either that which is before the camera or something already filmed.

The Film Comment Letter is a free weekly digital newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing—including the Film Comment Podcast, features, reviews, interviews, streaming picks, news, and more. The Letter is delivered directly to subscribers’ inboxes every Friday morning before being made available on filmcomment.com the following Monday.

Oct 16, 2024 · As the 62nd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was.This year, the end-of-fest ritual took place in collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle, which will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2025.

Jan 17, 2025 · A character in John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick (an enjoyable book that presents magic as a vestigial nature-religion) delivers a guest sermon at a local church. It’s a pretty weird sermon, too, all about the emotions of the roundworm nestled in your small intestine, “when a big gobbety mess of half-digested steak or moo goo …