Richard Brody’s Best Movies of 2024 So Far

[gentle piano music] I'm Richard Brody.

I'm a film critic at The New Yorker,

and these are the best films from the first half of 2024.

[music ends]

Jane Schoenbrun's second dramatic feature,

I Saw the TV Glow, is two kinds of experience at once.

Schoenbrun, who is a trans filmmaker,

films the experience of dysphoria,

as a kind of general dysphoria,

not specifically gender oriented,

but a discomfort in existing in the world.

[Owen] What if I really was someone else,

very far away, on the other side of a television screen?

It's set in an unnamed suburb.

[gentle jazz music] Starts out in 1996

when Owen, who's in seventh grade,

is obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque,

something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

about two teenage girls with superpowers who fight evil.

He shares that obsession

with a slightly older girl named Maddy.

But there's an underlying question

at the center of the film.

Why this fandom for a TV show

that's ultimately revealed to be fairly trivial?

And that too is one of Schoenbrun's big ideas.

The reason that these two gender conflicted teens

fixate on this TV show is that in mass media at the time,

there was nothing else for them.

And so they pick up on whatever they can get hold of.

In a way I Saw the TV Glow

makes its very existence, its subject.

It's a hard title to remember,

but an impossible movie to forget.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.

It's the first fiction feature

by the Brooklyn based filmmaker, Joanna Arnow,

who wrote it, directed it, and also stars in it.

She plays Ann, a 30-something Brooklynite,

who desires a relationship based on BDSM.

But she also wants a romantic relationship

and those two desires come into conflict.

The movie is simultaneously very earnest

about emotional and sexual matters,

and yet wryly delicately comedic.

I like when you tell me what to do.

[Allen] I know that. What else?

I don't know. Can you just tell me what you want me to do?

[Allen] I'm telling you what to do right now

and you are not doing it.

What she wants from BDSM

isn't so much pain as humiliation,

which is to say, a controlled version

of what she's getting in an uncontrolled way

in the rest of her life,

at her office job, which is both numbing and oppressive

and even in her family life where her parents,

though loving, are also harshly and obliviously judgmental.

For that matter, love, when Ann finds it,

turns out to be humiliating too.

I worry about being alone.

Oh,

sorry.

Her writing is epigrammatically exquisite.

Her performance is bold and uninhibited,

yet choreographically precise.

And as a director, she frames herself and the action

at just the right distance and just the right angle

to lend it an air of ambiguity, complexity,

and almost kaleidoscopic emotionality.

The Japanese director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi,

is one of the living masters of the art of dialogue

as seen in his most famous film, Drive My Car,

which won an Oscar two years ago.

But in his new film, Evil Does Not Exist,

though the dialogue is terrific,

he does something entirely new.

The movie is set in a rural mountain village

not far from Tokyo, where a man named Takumi

lives with his young daughter.

He works as a sort of factoid, and sort of handyman

who helps out the proprietors of a local restaurant.

But there's trouble in paradise.

An entertainment company from Tokyo

wants to build a glamping lodge in the vicinity,

which runs the risk of despoiling the environment

and in particular ruining the water supply for the town.

[people speaking in Japanese]

But in this film, Hamaguchi does something,

that in his urban dramas, he hasn't done.

He simply watches.

He looks with fascination and admiration

at the physical work

that goes into making life in a village

not just possible, but beautiful.

Though the movie takes a tense view

of personal relationships and even has a tragic dimension,

it's nonetheless an exultant movie.

Hamaguchi's contemplative ardor is in no way passive.

On the contrary, there's something exemplary

about the art of cinema in Evil Does Not Exist.

It proves that the essence of the cinema

isn't just to observe beauty, but to preserve it.