Richard Brody’s Best Movies of 2024 So Far

The New Yorker

At the midway point of the year, the film critic discusses his top three films.

Transcript

00:00I'm Richard Brody, I'm a film critic at The New Yorker,

00:02and these are the best films of the first half of 2024.

00:09Jane Schoenbrun's second dramatic feature,

00:11I Saw the TV Glow, is two kinds of experience at once.

00:14Schoenbrun, who is a trans filmmaker,

00:17films the experience of dysphoria

00:19as a kind of general dysphoria,

00:21not specifically gender-oriented,

00:23but a discomfort in existing in the world.

00:26What if I really was someone else?

00:29Very far away on the other side of a television screen.

00:34It's set in an unnamed suburb.

00:36Starts out in 1996 when Owen, who's in seventh grade,

00:39is obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque,

00:42something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

00:44about two teenage girls with superpowers who fight evil.

00:47He shares that obsession

00:48with a slightly older girl named Maddie.

00:51But there's an underlying question

00:52at the center of the film.

00:53Why this fandom for a TV show

00:56that's ultimately revealed to be fairly trivial?

00:58And that, too, is one of Schoenbrun's big ideas.

01:02The reason that these two gender-conflicted teens

01:04fixate on this TV show is that, in mass media,

01:07at the time, there was nothing else for them,

01:09and so they pick up on whatever they can get hold of.

01:12In a way, I Saw the TV Glow

01:14makes its very existence its subject.

01:19It's a hard title to remember,

01:20but an impossible movie to forget.

01:22The feeling that the time for doing something has passed.

01:25It's the first fiction feature

01:26by the Brooklyn-based filmmaker Joanna Arnau,

01:29who wrote it, directed it, and also stars in it.

01:32She plays Anne, a 30-something Brooklynite

01:35who desires a relationship based on BDSM.

01:40But she also wants a romantic relationship,

01:42and those two desires come into conflict.

01:44The movie is simultaneously very earnest

01:47about emotional and sexual matters,

01:49and yet wryly, delicately comedic.

01:52I like when you tell me what to do.

01:55I know that.

01:56What else?

01:59I don't know.

02:00Can you just tell me what you want me to do?

02:02I'm telling you what to do right now,

02:04and you're not doing it.

02:06What she wants from BDSM isn't so much pain as humiliation,

02:09which is to say a controlled version

02:11of what she's getting in an uncontrolled way

02:13in the rest of her life.

02:15At her office job, which is both numbing and oppressive,

02:18and even in her family life,

02:19where her parents, though loving,

02:21are also harshly and obliviously judgmental.

02:24Love, when Anne finds it, turns out to be humiliating, too.

02:28I worry about being alone.

02:34Oh.

02:38Sorry.

02:39Her writing is epigrammatically exquisite.

02:43Her performance is bold and uninhibited,

02:46yet choreographically precise.

02:48And as a director, she frames herself and the action

02:52at just the right distance and just the right angle

02:55to lend it an air of ambiguity, complexity,

02:58and almost kaleidoscopic emotionality.

03:01The Japanese director, Ryosuke Hamaguchi,

03:04is one of the living masters of the art of dialogue,

03:06as seen in his most famous film, Drive My Car,

03:09which won an Oscar two years ago.

03:11But in his new film, evil does not exist.

03:13Though the dialogue is terrific,

03:14he does something entirely new.

03:17The movie is set in a rural mountain village

03:19not far from Tokyo,

03:21where a man named Takumi lives with his young daughter.

03:24He works as a sort of factotum,

03:26sort of handyman who helps out

03:28the proprietors of a local restaurant.

03:30But there's trouble in paradise.

03:32An entertainment company from Tokyo

03:34wants to build a glamping lodge in the vicinity,

03:37which runs the risk of despoiling the environment

03:39and in particular, ruining the water supply for the town.

03:50But in this film,

03:51Hamaguchi does something that in his urban dramas,

03:54he hasn't done.

03:55He simply watches.

03:58He looks with fascination and admiration

04:02at the physical work that goes into making life

04:05in a village, not just possible, but beautiful.

04:08Though the movie takes a tense view

04:09of personal relationships

04:11and even has a dark side to it,

04:13Hamaguchi is still fascinated by the beauty of nature.

04:16Though the movie takes a tense view

04:17of personal relationships

04:19and even has a tragic dimension,

04:21it's nonetheless an exultant movie.

04:23Hamaguchi's contemplative ardor is in no way passive.

04:26On the contrary, there's something exemplary

04:28about the art of cinema in Evil Does Not Exist.

04:30It proves that the essence of the cinema

04:33isn't just to observe beauty, but to preserve it.

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