Past and Present in the Cinema of 2024 (2025)

The past haunts the present in the cinema of 2024. More and more of our film conversations, it seems to me, center on nostalgia, its increasingly dominant role in the stories our industries and filmmakers choose to tell, and the potential pitfalls of dwelling in the (creative or historical) past. In this, the season for end-of-year roundups, I’ve chosen to offer up a brief overview of the landscape built around this theme and delimited by my own messier and more diffuse viewing habits, which means that what follows is not a definitive “best of the year” list. Instead, what unifies the following capsules besides my perspective is some connection to the filmic relationship between past and present, between cinema and its own history. After beginning with a Hollywood movie that I felt could stand in for some of the most distressing industry trends, I’ll survey—in no particular order, save for one overall favorite—a handful of the 2024 releases that, even amidst forbidding signs for the future of film art, demonstrate for me its continued capacity to approach both the present moment and the history of the medium with integrity and invention. The films below represent not only, in my view, the good and the bad of ‘nostalgia’ filmmaking, but also a number of thrilling rejoinders to the idea that contemporary filmmakers are allergic to the contemporary. Many of the best films of the year suggest that cinema can still (in seasonally apposite fashion) live in past, present, and future all at once—but the worst seem to indicate that the corporate drive to seek rents on our collective memory is still accelerating disastrously.

A brief note on release year: I saw all of the following films in 2024, but a few were certainly seen by some critics in 2023, and one or two may have had Oscar qualifying runs late last year. I am classifying them all by the year in which they came to a theater near me, confident at least that the bulk of critical conversation in each case took place in 2024. If you are minded to be more precise about these things, I can only apologize.

Alien: Romulus

This movie did not have to be bad. Fede Alvarez is a technically gifted filmmaker, and Don’t Breathe especially suggested that he had two things that might have made for an excellent Alien film: the ability to generate inventive scenes from the internal logic of a simple premise, and the meanness to play for keeps. The Alien franchise is also one that never had the chance to become strongly associated with a single auteur; though Ridley Scott’s belated quasi-prequels are suggestive of what thematic through-lines he might have pursued if given free rein from the start, the series as it has actually developed is determinedly arhythmic and iconoclastic, with successive filmmakers perhaps admirably willing to play fast and loose with the preoccupations of their predecessors. On paper, then, here was the opportunity for a ‘legacy sequel’ that wasn’t simply that, a cynical franchise cash-in that might have nonetheless become something distinctive, like some of the cynical franchise cash-ins of a bygone age (whoops—nostalgia detected). While the film we ultimately got has flashes of technique—nice use of color and lighting, some striking images, the occasional glimpse of a coherent set piece—it seems emblematic of a ‘legacy’ culture in the industry which is simply no longer capable of admitting blockbuster films with a fully-realized point of view. Alien: Romulus is constructed entirely from spare parts, stuffed with self-satisfied Easter eggs that remind you of everything but the film you’re actually watching, and built to a genuinely unforgivable extent around a monstrously reanimated Ian Holm simulacrum as tasteless and incoherent in conception as it is distressingly executed. The conclusion that franchise filmmaking is at this point virtually irredeemable as a creative enterprise seems difficult to avoid; the mammoth box-office successes of, for instance, Wicked Part One and Deadpool & Wolverine are the triumphs of an industry which cares less than ever. Coming on Christmas Day: Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa.

Juror #2

I’m hoping to write more extensively elsewhere about Clint Eastwood’s thorny, provocative picture, which weaponizes some of the most comforting verities of American narrative fiction to implicate both protagonist and audience. The film is worth mentioning here, however, because of what else it weaponizes: namely, the appealing rhythms and satisfying craft of a largely-defunct filmmaking mode. As soon as the logline for Eastwood’s potentially valedictory film began to circulate it was being widely described as a “throwback,” a middlebrow thriller (complimentary) of the kind Clint made a dozen times in the 90s and 2000s, a legal drama of the sort that once served as reliable star vehicles and representatives of the mid-budget. Nostalgia for these films, and for their era of studio production, is something I indulge frequently, and not always healthily; the ‘movie star’ was a kind of planetary body with its own sometimes-destructive commercial gravity, and the studio thrillers of my youth were very frequently vehicles for reactionary politics and for the construction of a hegemonic liberalism. Yet it’s that very quality which makes Juror #2 such an effective instrument, and one which, if my experience is any indication, works like gangbusters on a theatrical audience. The legal dilemma in which Nicholas Hoult’s Justin is trapped pits his conception of himself as a man redeemed by the love of his family against his broader sense of right and wrong. The soft-focus moral Americana of the liberal courtroom thriller is mobilized against the mythic image of the American family; a filmmaker whose roots in Hollywood go back to the midcentury lends his immense stature to a deceptively ambivalent ‘throwback’. Nostalgia is a blade that’s sharp on both ends, and Juror #2 is ruthless in where it chooses to cut.

I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature constructs its central allegory in such a way as to have its cake and eat it too: strictly speaking it is only fleetingly about being trans at a textual level, which in my view keeps its more overt messaging from being ham-fisted or saccharine, but it is in practice overwhelmingly, self-evidently about being trans, which grounds it in a particular kind of affecting real-world experience. This is a real razor’s edge to walk, and as a cis writer I’m hesitant to speak over trans friends and colleagues who have sometimes disagreed with one another vigorously on the question of the film’s success in walking it. But I personally found it perhaps the most emotionally overpowering film of the year, with a dense, miasmic atmosphere that mirrors the stifling life conditions of its protagonist Owen (Justice Smith—heartstopping), and a conclusion that had me plastered to my seat as the credits rolled, stumbling out of the theater with my eyes on the ground, dimly aware that the sun seemed too bright. On paper, the numerous textual and stylistic references to the tween- and teen-oriented genre TV of the 90s make I Saw The TV Glow an exercise in nostalgia, but it’s nostalgia as defined by Don Draper of Mad Men, who at one point translates the word—not quite accurately, but searingly—as “pain from an old wound.” The fictional TV show of Owen’s fixation might well be more “real” than his crushingly oneiric everyday, but it’s also frightening, possibly lethal, and there’s nothing warm or wistful about the way the film regards his life of missed opportunities and lurching, empty time. Schoenbrun has no interest in the past as a place to shelter, or in pop culture as a soothing reminder of better times. For them the past is where the wounds were made, and the world must happen now, while there is still time.

Janet Planet

The phrase “directorial debut by a decorated playwright,” fairly or unfairly, produces certain expectations. Even if very good, you imagine, the film will have a certain ‘writerly’ quality, an emphasis on blocked conversations, a certain kind of structure that’s discernibly the product of the stage. How maddening, then, that Annie Baker’s Janet Planet is not only exceptional, but distinctively and unmistakably filmic, full of precise, evocative compositions and spare, elliptical dialogue exchanges. In the same way, an understandable suspicion of (quasi-autobiographical?) films about loving parent-child relationships set during the period of the filmmaker’s childhood would get Janet Planet exactly wrong. Understated specificity is Baker’s project, rather than nostalgia; the period signifiers are simply elements of a milieu the film understands implicitly, and into which each character steps fully-realized. (In this Baker is aided by superb performances from the entire cast, particularly Julianne Nicholson, who has recently expressed a feeling that the industry has seldom recognized her gifts; on this evidence, she’s unquestionably correct.) Setting, character, and image are aligned sufficiently here that pattern-recognition and revelation are able to emerge organically from narrative situations that never need to do too much. As with Schoenbrun, there’s nothing really ‘fun’ about this vision of the past, not much about this childhood that seems worth chasing; while the film is sometimes piercingly funny, I found it mostly very sad, not least because it is so clear-eyed. If Juror #2 is about familial love as a force that blinds, Janet Planet is a film about a love that comes to see, unsparingly, and the tragedy that knowing and changing are seldom the same.

La Chimera

Few films this year were more haunted by the past than Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, a sun-faded painting of a movie with a wonderfully rumpled central performance from Josh O’Connor. O’Connor’s Arthur, an archaeologist turned dowsing specialist for a band of Etrurian grave robbers, is haunted by the memory of his wife Beniamina; the landscape he inhabits is haunted by the Etruscan dead, whose tombs dot the countryside in apparently staggering numbers, legally state property but in practice largely abandoned to the centuries. Formally, too, it’s a film in conversation with a cinematic past, with lush celluloid cinematography on multiple stocks and an overall sensibility that often recalls Pasolini. Yet here again the past, however beautiful, is never wholly desirable, and the dangers of pursuing it are considerable. The grave robbers are in danger of arrest or worse, but the past they seek is in danger from them as well; Rohrwacher’s film is satisfyingly ambivalent towards these tombaroli, whose self-mythologizing gives their rowdy outlaw escapades the character of a defiant folk custom, but who are after all engaged in acts of breathtakingly casual despoliation. Their detailed knowledge of the world beneath their feet is uninflected by the transcendent, and they descend into their history ultimately to plunder it, to strip it for parts. The cultural heritage of three millennia is sold on the open market to a global ownership class that values only its aesthetics. Arthur retains enough of the lapsed believer’s faith in antiquity to be horrified by this arrangement, and to conclude that some beauties must be placed beyond its reach; his own ancient ghosts, however, tempt him back towards the dark under the earth, where La Chimera suggests there are older things than beauty to be found. The past, Rohrwacher seems to argue, can be made to serve the needs of the present; one or the other, however, may not survive the encounter.

Red Rooms

As complex and successful as some of the year’s ‘backward-looking’ films were, there was also space for Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (released in Canada last year, a 2024 film in the US) to deliver the bracingly, chillingly contemporary. There’s nothing lush or seductive about the world Plante creates, no whisper of nostalgia or elegy; these are cold, sterile, alienating spaces, and Juliette Gariépy’s Kelly-Anne is a creature of postmodernity. When not indulging a monomaniacal obsession with the trial of a vicious child murderer named Chevalier, whose garishly hideous snuff films she also pursues through the fetid recesses of the dark web, Kelly-Anne divides her time between online poker and a successful modeling career. This is the life of the perfectly atomized subject, no friends or community, no sex or food or tactile pleasures, just drab interiors and glowing screens. Everything on these screens is being sold one way or another, and there is a unifying violence to the images on display; Kelly-Anne’s modeling shots, ostensibly sleek and beautiful, are linked to the snuff films by a sense of macabre spectacle, the human body reshaped, perhaps punished, and bent to the will of a person with a camera. Even a series of jaw-dropping, nauseating (probably not the way you’d think) third-act sequences do little definitively to resolve the central whys and wherefores of this disturbingly rich text, but what we do see in the film makes it hard to imagine that the answers would be comforting. No matter how this one case resolves, the world is still the world, brutal, isolating, creating a Kelly-Anne—perhaps a Chevalier—every day. Pascal Plante, presently aged just 36, seems to possess that much-sought-after quality of clear-eyed engagement with our precise historical moment; the great success of Red Rooms lies in making you wish he didn’t.

The Beast

Any conversation about the cinema of past, present, and future would be incomplete without the only film I can think of from this year that literally takes place in all three, at least if you squint and permit 2014 to stand in for the present. To a certain extent I think you can; often the charge is not that modern filmmakers neglect the current year as such, but that they reject technological postmodernity, the plugged-in world of smartphones and social media, and in this respect 2014 is certainly close enough. At another level, however, I’m blurring a crucial distinction: The Beast is a film about a sense of what’s coming, a future already contained in the present, and in this respect it matters very much that 2014 is like 2023 but not, that it represents the not-quite-there from which we have arrived. An absurd Trump popup on Lea Seydoux’s computer screen in 2014 is ironic from our perspective, meaningless from hers; only in The Beast’s world of always-already is it portentous, ominous, a disaster that will happen and is happening now. The film’s 2044, too, is filled with things that have already happened and are nonetheless yet to come: an AI ‘revolution’ that may already be in progress (okay, maybe not, but again, you can squint); a nightclub at which years and decades are recycled as costume-party themes. ‘Pastiche’ is a word frequently applied to The Beast; Bertrand Bonello fills his three chronological segments with overt nods to The Age of Innocence, Trash Humpers, and the third season of Twin Peaks, among others, and there is a sense of knowing artifice throughout. But Bonello’s pastiche, like Schoenbrun’s nostalgia, is barbed and purposeful. Whether anything truly human can survive a world of pastiche, artifice, and lazy facsimile is something like the film’s ultimate question, one it poses formally as much as textually. The disaster is coming, or perhaps it has already come. Will the movies be able to confront it in earnest, or are they already reduced to mere imitation? And at a certain point, how will we know the difference?

Close Your Eyes

Whether film still has the power to transform a human life—whether, indeed, we should even want it to—is the question that anchors Victor Erice’s monumental Close Your Eyes, which ties personal history and the cinematic past together in a stunning meditation on aging and death. It’s a question already posed in one of only two previous narrative features by Erice, his 1973 debut The Spirit of the Beehive, a film built around the sheer power of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and the way one child’s experience of it infuses her world with fantasy, though not necessarily the good kind. Erice now returns to these ideas from the other end of the human life cycle, following an aging filmmaker and novelist named Miguel (Manolo Solo) whose career seems roughly to mirror Erice’s own. Miguel’s would-be second film as a director—glimpsed in an extended opening sequence which establishes the theme of a search for lost time—was waylaid during production by its star’s disappearance, a mischance recalling Erice’s El Sur (1983): tremendously powerful in its existing form, but robbed of its entire planned second half by a producer’s whim. These parallels, not to mention the presence of Beehive star Ana Torrent in a prominent role, suggest that Erice is engaged in a kind of intertextual autobiography, his perspective on his earlier preoccupations enriched by age and by reflection on a medium whose best days often seem to be behind it. “Miracles haven’t existed in movies since Dreyer died,” a retired projectionist tells Miguel at one point, and Close Your Eyes is shot through with love for a lost or fading cinematic world. Nostalgia? Perhaps—but not the kind that evokes a past which can be lived in forever. Erice’s is the work of a filmmaker nearing the end, and an elegy for an art form that conjures all the more powerfully in an era that sometimes seems poised to forget it.

Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World

This time the release-year purists will certainly get me, but this film screened here when it screened here, and after I saw it in April it loomed over the rest of my viewing year at a height that demands its inclusion. Radu Jude’s electric, infuriating masterpiece contains my favorite character of the year, my favorite scene of the year, and enough thematic richness to reward engagement from a dozen different angles. Its structure serves to place the past and present of Romania in direct juxtaposition: for much of the film Jude’s own footage is intercut with scenes from Lucian Bratu’s Angela merge mai departe (1981), introducing a piece of cinematic history, a fascinating intertextual thread, and a glimpse of Bucharest under Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose impact on the city we can trace visually between the two films. There might be something nostalgic about this exercise, certainly, but it’s hard to be certain how far this goes; though Jude’s vision of modern capitalist Romania is almost cheerfully dystopian, the very weight of the country’s past seems to be one of its many burdens. The film’s heroine, Angela—played by Ilinca Manolache in an explosively charismatic performance—is surviving this anarchic landscape, just barely, with a job as a production assistant on a workplace safety video. The merciless nature of this job allows Jude both to wink at the growing exploitation of low-level film workers and to suggest the ways in which capitalism inculcates complicity; Angela is being ground down by a job which also involves her in an act of grotesque corporate propaganda. Watching her navigate this frenetic existence, we touch on sex work, homicidal car culture, and faux-radical social media provocations (represented by Angela’s TikTok creation Bobita, another effortless breakout character). To describe all this political subtext, to nod towards the film’s many explicit theoretical influences—it ends with an onscreen bibliography—might be to make this picture sound like homework; but like most truly great postmodernist texts, Do Not Expect… is animated by a comprehensive sense of play, an aversion to self-seriousness, an overall commitment to fun. There is cynicism here, yes, and political didacticism too, but there is also warmth and humanity, riotous humor, and a Godardian sense of formal experimentation that is simply thrilling to watch. The world we have inherited demands much, Jude asserts, and offers little; history bears down upon us with crushing immensity, and the arts by which we reckon with it are drawn into its same decaying orbit. But we can still find pleasure here, if we do not expect too much.