Welcome to Part 2 of what I hope will be an annual Rasher Report tradition. During late 2024 and early 2025, I watched more than 50 movies that had been released in 2024. Now that everything is available on streaming, I'm awarding the best of what I saw. This post focuses on the work behind the camera, looking at the elements that make a great film great, or that become the saving grace of a film with problems in other areas.

Here's Part One, with my awards in four acting categories.

Best Writing

It’s hard to tell what’s in a screenplay without reading it, because so much of what’s on the page is translated to visuals instead of being spoken word for word. So I’m looking at what I could be certain of as a viewer: dialogue, narrative, and story structure.

Levan Akin, Crossing

Akin’s narrative of displacement and belonging, miscommunication and connection, takes place in three languages plus gestures and drawings. It’s the rare film that handles multiple languages the way people really experience them, but also makes sure the viewer is oriented enough to follow.

Annie Baker, Janet Planet

Baker has created a local language for this film, full of quips and profound observations as well as the private vocabulary and shorthand of a realistic family. Some lines make you laugh out loud, while others imply hidden or avoided truths. And it walks the fine line of depicting a precocious child as sometimes startlingly articulate, but always still a kid.

Bertrand Bonello, Benjamin Charbit, and Guillaume Bréaud, The Beast

This absolute mess of a film has amazing bones, and much of what’s frustrating about it boils down to a failure to translate its ideas from page to screen. Those failures don’t seem to be the script’s fault: its time-bending sci-fi structure feels airtight even when the viewer has to work to make connections, and its actors aren’t always up to the cleverness of its polyglot dialogue.

Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist

Another film that navigates multiple languages and levels of proficiency, giving each character a distinct voice. Despite its length, the film moves fast and feels packed with important events and conversations, largely because of a tight and clearly signposted structure.

Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain

The film’s dialogue feels lived-in but artful, with lots of room for actors to convey more or different things than they intend. Humor is a big challenge in a film with such serious subject matter, and the tone of gallows playfulness works consistently.

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

It was hard for me to get through a film as viscerally unpleasant as The Substance, and it’s a credit to Fargeat’s tightly constructed and witty script that I made it to the disgusting and bonkers end. The surrealism is so controlled that it almost feels like reality – not a straw man reality, but the horror movie we all live in.

 Azazel Jacobs, His 3 Daughters

I’m not sure what’s harder to write: a monologue that feels organic to the narrative, or an argument between two characters with a long history that feels human and unstaged. Jacobs does both with finesse, and also crafts each reveal as if placing it with tweezers.

Josh Margolin, Thelma

Perhaps the funniest script of the year, and one of the finest follow-throughs on concept: live long enough, and everyday activities have action-movie stakes. There are dozens of guns placed on the mantle, and they all go off when you least expect them.

Best Visuals (Live-Action)

If I try hard enough, I can tell the difference between cinematography and production design. But when I’m watching a film, especially for the first time, the visual elements usually strike me as a gestalt. For this category, I considered cinematography, editing, production design, visual effects, costumes, makeup, and hair – whatever contributed to a film’s overall visual language.

The Brutalist

The film itself has as clear an ideology of aesthetics as its traumatized protagonist. It’s a lesson in the precepts of Brutalism, all clean lines and controlled slants of light, wide shots punctuated with nodes of activity. The big reveal of the renovated library, as the shelves float out of the walls, may be my favorite visual moment of the year.

Challengers

Every space in the film looks like a tennis court, framed with white boundaries. It’s great to see a film embrace color, often so saturated that it’s unnerving. The camera has a lascivious eye, especially for male bodies.

Conclave

I saw someone online complain about the contrast between the adolescent machinations behind closed doors and the wide-shot pageantry in the interstitial sequences, but that’s the point: all the outside world sees is the pomp and circumstance. The institutional dustiness on every interior surface feels so real it makes you cough.

Janet Planet

An earthier, more modest approach to visual language, but no less effective. It’s full of off-center shots, often providing a child’s eye view. I remember being a kid in the ‘90s when this film is set, and it’s a spot-on representation of the clothing and living spaces of that time.

Nickel Boys

The riskiest visual innovation of the year, telling a whole story in first-person plural without making it feel like a video game. The camera peers up from the floor and out from corners, or wobbles to nod a response or fidget at a desk. Visual information from montages or quick cuts flies past too fast to take it all in, but that overwhelm feels intentional and immersive.

The Substance

It’s hard to tell where the makeup effects end and the CGI magic begins, and those practical effects go a lot further than you’d think. This turns the cheery candy-colored aesthetic of advertising into an overlit nightmare – the horror of a retouched smile reflecting through a window, outshining the dim blue drone of TV light.

Wicked

Musical maximalism done right. Big, sweeping shots make Oz look like a vast and coherent world. We’ve mostly forgotten how to shoot large-scale dance numbers, but this film revives the art. Costumes and makeup are stylized but fit the cast’s diverse bodies, looking just lived-in enough.

Best Sound

As with the Visuals category, I’m combining several types of technical work here: sound effects, sound editing, music coordination, and score. I’m pleased that this is one of the categories where I get to talk about some movies that don’t come up elsewhere.

Challengers

In my mind, Challengers has the best score of any film this year, and nothing else comes close. That score is used brilliantly, accenting and setting emotion without taking over. There’s a lot of smart sound editing, too, such as the way intimate conversations tangle with crowd noise.

A Complete Unknown

As a Bob Dylan fan, I had lots of issues with this film overall, but the thing about it that really worked for me was its use of diegetic sound. Music always seems to be coming from somewhere – a live performance, a radio, the cacophony of street noise, the rhythm of rain – and transforming into inspiration.

Crossing

In this polyglot film, dialogue is thoughtfully edited to communicate or obscure, recreating the displacement of not understanding what’s said. There’s also a ton of strategic silence and a series of fabulous needle drops that efficiently convey the type of space you’re entering.

Monkey Man

This blend of action movie and introduction to Indian ethno-religious politics is an exciting mess, but man, do those punches land. It’s a noisy movie, with the layers of sound often communicating several messages at once, but with enough care that an attentive viewer can pick up the threads of music, shouting, and Foley artistry.

Nickel Boys

This film’s use of sound is crucial to the sense of a reconstructed memory. So much is half-heard, presented as an incomplete document. As much care has gone into sound editing as visual editing, and the result is a film with a sonic language as much as a visual language.

Venom: The Last Dance

I love a loud, stupid movie, and this is definitely loud but not as stupid as it seems. Tom Hardy’s dual lead role leaves him talking to himself a lot of the time, and the natural feel of those conversations is a triumph of sound editing. Two key needle drops seem to stop time while advancing the narrative, and each interior space has its own soundscape, from a Mexican dive bar to a streamlined torture lab.

Best Direction

A lot of the success of a film gets attributed to the director, when often it’s others in the crew who are really responsible for what works. But when everything works together, I know the director(s) made it happen.

Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, No Other Land

Most attempts to humanize tragedy fall into predictable tropes, and this documentary’s team of directors seems to have come in prepared to address and subvert every one of them. I can’t imagine leaving this film without a sense of urgency, and that’s because the directors do so much more than collect footage or compile interviews – they make the viewer realize we’re all part of this story.

Andrea Arnold, Bird

Arnold is exceptionally successful in rolling out this film’s series of magical realism reveals. The movie’s world seems lived-in and real, but motifs continually tie the narrative and its images together. Every actor portrays the gap between what their characters believe and what is really happening – a real trick for a director to evoke consistently, and all the more so when working with children.

Annie Baker, Janet Planet

Most movies about parent-child relationships pull in close, mirroring the intimacy of that bond. But Baker gives her mother and daughter so much breathing room that it’s sometimes uncomfortable, trusting the viewer to gradually catch on to their patterns and ways of communicating. While the camera often mimics a child’s-eye view, the film as a whole feels more like flipping through a photo album, landing intensely on each important moment before turning to the next.

Sean Baker, Anora

For all my ethical problems about how Baker runs a set, he might be my favorite living filmmaker. He’s one of the few for whom auteur theory holds: he insists on doing a lot of the work himself because he knows how, and because it ensures each film will adhere thoroughly to his vision. In most hands, this film would be a shaggy romp, but Baker draws attention to the visual and dialogue motifs that create continuity and tread the tightrope between fairy tale and social realism.

Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

When a film clocks in at nearly four hours but flies by, the director is doing things right. Although it’s divided into acts, the film flows as smoothly as well-designed architecture, as if we’re moving from room to room in Laszlo’s life. While I didn’t connect with every performance, it’s clear that Corbet had a strong sense of what he wanted from each actor and guided them expertly toward it.

RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys

How do you adapt an imagistic first-person novel into a film that captures its experimental weirdness but also brings to life the horrors of history that it witnesses? I’m not sure Ross could articulate an answer any more than I can, but no 2024 film came close to this one in terms of directorial ingenuity. It’s not just cool and creative – it all makes sense.

Further Reading

Junot Diaz's Forced Disappearing Act - I loved teaching Diaz's short fiction as part of my college composition courses, and I remember one young woman of Caribbean heritage telling me how much his writing had helped her find her own voice. Unfortunately, Diaz seems to be a sex pest at best and a predator at worst. The author makes a strong case for keeping his work in the literary canon despite his horrible behavior, and for examining the racial biases that lead us to excuse some artists while silencing others. I'm not sure I would be comfortable teaching Diaz now, but I've managed to navigate students through historical monsters like Edmund Spenser by examining how what we know of an author personally colors our reading of their creative work. On the other hand, there are living authors who have made it clear that even discussing their writing implies complicity with their reprehensible views and actions. Anyway, I'm glad I'm not at the front of a classroom anymore, so I can present this as an ethical quandary rather than having to confront it in a syllabus.

And a cat picture!

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