​There’s a part in the excellent documentary Hail Satan where a member of the satirical Satanic Temple talks about the irony of the Satanic Panic, where seemingly all of American culture imagined ritualistic sexual abuse and demonic rituals in every dark basement with a heavy metal poster on the wall and Dungeons and Dragons in the cabinet, only for that same vision of sexual abuse to be later uncovered in churches perpetrated by priests and ministers.  Osgood Perkins’  horror hit Longlegs wonders, what if James Dobson was right?  What if Satan really was infiltrating families in the form of an effeminate metal freak, corrupting them in the service of the dark lord himself?  This Robert Eggers-esque approach, where the belief system of a subculture is treated as true, utterly fails in Longlegs.  It’s one thing to conjure Norse mythology or Puritan paranoia, and it’s another to plumb a phenomenon so recent, that the falsely accused continue to rot in prison. 

​Let’s not pretend that there’s a vast wealth of movies about the trans experience, but for the viewer who stays plugged into the world of independent cinema and has access to the theaters that program them, there are more and more examples every year.  In the first 9 months of 2024, there’s been Crossing, Monkey Man, National Anthem, and The People’s Joker, with Emilia Perez soon to come.  These films have been some of the best of the year, and the hope is that there are more and more onscreen ways into trans lives that use the medium as more than just a visual memoir, which feels like the most boring outcome.  Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is one of the best possible outcomes, as it is plainly about the writer/director’s own feelings as a trans woman, but can also be read as an allegory for the kind of teenage alienation that fails to dissipate with age.  Its personal specificity is so precise that it does the classic thing and taps into the universal.

​Luca Guadagnino hops genres from erotic thrillers (A Bigger Splash) to coming of age (Call Me By Your Name) to horror (Suspiria, Bones and All), but he always brings a lusty romance that enchants his characters and takes over their higher brain functions til all that’s left is animalistic passion.  He does the same for the sports genre in Challengers, another dense and sensual critical hit from the Italian director.  With his magnetic trio of stars, Guadagnino crafts a game of musical chairs between a character who demands control, a character happy to give it up, and a character who scoffs at the idea of control in the first place.  Using tennis as a backdrop, Challengers is a riotous feat of filmmaking from one of cinema’s most exciting filmmakers.

One of the most irritating critiques of Oppenheimer was its omission of the Japanese victims of the atomic bomb.  Christopher Nolan chooses to omit any images of their suffering beyond on off-screen newsreel.  It’s easy to imagine the worse version of the film that does include those images, just as it’s easy to conjure up the opposite critiques.  How dare a white Englishman appropriate Japanese misery for use in his blockbuster?  The best people to deal with the aftermath of the atomic bombings of the Japanese are the Japanese themselves, a truism that’s been enacted over and over again in countless movies made by Japanese directors, up to and including Godzilla, one of Japan’s most enduring 20th century cultural exports.  Godzilla Minus One continues in this long tradition as the latest version of the lumbering nuke-metaphor became an international hit and a critical darling.  Director Takashi Yamazaki expertly balances big-screen kaiju thrills while exploring and purging the strain of suicidal nationalism that infected Japan during World War II.  

​In Jonathan Glaser’s The Zone of Interest, a father and son, depicted as earnest and industrious factory owners who take pride in their work, make a big sale to a major prospective client.  The actors portraying them do an excellent job of feeling excited but downplaying it, as though the characters are too decent to be good at hiding their emotions well.  This scene could be the climax of an underdog story, where the elderly father’s dream of building something that will guarantee his legacy and the success of his descendants is finally achieved.  Instead, it’s one horrifying entry of many, as the company is selling incinerators to Nazi death camps, each efficiently designed to function around the clock.  Glazer’s film focuses on the client, Commandant Rudolf Hess (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children who live in a homestead directly abutting the walls of Auschwitz.  Like the factory owners, they’re carrying out their own stories while hundreds of thousands are being snuffed out a few hundred meters away.  Glazer uses all his considerable cinematic talents to observe and contextualize this family, never letting them forget how it is they’ve come to live the good life and watching as they shrug.