My favorite movies I saw in 2024 that are not from the US
I mentioned last week that in 2024 I tried to watch mostly movies that were not from the United States. Here are some of my favorites that I watched for the first time during that year.
I should have done this roundup in January... but I was very busy trying to ship multiple games at once!!
Night is Short, Walk On Girl
It's perfect. It is full of so much love for city life and for being young and doing little projects with your friends. And it is funny as hell!! I was so impressed by every part of this. Another one I cannot believe I waited this long to finally see.
Playtime
Watched Tati's best work on January 1, 2024, and it set the tone for the rest of the year. This is one of the biggest brained movies of all time. I was absolutely blown away by it. Every performer in the film is, like, one of the best clowns to have ever lived. Stunning!!
The Big House
This one is a bit of a stretch to include, but I feel justified: it is a documentary about a University of Michigan football game created by Japanese documentarian Kazuhiro Soda. It is, like, an anthropological examination of American big-state-school football and sports culture and university life and labor, and clearly something that only could have been made by someone who was not from the US - his perspective is extremely clear throughout. Absolutely one of the best documentaries I have ever seen, period.
Certified Copy
A real mindbender!! I saw a bunch of Kiarostami movies last year and they will all be on this list. This wasn't my favorite of them all, but it was totally compelling and very, very strange! It's amazing how your guesses about what might be going on - and what the characters might want from one another - changes over the course of this film.
Muriel's Wedding
Can't believe it took me this long to see this one. Incredibly funny. Has some of the hardest lines ever written. Instantly catapulted into the top ranks of my favorite movies of all time (I refuse to calculate how many are up there, but this is one of them for sure).
Junk Head
This movie was animated by hand by Takahide Hori over the course of seven years - the first four alone, then the last three with a team. It's extremely funny and grotesque and shocking, and some of the stuff he does with the camera and the more cartoon/action stuff the characters do in-frame is just mindboggling. It really does feel like you are watching a singular human accomplishment on the level of, like, a sixteen foot wide painting in an art museum, or something. Just tremendous in scale!!
Night on the Galactic Railroad
Heartbreaking, brilliant animation with a lot to say and a lot left unsaid. If you have ever had a difficult personal confrontation with religion, grief, or your sexuality, this one is probably going to speak to you very directly. And the animation is fucking beautiful.
Ricky-Oh: The Story of Ricky
Absolutely deranged b-movie perfection. Some incredibly gross (yet obviously fake) gore scenes. Constant dismemberment, disembowlment, etc. Constantly completely hilarious. A plot bursting with Weird Fucking Guys. Nothing makes any sense. I loved it.
Run Lola Run
Another one that made me ask: why did I wait so long to see this?? Felt like a Rosetta Stone for a lot of my husband's work - it is definitely Brendoncore stuff, he admits. Very sincere and absurdist in a way I really enjoyed.
Where is the Friend's House?
What an incredibly concentrated and pure emotional core-sample of what it's like to be a conscientious, rule-following person in a moral crisis!! The moral crisis is so minor and the protagonist's anxiety about doing the right thing is so fucking intense. Felt like a flashback to being me at age eight, but like, so much more catastrophic and tremendous than anything I experienced, lmao. I loved it. 2024 was my year of Kiarostami bangers, including...
Close Up
Oh my god, this one was good. I watched it for my birthday and I made all my friends watch it with me. I have no idea if they were just pretending to like it or what, but it was an absolutely insane experience for me. What was synthetic here? What was real? What was performance? What was an unadulterated truth? You really can't tell. Kiarostami jumped up to one of my favorite directors ever last year. I loved this one so much.