The best movies I watched in 2024

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 13, 2025 | In Reviews

It’s time for my annual list of my favorite films I saw in the past year. Eight of the twenty-two films listed here we discussed on Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast, in which cases I link to the relevant episode.

New films:

Ethan Hawke, Wildcat. The film is a respectful and nuanced portrayal of O’Connor, her faith, and her art, accomplished by extensive quotation from her prayer journal and letters, as well as several interludes depicting her short stories (which keeps the film from feeling like a formulaic biopic).

Wildcat’s portrayal of the relationship between artistic ambition and faith is deeply relevant to Catholic artists. It should inspire them to find creative ways of dealing with the pressures that would subvert their God-given gifts, whether those pressures come from other Catholics, family, or the secular art world.

Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus One Minus Color. You may be surprised to hear that one of the more morally profound movies of recent years is a Godzilla reboot! The original 1954 Godzilla was a pop-culture reckoning with Japan’s nuclear trauma and the ethical implications of superweapons. But the new Godzilla Minus One (I highly recommend the black-and-white version) goes even deeper, examining not only the trauma of the war but the psychological and spiritual fallout of a culture that produced the kamikaze phenomenon. The film confronts the culture of death that dominated WWII-era Japan and its corruption of the idea of self-sacrifice, and shows how our sacrifices in war should be rightly ordered to preserving the value of human life rather than seeking a heroic death for its own sake.

Note: Many of the films listed below can be viewed with a subscription to the Criterion Channel.

More films dealing with Catholicism:

Roberto Rossellini, Journey to Italy (1954) & Stromboli (1950). These are two of the five films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, most of which are concerned in some way with religion. Journey to Italy is the best on a Catholic level, depicting a rich, selfish married couple (outstandingly played by Bergman and George Sanders) whose stay in the vicinity of Pompeii (and in Italy’s atmosphere of Catholic piety and fecundity) forces them to confront their disintegrating marriage, their own selfishness, and their mortality. Stromboli (the original Italian title is Stromboli, Land of God) has the more exciting scenario, with the sophisticated Bergman marrying an illiterate fisherman in order to escape a postwar internment camp, then finding herself growing increasingly desperate to escape the remote volcanic island he calls home. However, Stromboli does not land its spiritual themes as successfully as Journey to Italy.

Roberto Rossellini, Paisan (1946). Made in the immediate aftermath of WWII, Paisan consists of six vignettes (often based on real events) following the movement of American troops liberating Italy from south to north, starting in Sicily and ending in the Po Delta. This Italian film was made with American help, but very often the tragedy of the scenarios relates to the American troops’ incomprehension of Italian plight and their culture more generally. One of the more lighthearted scenarios features three American chaplains (Catholic, Protestant and Jewish) visiting Italian monks and being confronted with a very different religious culture than even the American priest is accustomed to (in his character you can see Vatican II coming round the bend). Paisan’s use of locations is remarkable, especially to anyone who has visited a place like Florence.

Jean-Pierre Melville, Léon Morin, Priest (1961). In occupied France during World War II, a Communist woman named Barny (Emmanuelle Riva) enters a confessional for the first time since her first Communion. She is there not to confess but to troll the priest by saying “Religion is the opiate of the people.” To her surprise, Fr. Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is not thrown off balance, but offers a compelling response to each of her critiques of Catholicism. Barny starts to see Fr. Morin regularly for a mix of intellectual tête-à-tête and spiritual counsel, and is gradually drawn back to the Church—but mixed in with her spiritual attraction to the Church is a romantic attraction to the man.

This, combined with subplots about the experience of wartime France, is the premise of Léon Morin, Priest, and it may on first summary sound like the sort of sensational and irreverent story no Catholic wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. But Fr. Morin does not break his vows. Instead, this is one of the best priest movies ever made, a realistic, tasteful (and not excessively cringe-inducing) treatment of a real problem that arises in priestly life. From the priest’s point of view, it’s a thought-provoking study of pastoral prudence; from the female protagonist’s point of view, it deals with the necessity of gradually purifying one’s motives in the course of conversion.

Jacques Demy, Ars (1960). Demy is best known for his Michel Legrand-composed musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. Almost nobody has heard of his early short film about St. Jean Marie Vianney. Vianney does not appear as an active character in the film; rather, over the film’s fifteen minutes, a narrator describes his life and motivations as we move through the places he inhabited—his church, the streets of his village, his private room where he did penance. Crowds of modern parishioners appear in the film, representing Vianney’s flock. The film could be described as reverent, but also perhaps as a little cold, or at least ambivalent about the severity of St. Jean’s preaching. I chiefly came away with an impression of the isolation and loneliness the saint suffered in his early efforts to break through to his hard-hearted flock.

Robert Wise, The Sound of Music (1965). Everyone has seen this movie except me (until I watched it for the podcast).

More excellent films:

Terrence Malick, The New World (2005). This represents my second and third viewing of the film. The New World is an underrated masterpiece about Pocahontas and the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Starring the 14-year-old Q’orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, Colin Farrell as John Smith, and Christian Bale as John Rolfe, Malick’s retelling of the story remarkably combines realism and historical accuracy with poetry and romance, as all three protagonists explore not just one but multiple new worlds, geographical and interior.

With The New World, Malick definitively entered a new stage in his career, particularly in his unforgettable collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The result is an aesthetic that is humble and receptive rather than magisterial. Rather than dominating reality, the camera seems to enter into it, so that we can contemplate something the camera cannot exhaust. The New World is a wonderful prelude to Malick’s masterpiece, The Tree of Life.

Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story (1953). Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Tokyo Story is a quiet, gentle, yet tragic family drama about the distance that can grow between elderly parents and their adult children. It’s a critique of the transformation of culture and mores in postwar Japan, particularly the loss of filial piety, but it’s not just specific to Japanese culture. The film holds a mirror up to both parents and children, and if it is critical of those who fail to honor and love their elderly parents, it also shows that this is often a result of the parents having failed to love their children. Tokyo Story should provoke an examination of conscience in viewers of every generation.

Edward Yang, A Brighter Summer Day (1991). The 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, directed by Edward Yang, is considered by many one of the best movies ever made. The film is set in Taiwan, shortly after the Chinese Civil War, when the country was under martial law, with a political and cultural pressure felt at every level of society. At the center of this intricately plotted four-hour drama is the family of fourteen-year-old Xiao Si’r, whose strong sense of honor and justice is pulled in various directions as he gets caught up in a youth gang and romantically entangled with the girlfriend of a disappeared gang leader. But more than that, this incredibly textured four-hour drama gives the sense of a whole uneasy social fabric.

Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt (1943). I didn’t know Hitchcock was capable of portraying such human warmth—but that of course makes what happens all the more devastating.

David Lean, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Alec Guinness was excellent at playing ambiguously maniacal characters; his British colonel who, stuck in a Japanese POW camp, takes on as a personal mission his captors’ orders for his men to build a bridge, is one of his most fascinating performances.

Erich von Stroheim, Greed (1924). One of the most legendary films of the silent era, Stroheim’s Greed adapts the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague, telling the story of how a lottery win activates the vices of a young couple and destroys their lives. Originally almost eight hours long, it was cut by the studio to two-and-a-half hours. Though the film lacks subtlety and takes an erroneous heredity-is-destiny approach to human nature, its final act filmed in Death Valley is unforgettable cinema.

Larry and Andy Wachowski, Speed Racer (2008). The Wachowskis’ live-action adaptation of a popular manga about a family whose lives are centered around high-speed car racing was not very well received when it came out, but its reputation is growing these days. Bursting with creativity, it’s an avant-garde art film in its visual execution while simultaneously being unabashed pop entertainment through and through—it’s incredibly fun to watch.

Christopher Nolan, Tenet (2020). A wonderfully entertaining action sci-fi movie that to enjoy, you must deny your need to understand the plot. Approach it like a piece of music.

S.S. Rajamouli, Eega (2012). In this insane Indian action movie by the director of RRR, a man is murdered, and then is reincarnated as a fly in order to do anything and everything a fly can do to take revenge on the evil gangster who killed him, while protecting his girlfriend from said evil gangster. I believe in neither reincarnation nor revenge, but I do believe in sheer creative audacity.

Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet (1996). Perhaps the definitive Shakespeare film adaptation, and the only one to do Hamlet in its entirety. Great cinematic panache by Branagh, and an all-star cast. Unfortunately there are some brief sexual flashbacks during Polonius’ first dialogue with Ophelia.

Oliver Parker, Othello (1995). Starring Laurence Fishburne, Jr., as Othello and Branagh as Iago. This is the most emotionally affected I’ve been by a Shakespeare film. Suffers from the same unchastity problem as Branagh’s Hamlet—all too common in film adaptations of Shakespeare.

Abbas Kiarostami, Homework (1989). The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami spent the first two decades of his career making films for or about children. In Homework, his second feature-length documentary about education, he goes to a rather militaristic Iranian school and interviews a succession of young children on their feelings about homework. A suspicious number claim that they prefer doing homework to watching cartoons. Our feeling that their answers and behavior might be constrained by the presence of the camera is reinforced by Kiarostami’s frequent cuts to a view of the cameraman himself, and of Kiarostami interrogating the children while wearing imposing sunglasses. The movie starts out cute, but gets heavy by the end.

How to Make Use of Leisure Time Painting (1977). Kiarostami infuses so much heart and beauty into this 18-minute documentary that I would rather watch what is essentially an after-school special than almost anything coming out of Hollywood these days. And the music is fantastic.

Through the Olive Trees (1994). The third film in Kiarostami’s so-called “Koker Trilogy” (the first two are Where Is the Friend’s House? and And Life Goes On) gets highly meta. While shooting a scene in the second film, Kiarostami noticed some tension between the two young actors playing a married couple. So he invented a love story about these two actors, and the third film is about this story that takes place while that scene from the second film was being shot. Shot, I should add, by a director who is directing scenes involving the character of the “director” from the 2nd film—so we have two different actors playing directors, both of which represent the real director, Kiarostami. As avant-garde as this sounds, it’s a highly entertaining story that never could have been done as well by a director hewing to commercial instincts.