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“Tell all the truth,” Emily Dickinson writes, “but tell it slant.” In terms of film coverage, our bread and butter here at Hyperallergic is documentary. But as our coverage writ large — reviews, opinions, reporting, original art — demonstrates, there are many ways to tell a truth.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the best art films of the year. This list, as you might expect, is eclectic, jump-roping between avant-garde short film and YouTube essays, feature-length investigative documentaries and the intrepid, iterative efforts of late-night talk shows.
These works of moving image tell truths that cannot be as thoroughly or artfully conveyed in any other medium, such as the “whirring body” of Loïe Fuller in Obsessed With Light, which Eileen G’Sell likens to “a lambent flower.” Or the relentless use of extended footage of people doing the same repetitive work in sweatshops in Wang Bing’s Homecoming trilogy — “if you think it’s hard to sit through,” Dan Schindel writes, “imagine what it’s like to do that work.”
Sorted by release date in North America, here are the top films of 2024. —Lisa Yin Zhang
No Other Land, directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor
From the moment it debuted at the Berlinale Film Festival in mid-February, this was the most controversial documentary of the year, spawning death threats for its directors. This searing film, which looks into encroaching Israeli settlements in the West Bank, arrived just a few months into the country’s ongoing assault against Gaza. In the back and forth between the Palestinian and Israeli members of the filmmaking collective behind the camera, the movie captures how a synthesis of viewpoints frames every media object we see. Amidst 2024’s deluge of images of Palestinian suffering and resilience, this film’s contribution — its portrait of constant rebuilding, and protest, and resistance — should not go overlooked, even as it still can’t find a distributor in the United States. —Dan Schindel
Read our original review.
Pictures of Ghosts, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Among current filmmakers, Kleber Mendonça Filho is one of the most adept at portraying the relationships between people, their homes, and their communities. In this hybrid of history and memoir, he explores his hometown of Recife, Brazil through the lives (and afterlives) of its movie palaces. Many are now derelict, some are gone, but together they embody their city in miniature. One theater’s position next to a picturesque bridge, for instance, means it’s been in the backgrounds of countless photos shot on that bridge, creating a timeline of that neighborhood’s evolution. —DS
The Other Profile, directed by Armel Hostiou
How does a namesake shape identity? How does access to social media both exploit and empower individuals in the so-called Global South? When the French filmmaker discovers another “Armel Hostiou” via an active Facebook profile in the People’s Republic of Congo, he sets out to find the impostor in person, leading to a madcap survey of Kinshasa, the largest Francophone city in the world. A Gallic, often droll version of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, this provocative documentary challenges how we see our doubles in the digital age, especially one fraught with massive economic global inequalities. —Eileen G’Sell
There Was, There Was Not, directed by Emily Mkrtichian
Probing the fraught relationship between feminist solidarity and nationalist zeal, this debut documentary follows four ethnic Armenian women whose lives are riven by the Second Artsakh War. Mixing the fairy tales of her youth with the devastating reality of the region today, the Armenian-American director presents Artsakh as both a sun-swept “paradise” and a bastion of patriarchal control to which her diverse heroines refuse to succumb. A stirring tribute to a lost homeland, There Was… calls attention to the scourge of ethnic cleansing in corners of the world long overlooked by American media. —EGS
Read our original review.
Problemista, directed by Julio Torres
Whimsical and irreverent, Torres’s directorial debut takes a fantastical approach to depicting the very real trials of immigration and creative work. To stay in New York, a young Salvadoran has less than a month to secure a visa sponsor, who comes in the flamboyant form of an embittered middle-aged art critic (Tilda Swinton). Narrated by Isabella Rossellini, the film visually scans as a ludic mashup of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — but with an undercurrent of class consciousness that feels all too relatable to anyone hustling to get by on a creative’s salary.—EGS
Read our original review.
“REFORM!” by Secret Base
For years, Jon Bois has quietly been building a playbook for making data on a computer screen cinematically riveting. His series Pretty Good (2015–17), which looks at different odd and interesting cultural moments, had long been on hiatus. Its triumphant return came in the form of this three-part essay about the ridiculous history of the Reform Party, the last real attempt at creating a viable third political party in the United States, which quickly succumbed to petty infighting. It’s a chamber drama of political grievances and machinations, acted out mainly with charts. —DS
Gasoline Rainbow, directed by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross
Directors Bill and Turner Ross tag along with a group of teens on a postgrad road trip from Oregon down the Pacific Coast, and turn it into an epic journey. The brothers’ films often straddle a line between believability and unreality; every scenario reveals itself as carefully constructed, once you think about it. Did the kids really just happen onto a party on a ferry? Probably not. It doesn’t matter, though, because the emotions of the rambling conversations and heart-to-hearts feel completely genuine. It is, as the kids say, an incredible vibe. —DS
Read our original review.
Janet Planet, directed by Annie Baker
Shot on grainy, intimate 16mm, this debut film is grounded in the spare but potent dialogue of its Pulitzer-winning playwright of a director, whose early ’90s Massachusetts upbringing serves as the bucolic backdrop. Adopting the perspective of an 11-year-old (Zoe Ziegler) who is as pessimistic and guarded as her hippie mother (Julianne Nicholson) is naive, Janet Planet offers a resolutely unsentimental depiction of their filial bond. A slow burn with a daring final act, the film reminds us that so much depends on shot composition, acting, and a brilliant script. —EGS
Daughters, directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton
Co-directed by a former journalist and the Chief Executive Officer of Girls for a Change, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering Black girls, Daughters may be the most heart-wrenching documentary of the year. Following four young girls anxiously awaiting the “Date with Dad” dance held at a Washington, DC prison, the film offers a layered account of their fathers’ preparation for the event, much of which resembles group therapy for men traumatized by their own troubled pasts. A tender portrait of families caught in the correctional system, this documentary reveals the extent to which mass incarceration perhaps punishes the innocent most of all. If “our daddies are our mirrors,” as the film posits, what does it mean if they are completely off-limits to those who need them most? —EGS
Sugarcane, directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat
Unlike last year’s overhyped Killers of the Flower Moon, this disquieting investigative documentary puts native voices front and center. Prompted by the 2021 discovery of unmarked graves at a former Catholic “residential school” for Indigenous children, the filmmakers embark on a fact-finding mission that takes them from British Columbia to Vatican City. Brilliantly edited and sensitively shot, this exposé of institutional brutality and ensuing intergenerational trauma never reduces its native subjects to the status of passive victims. “Indigenous peoples are still dying from residential schools,” the film asserts. “And still living, despite them.” —EGS
Read our interview with the filmmakers.
Will & Harper, directed by Josh Greenbaum
Partnering A-list celebrity Will Ferrell with writer Harper Steele, this charming film plays off the classic road trip genre but adds a twist in the form of Steele’s gender transition, which she began in 2022. We are taken along for the ride as the two explore their longtime friendship, navigating gender, fame, and the blue/red divide in the United States. The drama that ensues at a Texan steakhouse proves that trans people still have to navigate an intolerant world, in which there exist people with the best of intentions who just don’t get it. But the film also shows that some of those people eventually do, and that this country is often more tolerant than it can seem online. Touching, truly. —Hrag Vartanian
Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming), directed by Wang Bing
Wang Bing, one of the chief nonfiction chroniclers of China’s shifting capitalist fortunes, completed his trilogy about young migrant textile workers this year with these two features. Through a relentless use of extended footage of people doing the same repetitive work in sweatshops — if you think it’s hard to sit through, imagine what it’s like to do it — the film drives home the tedium of this labor. But this also makes the moments of comradery and familial love, like a return home for a wedding, all the more poignant. —DS
Read our original review.
Allo la France, directed by Floriane Devigne
When the French director witnesses the gradual, then rapid, removal of public phone booths across her country, she sets out to find and document the last vestiges of a pre-digital era. With its mid-century color palette and stunning symmetrical shot composition, Allo La France may initially seem a Wes-Andersonian tribute to the endearing, yet obsolete, world of phone booths, but ultimately serves as a quiet polemic against the dangers of privatization and the dissolution of public services in France. You’ll never look at, or remember, a payphone the same way again. —EGS
Scénarios, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
It has been more than two years since Jean-Luc Godard’s death, but he continues to live on through new short film releases. Completed the day before he passed, Scénarios feels like Godard’s final thoughts embodied in film, dense with allusions and experimental free associations between different depictions of mortality, from Howard Hawks movies to social media war footage set in rapid montage. Like much of his work, it demands rigorous attention and thought, yet remains widely open to interpretation. To the very end, no one was doing it like him. —DS
Black Glass, directed by Adam Piron
Eadweard Muybridge is famous for his motion studies in the 1800s, which constitute some of the earliest approximations of moving images. He also accompanied the US Army during the Modoc War, staging photos of Indigenous aggressors for propaganda purposes. Setting these photographs against modern footage of the landscapes where they were shot, Adam Piron creates a brief but powerful intonation of how photographic images have been part of the colonizer’s war on indigeneity. People die, the film suggests, but the land and the memory endure, however warped. —DS
American Muslims: A History Revealed
These six short documentary films tell unlikely stories about being Muslim in the United States. Among the incredible stories they share is the unusual tale of the first mosque in North Dakota and the moving story of Muhammad Kahn, an immigrant from Afghanistan who traveled to the United States in 1861 and fought in the Union Army before sparring with the US government for the veteran pension he deserved. This series may shift some of your thinking about the history of diversity in this country — it’s longer, for instance, than you might think — and new revelations finally allow a fuller story to be told. Highly watchable. —HV
Exhibiting Forgiveness, directed by Titus Kaphar
“Relationships are hard. They’re hard,” a mother tells her resentful son, who is estranged from his abusive father. Few films depict the depth and complexity of childhood trauma — or Black masculinity — more cogently and sensitively than this debut film from artist Titus Kaphar, whose lived experience serves as the backdrop. Both an indictment of the art world’s racial hypocrisies and a tribute to the tenets of forgiving on one’s own terms, Exhibiting is a work of art about the art of survival — and of healing — when neither necessarily serves the bottom line. —EGS
“Silverback,” from the series Nature
I wasn’t sure what to expect in this 43-minute documentary, but by the end, I was moved by the connection between filmmaker Vianet Djenguet and a protective 500-pound silverback gorilla in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly the empathy the former showed toward the latter. Djenguet’s three-month journey, often surrounded by security forces, gives you a peek into the psychology of a great ape who has never been habituated to humans, and the distrust he has built after decades of mistreatment and familial tragedies. It was the first time a documentary made me consider the impact of generational trauma on apes. The film works, too, because Djenguet learns as much about his own desire to connect with an animal that isn’t as eager to do the same. —HV
Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop
In less than an hour, Mati Diop finds ways to approach the issue of artifact repatriation from a multitude of perspectives – including that of the artifacts themselves. Through voiceover, the documentary gives an inner life to a statue of a Dahomeyan king being given back to Benin by France. The statue’s anxieties about his return to his homeland poignantly crystallize ideas about cultural alienation and homecoming. —DS
Read our report on the film here.
Black Box Diaries, directed by Shiori Itô
Editor’s Note: The following contains mentions of sexual assault. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org.
Based on her memoir of the same name, Itō’s investigative documentary examines, in painful detail, the director’s sexual assault at the hands of television reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, only to witness her criminal case tossed out by police. In a country where only 4% of women report rape, Black Box Diaries reveals the extent to which the #MeToo movement in the United States both galvanized and overlooked victims in other countries and from other cultures. “I’m not an activist or a propagandist,” Itō vents to a loved one when facing national pushback. In this film, she achieves her own kind of justice in confronting the hypocrisy of Japanese officials head-on, precipitating actual legal changes. —EGS
Read our interview with the filmmaker here.
Leonardo da Vinci, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon
In classic PBS and Ken Burns style, this two-part, four-hour documentary tells the story of the original Renaissance man, who seemed to march through history with a sense of purpose that makes him continually relevant to this day. Combining interviews with experts and images of his art, Burns and team don’t demystify Leonardo so much as contribute to his mystique as a universal genius — though I never quite understood how likable and funny the Renaissance master was to his contemporaries until this film. This is a good primer for the novice, and kudos to the documentary team for not ignoring the artist’s sexuality, but instead including it in a very matter-of-fact way that helps normalize queerness in historical people, creating a fuller picture of their often wondrous lives. —HV
Obsessed with Light, directed by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum
Less in-depth biography of Loïe Fuller’s life than a chronicle of the dancer’s impact on the last 100-plus years of culture, this documentary heralds “La Loïe” as a singular agent of her own success, a woman as unapologetically brash as she was creatively ingenious. A lustrous tribute to the lesbian icon’s vision, Obsessed with Light juxtaposes archival footage with contemporary iterations Serpentine Dance, a genre she created. To see original footage of Fuller onstage, her whirring body a lambent flower, is to reconsider what makes dance — or any art form — “modern.” —EGS
Read our original review.
The Girl with the Needle, directed by Magnus von Horn
With its stark chiaroscuro lighting and Michal Dymak’s haunting black-and-white cinematography, The Girl with the Needle exudes a shadowy aesthetic redolent of German Expressionism. Following one woman’s struggle to survive during the devastating aftermath of World War I, this visual tour de force pierces the dark, banal heart of misogyny in early 20th-century Denmark. Bracingly relevant to ongoing discussions of reproductive and bodily autonomy, this is a film best viewed with little knowledge of its true-crime basis. —EGS
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
During a trying year, it was great to have John Oliver offering his highly researched and entertaining takes on a world gone awry. From Trump’s plans for mass deportation to Israeli settlements in the West Bank to hospice care in the United States, Oliver finds a way to combine his unique and hardcore nerdiness with his need to produce a highly watchable story that challenges the attention span of audiences normally deathscrolling on personal devices. I’m not sure the American mediascape has anyone like Oliver, who can discuss Indian or British elections with the same intensity as corn production, pig farming, or student loan debt, while still finding a way to go viral in the process. Oliver demonstrates that some are still committed to the political purpose of education, and the portion of the public that knows that journalism is key to keeping them informed. —HV
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