Jharrel Jerome stars in Unstoppable as Anthony Robles, a NCAA wrestling champ who took on all comers despite being born with only one leg.Ana Carballosa/The Associated Press
I’ve already highlighted my 10 favourite films of 2024 elsewhere. But some of the 127 other new movies I watched this year deserve attention, too. Here is an alternative Top 10 list: a collection of the most overlooked, underrated, underseen and unfairly dismissed films of the year – and how you can watch them right now.
10. Unstoppable
There was a moment during this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival in which it looked like William Goldenberg’s underdog sports story might have landed the fest’s coveted People’s Choice Award. Unstoppable certainly checked all the boxes: a fantastic lead performance from Jharrel Jerome as Anthony Robles, a NCAA wrestling champ who took on all comers despite being born with only one leg, plus solid and starry supporting turns from Jennifer Lopez as Robles’s mom, and Don Cheadle as his coach. And then there are the film’s remarkable visual effects, which digitally erase Jerome’s real right leg – proof that the best VFX work goes unnoticed. Yet after Unstoppable left TIFF empty-handed, MGM Amazon seemed to forget about the movie entirely. Don’t make the same mistake. (Streaming on Prime Video starting Jan. 16)
9. Didi
A wonderfully uncomfortable, deeply hilarious coming-of-age movie, Sean Wang’s Didi plays like an extended and surprisingly welcome visit to the filmmaker’s childhood bedroom, if it happened to be preserved in the amber-ooze of Mountain Dew Code Red circa 2008. That is the year – the summer, specifically – in which 13-year-old Chris, a.k.a. Didi (Izaac Wang), is trying to figure out so much of himself and his ever-changing surroundings. Living with his Taiwanese single mother Chungsing (Joan Chen), college-bound sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), and nai nai/grandmother (Chang Li Hua) in the suburbs of Fremont, Calif., Didi doesn’t seem to be interested in much other than arguing with his family, skateboarding and trying to get closer to his crush. Obviously mining his own youth for the material, Wang does a remarkable job of digging deep into the uglier, more cringeworthy corners of his memory, a courageous route given that so many other storytellers might instead choose to sit in the comfortable corners of sun-dappled nostalgia. (Streaming on Prime Video)
8. The Promised Land
Mads Mikkelsen has the rugged, dirt-under-the-fingernails gravitas that suggests he could survive the harshest of climates. Perhaps this is simply a perception born from the Danish actor’s choice of productions, whether they require surviving the tundra in 2018’s Arctic or the American West of 2014’s The Salvation. But whether roles make the man or vice-versa, Mikkelsen is someone who you want to be standing next to when the storm arrives. All of which makes The Promised Land a perfect fit for the star survivor. An historical epic that is as grand as it is brutal, the new film from regular Mikkelsen collaborators Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) and Anders Thomas Jensen (Riders of Justice) casts the hard-eyed actor as an impoverished army veteran who obtains royal permission to farm a desolate piece of land in 1700s Denmark. (Streaming on Hoopla and Crave)
7. Kneecap
When writer-director Rich Peppiatt first decided to make a fictionalized movie chronicling the rise of the controversial real-life Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap, who rap in a blend of English and the endangered Irish mother tongue, the filmmaker wanted to cast the musicians as themselves. Except Peppiatt had no idea whether Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh and JJ Ó Dochartaigh could act. Turns out, the three young men can, and then some, riffing on both their stage personas and day-to-day personal lives with the kind of slick charm that cements the lads as natural-born performers. Shot with the zigzagging energy of an incendiary rap battle and laced with the sharp politics of a generation that’s been too long disenfranchised, Peppiatt’s film is both a rags-to-semi-riches success story, and a treatise on Irish geopolitics post-Troubles. Think 8 Mile meets Trainspotting, shot through with a lightning bolt of don’t-give-a-fig ferocity. (Streaming on Hoopla)
6. Between the Temples
“Are you laughing or crying?” That question, posed from one character to another late in the new film Between the Temples, sums up the production’s jagged sensibilities neatly. Directed by Nathan Silver, the movie is a deliberately unbalanced affair about confused souls trying and often failing to navigate the fine line between tragedy and comedy, set in and around a suburban synagogue. But that quick bit of dialogue also conjures up a specific kind of nerve-rattling, nostalgic anxiety that likely courses through the audience Silver is most directly targeting: Jewish moviegoers who have gone through the sweetly awkward pain of being bar or bat mitzvahed. Oy, what a movie this is. (Streaming on Hoopla)
5. Kill
A film that answers the likely unasked-till-now-but-still-important question of what would happen if John Wick boarded the train in Snowpiercer, the new Hindi-language film Kill is a spectacular exercise in high-speed, throat-kicking chaos. Pushing the limits of Bollywood’s typically conservative tolerance for blood and guts, writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s feature is built on a number of sly narrative and stylistic tricks that gradually cement its status as a new action classic full of nasty surprises. (Streaming on Prime Video)
4. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
The confrontational and playful Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has been alighting the international cinema scene for a good decade now, and just about escaped into the wider cultural conversation with 2021’s absurd, explicit and brilliant satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, far and away the best movie made about, and during, the pandemic. But Jude graduates to a new level of controlled chaos with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a bracing and eye-opening snapshot of the current moment. Following a harried production assistant who is helping put together a workplace-safety film for a dubiously ethical megacorporation, the film tackles the gig economy, TiKTok, Romanian history, the immaturity of the European film industry, worker exploitation, and more, all culminating in an epic, wild ride whose presumed destination is hell itself. (Streaming on MUBI)
3. Love Lies Bleeding
Shot with an eye for grime and populated by characters fatally allergic to doing the right thing, director Rose Glass’s follow-up to her deeply discomforting 2019 horror film Saint Maud represents as much a levelling up of ambitions as it does an impressively stubborn commitment to pushing buttons audiences might not even be aware that they have. The bad-romance tale between a small-town gym clerk (Kristen Stewart) and the hitchhiking bodybuilder with a dark past (Katy O’Brian) – with an unhealthy amount of guns and double crosses thrown in – is an unnerving yet deeply romantic ride. (Streaming on Prime Video)
2. About Dry Grasses
A desolate, forbidding landscape. A hero who may not be worth rooting for. Dialogue laced with forbidden politics and sexual desire. And an epic run time designed to toy with the limits of the human attention span. This isn’t Dune: Part Two, but rather another, altogether different kind of cinematic masterpiece from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan that has disappeared from the art-house conversation after its quick release this past February. Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character. Through a half-dozen scenes of intricately choreographed dialogue – long, looping conversations whose naturalism belies their careful construction – the film builds a remarkably real, often uncomfortable world of thorny men and prickly philosophies. (Streaming on Criterion Channel)
1. The Order
There is not much more you can ask for in a movie than watching FBI agent Jude Law, cigarette constantly dangling from his mouth, engage in a gritty cat-and-mouse game with vile neo-Nazis led by a baby-faced Nicholas Hoult in the 1980s Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately lost in the glut of year-end releases – bypassing Canadian theatres entirely – director Justin Kurzel’s thriller based on a real-life case plays like a tightly wound cross between Michael Mann’s Heat (Hoult’s thugs fuel their cause by pulling off bank heists) and Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (another film in which fascists built their nightmarish paradise in the woods). Keep all your eyes open for The Order once it hits the on-demand market in the coming weeks.