Earlier this year, I wrote in our Pride Month issue that trans filmmakers might be the next wave in LGBTQ filmmaking. Now I find that such directors have made entries in both my Top 10 list from last week and here. I’m pretty sure that’s never happened before in the same year. That’s why cinema isn’t going to die anytime soon, because we haven’t had these stories yet. May they continue in 2025, and may you have a happy New Year.
1.) No Other Land is agitprop filmmaking at its finest. Made by a team of two Palestinian Muslims and two Israeli Jews, this movie takes a scant 95 minutes to chronicle Israel’s actions in Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank. In that time, co-directors Yuval Abraham (one of the Jews) and Basel Adra (one of the Palestinians) become friends as the latter’s legal status in his own country becomes increasingly tenuous. You won’t be able to look away when Abraham shoves his camera in the faces of Israeli soldiers and settlers to ask them why they’re destroying Palestinians’ homes. The soldiers seem way more pissed off at him than at any of the Palestinians. Is he the next Michael Moore? He may just need to be.
2.) We had some fine documentaries about movies this year, but the best movie-as-film criticism was Chasing Chasing Amy. Sav Rodgers looks back at Kevin Smith’s 1997 indie comedy, how it has aged well and poorly, and how it came as a thunderbolt to the teenage Rodgers growing up gay in Kansas. Just as compelling is Rodgers’ transition during the filmmaking from lesbian to transgender man and his wife sticking by him. Do not miss the interview with Joey Lauren Adams about the terrible time she went through while acting the female lead in the film. No surprise, Harvey Weinstein treated her like crap, but she’s well aware that it could have been worse.
3.) One of the year’s best animated films was Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. Using World of Warcraft, it re-creates the in-game life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian man born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The disease prevented him from doing many things and eventually took his life at age 25, but it didn’t stop him from creating the alter ego of Ibelin Redmoore and living out a rich fantasy life, unbeknownst to the parents he lived with. It culminates in a deeply moving scene when gamers from all over the world who knew Ibelin from the game show up to his funeral in Oslo and then hold an annual gathering in World of Warcraft to celebrate his memory.
4.) Mati Diop made my list of great debut filmmakers with her feature Atlantics back in 2019. Now the Senegalese-French director makes this list with Dahomey, a startling, vivid, and sometimes bizarre accounting of the French government returning 26 works of art looted during the 19th century to Benin as they’re loaded onto crates in Paris and transported to the West African nation. The Beninese don’t receive them as positively as you might think, since France still possesses hundreds more such works in its museums. Diop takes this in and includes a mysterious voiceover narration from the point of view of one of the statues. The beautifully photographed film runs a scant 68 minutes and leaves an indelible impression.
5.) A creative music biopic finds its way onto this list, as Pharrell Williams requested that Piece by Piece be made as an animated Lego movie. Thus, Morgan Neville tracks the superstar music producer’s career via interviews with Lego versions of Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg, and the other members of the Neptunes. The approach allows for moments of transcendent visuals as Pharrell describes the effect music had on him, as well as the well-known beats from songs like “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and “Hollaback Girl” whimsically represented by stacks of pulsating blocks. Neville won an Oscar for his previous music documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, but I’ll watch this movie before that one any day.
6.) Raoul Peck doesn’t get enough credit as one of the world’s great documentarians. The Haitian filmmaker came through again this year with Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, a retrospective of the short-statured, short-lived Black South African photographer who kept a visual record of his country under apartheid. The movie’s power comes from Cole’s astonishing images (many of them unseen before this movie’s release) but also his astute written observations of life in South Africa and America, read sonorously by narrator LaKeith Stanfield. Who deposited 60,000 of Cole’s photos in a Swedish bank vault while the man was homeless on the streets of New York? Cole’s family is still trying to find out.
7.) Indian entomologists travel to different altitudes of the Himalayas and study the moths that live there in Nocturnes. Directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan follow the scientists as they spend summers hanging up bedsheets and lighting them with ultraviolet light to attract the insects. As they deal with inclement weather, bad roads, and elephants, they ponder the endless variety of these nighttime flyers and why they come in such brilliant colors when they live in places where hardly any light (from the sun or humans) penetrates. This feast for the eyes is must-viewing for fans of nature documentaries.
8.) The year’s best prison movie was Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Daughters about Patton’s own pilot program that throws a party to reunite men incarcerated in Washington, D.C., with their daughters for one night a year. Honestly, father-daughter dances creep me out under normal circumstances, but seeing these men able to hold their children without the constraints of prison visits and the effect it has on them is inspiring. Along with No. 2 on this list, this movie originated as a TED talk. Our prison system could probably use more carrots like Patton’s program and fewer sticks.
9-10.) (tie) In Agniia Galdanova’s Queendom, model and performance artist Gena Marvin (né Gennadiy Chebotarev) goes from a fishing village on Russia’s eastern coast to becoming a national pariah when she opposes her country’s invasion of Ukraine and uses fashion as a medium of protest. In Josh Greenbaum’s Will & Harper, Will Ferrell is already famous when he sees his longtime friend and colleague come out as trans woman Harper Steele and asks all the dumb questions that I would ask. (Why the name Harper? And do the kids she fathered still call her “Dad”?) The Russian film has striking visuals and costumes. The American film has Kristen Wiig writing a song for Harper and Will’s road trip. They both testify to the experiences of their LGBTQ protagonists as they navigate the perils and pleasures of this life.
Honorable mention: Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Sugarcane … Jazmin Jones’ Seeking Mavis Beacon … Johan Grimonprez’ Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat … Edmund Stenson and Daniel Roher’s Blink … Erin Lee Carr’s Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara … David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger … Laurent Bouzereau’s Music by John Williams … Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn’s Going Varsity in Mariachi … Clair Titley’s The Contestant … Lucy Lawless’ Never Look Away … Errol Morris’ Separated.
