Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’ Is the Only 2024 Movie Musical That Matters — In Review
The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.
This week, IndieWire published our list of the 25 best films of the year, and once again it was objectively correct, obviously infallible, and universally celebrated by our readers. I joke, I joke (we straight up forgot to include “Babygirl,” even though our entire staff is obsessed with it), but the Twitter pushback did seem to be much lighter than usual. Maybe the conversation has just shifted over to Reddit and Bluesky, or maybe @LisanAlGaib69 has simply come to accept that a zany Jewish comedy about Jason Schwartzman falling in love with Carol Kane might be a superior achievement to “Dune: Part 2.” (I just looked it up and @LisanAlGaib69 is a real account that belongs to someone named Gustavo, whose one and only post is a heartfelt eulogy for Stan Lee from 2018. I hope they’re doing well.)
More from IndieWire
Anyway, if the fear was that the residual impact of last year’s strikes would make 2024 a miserable year for good movies, the process of watching the likes of “Janet Planet,” “Chicken for Linda,” and “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” get relegated to “honorable mention” status painted a very different picture. So did the films at the very top of our list, especially RaMell Ross’ astonishing “Nickel Boys,” which might be the best and most forward-thinking American film so far this decade. Some years may offer more life-altering masterpieces than others (2019 comes to mind), and the ones that don’t include a new Tom Cruise vehicle are definitely at a serious disadvantage, but there are good movies every year year, if you make the effort to look for them.
But I’d argue that a certain number of good films does not necessarily make for “a good year for movies.” That can only be determined by how those films respond to existential questions for the medium at large. In 2024, did cinema fight against the snowballing forces of cultural enshittification (among the other, even more pernicious evils of our time)? Did it renew our faith in cinema’s unique ability to see us better in the darkness than we can see ourselves in the daylight? Did it broaden our sense of what’s possible for this world, or did they simply flatter our desire to feel like we’re doing the best we can?
After all, the movies have a unique ability to do that, too.
Want to read the rest? Subscribe to In Review by David Ehrlich and you’ll be the first to read the latest insights from IndieWire’s chief critic David Ehrlich, along with the best of our film and TV reviews.
Written by Ian Wang, a fascinating and justifiably furious new piece in ArtReview has argued that the movies of 2024 failed us on every front that matters. And not just the movies, but also the machine that produces them. A machine that manufactures empathy as a panacea rather than as a means to an end. Rooted in his frustration with the film industry’s response to the war in Gaza, Wang rails against the hostile non-reaction to Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Oscars, which crystallized the film world’s cowardly refusal to take sides in a humanitarian crisis that continues to be abetted by public opinion.
Wang excoriates the “hollow truisms” and “mealy-mouthed appeals for unity” that several institutions have published in response to the genocide, and takes particular issue with the Berlinale’s hypocritical decision to disavow the comments made by the directors of “No Other Land” upon receiving the festival’s documentary prize. I’d add that “No Other Land,” number two on IndieWire’s list of the year’s best films and the recent winner of the New York Film Critics Circle’s award for Best Documentary, is still without U.S. distribution, which to my knowledge is unprecedented for a film that would otherwise be a lock for an Oscar nomination. I’d also add that ranking “No Other Land” anywhere on the same list that includes the likes of “Challengers” and “The Substance” is an exercise in absurdity, but that I hoped its position would most effectively call attention to the film’s humanity without inviting readers to dismiss the film’s inclusion because of their politics.
Wang extends his critique to what happened on screen as well. The writer calls out Alex Garland’s “Civil War” for its adamant bothsidesism (“I tried to imagine him making such a film about the actual American Civil War; would he also say that the issue was polarization?”), and Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” for promoting a “facile universalism” that sours its satirical critique of Hollywood ageism into the stuff of misogynistic hagsploitation.
I strongly disagree with his second example, as I maintain that Fargeat’s Ozempic fairytale is a fantastical portrait of self-loathing that pointedly engenders our disgust as a means to an end, but I share Wang’s broader frustration with the distorted role that reality — political or otherwise — has come to play in the movies of our time. You can’t go five minutes during awards season without hearing someone yammer on about “the power of storytelling,” but people seem to get uncomfortable when storytellers actually flex that power in meaningful and decisive ways. It’s the inevitable question of cinema in the age of neoliberalism: Do we want movies to change the world, or do we just want them to let us indulge in the fantasy that movies can change the world?
Unlike Wang, I don’t think it’s a problem if people are eager to laugh with films like “The Substance” and “Anora” (the latter of which he accuses of being disconnected from its protagonist’s suffering), but I do think it’s a problem if people feel like singing along to “Wicked” in a crowded theater — or rewarding it with Best Picture at the Oscars — is some kind of blow against tyranny, for example. I swear to every god on Earth this isn’t another rant about that movie (I’ve already held way too much space for it in this newsletter), I’m only bringing it up because the hollowness of its anti-fascist message speaks to the value of the one movie I’m truly upset wasn’t on IndieWire’s top 25 list — the one movie that I feel is most sorely missing from all of the various awards conversations, and the one movie that I’m most convinced will be reclaimed as a masterpiece at some point in the future. Probably by the French.
I’m talking about Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End.”
Want to read the rest? Subscribe to In Review by David Ehrlich and you’ll be the first to read the latest insights from IndieWire’s chief critic David Ehrlich, along with the best of our film and TV reviews.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
