Lost Illusions: A Film Snob's Favorites of '24.

Every year I make a list, like most film critics, of my favorite movies from the previous year. I do mine later than just about everyone, because I want the quality films released at the end of the calendar year to have time to make it to my home city. I also need to add that in this age of streaming, the recent foreign language films I’ve watched don’t always officially fall within that calendar. C’est la vie. The great thing about streaming is that there are so many excellent films to see besides all the mediocre Hollywood product. This was a good year for movies. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher). A thing of beauty. Arthur, a young English archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) is released from an Italian prison, some time in the 1980s, only to again fall in with a gang robbing valuable artifacts from ancient Etruscan tombs. He is a key member of this group because he has access to some kind of psychic power that allows him to find where these tombs are. Yet he’s haunted by memories of a woman he loved, and beguiled by another woman whose wit and self-regard act to pull him away from crime. Leisurely and richly seductive in style, La Chimera depicts the conflict between love and greed with delightful eloquence. Tótem (Lila Avilés). From Mexico, a gorgeous multi-character ensemble piece about family, mortality, and coming of age. At the center is a seven-year-old girl named Sol, played by promising newcomer Naíma Sentíes, whose parents, we gradually realize, are divorced. She is dropped at her grandfather’s house where her extended family is having a birthday celebration for her father. The stark fact behind the story is that her father is dying of cancer. Tótem charts, with a warm and at times humorous understanding, a young girl’s gradual recognition of a painful but unavoidable truth. Petrov’s Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov). This remarkable film has the nerve to metaphorically summarize the last fifty years of Russian history, in a satirical epic about a comic book artist with a permanent case of the flu. Going back and forth in time, we witness Petrov being taken off a bus to serve in a firing squad, as a child talking to a woman playing the Snow Queen in his school pageant, and hiding with someone in the back of a hearse van carrying a coffin. Finally, the film turns black and white, and we get a new main character. In the end, the amazing flamboyant style of Petrov’s Flu serves to reveal the absurd tragedy of Putin’s Russia. Our Body (Claire Simon). A film about women’s relationship to their own bodies, as seen through many stories of patients and doctors in the g...