A great artist can offer a radical new perspective on a well-trodden subject. So it is with Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust masterpiece, which takes Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and shows us what banal evil really looks like. The family life of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller) is a vision of cursed domesticity. The horrors remain out of sight but, crucially, not out of earshot. Sound designer Johnnie Burn’s soundscape has the yelling of guards and the crack of rifle shots punctuating scenes of gardening and kids’ playing. The result is a Come and See for the 2020s.
For the first half of 2024, the main talking point around the movies was that no one was going to see them. Why weren’t audiences flocking to see Ryan Gosling drive stunt cars and flirt with Emily Blunt? Why did Furiosa flop when the last Mad Max film was such a hit? It was especially perplexing given that last year, the worldwide box office had seemed to finally rebound from the post-pandemic doldrums.
Studio fortunes are improving, however, on the backs of some major kids movies and the monster success of Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, and now Wicked. So how about we all stop wringing our hands, and begin appreciating what’s been a pretty great year for movies so far, both in the mainstream and at the arthouse? You’ll notice some of these movies came out in the US at the back end of 2023, but we’re basing this list on UK release dates to include the best worldwide releases from between January and December. And there is plenty more coming, so keep this one bookmarked.
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