1. Emilia Pérez, by Jacques Audiard
There are many reasons to fall in love with Jacques Audiard's narcomusical about identity accidents, but none comparable to the pleasure of embracing chaos. The film dares everything and allows itself everything, a happy film with each of its mistakes, absurd, eccentric, captivating, and alive, perfectly alive. The fact that the protagonist, Karla Sofía Gascón, is the revelation of the year definitively crowns it.
2. The Brutalist, by Brady Corbet
Brady Corbet creates one of those monumental and rare artifacts that occasionally split cinema in two. The story of the Jewish architect who emigrated to the United States, portrayed by Adrien Brody, serves to x-ray the fissures of the so-called American dream while rethinking, with all the naivety and flaws one wants, the very essence of cinematic image.
3. The Chimera, by Alice Rohrwacher
Alice Rohrwacher takes on the task of giving meaning to something as basic as the word turned into a tale, the verb transformed into common action. And in this way, she rescues from their uniqueness people like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi, or the Taviani brothers. The idea is to dignify the supposedly undignified, the invisible, and in that gesture, both political and almost suicidal, to establish a world. The dream of some looters of archaeological secrets is the excuse to connect the underground and the world, the past with the present, life with the other.
4. The Light We Imagine, by Payal Kapadia
The story of two women, adrift in an overwhelming Mumbai, becomes in the hands of Payal Kapadia a journey to the depths of sight, dreams, and the senses themselves. Undoubtedly, one of those films that, because of their unexpectedness, captivate from the first frame. It is a profoundly sensory film, but it points to the undisturbed, the eternal, to that infinite that only the back of the eyes, and the ears, and all the other senses can truly appreciate.
5. When Evil Lurks, by Demián Rugna
Memorize this term: "embichados." The embichados are like zombies, more terrible; like the worst of monsters, but too similar to each one of us. Rarely has genre cinema come so close to the perfect description of the world, the worst of all worlds that, little by little, is becoming a reality. Demián Rugna offers a terrifying display of pure, unapologetic terror.
Sean Baker reaches the peak of his perfect and extremely coherent filmography, always focused on the back, always attentive to those who go unnoticed. This time, he dares to make a sexual comedy that is also a precise and very cruel portrait of a society, ours, that is crumbling. Every laugh hurts.
7. The Substance, by Coralie Fargeat
Every year deserves a prank, and none as wild, wise, and disconcerting as the one proposed by Coralie Fargeat. Both the obsession with beauty and youth and the mundane rigor of the macho and patriarchal society in which we happily splash around are subjected to a third-degree as fun as it is repulsive, as enjoyable as, let's admit it, repugnant.
8. Furiosa: From the Mad Max Saga, by George Miller
The origin of everything ('Furiosa' is a prequel) is also the ecstasy of everything. Miller continues his journey through the decaying world and manages to enlarge the legend of Mad Max beyond all reason. No film this year is as joyfully enjoyable as the one following the masterpiece 'Mad Max: Fury Road'.
9. Evil Does Not Exist, by Ryusuke Yamaguchi
The director of 'Drive My Car' creates one of those rare wonders that seem to be the result of a happy accident. The story of a rural conflict between the inhabitants of a village and the city speculators is resolved with a mysterious and enlightened filmic poem that speaks of confrontation, but also of loss, and of understanding the other, and of loneliness, and of love, and of nature, and of wounded deer, and clear water, and steaming noodles.
10. The Devil's Bath, by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Based on a real event from another era, directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (aunt and nephew) create the most terrifying of tales for the present day. The fear of the past is the same as today. Patriarchal and religious brutality remains intact. The strange suicides of women in the 18th century lead to a tale of unusual precision into the depths of the darkest.
11. No Other Land, by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Not yet released in Spain (it will be on Filmin very soon), but it is already the documentary of the year. Not of the one to come, but the one that continues to live through the massacre in Gaza. Directed by Palestinian and Jewish filmmakers, it offers the rawest and most truthful description of the gradual ethnic cleansing taking place in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers slowly, with the precision of a cruel metronome, demolish houses and expel their inhabitants. The fractured calligraphy and the pain that spills from each frame restore to cinema the privilege of truth.
12. Strangers, by Andrew Haigh
Love cinema, the cinema of a lifetime, has its moment of glory in Andrew Haigh's latest work. Between fantasy and fiction, dream and horror, the director stages with delicacy, precision, taste, and mystery the dream of eternity against the inevitable limitation of death, which is indeed love.
It is very difficult to watch Luca Guadagnino's penultimate film (the latest, 'Queer', will be on next year's list) and not leave the cinema convinced that tennis is, definitively and from this precise moment, something else. Only the final sequence to the rhythm of Trent Reznor's 'Match Point' music seems to be the best of the year on its own. What comes before is fun, sexy, uninhibited, and very enjoyable. Does anyone offer more?
13. Rivals, by Luca Guadagnino
It is very difficult to watch Luca Guadagnino's penultimate film (the latest, 'Queer', will be included in next year's list) and not leave the cinema convinced that tennis is, definitively and from this precise moment, something else. Only the final sequence set to the music of 'Match Point' by Trent Reznor alone seems to be the best of the year. What comes before is fun, sexy, uninhibited, and very enjoyable. Can anyone top that?
14. Nosferatu, by Robert Eggers
The director of 'The Witch' or 'The Lighthouse' and the main responsible for the renewal of genre cinema in recent times revisits one of the greatest classics of cinema to deliver a true feast of suggestive, hidden, mysterious, and, whatever it may mean, mesmerizing cinema. A display of macabre poetry from the perspective of a possessed woman portrayed by the superb and deeply broken Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of).
15. Flow. A World to Save, by Gints Zilbalodis
The animated film of the year is Latvian and is signed by Gints Zilbalodis. Forget about Pixar for a moment. The poetic, Homeric, and somewhat 'Miyazakian' (by Hayao Miyazaki) adventure of a cat in a flooding world comes very close to the miracle of the unheard of, the memorable, the unique.
16. Longless, by Osgood Perkins
It's hard to make a list without including Nicolas Cage at some point. Osgood Perkins' perfect handling of pure fear seems to be the perfect stage for our 'overactor' (he is not just an actor, Cage acts on his own performance) favorite to shine in the most delirious of horrors.
17. Conclave, by Edward Berger
Choosing a pope, not a dad, is not a trivial matter. And to prove it, no one better than Edward Berger who, after his adaptation of 'All Quiet on the Western Front', continues to demonstrate himself as a master in building tension in any space and situation. The final coda, so close to Almodóvar, is simply sublime.
18. Dahomey, by Mati Diop
The great revelation of the Berlin Festival, awarded the Golden Bear, signed by Mati Diop, is not just a political manifesto about the ongoing hazards of colonialism, it is also a delicate and extremely simple production always focused not so much on things, treasures, or speeches but on the subtle and deep vibration of a cinematic gesture, a gesture of virtue. Incontestable.
19. The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree, by Mohammad Rasoulof
The Iranian director in exile (or rather, expelled) from a country plagued by the dictatorship of the ayatollahs insists on his always committed cinema to offer a story entirely built on suspicion, fear, and desire. The filmmaker masterfully composes a locked-room thriller where three women struggle against the world. Rasoulof manages to intersperse real images, and there, in the structured construction of an allegory that is also a faithful testimony, the film grows to the most evident pain.
20. Dune Part Two, by Denis Villeneuve
Denis Villeneuve has taken popular cinema, for its spectacular nature, to a new territory. The giant sandworms of Arrakis are there to devour and make us devour the ability of cinema to create other worlds that, indeed, are in this one. Those deserts are ours.