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The Best Films of 2024, According To Oliver Guild

Sing Sing 

Set in the real-life Sing Sing prison in New York, Greg Kwedar’s hopeful tale of an all-inmate theatre group staging a bonkers original production (featuring time travel and Freddie Krueger) is a vital reminder of why the arts are so important. 

Starring many of the ex-cons who inspired the film, and shot like a documentary for added realism, we don’t follow a mass breakout or drug smugglers in this prison drama; Sing Sing is more concerned with the life you build inside the prison.  

As John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, a stoic inmate incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, Colman Domingo is raw. Within the theatre group, his life is purposeful and uncomplicated, although when gangster Clarence Maclin (played by himself in the standout performance of the movie) joins up, G’s world is turned upside down. 

From the outset, the film never fails to exploit our emotional investment in its characters. As a way to breathe new life into its more familiar narrative moments, taking this route is certainly impressive. And as a result, I was left winded by the end. 

Sing Sing

Civil War

Even though it’s technically a war movie, writer/director Alex Garland (known for his rogue A.I. machines, zombies and ‘men’) is much more interested in character than anything to the tune of mindless gunfire and pyrotechnics; our heroes only shoot a gun once the entire movie. 

America is in a civil war. Rebels have taken over many of the country’s major states and are close to invading the capital to kill the president (Nick Offerman). Made in a guerrilla style unlike his usually pristine sci-fi futures, Garland’s Civil War is appropriately dirt-encrusted and dystopian, not just in its visuals but its tone; America’s political future is in shambles, which feels alarmingly prescient. 

Curiously, we don’t follow a crack team of commandos in this war movie. Instead, just before the revolution can reach Washington, a group of journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura) band together on a mission to interview the president before he’s assassinated. It’s a road trip movie, then, and seeing what Garland does with such a unique take is compelling, and thoroughly entertaining. 

Civil War

Conclave 

When reluctant Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) gets the call that the Pope has died, I was reminded of Succession. Like Logan Roy’s spoiled brat kids, there’s a scramble of manipulative, conniving Cardinals that descend on the Vatican to orchestrate their own greedy ascension to the top (but instead of Waystar Royco it’s the succession of the Roman Catholic Church). 

On paper, this could have been a stuffy, pompous drama about the upper echelon of the Church dithering away on the fate of the Holy Father. Fortunately, we have an in-your-face, punchy thriller that has more in common with a boxing movie than a straight drama. These surprisingly animalistic men, who look, act and sound like selfless guardians of peace, have their gloves on; at all times, they’re ready to strike for what they want. 

Spearheaded by Lawrence, the Cardinals (including John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci) enter the Conclave: locked in the Vatican until they can name the next Pope. It’s close quarters fighting, then. And a stalemate. With such heavyweight actors, you quickly become invested, start to form your own alliances, suspect some, others, then realise that everyone is up to something. 

So, who will be the next Pope? You won’t believe the answer! 


The Zone of Interest 

We’re in Germany, 1943. The commander of Auschwitz (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller) live in luxury, albeit right next to a concentration and extermination camp. Theirs is a charmed life, with opulent food, family picnics, expensive new clothes and even a pool in the back garden. Things are good for the commander and his family. 

Though, just out of sight, hundreds of innocents are murdered daily. We never see them, but we hear something as the family eats dinner, or has tea, or throws a birthday party. Sound is used to knock us off balance – dogs, bombs, screams, gunfire – and everything, from the use of hidden cameras to infrared sequences, immerse us into this horrible world. 

Just when WWII seemed mined of all its interesting stories, writer/director Jonathan Glazer gave us a film that feels definitive of the time, and the people that came to etch it into history. It presents a Nazi commander and his family as duly ugly, but never to the detriment of making them real; we’re fascinated by their deranged, twisted minds. 

The Zone of Interest is classy filmmaking – an impossible film, I like to call it – and operates at a whole other level than anything on this list. Just like the story it tells, the film will stand the test of time. And its use of sound to tell a hidden, subtextual story is so much more impactful because we can’t see it – now that’s smart. 

The Zone of Interest

Dune: Part Two 

Dune: Part Two struck an emotional cord with me, which is saying a lot considering it has a bigger budget than all the other films on this list combined ($190 million). That’s rare in Hollywood, especially with blockbuster films. Yet, Denis Villeneuve dared to do something more with his sci-fi sequel. It’s a rare example of a massive studio film that isn’t a mindless cash grab or soulless action spectacle. It’s a dense, unapproachable epic about the disillusionment of a messiah that could’ve been the awkward middle child of a trilogy, but managed to find its own identity. 

In an article about this year’s Oscars, I wrote that Dune: Part Two is the best film of the decade. To Generation Alpha (those born after 2010), they’d call that a ‘hot take’, and they’d be right. Yet, I stand by my hot take. In the past ten years, nothing has hit me like Dune: Part Two. From a technical level, from a narrative standpoint, its craft is immaculate. And then there’s IMAX, a medium this movie is made (literally) for. If you haven’t seen it on a fifty foot screen, you haven’t really seen it.  

To echo myself in the same article, if Star Wars is the family friendly side of science fiction, then Dune is the emo cousin with face tattoos and a sick leather jacket. And who doesn’t like a sick leather jacket? 

Dune: Part Two 

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