When I look back at 2024 at the movies, it feels like it lacked that extra something.
Most films felt like recycled formulas wanting to reclaim the box office by hook or crook. And the ones that did try to be different could neither sustain their momentum nor our excitement.
Despite the mediocrity at large, these 10 films had me in raptures for the emotions they evoked within as a cheering audience, critic and cinephile.
Sukanya Verma's Top 10 Films of 2024, in no particular order.
Kill
From my review: An ultra-violent film about violence, Kill's greatest accomplishment isn't its death count alone but to challenge our perception of violence.
Between the gut-punching gratification it delivers, there's also food for thought in comparing evil born out of necessity as well as retaliation depending on which side of the socioeconomic spectrum one belongs to.
Heroes coming to the rescue by beating a dozen baddies into pulp is a timeworn trope in Hindi movies. What sweetens the deal is the element of complexity in both good and bad and the bloody heights their unbridled aggression attains when lines of morality are blurred.
All We Imagine As Light
From my review: Payal Kapadia's understanding of what it means to be a woman is as poignant as her authentic portrait of Mumbai's hoi polloi.
Payal's veteran-like ease in arthouse aesthetics illuminates All We Imagine As Light's uncompromised ideals as it speaks to its audience in Malayalam, Hindi and a sprinkling of Marathi.
But it's the wisdom of her sparkling mind and mastery of her layered writing that promoted her right away in the big league.
With this just one 115-minute long film, she packs in days of reflection, hours of insight and moments of joy. And light.
CTRL
From my review: Vikramaditya Motwane's riveting, masterful CTRL, penned by Avinash Sampath, uses this prevailing landscape of handy Apps and manipulative tech to craft a cautionary thriller about a pair of influencers caught in its grasp.
But the real tech-savviness of his screenlife format, where the storytelling unfolds entirely on computer and cell phone screens, shows in how he builds nail-biting moments over scenes of password recovery and sneaky virtual assistants.
That constant feeling of being heard, seen, traced and tracked, whenever a subject of search or discussion is caught on by an algorithm to throw up ads and offers, is conspicuous throughout the course of CTRL's claustrophobic captivity.
I would recommend watching it on a computer for an eerie, immersive, real-time experience.
Laapataa Ladies
From my review: Laapataa Ladies is gentle yet firm in calling out the hypocrisies colouring everyday mindsets and prejudices without acquiring the high-handedness of a crusader.
Unlike Rao's savvy exploration of urban conflicts in her directorial debut Dhobi Ghat, which felt a tad too self-conscious to be fully empathetic, the film-maker is completely at home in the rustic, rooted ambiance of Laapataa Ladies.
There's a lot more sureness in her craft, her impeccable use of Ram Sampath's folksy tunes, her depiction of the heartland in all its bustling bazaars and bucolic imprints, her ability to find laugh-out-loud comic moments in offhand impulses and her cheerful marriage between vishwas and vigyan.
Amar Singh Chamkila
From my review: Imtiaz A=li's earlier works dabble in journeys leading to self-discovery, contemporary coming-of-ages or meet-cute whimsy.
In Amar Singh Chamkila, his most revolutionary creation since Geet and Jordan, he revisits a decade worth of memories to document a man on the fringes coming up in life by regaling an audience who loves his guts.
Amar Singh Chamkila's social commentary comes alive in its musical elegy for a ribald rebel.
Brimming in exuberant covers of his original numbers, performed in person by its leads, the biopic finds its alter ego in Irshad Kamil's kaleidoscopic song writing. Composer A R Rahman is happy to accommodate the zeal of his many, many, beautiful words in beats so sublime they do perfect justice to Punjab's fabled Elvis Presley.
Do Aur Do Pyaar
From my review: Based on the indie rom-com The Lovers that premiered at the Tribeca film festival in 2017, its official Indian adaptation by Suprotim Sengupta and Eisha A Chopra veers away from the American original's middle-aged existentialism to offer a frothy, fun-filled look into enduring friendships in marital relationships.
Even when Do Aur Do Pyaar surrenders to its 'You don't realise how much you miss something until you have it again' impulses, its farcical premise is always in touch with its emotional core.
I Want to Talk
From my review: Shoojit Sircar has a knack for drawing the oddities of the human condition that both unifies and tells us apart.
Inspired by Arjun Sen's memoir Raising A Father, I Want to Talk chronicles the inspiring journey of a marketing virtuoso-turned-motivational speaker from fatal diagnosis to surviving all odds.
I Want to Talk is a celebration of Sen's tenacity to get to the finishing line in hell, hospital and humour.
Abhishek Bachchan conveys the numerous chapters and challenges of his mind, body and soul with a never-before candour.
It's not just his best but the beginning of how far he's willing to go in immersing himself with not just a persona but the idea of staying alive. Even an appearance by the real Arjun Sen towards the end cannot lessen that achievement.
Merry Christmas
From my review: Crime at its cold-blooded best attracts him as much nostalgia fuelled by classic cinema. But with Merry Christmas, Sriram Raghavan may have made his most romantic movie yet.
Shimmering with spellbinding charisma and treacherous impulses, it is a one night's tale unfolding on X'mas eve in Bombay, before it became Mumbai, at an unspecified time that could be anywhere between the late 1980s or mid 1990s.
I was prepared to be marvelled by Merry Christmas, but to be moved to the extent I was at the end of its mesmerising 144 minutes? That I did not anticipate.
Kalki 2898 AD
From my review: I'm suspicious of anything that comes with the 'most expensive movie ever made' tag. These big-budget, bombastic extravaganzas are so consumed by scale they forget to let their hair down.
But the force is strong with Nag Ashwin's Kalki 2898 AD whose Hollywood dystopia-meets-Hindu mythology gig is a welcome offering on the shuddh desi sci-fi action fantasy front.
Clearly fanboying at Star Wars and Mad Max: Fury Road in its aspirations, Kalki 2898 AD'S visual pizzazz and wizardry takes cues from everything between Avengers and anime. But Nag Ashwin's world-building is most gratifying when following its own path and roots.
All India Rank
From my review: What struck me most is the gentle rhythm of Varun Grover's film-making. A worldview, where wry and wistful blissfully coexist, colours the nostalgia of the writer-turned-director's feature debut while he revisits some of his own experiences as an engineering student in 1990s India.
What is seamless though is Grover's love for language. His curious choice of words and phrases within the vast North Indian dialect are telling of his gorgeous knowledge of Hindi, which lends the soundtrack and conversations a melody of their own.
It's not all retro touches and embellishments. Under All India Rank's seemingly calm exterior is a profoundly felt existentialism that aches and soothes in equal measure.
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