A year ago, I wasn’t sanguine about the state of ultra-low-budget filmmaking; this year, the D.I.Y. domain accounts for many of the best new releases. What I’m still not sanguine about is the economic prospects for such movies, which, even in the best of times, were shaky box-office propositions. This may not matter for the films themselves, insofar as the best movies, the ones that open new prospects for the art, are made for the future (and the few who see that future in them) as much as for their own time; they reach large audiences only by happy coincidence. But it matters greatly for filmmakers, because early commercial failure may curtail promising careers.
On the other hand, sometimes the few who discern merit in a small, unprofitable movie include producers, financiers, and others with the power to make things happen. RaMell Ross’s exquisite 2018 documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” took in only $112,282 at the box office, but it got him the chance to direct his first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys,” with a budget of more than twenty million dollars. That’s good news for Ross, of course, but it’s also good news for the cinema at large—because the remarkable conceptual and aesthetic innovations of his new movie couldn’t have been realized on a shoestring budget. This year’s best releases are crucial reminders of the vitality and the invigorating energy of independent filmmaking—at all levels, ranging from the megamillions that Francis Ford Coppola personally pumped into “Megalopolis” to the hard-scrounged microbudgets of “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” “My First Film,” and “The People’s Joker” (which was launched with a crowdfunding campaign).
A year, though real enough celestially speaking, is a cinematic artifice. It’s hard to glean trends from a year’s releases, because what’s released depends on the vagaries of production and distribution—the happenstance of which directors have movies in the works at a given moment, which movies premièring at festivals get acquired by a distributor for U.S. release. Some films that might have made it to my 2024 list (“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” “Eephus,” “Misericordia”) are now scheduled for 2025, and others (“Subtraction,” “Suburban Fury,” “Vas-Tu Renoncer?”) have no U.S. distribution. Still, the movies on the list do suggest a shared theme that has been latent in new releases for a while: the expansion of the art.
That may sound vague and grandiose, but a specific kind of expansion has recently been in evidence among many of the best new films. The point-of-view shots in “Nickel Boys” that vertiginously unite viewers and characters, the live performance of an actor who pops up in person and seemingly interacts with Adam Driver during screenings of “Megalopolis,” the pointillistic fragmentation of “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” and the multiple levels of fiction and autofiction in “My First Film” all suggest an expanded cinema that doesn’t so much break film frames as it displaces them off the screen—that doesn’t make movies less cinematic but cinematizes life.
Such concepts and practices have been around for a long while, and so has the term “expanded cinema,” which gained prominence (with an altogether different meaning) as the title of a remarkable 1970 book by Gene Youngblood on the use of advanced technology in avant-garde films. Francis Ford Coppola’s 2017 book “Live Cinema and Its Techniques” is based on concepts that he had been mulling since the nineteen-fifties and developing since the nineteen-seventies. If these ideas are only now being openly advanced in a wide range of works by a multigenerational set of directors, I think it’s no accident: thanks to the prevalence of streaming and the watching of movies on cell phones or wherever, the very notion of the theatre and the fixed gaze at its screen has come to seem secondary and inessential to the cinematic experience.
That’s precisely why this new variety of cinema has come to the fore—not to concede movies to the pocket-size travelling show but to reclaim them from it. These new movies offer a new kind of spectacle, one that’s not just a matter of audiovisual bombast but that inheres in cinematic form, becomes part of a film’s narrative architecture, and creates a distinctive psychological relationship with viewers. This expanded cinema gives life to a movable spectacle, to one that can survive from format to format and won’t generate anything like the now clichéd disproportion of watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on a cell phone. With the new cinema, it isn’t the images that get small but the ideas that get big.
Despite the innovative extremes of the year’s best movies, the most exciting cinematic experience I had in 2024 involved a program, at BAM, in April, of four silent Japanese movies made between 1917 and 1933—one live-action film from each of the the two greatest Japanese filmmakers (a short by Yasujirō Ozu and a feature by Kenji Mizoguchi) and two animated shorts. The movies were presented in the manner that, in their time, was standard in Japan: with live accompaniment by performers, called benshi, who stood next to the screen and functioned as m.c.s, narrators, and actors. Each benshi—one per film—introduces the film and then, while the movie plays (with live musical accompaniment from a small band featuring both Japanese and European instruments), describes the action (with literary flair and dramatic verve) and also gives voice to the characters, providing and performing dialogue with keen interpretive variety.
With the rise of talking pictures in Japan, in the mid-thirties, the art of the benshi largely vanished, but in recent decades it has been cultivated anew and deployed at revival screenings. The result is entrancing, astonishing, even startling, both for its immediate dramatic thrills and for its wider implications. Though I’d felt that I’d seen acting of sublime refinement and inventive magnificence, I also had the sense that I’d experienced something that was neither quite like moviegoing nor like theatre. Rather, just as opera, which combines music and theatre but is an art in itself and different from both, so movies with benshi accompaniment are—despite their practical basis in the ordinary habit of moviegoing—transformed into an altogether separate art.
The lesson is jolting: from the start, the cinema was expanded. Whether with the rise of talking pictures, the radio-based and theatrically inspired innovations of Orson Welles, the development of immersive cinema-vérité documentaries along with their metafictional implications, or the notebook-like immediacy of movies made with lightweight digital video, the cinema has always been breaking out of its onscreen cloister and taking its place in the world. Now it’s doing so openly, boldly, self-consciously, and with a sharp sense of purpose. In 1970, Youngblood understood aesthetic advances in social and political terms: “We can now see through each other’s eyes, moving toward expanded vision and inevitably expanded consciousness.” The new cinema is an inherent part of a struggle for inner and outer liberation, for the reckoning with unacknowledged realities in clearer and more personal ways. Filmmakers whose movies have been part of that struggle this year could certainly not have known in advance how the election would turn out—but they filmed as if affirming that, no matter what, the struggle is ongoing and is inseparable from their artistic quest.
1. “Nickel Boys”
It’s hard to adapt a good novel, because the necessary directorial freedom runs up against the fear of betraying the admirable source, but RaMell Ross, in his first dramatic feature, creates a bolder, riskier, and more imaginative adaptation (of Colson Whitehead’s superb 2019 novel) than any other recent filmmaker. He turns a sharply observed, naturalistic third-person narrative—a story of two Black teen-agers trapped in a cruel and murderous, and segregated, juvenile-detention facility in Florida, in the nineteen-sixties—into the subjective visions of the two friends’ perspectives, shot from their points of view, with the requisite complex choreography of action and camera. The result is a form that elevates the very notion of point of view into a moral and political challenge of the highest order, in movies and in life at large.
In the writer-director Tyler Taormina’s hands, the clichéd premise of a memory-rich family drama set during the holidays yields a comprehensively original film. Its mosaic-like structure and epigrammatic dialogue are propulsive, its characterizations high-relief yet finely etched, its performances prickly yet tenderly observed, and its over-all style as colorfully enticing as it is subtly ambivalent.
Photograph from Lionsgate Films / Everett Collection
