Another year has gone by and DMovies is now nearly nine years old. Since we started in February 2016, we have published nearly 3,500 exclusive articles and reviews. We have attended both big and small film festivals and industry events of Europe, always digging the dirty gems of cinema firsthand and exclusively for you.
We attended seven a-list festivals across Europe (often with multiple journalists on site): Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, San Sebastian, Karlovy Vary and the Tallinn Black Nights. Other gigs included Rotterdam, Tiff Romania, the REC Tarragona, and the Red Sea Film Festival (in Saudi Arabia). Plus the usual suspects in the UK: the BFI London Film Festival and our indie favourite Raindance. We have published nearly 600 articles and reviews and renewed our biggest partnerships, such as ArteKino.
We decided to pull together a little list of the 10 dirtiest films of 2024. And what better way to do it than asking our most prolific writers and also our audience for their dirty pick of the year? This is a truly diverse and international list, containing very different films from every corner of the planet, some big, some small, some you can still catch in cinemas, some on VoD and some you will just have to keep an eye for, at least for now!
Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to the our dirty review of the movie (not necessarily written by the same person who picked it as their dirty film of the year). The movies are listed alphabetically…
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1. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili; Georgia):
Quiet and reserved Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is an obstetrician in a rural hospital somewhere in the impoverished Georgian flatlands. The facilities are spacious and barren, much like the surrounding environment. The devoted doctor literally takes matters into her own hands, fulfilling multiple functions. She helps to deliver children, provides postnatal care, preconception advice and – unbeknownst to her peers – carries out abortions (often past the 12-week legal threshold). She is motivated neither by money nor career ambitions, but instead empathy and solidarity.
This is a miraculous piece of slow cinema, with a runtime of 134 minutes (nearly hour hours and a quarter). Extremely long and mostly static takes with little movement prevail, often ranging between five and 10 minutes. The images of the female body at work are extremely graphic. The movie opens with one of the most shocking birth scenes in the history of cinema. A premature and malnourished baby is seen inside an incubator. Nina performs an abortion on the dining room table of a patient’s home. The nudity is gracefully frank. The doctor too is prepared to disrobe herself in front of the camera, revealing her bony figure and modest breasts. However strong her goodwill and determination, Nina’s body remains frail and vulnerable reminding viewers of her mortality.
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2. Kneecap (Rich Peppiatt; Ireland):
For me, the dirtiest film of the year is about music and identity. Two young men from Belfast raised in the shadow of The Troubles use their embattled native language to make songs about who they are. Urgent, thoughtful, and very funny, it’s the type of film that grabs you from the first frame and doesn’t let go. Daring, vital cinema that should be seen by everyone.
This is one of the most original films of the past decade. It is also is an example of how good a film can turn out if its director knows his subjects so well, that re-inventing their life story isn’t just a matter of creativity.
Kneecap is also pictured at the top of this article.
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3. Nobody Likes Me (Petr Kazda and Tomáš Weinreb; Czechia, Slovakia and France):
Military woman develops full-blown physical relationship with an outsider, in a deeply provocative European drama with a touch of Nicolas Roeg. One eventing, Sarah sees a woman across the street in physical difficulty. Perhaps she should help but, frozen on the spot, she stares. The woman starts to throw up – presumably she’s had too much to drink. A man appears from nowhere and comes to the woman’s aid. Sarah can’t take her eyes off him. The female gaze. He looks back at her. She looks back at him.
This is a movie skilfully put together and performed, and in a way a difficult film to talk about because if you were to give away exactly what it’s about, that would be to ruin the first-time viewing experience for potential cinema-goers. The trailer does a brilliant job of representing the film without giving the various games away (there’s more than one).
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4. Anora (Sean Baker; United States):
Told with emotionally charged yet unabashed precision, Anora delivers a wild ride of a whirlwind romance gone bad. An honest anti-Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), that dwells on the fact that no, often one in love does not traverse it all. A young stripper, Anora, meets a boyish Oligarch’s son, Vanya. While he may seem a bit childish, after a few weeks of fake dating and sex, she does see her prospects lighting up, when he proposes marriage. The young love soon gets turned upside down, when Vanya’s parents send their henchmen to force the couple to annul the marriage. Baker, who has a keen eye for the difference between social classes, does, however, not focus on a romantic “us versus them” showdown. Rather, he delivers a fragile bond between Anora and these henchmen, who are mere puppets of the rich and mighty. A happy end for the couple soon seems rather unlikely. Then again, the plot pointedly asks the question if Anora should even want to continue in that marriage.
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5. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet; United States):
The Brutalist is the epic biopic of Hungarian architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States. Commissioned by a millionaire, he designs a monumental building in brutalist style. Soon, he is joined by his wife and niece. The film spans more than three and a half hours, immersing the audience in the characters’ journey, accompanied by the haunting soundtrack of Daniel Blumberg. It is a story about the many faces of power and its inability to break the human spirit.
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6. It’s What’s Inside (Greg Jardin; United States):
It’s What’s Inside offers enough twists and turns, cunning misdirections, and intriguing mystery to ensure an entertaining and humorous experience. Mixing elements of director Karyn Kusama’s quesy horror The Invitation (2015) and Halina Reijn’s comedic Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), the film lights up the screen with some unnerving performances from the ensemble cast, dazzling cinematography, inventive editing, and a memorable score. It’s a head scratcher of a plot about body swapping millennials at a house party. And the intentions and betrayals are kept buried until the explosive end. Loved it.
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7. Red Rooms (Pascal Plante; Canada):
At the centre of Pascal Plante’s mystery is an utterly repellent crime: the abduction, rape, torture and murder of three young teenage girls recorded by the perpetrator in a ‘red room’ for anonymous paying customers – but these acts are thankfully never shown on screen. Rather, as the prime suspect Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) is subjected to forensic scrutiny in court, the film focuses on two members of the public who obsessively attend the trial, and follow it via other media outside of the courtroom. Young Clementine (Laurie Babin) is a straightforward hybristophile who has run away from her small town just to see Chevalier, while Montréal local Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is harder to read – a poker-playing, poker-faced model and amateur online sleuth whose compulsive viewership of the unspeakable mirrors our own spectatorship. Accordingly, this judicial j’accuse confronts us with the complicated, contradictory drives of the ‘true crime’/horror audience to which we, in watching, also inevitably belong, and puts us in our most ambiguous, uncomfortable place. The cognitive dissonance that its scenes engender haunted my mind for literal months afterwards.
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8. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, United States):
No mainstream film this year was more uniquely cinematic than RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. It does something that can only really happen with moving pictures. An adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black teen boys at a “reform” school in the segregated American South, most of Nickel Boys takes place at Nickel Academy, a fictional prison camp based on the real Florida School for Boys where graves of black boys fill the land. It is a place without hope and where the white authority figures use the stick more than the carrot. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray employ the rarely used first-person perspective to do for cinema the same thing that first-person narration does for literature: generate an overwhelming abundance of empathy in its spectators.
But even in a novel, the words before a reader aren’t their own. They don’t sound like you. They don’t talk like you. Even in the 4:3 aspect ratio, our eyes deceive us more convincingly than an author’s words ever can. The formalistically daring perspective – something that filmmakers have experimented without fruit to show since the 1930s – isn’t a dungeon of creative restraint but a door to new levels of empathy, a heartbreaking arrival of Roger Ebert’s famed insight of cinema as “a machine that generates empathy.” Whether you’re a white woman in Finland or an Indian immigrant in Vancouver, when you watch Nickel Boys, these identities come as close as they ever can to being discarded at the door and you become Elwood and Turner. And the personal devastation will break the way you see.
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9. The Sparrow in the Chimney (Ramon Zürcher; Switzerland):
There’s dysfunction, there’s depravity, and then there’s the family in The Sparrow in the Chimney, a group who engage in adultery, animal abuse and occasional mutilation. Leon (Ilja Bultmann) is a cuisine-obsessed son that is regularly beaten up by local thugs; Markus’ (Andreas Dohler) is the patriarch, a man fervently cheating on his wife with the lodger staying in the cabin; and the rake thin Karen (Maren Eggert), who is desperately trying to reconcile her decision to live in the house where her father committed suicide. They are visited by Karen’s sibling Jule (Britta Hammelstein) who is visibly irritated by the presence of her mother’s possessions, and although her buoyant attitude cheers up teenager Johanna (Lea Zoë Voss), it serves to create more chaos in a house driven by noise and negative energy.
The Sparrow in the Chimney is a tragicomedy of sorts, not least because some of the lines are very funny indeed. Johanna, headstrong and outgoing, bags many of the funniest lines, but Leon – a child who places crockery in microwaves and pets in the washing machine – is also noteworthy. But for every amusing anecdote comes a darker alternative, particularly from Karen, a mother of intense loneliness and quaint despair. She stands outside the hut where her partner is fellated by another, walking by the gardens her parents once tended.
And don’t forget to read our exclusive interview with the Swiss filmmaker by clicking here.
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10. Good One (India Donaldson):
The simple premise revolves around a trio of characters on a backpacking trip in the Catskill Mountains, in Upstate New York. Director India Donaldson impresses in her emotionally intelligent feature debut. She sensitively explores the dynamic between 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias), her father and his best friend. The story is a collision between adolescence and adulthood, and Donaldson’s attention to themes and ideas, especially those around the messiness of life, self-awareness, empathy and personal accountability, sees her challenge the naïve notion that wisdom comes with age. It’s also a coming-of-age story that winds up being a transformative experience for Sam. Donaldson gives us a brief glimpse into a chapter of her character’s life, and while we might not want to part ways so soon, Good One is intended to be the end of a beginning.
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… and one little last minute addition to the list:
11. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun):
I Saw the TV Glow tells the story of Owen and Maddy, two television-obsessed teens. When Maddy reveals to Owen that the two of them are really Isabel and Tara, the protagonists of The Pink Opaque (their favourite tv show and a very unsubtle stand-in for Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Owen must make a choice – bury himself alive in the hopes that he will wake up as Isabel or do nothing. I Saw the TV Glow is the horror of never transitioning, of letting your life slip by without becoming your authentic self. It’s an incredibly powerful metaphor, and one that I love all the more for the queer reading it lends to Buffy, one of my favourite tv shows of all time.
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