As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.) All Quiet on the Western Front is the third film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here.

As a project for 2025, we at Spinning the Reel are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.) The Broadway Melody is the second film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here.

I watch a lot of movies every year. Just in 2024, my wife — Anna — and I watched over 350, with almost half of those being brand new releases. To help compensate for the deluge of new films, we try to focus our home viewing on little projects. Last year we decided to watch all of the Disney Animation Studio catalogue and Pixar features. We found it a cool thing to do together, a great way to fill in some blank spots and a dispiriting tour of the downfall of a studio once devoted to artistry that now puts out whatever the hell Moana 2 was. But I digress. This year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.)

Another year has come to a close and that means that it is again time to look back on the year in film. 2024 has been lamented in some corners as a relatively weaker one at the movies more broadly, with the release calendar altered significantly by the writing and acting strikes of 2023. Still, as with any other year in film, if you watch enough, 2024 brought an incredible wealth of brilliant cinema. So much so, in fact, that I have decided to expand this list to 15 films rather than the usual 10.

Colonization leaves an echo. Hundreds of years later, after the damage that has been inflicted, after the invaders have been driven out the fallout reverberates. Native languages whither, replaced by imperial tongue and cultural treasures — art, statues, sculptures — remain captive in museums around the world. For years, even before her feature debut Atlantics, director Mati Diop had been planning to interrogate the repatriation of these looted treasures. In 2021 she got her chance as France agreed to return 26 artifacts to the Republic of Benin, formerly the Kingdom of Dahomey.

Pete Docter’s 2015 masterpiece, Inside Out, presented the inner workings of the mind as an office and anthropomorphized the emotions that drive us as employees. It had the sort of universal appeal that Pixar wants to return to, but not for the reasons that they think. Misidentifying the reason for the blockbuster success of Docter’s film has lead Pixar and first time director Kelsey Mann to craft Inside Out 2 with more emotions but significantly less emotionality.

Alice Rohrwacher’s last feature, Happy as Lazzaro, has grown in my estimation more than just about any film of 2018, in part because of the way she infuses a fantastical surrealism into otherwise ordinary sequences of life in the Italian countryside. Somewhere between a dream and a nightmare for both the audience and the characters, Rohrwacher’s stories often double as cinematic hypnotism. With La Chimera the Italian auteur, another fable centered on a sort of plundering of rural Italy, uses this same mysticism to explore the holes we dig ourselves into in service of the past. 

Smack dab in the middle of the Trump era, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine trained their cameras on an ambitious bunch of teenage boys in Texas participating in a weeklong program designed to simulate American government. Shot just before the pandemic ground everything to a halt, and released in the darkest depths of it, Boys State found a moment to reflect the insidious ways in which the politics of the day influence the politicians of the future and offered a glimmer of hope that the future generations might yet offer a balm for the divisions of the moment. Four years later, Moss and McBaine have found another eerily perfect moment for Girls State, examining if the politically engaged girls of America might form a more perfect union in an equally divisive time.

Aging has long been a fascination of cinema as it is the one affliction inescapable from all. Not so equal parts a badge of honor and a sign of weakness, reaching your 80th or 90th decade elicits starkly different treatment. The elderly are targeted by scammers, preying on unfamiliarity with technology and an assumption of mental deterioration. As if that is not bad enough, children and grandchildren begin to treat their elders like they’re fragile. Both of these situations are where the titular Thelma (June Squibb) finds herself in Josh Margolin’s feature debut.