Day for Night’s Notable Films of 2024

Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

On April 1, 2025, the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) proposed significant budget cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), effectively terminating the grants of hundreds of humanities councils across the U.S. This move shuttered the operations of the NEH, resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs across the US and the loss of funding for research projects. The closure of the NEH follows in the wake of proposed cuts and the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education–a troubling pattern that signals a broader retreat from public investment in knowledge, creativity, and intellectual freedom. This sweeping defunding of the NEH and the Department of Education not only jeopardizes academic research and public programming but also threatens prison education programs and community-based arts initiatives.

Sing Sing, a film that ran the festival circuit in 2023 but was not given a theatrical release until the summer of 2024, powerfully illustrates what is at stake when we invest in the humanities, not just in universities and museums, but in prisons. Directed by Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing is based on the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. The film centers on John “Divine G” Whitfield, played by the magnetic Colman Domingo, a respected actor and playwright in the prison’s RTA program. Divine G believes that theater is a useful rehabilitation tool and that acting is a therapeutic process, where one can emotionally connect with their inner self. Opposite Divine G is Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, played by himself. Maclin was formally incarcerated at 29 and participated in the RTA program at Sing Sing Correctional, an experience that informs his role in the film. Through staging an original play, Divine G and Divine Eye must overcome their differences, institutional barriers, and personal traumas and forge a sense of community and purpose denied to them by the carceral system.

In the wake of the loss of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sing Sing becomes more than a compelling narrative. It is a celebration of the humanities’ redemptive power and a mourning of the institutional neglect that seeks to extinguish it.

Chloe Kwiatkowski

Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

Despite what the title may lead you to believe, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language (2024) escapes easy description or categorization. Beginning with a recreation of the opening sequence of Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House (1987), the film quickly veers to the absurd and surreal: the film’s setting has been described as somewhere between Winnipeg and Tehran—albeit if the building blocks of these cities had been constructed less from the stance of faithful recreation and more from half remembered dreams. In this Winnipeg, Persian is the dominant language, (Tim Hortons storefronts contain no English, only Persian), market owners break out spontaneously in poetic song and a lost turkey torments the city’s population.

Director Matthew Rankin—who was born and raised in Winnipeg and stars as one of its main characters—feels right at home alongside the city’s quirky residents. Rankin very much (and Universal Language by extension) wears both heart and inspiration on his sleeve. Much like how the characters search through their personal memory and Winnipeg’s cultural history in order to locate and grasp their  communal, transnational, and individual identities, each of the featured trio of stories feel emotionally resonant to Rankin. And he is not the only filmmaker to inhabit Language’s Winnipeg, after all. The presence of not just Abbas Kiarostami but also the likes of Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismäki can be felt throughout the film’s narrative, tone, and cinematic style. This mélange of cinematic homages is unified and given a unique spin by Rankin’s dry sense of humor and humanistic point of view. 

Universal Language is as mysterious and elusive as it is tender and sincere. Part love letter to Iranian cinema, part hometown reverie, the overlapping of its many elements produces a pitch perfect harmony and singular identity—one that is relatable and necessary in our present moment. A language of kindness and empathy.

Kyle Brandys

Queer (Luca Guadagnino)

“I’m not queer, I’m just disembodied,” exclaims William Lee, portrayed by Daniel Craig in the film Queer (2024). Directed by Luca Guadagnino and adapted from William S. Burroughs’ novella of the same name, Queer follows the aforementioned Lee, a middle-aged American man living in Mexico City, as he falls for the younger and illusive Eugene Allerton. Background on the novel and its author aren’t necessary to enjoy the work, but give great insight to the symbols and metaphors that make up the back half of the film.

The film is autobiographical, with the character of Lee directly based on Burroughs’ own life. It’s a painfully honest portrait, as he reveals and examines the worst parts of himself and his insecurities: his addiction to heroin, his struggles with alcoholism, and his sexuality. In the 1950s, parts of Mexico City were seen as a sanctuary for queer men hoping to escape their American lives; a communal place where fresh starts could be found. It’s within this place Lee meets Allerton.

Lee tries desperately to find out if he’s queer and get closer to him, but Allerton’s stoic and slippery nature make him impossible to pin down. The truth is that both of these men are here for a reason. Whether it be hiding from persecution in America or coming to terms with their innermost demons, they’re running from something. A change of scenery doesn’t allow one to truly escape, and the underlying issues in their relationship and lives slowly bubble up to the surface. If they’re unable to establish a sense of self, how are they to form a relationship with an entirely different being? They’re disembodied, trying to break out of the vessel they’ve been forced into. Their love, their bond, no matter how strong, is unsustainable. Allerton recognizes this long before Lee.

Guadagnino has a way of capturing his subjects that’s equally raw and revealing. We, the viewer, through the lens he provides us, grow to know more about the characters than they do themselves.

Calvin Bowers

Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

This exceptionally animated film welcomes all to a world of wonder and beauty: one filled with breathtaking sceneries, colorful animals, and occasional oddities. One such strangeness was the cat statues. What was up with that? However, the film is adamant in not revealing the full picture. Not a single human appears and none of the animals talk, so there is no narration or dialogue. You are left to your own interpretations. However, despite my frustration with needing to know the “what, when, where, why, and how,” I never found it emotionally lacking. In fact, I was continuously and anxiously engaged the entire watch time.

Our protagonist, the black cat, is interrupted during its hunt by a pack of dogs and is chased further into the forest. While the cat does escape, the next main threat is immediate—a tsunami. Its eventual savior is a boat with a capybara on it. As the story progresses, they are joined by a lemur, a dog, and a secretarybird.

The film’s overarching message is among the very few details I can say is concrete: the only way the cast of animals can survive this new and uncertain world is to unite despite their differences. This challenging adventure is heightened by the fact that each animal has a distinct personality and various needs.

Once the end credits appeared, I had to metaphorically “pick up the puzzle pieces.” My main concern was understanding what the flood itself stood for. Is it meant to be a biblical flood conjured by divine wrath, or are the sea levels rising due to manmade climate change? I have settled on the answer being a mixture of both. Due to humans polluting the Earth, a divine presence intervened. It aligns well if one turns to the biblical story of Noah, as the cat’s journey somewhat echoes his. Furthermore, the boat symbolizes the Ark, and the animals are a representative “sample” of what would have been on said Ark. Thus, the purpose of the flood was to cleanse the Earth of sin and pollution. Once the flood recedes, the spiritual and physical contamination is purged. The world is restored and revitalized.

Kai Walker

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)

Body horror is back, baby! French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat analyzes beauty standards and dissects misogyny with a new twist. Body horror is a seemingly dying subgenre of horror, but with audience members vomiting, fainting, and sometimes leaving the theater altogether, I’d say Fargeat has it figured out.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fired from a television company because she is aging and her “loss of beauty” isn’t gaining the company any new viewers. Sparkle decides to take a black market drug that promises to create a younger and hotter version of herself, Sue (played by Margaret Qualley). Shocker – there are side effects! Sue slowly drains Sparkle of all her youth, ultimately leaving her as a monstrous culmination of body parts.

Fargeat’s prior film, Revenge (2017), shares both feminist undertones and elements of body horror. But The Substance takes this demonstration to an entirely new level. This film is deemed terrifying for many reasons, but the main one is the fact that it’s undoubtedly accurate to the modern beauty standards created for women. Anti-aging lotions, creams, UV treatments, serums, and surgery. The list goes on. Women are made to feel less beautiful as they age, and we are constantly being advertised and sold “remedies” for what society (via the patriarchy) has deemed a curse: growing old.

While a bit grotesque in her analysis and unpacking of misogyny, I found this film to be relatable nonetheless. Fargeat has delivered two films that both uniquely examine societal gender norms, simultaneously scrutinizing them. I look forward to Fargeat’s next project(s).

“In the meantime, take care of yourself!”

Bri Bishop

Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu retains the beats of the Dracula tale. In early 19th century Germany, an ambitious realtor Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) lands a lucrative contract from the reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) who lives in a cool castle in the mountains. Bidding goodbye to his beloved wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), Hutter sets off for his meeting to discover Orlok’s presence casts a bewitching spell on Ellen from afar through her dreams.

Remakes are tricky because the first question is “Why?” Dracula has been told in film form well over 100 times since Bram Stoker’s novel was published in 1897. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu minimally altered the story to escape copyright claims and Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre paid homage to the heritage of German cinema with raw, stripped down filmmaking. Since Eggers chose to specifically remake Nosferatu, and not simply adapt Dracula, comparisons of the three films are in order.

It’s no surprise that Nosferatu (2024) is the most technically polished version as film technology has advanced in the past 102 years. Murnau’s is a hallmark of German expressionism and remains iconic while Herzog’s employs even less technical proficiency to capture the bleak lives of characters facing an approaching plague. Eggers and regular DP Jarin Blaschke & Production Designer Craig Lathrop evoke a dreary atmosphere of darkened chambers, hazy gas lamps, and fireplaces that, while exquisite to look at, feels too curated for a story that bristles with sexual repression and societal breakdown. The film owes a greater aesthetic debt to Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, set in approximately the same time period and also confronting a community’s hidden psychological and sexual truths in the wake of supernatural death (but leans more knowingly into the storybook tone of its folklore).

Neither Murnau’s nor Herzog’s film can be removed from historical context; the original captures the inescapable doom of a country headed for disaster while Herzog’s version takes place not so much in the past but in a charred wasteland left behind by unimaginable destruction. Eggers’ film lacks similar resonance not because he isn’t German but because the focus is on executing familiar horror mechanics (spooky lighting, raving lunatics, Exorcist-like gesticulations, guys with mustaches), leaving us seeing the filmmaker as an outsider looking in.

Andrew Salerno

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)

Set in a stagnant late 1990s suburban landscape, Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to an already great feature debut (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, 2021) is a haunting thematic piece and painfully real queer allegory. Following a young boy named Owen, I Saw the TV Glow takes him on a journey of identity triggered by weekly viewings of a late-night television show called The Pink Opaque with his obsessed and trouble friend Maddy.

Together, they discover the beauty and the horror of identity being revolutionized by art. The Pink Opaque is a stand-in for your favorite TV show that altered the way you saw or processed art at a young age, but it also is far more. What if it knew exactly who you were and could reveal that to you? Maddy and Owen are connected by their love for the show but are diametrically opposed on the role it plays in their lives, which reveals the very real struggle of queer youth: do I embrace who I am no matter the cost, or do I create a mask and hope that what’s underneath will go away?

The mythology of The Pink Opaque is central to the narrative but also doubles as a very fascinating structural device. In the show, Tara and Isabel are teen psychics who have an ancient bond to one another and use their superpowers to fight the monster of the week types sent their way by the Big Bad, Mr. Melancholy — whose only goal is to steal the girls’ hearts, brainwash them, and bury them alive. Maddy becomes obsessed with the idea that she and Owen are in fact Tara and Isabel, that they have to overcome the amnesia forced on them by Mr. Melancholy, so they can become who they truly are.

Shot on luscious 35mm and dreamy VHS, this is the kind of film that sneaks in and defies what is typically expected in modern films that center on queer youth. It abstracts the lived experience while intertwining that with powerful ideas about the ways we interact with art and how it interacts with us.

Chayce Ward

A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)

“You can’t run away from yourself” – a common statement dramatized in a new way in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man. Sebastian Stan, cashing in some of his Marvel chips, stars as Edward, an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental procedure to “cure” himself – his face quite literally peels off and reveals the more conventionally handsome visage of Guy, the name and identity he will assume upon claiming that Edward has died.

A former actor, Guy eventually discovers that Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a playwright whose romantic disinterest partly inspired him to enact his radical transformation in the first place, has written a play based on Edward’s life. Guy goes out for the part, which he feels naturally entitled to play, and finds himself in competition with Oswald (Adam Pearson), a non-actor who also has neurofibromatosis and who feels inspired to give acting a shot since the role is so perfectly tailored to him. The introduction of Oswald is the film’s masterstroke – it is through his effortless confidence and joie de vivre that we begin to understand that Edward was never held back by his condition so much as by elements of his own character. Edward, now so successful as Guy, finds that his insecurities, self-loathing, and jealousy are brought back to the surface as Oswald ingratiates himself more fully into his life – first taking the role of “Edward” from him, and then the affections of Ingrid as well.

The film continues to go in ever-more unexpected directions that are nonetheless always anchored by the central themes in addition to the performances of its three leads. A Different Man probes questions of identity and relationships in brilliant and original ways, but it also does something rare in today’s cinematic climate – it conveys meaning in the very structure of its narrative. The movie is hard to pin down tonally and generically – it is by turns dramatic, darkly comic, absurdist, and even vaguely sci-fi – in a way that mirrors the mutability of its character’s personalities and lends to its exploration of the nature of identity and how it can shift and change in the context of not only our relationships to other people but also with our own selves.

Christopher Sailor

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)

Inspired by the tragic death of a PA working long shifts on set, Jude uses his latest film to denounce labor practices of the film industry. His protagonist Angela (played with grounded sparkle by Ilinca Manolache) works as a PA for the media wing of a multinational company and spends most of the film driving between locations, making consistent, marked efforts to log complaints about her working hours and measly pay. Halfway through the film, Angela’s supervisor, exasperated, tells her to just pull over to take a cat nap before her next pickup. Such suggestions from superiors do not go over well with our hero, as though Angela is quite aware of our reality where overworked crew are consistently put in unsafe and risky positions. It is not just ironic, then, that her current assignment is on a PSA video regarding workplace safety.

The social commentary in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is not as direct as in some of Jude’s previous work (such as the excellent Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, 2021). This film is layered and interstitched into a knot of cars, labor, film doubles, and staged documentary. Having no free time, given her work schedule, Angela folds in her other ventures into work life. She reads novels in traffic jams. She argues philosophy with Goethe’s descendant, who is strangely a corporate mogul. And she films TikTok reels as her alter ego: the sexist, foul-mouthed, conspiracy theorist Bobita. The horrendous and endlessly glitchy filter that turns Angela into the bald Bobita is hilarious, but it is also a quick reminder of our fractured, layered, multitasked world coming apart at the seams.

The “end of the world” here is not necessarily the filtering of life through new technologies – Angela is far too competent, self-assured, and well-rounded of a thinker to be positioned as a victim here. She is convinced, despite others’ suspicions, that her TikTok audience understands Bobita as intended satire. Jude also seems to have faith that audiences will understand that when he intercuts Do Not Expect with the 1980s Romanian film Angela Goes On — another film about labor, driving, and female workers — he is waiting for the industry to catch up with its own messaging.

Note: Radu Jude insisted on an 8-hour workday for all crew on the Do Not Expect set. Reportedly, many shooting days ended well under the 8-hour cap.

Yelizaveta Moss