INDIEWIRE: The 9 Best Undistributed Movies of 2024
By David Ehrlich
2024 was “a good year for movies” (whatever that means), but the fact is that it could have been an even better one had some of the best films we saw on the festival circuit been released in the United States.
In some cases, it’s easy to understand why distributors balked at these titles. For example: There’s probably not a lot of money in a five-and-a-half-hour documentary about the last independent TV station in Russia, riveting as it might be to watch (besides, it feels like only a matter of time before MUBI steps in to give that one the platform it deserves). And it’s no great mystery why American companies have stayed away from the historic and vital “No Other Land,” even as it continues to sweep critics awards on its march to a guaranteed nomination for Best Documentary — or the most damning Oscar snub of all time.
In other cases — as with Noémie Merlant’s riotous “The Balconettes,” and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s bracing crime thriller “Cloud” — the continued lack of distribution is harder to wrap our heads around. Be that as it may, we remain confident that all of these films will get snagged at some point before the end of next year. In the meantime, keep these nine titles on your radar, and take comfort in the idea that 2025 will have even more to offer than what the current release calendar suggests.
“The Balconettes”
It’s hard to remember the last time a director prominently displayed their own vagina onscreen. Statistically speaking, most of them wouldn’t be able to do it if they tried. But Noémie Merlant has never shied away from an opportunity to redefine how female bodies are depicted on film, and the “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star’s recent pivot behind the camera has only emboldened her efforts to reject the male gaze by inviting her characters to reclaim its oppressive hyper-sexualization on their own terms.
Needless to say, she’s happy to lead by example in her poisoned but delicious midnight snack of a second feature. Playing Élise, a C-list starlet who’s recently been cast as Marilyn Monroe in a TV movie (only to steal her boyfriend’s car and flee the set in a panic), Merlant crashes into “The Balconettes” dolled up to look like a cheap synonym for male desire. It’s a costume that Élise will strip away over the course of the physically uninhibited and formally unbound rape-revenge horror-comedy that follows, a messy and boisterous romp that seeks to reclaim the female body from its very first shot — which ends with a middle-aged woman receiving a tickle of pleasure as she suffocates her awful husband to death by sitting on his face. “A woman’s mystique is not a choice,” someone sighs. “It’s a punishment.” Merlant’s confrontational approach allows Élise to forcibly dispel herself of that mystique, freeing the character to redefine her image from the ground up over the rest of a film that combines an Almodóvar-like sex farce with 100 other flavors that all combine to reflect a righteous truth all its own. It’s a truth that American audiences will hopefully get to experience for themselves in 2025.
“Cloud”
An action film as only “Cure” and “Pulse” director Kiyoshi Kurosawa would think to make one, “Cloud” leverages the social disaffection at the heart of his analog horror masterpieces into a sterile — but eventually bullet-filled — morality tale about the dehumanizing nature of digital communication. The first hour is a slow accumulation of the petty crimes (and other various insults) that the internet allows people to commit against one another from a distance, and with the benefit of anonymity. The second hour observes what happens when those petty crimes reach a critical mass, and the animus that’s been welling up on social media spills into the real world with the deadly force of a double-barreled shotgun.
At its most basic level, “Cloud” is about a quasi-sociopathic internet reseller who hoards all manner of crap — medical devices, handbags, collectible dolls — so that he can artificially inflate the prices of these goods and sell them to desperate strangers on the internet for profit. When his buyers get hip to the scheme, they seek revenge.
If Kurosawa’s work has long displayed a morbid fascination with the relationship between diffuse psychic distress and localized physical violence, “Cloud” updates the filmmaker’s signature focus for a modern world that’s enmeshed in an infinite (but invisible) network of small cruelties and bitter grievances — a network so ubiquitous that even the better angels of our nature might drive us straight into hell. Almost too mundane to care about until it becomes impossible to stop watching for much the same reason, this riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be. Any U.S. distributor smart enough to pick this up will own the rights to one of the best films of the new year.
“Familiar Touch”
An achingly intimate debut feature from filmmaker and body movement coach Sarah Friedland, “Familiar Touch” follows a once-vibrant SoCal octogenarian named Ruth (Tony winner Kathleen Chalfant) as she struggles to acclimate to her first days in the nursing home where she’s been relocated in the aftermath of her dementia diagnosis. As Kate Erbland wrote in her review: “Friedland is not given over to histrionics or blaring displays of emotion, instead asking us to follow Ruth and experience the world through her eyes. The impact is profound. Each day, hell, each hour, brings a new hurdle for Ruth to cross. Some of them are just lovely — like a dreamy swim she takes in the home’s pool — while others would likely feel like anathema to even the mostly mentally ‘well’ of us. Speed dating? No. Sometimes, Ruth is able to capture some of her old spark, much of it rooted in her past career as a cook, and she gamely reels off complicated recipes and muscles her way into breakfast service. She can do something, her actions seem to say, she can be somebody of use.”
With “Familiar Touch,” Friedland aspires to challenge notions of how older adults become peripheral in our culture — she based the film around a paternal grandmother who died 12 years ago but also grappled with dementia. In the Horizons section at Venice, “Familiar Touch” won Best Director, Best Actress, and the Lion of the Future Award for a Debut Film. Somehow, it’s still available for the taking.
Update: Music Box Films will release “Familiar Touch” in 2025.
“Harvest”
Vague but stirringly elemental, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Harvest” blazed a unique trail across the fall festival circuit — not everyone was taken with this evocative fable, but few movies stirred up the same fever in those who saw it. Writing for IndieWire, critic Sophie Monks Kaufman reflected on the Greek New Wave icon’s first feature since “Chevalier” nine years ago:
“With her small but delicious body of directorial work, Tsangari has amassed a loyal fanbase. Her debut ‘Attenberg,’ (2010) announced a talent capable of balancing absurdist humor with an infectious warmth for human weirdness. Where lauded contemporary Yorgos Lanthimos makes his characters suffer to drive existential points home, Tsangari uses deadpan observations as a way to affectionately deepen her psychological portraits. Crucially, her creations care about each other, even if they are often hamstrung by certain weaknesses.
At first glance, it seems like Tsangari has totally switched things up. Her first literary adaptation (both previous films were her original ideas) plunges us into the world dreamed up by novelist Jim Crace. In an unspecified village in the wilds of Scotland on the cusp of industrial change, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry-Jones) is in love with land. He forages bugs from trees, then skinny-dips in a deserted lake. On returning to his village, he finds it is on fire.
As with many of the dramatic events in ‘Harvest’ the medium is the message with imagery that further burnishes the reputation of rising DP star Sean Price Williams. Having first captured the serenity of this place through Walter’s solo revelry, now he captures its ashy filth and danger. This is a film with a comprehensive visual grammar that does not settle for one viewpoint of its absorbing setting.” Fingers crossed U.S. audiences get to indulge in that setting next year.
“My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow”
After more than a decade of waiting for her follow-up to 2011’s indelible “The Loneliest Planet,” Julia Loktev returned with a characteristically unexpected pivot: In this case, a five-and-a-half-hour documentary about TV Rain, the last independent news channel in Putin’s Russia. And this, per the film’s title, might only be the beginning of the story. A project that was profoundly transformed by Russia’s invasion against Ukraine, which began four months into production, Loktev has described “My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow” as a result of “being at the right place at the right time — or the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Some filmmakers may have seen that as their cue to leave,” Lauren Wissot wrote in her IndieWire review, “especially as the FSB began to close in on their ragtag cast of charismatic idealists, but Loktev immediately recognized how the war would make TV Rain’s work even more vital than it already was; ditto the work she was doing to document it.
With ‘My Undesirable Friends,’ that work has taken the form of an addictive thriller that gets to know its subjects with the fly-on-the-wall intimacy of a reality TV show. With Loktev’s off-camera presence serving as a constant portal for the viewer, we’re invited into the apartments of these eager truth-tellers as they eat (and eat and eat), drink, and steal a healthy amount of gallows humor from the horrors of their situation. We learn about their Harry Potter obsessions, and the names of their dogs. Most of all, we watch as they try to figure out how late is too late to get out. And while five-plus hours of mostly hanging out in strangers’ apartments might seem like an increasingly tedious invitation, Loktev ends up justifying the running time as her ‘undesirable friends’ soon become ours as well.”
“No Other Land”
Born in the small Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, 28-year-old Basel Adra has never known a life that wasn’t under threat of forced removal — or worse. But the freshness of his memory can also be attributed to the fact that Adra has never known a life that wasn’t being documented for his own protection. The most dehumanizing episodes of his existence have all been captured on camera by his family and their fellow villagers, the footage preserved and shared in the hopes that the world might witness their suffering and prevail upon Israel to let Palestinians live in peace (“I started filming when we started to end,” Adra intones, perhaps repeating the same words his father said the first time he picked up his own camera).
Against all odds, that hope continues to persevere — not only among the survivors of Masafer Yatta, but also through “No Other Land,” the lucidly enraging documentary that Adra has co-directed about Israel’s decades-long attempt to erase them from the earth as completely as it erased them from its maps. The first major film about the occupation of Palestine since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October of last year, this intimate and harrowing portrait of endurance is all the more powerful for its focus on the decades of colonial degradation that paved the way for the current nightmare.
Unquestionably the most high-profile undistributed film of the year (a distinction that should soon be fortified even further by an Oscar nomination, for which it’s eligible, thanks to a brief qualifying run), “No Other Land” is a work of tremendous bravery that has been met with a show of extreme cowardice. There’s a profound shame in that, of course, but also a real sadness as well. Witnessing is the most effective defense people have against occupation, as occupiers — like all thieves — wilt in the face of being watched. The footage is out there, and it’s rarely or never been assembled into a more concise, powerful, and damning argument than it is here. Now it only needs to be seen.
“On Falling”
One of IndieWire’s most passionate reviews out of TIFF was for Portuguese writer/director Laura Carreira’s social-realist character study about an immigrant facing poor working conditions as a packer at a factory in Scotland, which Sophie Monks Kaufman described as “far better than anything Ken Loach made during the final innings of his career” (‘On Falling’ was produced by Sixteen Films, the company Loach co-founded).”
Kaufman continued that “Carreira has a docu-realistic eye for setting and a dramatist’s instinct for pacing and mood. The pitter-patter of workers footsteps, the squeaking of a metal turnstile gate, the beeping of its protagonist’s scanner — a tool of her trade — form a rhythm so that there is an assured quality that marks the film as a work by someone who has not fallen into the trap of thinking that social realism means no production values. Instantly, there is a charge to events despite the fact that the film is painstakingly fashioned from plausible locations and scenes are allowed to breathe. In a film that’s all the more powerful for its restraint, Carreira avoids wild swings and contrived speeches, and trusts the audience to be swept up by a devastating performance of a woman being hollowed out from within by inhumane working conditions.”
“TWST / Things We Said Today”
A low-key stunner from this year’s New York Film Festival, “TWST / Things We Said Today” is the latest work of cinematic magic from the Romanian director and screenwriter Andrei Ujica, and a film that Lauren Wissot described in her review as “both elaborately crafted and a heck of a lot of fun.” Wissot continued: “With its title aptly referring to the 1964 Beatles song that McCartney labeled as a piece of ‘future nostalgia,’ the all-archival documentary leisurely begins with the band’s arrival in NYC for their August ’65 concert at Shea Stadium, and then propels fast and furiously forward, zig-zagging back in time and through multiple spaces.
The film is culled from nearly 100 hours of 8mm home movies (sourced from Ebay) and another 100-plus hours of 16mm news footage shot around the weekend of August 13-15, 1965. It also deftly juxtaposes the Beatles (trailed by paparazzi and forced to endure carnivalesque press conferences) with their obsessed female fandom (likewise pursued by reporters attempting to understand this newfangled ‘Beatlemania’). Additionally, ‘TWST’ is able to deftly place this fragment of pop history in its proper American context by interweaving images from the other headline events of that month — the Watts riots and the World’s Fair. Strange days indeed.
And then there’s the more personal meets political layer, unsurprising coming from the filmmaker behind 2010’s three-hour tour de force ‘The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu,’ and the seminal ‘Videograms of a Revolution’ (co-directed with Harun Farocki) nearly two decades before that. While those masterworks utilized footage from Ujica’s home country’s National Archives and state TV (along with amateur video), respectively, to presciently put on display the government-toppling power of the moving image, ‘TWST — Things We Said Today’ is similarly revolutionary in its own unique way (starting with the fact that ‘TWST’ opens with Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ — and then goes on to feature no Beatles songs at all).”
“Zurawski v Texas”
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, along with actress Jennifer Lawrence, produce this incisive and all too urgent documentary look behind the curtain of Texas abortion laws. As Jourdain Searles wrote in their IndieWire review: “‘Zurawski v Texas’ is a film about America itself and the governmental failings that have brought us to this moment. In the two years since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, women and pregnant people have struggled to receive proper reproductive care. This urgent and necessary documentary makes plain the obvious evil of an uncaring government that insists on gaining full control of the bodies of its people, unmoved by the pain that follows.
When Amanda Zurawski’s water broke after 18 weeks, she was denied an emergency abortion and went into septic shock, having to spend three days in the ICU. She had already picked out a name for her unborn daughter — Willow — but the child never made it. As a result of this terrifying ordeal, Zurawski’s tubes were damaged and had to be reconstructed. Unlikely to be able to carry another child, she and her husband Josh are forced to turn to surrogacy to expand their family. In an effort to prevent this from happening to other women and pregnant people, Zurawski made the decision to sue the state of Texas with the help of Molly Duane, senior attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights.
‘Zurawski v Texas’ follows Zurawski and her legal team as they sue the Texas government for failing women and pregnant people throughout the state. Directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault take us through every aspect of the legal battle they face, from studying and case-prepping to taking the stand, facing questions from uncaring prosecutors with only the bottom line in mind. Thwarted at every turn by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, these brave women struggle to put public faces to the struggle for access to medically necessary abortions.”