In Slate's annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics -- for 2024, Bilge Ebiri, K. Austin Collins, Alison Willmore, and Odie Henderson -- about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Friends, Romans, critics attempting to plumb the riches of my Emersonian mind,

I love Megalopolis.

What can I say? On a sunny afternoon a couple of weeks after its release, I stole a little time away from my duties at the New York Film Festival to walk a few blocks uptown, to Lincoln Square, to catch a matinee showing of Megalopolis in IMAX. It was a full house, extremely diverse (especially in age), and for the entire two-hour-and-change run time, everyone was in it. No one left. No one jeered. No one held back on openly expressing themselves either -- there was laughter, there was skepticism, a couple of people clapped in places, a few groaned -- but, to a degree that impressed me after being so sure that Megalopolis was the kind of disaster that people would openly reject, everyone seemed to roll with it. I can't think of the last time I had quite as much fun belonging to a crowd of theatergoers whose mental wheels were so clearly spinning for the length of an entire movie.

When I saw Challengers -- another 2024 movie with a reputation for inspiring its audiences to react out loud -- the oohs and aahs at this bit of locker-room nudity and that bit of techno-steamy melodrama felt, in comparison, a little forced, as if the thirtysomethings in my midst had seriously never seen a dick before. My audience for Dune: Part Two erupted into applause and laughter (Javier Bardem's proud-uncle "Lisan al-Gaib!" is one of the line readings of the year) at moments that had genuinely earned them, but as I was walking out, to my surprise, all I heard were complaints. (I liked the movie just fine.) Megalopolis was my single best theatrical experience of 2024, not because everyone loved the film, but because -- embrace it or dismiss it -- they seemed enlivened by it. They were wrestling with it. They were asking questions of the film and of themselves: questions about the margins of their taste, "good" vs. "bad," what it means to be both suspicious of the film and completely enthralled by it. And so was I.

But I pretty quickly came down on the side of loving the movie itself: loving its chrome-bright aesthetics and perverse mix of Roman Empire cosplay with down-to-earth Gossip Girl trashiness; the flagrant lack of reality or factory-made, overly polished professionalism in its visual effects; its comedic broadness and outright silliness; and the early-aughts artificial bombast of its images, which have rightly (if semi-derisively) earned the film comparisons to music videos like Linkin Park's "In the End." I take for granted that some of the film is loopy, that some of the editing is janky, that the technocratic idealism of its protagonist-philosopher-hero is not a politics I can get behind, and that the swerves from high to low may demand that a viewer run to the nearest recompression chamber after the film ends.

By the time I saw Megalopolis, I had been led to believe that it was some errant misfire by a director who no longer knows what he's doing. Yes, this is the guy who directed The Godfather -- who so successfully merged popular moviegoing taste with serious, professional, auteur-driven, and frankly quite masculine Hollywood filmmaking. We still live in the shadow of that style of film today (see also: The Brutalist). But I think of Francis Ford Coppola as, above all, a filmmaker of complex set pieces: The wedding and baptism sequences of The Godfather come to mind, and the Madison Square Garden and "drive to Purgatory" sequences of Megalopolis are two great, parallel examples. Look at the way the MSG sequence breaks a huge social ritual down into various little microcosms all nibbling away at each other, not unlike The Godfather wedding -- this has Coppola written all over it. I don't see a film that's beyond its director's control. And I definitely don't see a film that's giving the audience the middle finger. I do see a film that knows that middle fingers might fly in the opposite direction. And it proceeds anyway.

There's nothing I value more, as a critic, than a film that makes me reexamine why I feel the way that I feel. And I sensed these questions blossoming quite a bit among the moviegoing public this year -- to Alison's question about how my role as a film programmer has affected my view on these things, it's made me way more aware of how people feel, what they're arguing about, what they think movies are "about." Not always to my satisfaction! To be honest, I think our culture is a little prone to exaggeration. And a little too quick to feel smarter than every film we see. I do not like Joker: Folie à Deux, but the people in my life who were quickest to call it dumb tended also to have the sloppiest critiques of it. (Why did so many people think it would be an MGM musical?) I similarly don't care to debate whether The Substance is too obvious. You aren't a bad viewer if you find its commitment to being on the nose a little stultifying, but you're also not in the wrong to say that for genre films, thematic obviousness is usually a virtue. If anything, The Substance doesn't do enough to take its own obviousness for granted, plow through its premise, get the hell on with it, and quit explaining itself. It's a bit boring. But obviousness in itself is not the problem.

This year, I kept feeling that most of the "crazy" films people either caterwauled about or unduly gassed up were simply not as ridiculous, horny, etc., as advertised. Do the rest of you ever feel that way? The Substance, love it or hate it, is a little gross but not really so extreme. Babygirl is not really that kinky. The glimpses of horniness we get in Challengers would be a lot less notable, I think, in a culture that wasn't so sex-negative. The response to that movie makes me feel as if the Puritans have already won.

There's so much more to say, especially about some of my favorite movies of the year, which range from the wink-wink himbo intelligence of Richard Linklater's Hit Man and the analytical despair of Mike Leigh's Hard Truths to the lush surrealness of Christmas Eve in Miller's Point and I Saw the TV Glow, and on and on.

But I'm stuck on the question of understanding why we feel the way we feel. Why do you love what you love? How do you know?

Kam

P.S. My favorite films of the year, in alphabetical order: