Faces of 2024

This has not been a time for celebration and cheer in cinema. How could it be? Hollywood came to the end of 2024 reeling from four years of a pandemic and strikes, battered by declining movie attendance and shaken by a bitterly divided culture, a troubling election and a natural disaster in its home city. In that atmosphere, the faces of our time are the faces of artists staring into a discomforting landscape and working to address it in their work. Mikey Madison in Anora: a sex worker who gets mixed up with Russian thugs. Colman Domingo in Sing Sing: an imprisoned man whose only moments of release come in a makeshift prison theater. Demi Moore in The Substance: a woman facing unendurable pressures to be youthful at any cost, even if she’s risking a descent into true horror. Adrien Brody in The Brutalist: a brilliant but haunted Holocaust survivor whose gifts are exploited by a condescending tycoon. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain: sibling cousins on a family vacation in the shadow of that Holocaust. Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Peréz: a transgender Mexican drug lord trying to escape a life of violence. Michelle Yeoh in Wicked: a conniving and powerful educator in league with a despotic ruler who is desperate to secure his power by finding people to demonize. 

The performances and the films aren’t all so grim on the surface; if you were to go only by those descriptions, you’d hardly know that Anora is wildly comedic and that Emilia Peréz and Wicked are full-on musicals. But the undercurrents are there, because the best entertainment faces the times and comes with a hefty dose of darkness these days. That was true even before wildfires devastated the city that serves as home to the film industry, Los Angeles, only four days after most of these photos were shot at the Palm Springs International Film Awards. —Steve Pond