’Tis the season of the critics’ paradox! We spend all year complaining about what we’ve watched; then, come mid-December, we also wail piteously that we can’t possibly fit our favourite watches onto a single list.
S2 of We Are Lady Parts is rich with insight and full of heart.
For me, the true test of a show or a film is whether it rises unbidden, like the festive spirit, come the end of the year. So many prove themselves memorable in different ways. This year, for its cinematography: Expats. For bucking the trend with a second season better than its first: The Diplomat.
So many dots yearn to be connected: Watch Wolfs (Brad Pitt and George Clooney), Conclave (Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini), The Last Showgirl (Pamela Anderson) and The Substance (Demi Moore) to experience the spectrum of how confining or liberating it can be for an actor to age.
It’s been a fantastic year for women’s stories in Indian entertainment: All We Imagine as Light, Laapataa Ladies, Ullozhukku (though this doesn’t make up for all the testosterone fests we’ve had to endure).
Here are 10 more of my favourite watches from 2024.
* We Are Lady Parts
In a year full of disappointing follow-up seasons (Bad Sisters, Slow Horses, The Bear), S2 of Nida Manzoor’s series about the misfit lead guitarist of a Muslim punk-rock band is a charming exception. Frequently hilarious, rich with insight and full of heart, it is the perfect comfort watch.
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* The Wild Robot
Armed with possibly the cutest duckling in animation, Chris Sanders’s adaption of Peter Brown’s brilliant young-adult novel is one of the most beautiful films of the year. It’s also one of the funniest, with Lupita Nyong’o playing Roz the robot and Pedro Pascal as a cranky, scheming fox named Fink.
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* Will Love in Spring
The chemistry between Li Xian and Zhou Yutong, who play a mortician and an amputee respectively, makes this Chinese romantic drama a great holiday watch. It is also a moving portrait of two unconventional families in a small town. Unusually for Chinese dramas, which often stretch to 80-odd episodes, this one is only 21 episodes long.
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* The Midnight Romance in Hagwon
This mellow workplace romance is set in the viciously competitive world of South Korea’s coaching centres, offering a view of the toxic culture fostered by teachers who see students as cash cows. In a year of flashy duds (I’m looking at you two, The Trunk and Queen of Tears), this K-drama is a quiet delight.
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* Kaos
Charlie Covell reimagines Greek myths with sparkling inventiveness to create Netflix’s best show of 2024. Come for Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, stay for the elegant storytelling. Adding to Kaos’s Greek-tragedy aura, Netflix inexplicably chose not to renew the show.
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* Perfect Days
Director Wim Wenders’s lyrical ode to everyday beauty had its festival run in 2023, but since it landed on Mubi this year, I’m sneaking it in — because it’s rare for an arty film to be so utterly wholesome, which is reason enough for more people to watch it. Inspired by the minimalism of the legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders focuses on the very ordinary life of a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, only to reveal how extraordinary the man really is.
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* Girls Will Be Girls
A lyrical but tense portrait of adolescence and a mother-daughter relationship, this film is anchored by the brilliant talent of Preeti Panigrahi. She plays a goody-two-shoes named Mira whose life starts to unravel when she falls for a boy in her class. Director Shuchi Talati’s debut, it won an audience award at the Sundance film festival.
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* Kishkindha Kaandam
Despite a couple of loopholes, this was one of the smartest mysteries to come out of India this year. Vijayaraghavan is outstanding as the proud Appu Pillai, who refuses to accept that he has a degenerative brain disease.
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* Mr & Mrs Smith
Maya Erskine and Donald Glover play hired assassins who go undercover as a married couple, and the results are explosive. Wild, violent and sharply witty, the show goes well beyond the 2005 film. It also has the best open-ended finale I’ve seen this year.
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* Shogun
The conclusion is awkward, but until the finale, Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’s retelling of James Clavell’s pulp-fiction saga is practically flawless. Set in 17th-century Japan, the exquisitely crafted period drama follows Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) as he discovers that his rivals outnumber his allies. Fortunately, he has the formidable Lady Toda Mariko (played to perfection by Anna Sawai) by his side.
May 2025 give us more choices, more joy and a lot more entertainment. Happy new year!
(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)
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