When can you rightly say a film has been “overlooked”? The measure of that isn’t nearly as objective as the box office — or as clearly defined as the rushing river of opinion that’s poured into a 10 Best list. Overlooked means a movie that got out there…but not enough. A movie that wasn’t praised enough, or seen enough, or cherished enough by the audiences that did see it. Or some combination of the above. Overlooked, we admit, can be a bit in the eye of the beholder. Yet we think that the movies on our list clear a high bar of “should have been out there more. Or appreciated more.” One thing is for sure: The time for making up for that starts now.
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Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy
Image Credit: Courtesy of Panarea Productions Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones’s chilling documentary is the scariest horror movie of the year, yet the media ignored it. The film is even more unsettling now than when it came out last spring, since its subject — the network of ideological soldiers that the Christian Right has been putting in place for decades, all in anticipation of the moment when they could take power — now looks, for the first time, like a nightmare with the potential to come true. The Christian nationalists view Donald Trump as a holy wrecking ball, and the film investigates their symbiotic alliance as well as the hidden roots, and hidden might, of this movement. In an era of social-justice filmmaking, “Bad Faith” went further than any film this year in uncovering the conspiratorial impulse toward injustice in America. —Owen Gleiberman
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Chicken for Linda
Image Credit: DORJE FILM Audiences this year couldn’t get enough of animation, flocking to massive studio sequels such as…
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The post “The Most Overlooked Movies of 2024” by Todd Gilchrist was published on 12/31/2024 by variety.com