[already reviewed The End, so here is the latest edition of my biweekly IndieWire newsletter, in which i write about why Joshua Oppenheimer's The End is by far the best and most relevant movie musical of the year. you can subscribe to "In Review" here if you want to.]

This week, IndieWire published our list of the 25 best films of the year, and once again it was objectively correct, obviously infallible, and universally celebrated by our readers. I joke, I joke (we straight up forgot to include “Babygirl,” even though our entire staff is obsessed with it), but the Twitter pushback did seem to be much lighter than usual. Maybe the conversation has just shifted over to Reddit and Bluesky, or maybe @LisanAlGaib69 has simply come to accept that a zany Jewish comedy about Jason Schwartzman falling in love with Carol Kane might be a superior achievement to “Dune: Part 2.” (I just looked it up and @LisanAlGaib69 is a real account that belongs to someone named Gustavo, whose one and only post is a heartfelt eulogy for Stan Lee from 2018. I hope they’re doing well.)

Anyway, if the fear was that the residual impact of last year’s strikes would make 2024 a miserable year for good movies, the process of watching the likes of “Janet Planet,” “Chicken for Linda,” and “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” get relegated to “honorable mention” status painted a very different picture. So did the films at the very top of our list, especially RaMell Ross’ astonishing “Nickel Boys,” which might be the best and most forward-thinking American film so far this decade. Some years may offer more life-altering masterpieces than others (2019 comes to mind), and the ones that don’t include a new Tom Cruise vehicle are definitely at a serious disadvantage, but there are good movies every year if you make the effort to look for them.

But I’d argue that a certain quantity of good films does not necessarily make for “a good year for movies.” That can only be determined by other, more existential questions for the medium at large. In 2024, did cinema fight against the snowballing forces of cultural enshittification (among the other, even more pernicious evils of our time)? Did it renew our faith in cinema’s unique ability to see us better in the darkness than we can see ourselves in the daylight? Did it broaden our sense of what’s possible for this world, or did they simply flatter our desire to feel like we’re doing the best we can?

After all, the movies have a unique ability to do that, too.

Written by Ian Wang, a fascinating and justifiably furious new piece in ArtReview has argued that the movies of 2024 failed us on every front that matters. And not just the movies, but also the machine that produces them. A machine that manufactures empathy as a panacea rather than as a means to an end. Rooted in his frustration with the film industry’s response to the war in Gaza, Wang rails against the hostile non-reaction to Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Oscars, which crystallized the film world’s cowardly refusal to take sides in a humanitarian crisis that continues to be abetted by public opinion.

Wang excoriates the “hollow truisms” and “mealy-mouthed appeals for unity” that several institutions have published in response to the genocide, and takes particular issue with the Berlinale’s hypocritical decision to disavow the comments made by the directors of “No Other Land” upon receiving the festival’s documentary prize. I’d add that “No Other Land,” number two on IndieWire’s list of the year’s best films and the recent winner of the New York Film Critics Circle’s award for Best Documentary, is still without U.S. distribution, which to my knowledge is unprecedented for a film that would otherwise be a lock for an Oscar nomination. I’d also add that ranking “No Other Land” anywhere on the same list that includes the likes of “Challengers” and “The Substance” is an exercise in absurdity, but that I hoped its position would most effectively call attention to the film’s humanity without inviting readers to dismiss the film’s inclusion because of their politics.

Wang extends his critique to what happened on screen as well. The writer calls out Alex Garland’s “Civil War” for its adamant bothsidesism (“I tried to imagine him making such a film about the actual American Civil War; would he also say that the issue was polarization?”), and Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” for promoting a “facile universalism” that sours its satirical critique of Hollywood ageism into the stuff of misogynistic hagsploitation.

I strongly disagree with his second example, as I maintain that Fargeat’s Ozempic fairytale is a fantastical portrait of self-loathing that pointedly engenders our disgust as a means to an end, but I share Wang’s broader frustration with the distorted role that reality — political or otherwise — has come to play in the movies of our time. You can’t go five minutes during awards season without hearing someone yammer on about “the power of storytelling,” but people seem to get uncomfortable when storytellers actually flex that power in meaningful and decisive ways. It’s the inevitable question of cinema in the age of neoliberalism: Do we want movies to change the world, or do we just want them to let us indulge in the fantasy that movies can change the world?

Unlike Wang, I don’t think it’s a problem if people are eager to laugh with films like “The Substance” and “Anora” (the latter of which he accuses of being disconnected from its protagonist’s suffering), but I do think it’s a problem if people feel like singing along to “Wicked” in a crowded theater — or rewarding it with Best Picture at the Oscars — is some kind of blow against tyranny, for example. I swear to every god on Earth this isn’t another rant about that movie (I’ve already held way too much space for it in this newsletter), I’m only bringing it up because its self-satisfaction speaks to the value of the one movie I’m truly upset wasn’t on IndieWire’s top 25 list — the one movie that I feel is most sorely missing from all of the various awards conversations, and the one movie that I’m most convinced will be reclaimed as a masterpiece at some point in the future. Probably by the French.

I’m talking about Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End,”which premiered at Telluride to a hyper-polarized response that left Neon without any clear path forward as to a release strategy. You’d at least think a lavish, post-apocalyptic musical starring Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton as the last married couple on Earth would be more of a conversation-starter, particularly one that sees “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence” director Joshua Oppenheimer finding such a delirious way to expand upon the notions of guilt and self-delusion he explored in his colossal documentary work about the Indonesian genocide.

Set entirely within the lavish, mansion-like bunker its characters have carved into the bowels of a salt mine (and where they’ve lived since everything went to shit aboveground 25 years earlier), “The End” watches as Father, Mother, their Son (a naively sinister George MacKay in what might be the scariest and most dynamic performance of 2024), and the small coterie of friends they deigned to save from extinction participate in the shared fantasy that everything is just fine. Mother screams awake every morning, but the rest of each day is devoted to keeping the nightmares at bay.

Son paints a toy model of the American West and helps Father write an ahistorical memoir about all the good he did for the world. Mother fusses over the paintings — Renoirs, Monets — she hoarded before the fall. The others play their part as the help, eternally subservient to Father and Mother for sparing them. That tense dynamic is held in place by the geometry of a non-violent Mexican standoff; everyone remembers the awful things that each of their fellow survivors are so desperate to forget about themselves (the damage they caused to the environment, the people they left behind, etc.), and everyone agrees not to mention them in order to avoid mutually assured destruction.

When the cast joins together for a Rodgers and Hammerstein-inspired opening number that cheerily insists their “future is bright,” they do so in perfect harmony. That harmony only comes under threat when a young woman (Moses Ingram as Girl) shows up on their doorstep, unaware of the detente she’s at risk of disturbing. The family keeps a well-stocked arsenal and obsessively rehearses how they’d prepare for any kind of outside threat, but the danger Girl poses to these people isn’t a physical one — it’s how the sheer reality of her presence unsettles several decades of shared delusion, forcing the other characters into direct contact with the most deeply repressed parts of themselves in the process. Did they really “have no choice” about who they decided to bring underground with them, or is humanity’s singular gift for self-absolution about to face its ultimate test?

Ambiently fact-checking the stories these people have been telling themselves and each other since doomsday, Girl unwittingly assumes the same role that Oppenheimer served in his documentaries — a connection formalized by the scene in which she inspires Swinton to retch up her guilt over dinner. Of course, the newcomer has some baggage of her own, and while “The End” is high on introspection and low on incident, it’s riveting to watch Ingram’s character become seduced by the solipsism that has allowed her new friends in the bunker to stay “sane” for so long.

Equally inspired by “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and a real oligarch whose bunker Oppenheimer toured while it was still safe for him to shoot in Indonesia, “The End” is the latest in a recent wave of “anti-musicals” that have subverted the genre’s inherent buoyancy in order to articulate the kind of self-conflict that people might struggle to express through dialogue. I’d put “Annette,” “Emilia Pérez,” and even “Joker: Folie à Deux” in the same category, though “Dancer in the Dark” remains the 21st century’s defining example of the form.

What’s so fascinating about Oppenheimer’s film, however, is that the musical numbers in “The End” don’t invite the characters to share their most secret truths, but rather to refortify their delusions. The process isn’t perfect, and some of the most brilliant moments in the movie find the characters stumbling into soul-baring confessions as if by accident, but it’s telling how Mother’s ode to her own mom — long-dead, abandoned by her daughter at the end of the world — so gingerly pivots from the heartfelt (“I wish that you were here”) to the deluded (“I hope you’re well”).

Unlike “Wicked” and so many of the other movies that are held up as full-throated “rallying cries” for unity in the face of fascism and whatnot, “The End” doesn’t allow us to remain in a position superior to its characters. It doesn’t reward us for being moved by how they defy the gravity of their circumstances, nor does it permit us to take solace in the belief we aren’t capable of deluding ourselves in the same way. “Why don’t they have names?,” someone asked at a Q&A I moderated with Oppenheimer the other night. “Because they are you,” the director responded.

Yes, this is a film about a particular kind of people living in an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the real power of its premise is that it invites satire without ever submitting to it; it thrives instead on the eminently recognizable narcissism of a nuclear family that would do anything to protect their own. Who cares if the world is over so long as they remain? Alone in their bunker, blissfully ignorant to whatever is or isn’t still happening up above, this family is able to rewrite history in a way that flatters their role in it and embrace the kind of naive optimism that can only emerge from the flames of annihilation. Father tried to promote a cleaner planet. Mother was in the Bolshoi ballet. Son is an unquestioning receptacle for whatever his parents choose to share with him.

To borrow a line from Joan Didion, these characters — like the genocidal murderers in “The Act of Killing” — have told themselves stories in order to live. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they’ve told themselves stories in order to live with themselves. And what good are the stories when the only response they’re designed to produce is the desire to tell more stories?

In the film’s press notes, Oppenheimer quotes from Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: ‘How nice to see children running on the grass!’ The second tear says: ‘How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’” So many films in the Trump Presidential Era — including a lot of films that I’m very fond of — are content to aspire to that second tear. And when real atrocities erupt into our world, the economy that made, screened, and watched those films reveal them to have been little more than kitsch.

Not “The End.” As Oppenheimer says, “I try to bring the viewer to a place where we cry a third tear — where we mourn the terrible cost of sentimentality itself.” He succeeds magnificently and without compromise, as his latest film builds to a gut-punch of an anticlimax in which the stories his characters tell themselves create a bittersweet new reality all their own.

“Our ability to lie to ourselves is probably the tragic flaw that makes us human,” Oppenheimer writes elsewhere in the press notes. “And it will surely be the one that destroys our species — unless we stop and find the courage to recognize our lies for what they are.” Storytelling is powerful. Maybe even the most powerful force on Earth. They’re so powerful, in fact, that they can excuse us from our moral obligation to reality. It’s great when the movies make us cry a tear or two of empathy and togetherness for all humanity, but the movies of 2024 prove why that isn’t enough. We need to cry that third tear, otherwise, the first two are really just for show.