2024: the year in war cinema

There are no years without wars, and which wars loom largest is greatly influenced by vested political and media interests. Those caveats granted, 2024 has still been a year in which continued carnage in Ukraine and Gaza and rising authoritarian movements in America and Europe were at once impossible to ignore and incendiary to comment upon. Film festivals debated their role: the Berlinale saw backlash for honouring representatives of the far-right AFD party; British director Jonathan Glazer was criticised for referencing Gaza in his acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest’s Best International Feature Oscar; Cannes saw red carpet protests over Gaza, while Venice resisted calls to exclude Israeli titles from its selection. But if compelled side-taking frustrated some – “I would love to attend an apolitical film festival again,” said Berlinale juror Christian Petzold – cinema could still supply complexity, humanity and ethical challenge as well as tribalism.

No Other Land, made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, used 20 years of family home videos to depict the effects of occupation and forced displacement. Still more intimate and unsettling was Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, in which Russian soldiers’ personal phone conversations, recorded by Ukrainian intelligence, play against footage of Ukraine’s ravaged and depopulated towns. Lesia Diak’s Dad’s Lullaby, also set against the Ukraine conflict, addressed the personal fallout from battlefield experience, while Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis’s Lyd chronicled the fate of one Palestinian city, and Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War used the work of three Ukrainian artists as a metaphor for the fragility of cultural cohesion and identity in time of war. “[Filmmakers] can make sure that the history record is set straight and that the truth will prevail,” said Mstyslav Chernov, whose 20 Days in Mariupol took the Oscar for Best Documentary Film and became Ukraine’s highest-grossing documentary ever. Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion was also impactful and widely admired, observing in sensitive but unobtrusive style not the drama of the conflict, but ordinary Ukrainian life going on as best it can. “Just as there is no end in sight yet to this war,” wrote Guy Lodge in Variety, “Loznitsa’s aptly sprawling, often overwhelming film arrives at no final feeling.”

Alex Garland’s ambitious fiction feature Civil War also eschewed specificity – though its premise, of a US riven with violent division as a populist president takes up his third term, certainly felt more pertinent after 6 November. The film’s dizzying tonal shifts alienated some, but its evocation of the turbulent moods of war – torpor, exhilaration, bloodlust, grief – was assured. Jaded, introspective protagonist Lee, remarkably played by Kirsten Dunst, explicitly recalled the American photographer Lee Miller, to whom full tribute was paid in the feature debut of the cinematographer Ellen Kuras. A long-nursed passion project for its star Kate Winslet, Lee depicts the complacency that can accompany the approach of drastic change, and asserts the importance of bearing witness and documenting. Another experienced filmmaker, Roberto Minervini, made a narrative debut with The Damned, a revisionist American Civil War story for which the veteran documentarian won critical plaudits, as well as Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two was more lavish, stately and starry, extending Villeneuve’s painterly vision into yet vaster vistas and more intricately coiled story detail. “A panorama of shimmering strangeness,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. And yet this extension of Frank Herbert’s space opera also had political resonance for those seeking it, with “theocratic authoritarianism, colonial violence [and] the pitiless economics of resource extraction”, as Dana Stevens phrased it in Slate, supplying “the very substance of the story”. Another hyped sequel – or rather, prequel – George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, addressed misogyny and rape as weapons of war, and earned passionate plaudits for its star Anya Taylor-Joy – although poor box-office performance may have put paid to further instalments.

Erik Poppe’s Quisling: The Final Days interrogated Norway’s wartime history via a much-praised portrait of the eponymous former minister for defence, whose name became a byword for traitorousness when he collaborated with the Nazis. Steve McQueen’s Blitz opened the BFI London Film Festival, and provided a further platform for one of the year’s most visible and admired actors, Saoirse Ronan. This story of a young mother seeking her wayward child in the thick of Nazi bombardment surprised some with its conventionality of style, but McQueen was unperturbed. “I want to make an exciting picture, first and foremost,” he told Sight and Sound, “and for it to be a picture anyone can see.”