Best of 2024: The top 10 movies of the year
Briefly

The best two-person movie since "Before Sunset" stars Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson as a cabdriver and a passenger, respectively, who get into a long conversation over the course of a drive from the airport to Manhattan. Director Christy Hall's screenplay has a real feel for the push-and-pull of how people go from being strangers to confidants. Ultimately, it's a movie about a phenomenon we sometimes encounter in life, in which a stranger is able to help us - not in a way that we can definitively identify, but in a way that we just know. This is Johnson's finest performance and the best work Penn has done since "Milk."
Mikey Madison, in a star-making turn, plays a lap dancer who meets and falls in love with a client, the son of a Russian oligarch, in the story of a young woman who, over the course of a brief period, must come to terms with her life choices. Sean Baker's film is funny, serious, occasionally slow and often ungainly, but it captures a sense of life as it's lived. And though Baker is interested in issues of wealth and power, he deftly balances humor with more serious reflections.
Read at Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
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