MoMA selects cinema’s most significant moments of the year

The year’s most consequential films deserve to be seen as their makers intended: in the luminous embrace of a darkened cinema, where the frame expands to fill one’s entire consciousness. The Museum of Modern Art understands this essential truth, which is why its Department of Film has long championed the ceremonial act of collective viewing, gathering discerning audiences to contemplate works of lasting artistic significance.

The Contenders represents an annual curation of films released within the past twelve months that possess the rare quality of temporal permanence. These are works that transcend their moment of release, carrying within them ideas, innovations and emotional truths that will resonate far into the future. Some may find their way to the accolades of major institutions; others will quietly accumulate devoted followers who recognise their quiet brilliance across years and decades.

What distinguishes a contender from the merely accomplished is a certain restlessness of spirit, a refusal to accept cinema as it has been. Whether through formal invention, thematic depth or an approach to storytelling that challenges conventional narrative architecture, each film selected possesses something that marks it as consequential. These are the works that critics and historians will return to when asking what cinema sounded and looked like during this particular moment in time.

Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma exemplifies this quality of artistic ambition. The director brings her characteristic sensibility to exploring the textures of youthful experience and mortality, crafting a film that demands attention and rewards contemplation.

The essential nature of cinema exists in its scale, its technical precision and its capacity to move an audience gathered in darkness. The Contenders series honours this understanding, presenting each film in conditions that allow its full artistic intention to manifest. These are works that have been selected not for commercial viability or predictable audience appeal, but for their genuine significance within the broader conversation about what cinema can accomplish.

To experience these films in the company of other serious viewers transforms the act of watching into something approaching the ceremonial. The shared attention of an audience, the collective breath held at moments of genuine beauty or provocation, the silence that follows the final frame, these constitute a form of cultural communion that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

Imagery courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art (@themuseumofmodernart).