The Top 10 Films of 2024 reflect the year’s boldest ambitions and wildest experiences

As theatrical moviegoing continues to rebound following the COVID shutdowns of 2020, cinema itself is fully back, baby. 2024 was another really good year for film, especially in the lower budgeted ranks, where a number of filmmakers used whatever was at their disposal to realize their visions, from open-source software to fur suits to crowdsourced artwork. 2024 was also a year of auteurs going completely bananas, to varying results. It was a year of big swings and bold visions and everyone just f-cking going for it. The best films of 2024 reflect the year’s boldest ambitions and wildest experiences. As always, this list is alphabetical, not ranked.

The Brutalist

One theme of cinema in 2024 is auteur excess, and few auteurs exceed Brady Corbet’s grandiloquent film The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour meditation on America, capitalism, and the failure of the American dream. Lusciously shot in nearly extinct VistaVision and with a score that slowly grinds you down like the protagonist is slowly ground down by his industrialist patron, The Brutalist is a sweeping epic, a work as towering and sculptural as the buildings proposed within the film itself. Of all the singular filmmakers who tried to say something about the end of America in 2024, no one better articulated his bleak vision than Corbet.

Full review here.

Flow

No, I didn’t pick this one just because it stars a cat. A low-budget wonder of animation, made with the open-source software Blender, Flow is in turn charming and thrilling and deeply emotional, especially for animal lovers. Featuring a cast of animals stranded on a boat during a flood, Flow is about survival, and how we survive better—thrive, even—when we learn to trust others and embrace our unique abilities and contributions. With no dialogue and its endearing animal cast, Flow is truly universal, appealing across continents and generations, embodying filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis’s message of cooperation and acceptance with drama, humor, and a touch of surrealism. And yeah, that super cute cat, too.

Hard Truths

British filmmaker Mike Leigh is one of the last cinematic champions of regular people, and in Hard Truths he reunites with star Marianne Jean-Baptiste to tell the story of Pansy, a woman angry at everyone and everything for reasons not even she can articulate. Jean-Baptiste’s performance is blazing, furious, and pathetic, as Pansy is anyone and everyone who has felt at the end of their rope with life itself. Is she depressed? Probably! Is her anger unjustified? Sometimes, sure! But there is such a creeping sense of modern dislocation, loneliness, and despair that permeates Jean-Baptiste’s performance and the film itself that it’s hard not to see ourselves in Pansy, at least a little bit. Despite its title, the film offers no easy answers or hard truths, except for the uncomfortable realization that the unlikeable, unsympathetic Pansy is more than a little relatable.

Hundreds of Beavers

If a Buster Keaton film and the Looney Tunes had a wacky baby, it would be Hundreds of Beavers, one of several low-budget wonders on this list. With nods to everything from silent-era stunts to videogames, Hundreds of Beavers has virtually no dialogue and a bonkers plot that pits a would-be fur trapper against his intended victims: beavers. It’s pure cinematic chaos that also happens to be one of the most singularly stylish films of the year. There is nothing else like Hundreds of Beavers in 2024.

I Saw the TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is memorably strange, the kind of “disaffected youths” film that always plays well at film festivals. But beyond its suburban neon trappings, Glow is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of nostalgia and lives mediated by entertainment. With one of the year’s best soundtracks and most unforgettable endings, Glow hits hardest as a parable for our childhood-obsessed adulthood, and the emotional cost of anesthetizing ourselves with the things we watch.

Nickel Boys

RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name is the most intimately devastating cinematic experience of the year. Using frequent first-person cinematography (from Jomo Fray), the audience is put directly into the action, and into peril alongside the film’s protagonists. Though a dark story of racial injustice in America—and straight-up torture at a reform school—Ross interjects small moments of beauty that leaven the film with an indelible impression of perseverance. No other film looks like Nickel Boys, and very few hit as hard.

The Order

Every year there is one film that makes everyone exclaim “they don’t make them like that anymore”, and in 2024, that film is Justin Kurzel’s bleak crime drama The Order. Set in the early Eighties but telling a story that remains depressingly relevant today, Kurzel turns his grim, gimlet eye on America’s malingering white nationalist cum domestic terrorism problem, telling the kind of stripped down, character-driven crime saga that, well, they don’t really make anymore. Featuring outstanding performances from Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult and among the year’s best cinematography, The Order is as thrilling as it is haunting.

Full review here.

The People’s Joker

Vera Drew’s transformative take on Gotham City recasts the Joker as an “anti-comedian” who moves to Gotham and experiences her trans coming of age. Directed, co-written, and starring Drew, working magic on the crowd-funded micro-budget end of the scale, The People’s Joker is one of the best-written films of the year and features stellar performances from Drew as the Joker and Lynn Downey as her semi-estranged mother. It’s funny, it’s sad, it has a perfect satirical take on Batman; The People’s Joker is a superhero film like no other. Mainly because it’s not about superheroes, but nor is it about villains. Instead, Drew uses a comic book world to explore the limits of the real world, which is what good comics have always done. If only every comic book movie approached its material with the boundary-pushing verve of Vera Drew!

Queer

Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel is gluttonous in its excess, patently and gleefully fake in its staging, and achingly melancholy in its performance. Daniel Craig is verbose and twitchy and obnoxious and sad as Lee, a post-war American ex-pat whiling away his days getting high and f-cking pretty young men, all while longing for a deeper connection that eludes him. If the sex in Challengers is competitive, the sex in Queer is transactional, society and Lee’s own emotional constipation keeping him from meaningful relationships. Queer is a lot, and it’s messy around the edges, but it also sticks with you for a long time, as haunting as one of Lee’s imagined touches. Queer is Guadagnino’s most complicated portrait of intimacy yet.

Full review here.

The Substance

Good body horror sears itself onto your retinas for the rest of your life, and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is excellent body horror, rife with goos and vomit and blobs and cavities and other disgusting things you’ll never forget. It’s also a cheeky, sexy, angry portrait of femininity and aging, where value is tied explicitly to the tightness of one’s ass and wrinkle-free façade. Elisabeth is an icon, but she’s in her fifties, ripe for replacement. In an Athenian moment Elisabeth births her own successor as Sue springs fully formed from her spine. Anchored by Demi Moore’s increasingly unhinged performance, Margaret Qualley’s sly ripostes as Elisabeth’s younger, hungrier half, and Fargeat’s stylish, vaguely Eighties influenced artistic design which propels The Substance into a kind of Malibu Barbie nightmare of excess and rage. One of the grossest and most memorable films of the year.

Runners-Up

Sing Sing

The David Cronenberg Why Did You Make Me See That Award

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

The Werner Herzog Prize for Realizing Your Vision At Any Cost

Francis Ford Coppola, Megalopolis

Okay Movies Featuring Stellar Performances

Andy Samberg – Lee