Top 10 Films of 2024 – Editors’ Choice

Despite many who have claimed as such, 2024 was a stellar year for cinema. Coming off contentious strike delays that saw a slow start to the year, 2024 gave audiences a variety of terrific films. This was a year that brought us a 3.5 hour film about an architect featuring an intermission that might just win Best Picture, a $2 million unrated slasher movie that made nearly $100 million at the box office and the year’s most controversial films were a sequel to an Oscar-winning film about a famous Batman villain, a passion project from the great director behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and an R-rated crime musical featuring Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez. Many of the best films from 2024 pushed forward different styles of filmmaking and told unique stories in unforgettable ways. These are the best films of 2024 according to our critics, Noah Damron and Adam Ferenz.

Noah Damron’s Picks

Courtesy Amazon MGM

1. Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

A cinematic endorphin rush of the highest order, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a one-of-a-kind film. Set in the cutthroat world of professional tennis, Guadagnino’s story of a decade-spanning love triangle between three tennis players pushes the envelope of visual storytelling. Guadagnino’s kinetic filmmaking has a propulsive energy and an intimacy towards every detail that makes this a tangible film experience. From the intricately structured script by Justin Kuritzkes, to the complex, dynamic performances from stars Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, Challengers is crafted to razor sharp precision. Guadagnino uses the world of tennis to explore the dynamics of his characters; their ambitions and iron-clad will, to lust, power and regret. While it’s far more than just a “sports movie”, the sport is shown as an extension of the characters and how their lives are ruled by winning. It’s a fascinating film, one that uses the camera to explore the most primal of desires and unspoken urges. The POV shot of the tennis ball in the film’s climactic showdown is one of the most thrillingly composed shots in recent memory. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping techno score leaves you with enough energy to run a marathon. Challengers simply never makes a false move in its high-wire balancing act. Very few films feel as vital and alive as this.

Courtesy A24

2. The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)

Brady Corbet’s third feature, The Brutalist, is a staggering cinematic achievement. The kind of movie you can feel in your gut, Corbet’s epic is one of the most audacious feats of filmmaking in recent years. This 3.5 hour post-war epic about a Hungarian architect looking to make his own American dream is the kind of sprawling, grandiose drama that puts it closer in line to classics such as The Godfather Part 2 and Once Upon a Time in America. Starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones in career-best performances, Corbet’s film is grand in ambition, but feels incredibly centered on the complexities of its characters. Though it’s set in the world of architecture, the film stands as a great metaphor for the state of filmmaking, particularly in the imbalance of power between an artist and a power broker. Corbet pulls together a myriad of themes to explore, leaving a film that is as rewarding to sit and chew on as it is to experience. Daniel Blumberg’s score does what any great score can do and helps establish the mood and the booming use of percussion and horns stirs up the emotions brimming underneath the frame. The score makes the images sing, even if you’re often not sure whether they’re serenading or wailing in despair. Director Brady Corbet has made a film in 2024 that has the patience and storytelling prowess of a 50’s melodrama while carrying the enigmatic morality of something akin to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. The Brutalist is miracle of filmmaking.

Courtesy Mubi

3. The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)

The Substance is a masterpiece of punk-rock cinema. Coralie Fargeat builds upon her already audacious debut feature and crafts a body horror epic that densely packages blistering commentary on beauty standards and self-loathing into its assault-on-the-senses visuals. I can’t get over just how much Fargeat relies on her to-the-point, abrasive visual language to tell her stories. For the last hour of her directorial debut, Revenge, there are maybe all of 40 lines spoken, but you feel every heightened survival instinct like its blood is pumping through your veins. Right off the bat she’s able to tell the story of Elizabeth Sparkle’s failing career by just a single overhead shot of her star on the walk of fame. Much of Demi Moore’s performance is wordless, relying primarily on her physicality and she carries so much screen power. This has to be some of her best work, clearly channeling her real life pain and sorrow into also being objectified and subsequently tossed aside once she reached a certain age. There’s an amazing scene where Fargeat builds tension from Moore getting ready to go out on a date, but she keeps going back to adjust herself in front of her bathroom mirror. It’s also notable just how much of this takes place in front of a bathroom mirror. Fargeat’s distinct vision of viscera goes even further in a final reel that is as go-for-broke gonzo as you may have heard, but also wraps up the story on a truly tragic and potent note. Fargeat literally plasters her themes on a bloody canvas. There is some disgusting shit here. It’s no mistake Fargeat and Julia Ducarneau are singlehandedly bringing exploitation cinema back (as if it’s every really been dead) in full-force and are two of the best emerging filmmakers of the past decade.

Courtesy Warner Bros

4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller)

If Mad Max: Fury Road was a nonstop adrenaline-fueled chase, Furiosa is a sprawling mythic odyssey spanning over 15 years. Some will be taken aback by Miller’s refusal to tread the same territory from his predecessor, opting for a grander, more deliberately paced narrative, one divided into five distinct chapters. Miller precisely builds upon the mythology established in the previous four films in the franchise, but particularly in Fury Road. The filmmaker retroactively enriches that film, which was already poetic in its simplicity, in both a thematic and narrative sense. The film’s breakthrough performance comes from a towering Chris Hemsworth as Lord Dementus. Riding around in a chariot composed of three motorcycles, his Dementus is perhaps Miller’s most fierce and compelling Mad Max villain to date.  You get the sense both Furiosa and Dementus are two sides of the same coin, two wounded souls exacting vengeance out of their own similar sense of grief. There’s almost a Batman/Joker dynamic between them, resulting in a climactic showdown that is one of the finest staged confrontations of Miller’s eclectic career.

Courtesy A24

5. I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)

Jane Schoenbrun’s dreamy and hypnotic I Saw the TV Glow is a bold, entrancing work from a filmmaker with just two films under their belt. A story of a teenager’s obsession with a campy 90’s television show whose cancellation sends him on a lifelong existential crisis, this is an exploration of how endlessly chasing a memory can leave you broken and empty. Shoenbrun’s film is steeped in a very specific sense of melancholy rooted in the loneliness of nostalgia that is incredibly piercing, Bolstered by an incredible soundtrack, I Saw the TV Glow is a woozy drone of weaponized nostalgia, obsession and nightmares that puts you under its spell and doesn’t let go easily.

Courtesy Amazon MGM

6. Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)

I’m always a sucker for films that show you new things and perspectives you’ve never seen before, but RaMell Ross takes that one step further in the emotionally soaring Nickel Boys. We’ve seen films told from the character’s POV, from Enter the Void to Hardcore Henry, but nothing has ever truly felt like this. This is already a vital, necessary story to be told, but through Ross’ camera, he immerses you into these characters in way I’ve simply never seen before. Nickel Boys is deeply harrowing but is also filled with poetic glimpses of love and beauty.

Courtesy Neon

7. Anora (dir. Sean Baker)

Sean Baker continues to prove himself as one of our great empathetic filmmakers. His hilarious and tragic Anora might just be the indie auteur’s best work to date. Star Mikey Madison is a massive force of nature, who makes for an indelible movie character. Baker borrows elements from his previous, humanistic works into a film that deftly juggles tones and genres. Sections of Anora feel like a Billy Wilder screwball comedy while the film is grounded in a rich sense of heart-wrenching neo-realism. The supporting cast consists of many great bit players including the Oscar-nominated Yura Borisov, who is a secret weapon of screen presence. What other film has a running gag involving a concussion?

Courtesy Warner Bros

8. Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

Denis Villeneuve’s epic conclusion to the first Dune story is thoroughly overwhelming. It’s hard to believe something this breathtaking and tragic exists on such a grand scale. Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet are finally able to infuse emotional depth the first part lacked while Austin Butler adds a disarming menace that serves as a welcoming jolt of energy. Beneath all the tactile image-making and craft on display, this manages to successfully interrogate the line between faith and blind worship, and the destructive nature behind power. It’s also more unflinchingly bleak — and formally audacious — than I anticipated. Hans Zimmer’s score is some of the composer’s greatest work in an already iconic career. While the table is set for the third installment, Dune: Messiah, Part Two stands on its own as a visionary sci-fi epic from one of our great modern storytellers.

Courtesy A24

9. A Different Man (dir. Aaron Schimberg)

Sebastian Stan may have garnered an Oscar nomination for his dynamic work as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, but I feel his best work of the year comes from this dense and unique mind-bender. Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is an unforgettable descent into madness through the search for one’s identity. Stan plays Edward, a deeply self-conscious man suffering from neurofibromatosis, who undergoes an operation to radically alter his face in order to live a supposedly “normal” life. When Edward changes his name to “Guy” and later establishes himself as an actor, he finds himself up for a dream role in a play. However, he meets Oswald (Adam Pearson), a lovable and confident man who also happens to suffer from neurofibromatosis, who is gunning for the same lead role. This sends Edward down a spiraling path of self-destruction, jealousy and hatred. A Different Man is an incredibly unique film, one that borrows from several different genres and styles of storytelling. The result is a breathtaking and peculiar film.

Courtesy Universal

10. The Wild Robot (dir. Chris Sanders)

The Wild Robot is bursting with creative ingenuity set around a powerful story that reaches the emotional heights of Pixar’s best. Director Chris Sanders takes the successful 2016 children’s book and adapts it with rich storytelling and impressive visual splendor. This adaptation is yet another exceptional work for DreamWorks Animation with an emotionally intelligent, funny and genuinely moving film. For my money, this is easily the best animated film of the year, one that will equally delight and enthrall viewers both young and old. I dare you not to cry at least once.

Runners-Up

Courtesy Neon

Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)

I truly have not felt this amount of dread stirring in the pit of my stomach in many years. Longlegs has proven divisive to many, but while watching it, I felt as if I could feel the presence of evil. Writer/director Osgood Perkins solidifies his stamp on genre filmmaking with a sinister detective story that worked its way into my core. Perkins’ voyeuristic and audacious camera work feels like it’s watching both the characters and the audience, simultaneously. Very few filmmakers nowadays are able to create a sense of dread that permeates throughout the frame quite like he does. Maika Monroe can give entire monologues with her eyes. Cage’s titular villain is frightening and is the perfect utilization of his manic performance style. This is not a perfect film, but it’s one I could not get out of my head.

Courtesy Focus Features

Conclave (dir. Edward Berger)

What could’ve been some stuffy dry Oscar bait film is instead a really tense, entertaining, a little trashy and wholly cinematic thriller. I was not a fan of Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but he does an impeccable job of laying out all the main players, their motivations and dynamics, before expertly building the stakes and gradually escalating tension. Love the unique compositions and framing to make the film, whose setting consists of a handful of large rooms, so involving and grand. Ralph Fiennes has never been more effortlessly commanding. While the setting and intrigue of the premise is always compelling, the element of Conclave that lingers the most is its poignant story regarding a crisis of faith.

Courtesy Netflix

The Shadow Strays (dir. Timo Tjahjanto)

Indonesian filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto has quietly been making some of the best, more hard-hitting action films over the past decade, but his latest spectacle of stunts and bone-crushing violence is his most intricate film to date. The Shadow Strays is the story of a young assassin who goes rogue from her elite organization of international killers only to find herself in deep with the criminal underbelly of Jakarta. Tjahjanto is among the finest modern directors of action, particularly in how visceral, yet elegant his set pieces feel. His hit 2018 Netflix film The Night Comes For Us was caked in brutal carnage, while the filmmaker’s latest ratchets up the scale of imaginative action and visual flair. One of the most gorgeous frames in the film is actually of a character standing in a forest illuminated by a flare. Despite the 2.5 hour runtime, Tjahjanto’s film is packed with numerous face-melting action sequences, endless gallons of blood and a barrage of cool characters. Even with all the grisly spectacle, which does include face stabbings, decapitations, night vision kills, skull crushing, eye gouging, even a  torturous gimp, there are real emotional truths to these characters.

Courtesy A24

Queer (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

A film of seismic gestures and yearning for the sweet release of loneliness. To say Luca Guadagnino is 2 for 2 in 2024 would be an understatement. Who knew a film this rich and textured about the haunting nature of searching for warm embrace could also have a soundtrack that includes Nirvana, Prince and New Order. There’s a 5-minute, unbroken take of Daniel Craig shooting up heroin, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer that is some of Craig’s best work and one of the most emotional depictions of aching I’ve seen in years.

Courtesy Sabljak Ravenwood Hogerton

Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik)

Filmed in both Wisconsin and Michigan. Mike Cheslik’s $150,000 black and white, silent comedy about a fur trapper looking to score big by hunting, well, hundreds of beavers is a tantalizing showcase of endless visual gags, formal control and next level joke designs. What is essentially a live-action, DIY Looney Tunes cartoon meets Mel Brooks and even Escanaba in Da Moonlight, Hundreds of Beavers is a real achievement in low budget filmmaking. This is one of the most consistently hilarious and guffaw-inducing comedies in recent years. It’s the kind of film I would recommend to literally everyone.

Honorable Mentions (In Alphabetical Order)

The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi)

The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello)

Blitz (dir. Steve McQueen)

The First Omen (dir. Arkasha Stevenson)

Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater)

How To Have Sex (dir. Molly Manning Walker)

In a Violent Nature (dir. Chris Nash)

Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood)

Late Night With the Devil (dir. Cameron & Colin Cairnes)

Monkey Man (dir. Dev Patel)

Wicked (dir. Jon M. Chu)

Adam Ferenz’s Picks

Courtesy A24

1. The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)

Brady Corbet has crafted a film that encompasses everything major in modern American discourse. Immigration, isolation, intolerance, loneliness, despair, dreaming, desire, hatred, loathing, art, survival, addiction, sex and capitalism, among many other monumental themes. The cast, with Adrien Brody, and Felicity Jones, along with Guy Pearce, Isaach de Bankole, Raffey Cassidy and Joe Alwyn, is as outstanding as the scope of this epic film. Telling the story of Lazlo Toth, a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust, in the decades following the Second World War, and his time in America, it never loses sight of the people at the heart of the story, no matter how large the themes.

Courtesy Kino Lorber

2. The Old Oak (dir. Ken Loach)

Ken Loach’s best film in decades. This story of immigrants settling into a small English village has a lot going on. It is a small film that bursts at the seams with what it contains beneath the surface. What it says about compassion, community and tolerance, is for the ages.

Courtesy Neon

3. Anora (dir. Sean Baker)

A drama and a comedy that will make you laugh and move you in equal measure. Mikey Madison’s star-making turn in Sean Baker’s film about a Russian-American sex worker from Brooklyn is the female lead performance of the year. So bold, fierce and funny is her work that it is easy to imagine the entire film falling apart without her.

Courtesy A24

4. Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar)

A true story about the inmates in the RTA drama program aimed at giving meaning and outlets to the inmates-at Sing Sing correctional facility, this drama stars Colman Domingo in a career-best performance, opposite Clarence Maclin, who plays himself. The fact this film casts the actual people is a bonus, lending it gravity and an all-too-real dimension.

Courtesy Amazon/MGM

5. Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)

Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, director and writer RaMell Ross’s film is viewed from the first person, a poetic choice that has as much to say about the way we are connected and disconnected as any film has in recent years. This is one of the strongest scripts and most gorgeously shot and directed films you will see from 2024.

Courtesy Searchlight Pictures

6. A Real Pain (dir. Jesse Eisenberg)

Jesse Eisenberg has written one of the best screenplays of the year, and Kieran Culkin has turned in a career performance. Detailing a Holocaust-honoring trip to pay homage to their late grandmother, the two cousins played by Culkin and Eisenberg-who also delicately directed this one-plays out a story about many types of trauma and how we do, or do not, process that and the meaning of different kinds of privilege.

Courtesy Searchlight Pictures

7. A Complete Unknown (dir. James Mangold)

James Mangold quietly crafted one of the year’s most entertaining films, a biopic about the first four years of Bob Dylan’s career. Featuring Timothee Chalamet”s convincing Dylan, Edward Norton’s eager, sincere Pete Seger and a marvelous Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro, the film captures the feeling of the time and place in which its events take place. It also says a lot about the push and pull artists face from both the business side and their fellow artists.

Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

8. The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodovar)

Pedro Almodovar’s first English language film is one of his very best films, with everything you have come to expect from the master film maker. Tilda Swinton, as a dying war correspondent, and Julianne Moore, as her estranged author friend, star in this tale of instantly rekindled friendship. The film has a lot to say about letting go, being brave, love and loyalty.

Courtesy Mubi

9. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World (dir. Radu Jude)

Radu Jude is one of modern cinema’s most radical and progressive, experimental directors. In this story of a film production assistant in Bucharest, Jude spins a tale where the journey demonstrates the point and the point is nothing less than a commentary on work and modern life, but so much more. If you have seen any of Jude’s films, you know they are unlike anything else currently being made. Just see it.

Courtesy Janus FIlms

10. About Dry Grasses (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

A quiet, contemplative work about two teachers and the woman they both come to love, amidst a treacherous accusation by students. A meditative look at the human condition, the film is wise enough to give us characters whom we might not like but whom we can identify with and find interesting enough to keep us invested. A marvel of quasi-slow cinema.

 

Runners-Up

Courtesy Cohen Media Group

Nowhere Special (dir. Uberto Pasolini)

A small, quiet and powerful film about love and hope. This work tells the story of a dying single father who wants to adopt his son to the most perfect situation he can find for him. Nothing in this film should work and yet everything in it absolutely does, without any of it feeling other than fully earned.

Courtesy Warner Bros

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller)

Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action adventure film since Raiders of the Lost Ark, but where that film is a marvel of showing rather than telling and a reminder that film is chiefly a visual medium, this one takes a different approach. While we do not learn much new about Furiosa, what we do learn re-contextualizes both the character and prior film in meaningful ways. While not as outright entertaining as the previous entry in the series, this could be the best dramatic entry in the franchise.

Courtesy Film Movement

Close Your Eyes (dir. Victor Erice)

Victor Erice has made four feature films and this could be the best one yet, a contemplative mystery about life, memory and loss. With touches of Cinema Paradiso, this is a film about the power-and doubt-of great art. It requires patience but is well worth the early going to dig deep into the wonderful heart of this film.

Courtesy Janus Films

Evil Does Not Exist (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

A film so still it might make Mizoguchi uncomfortable, but if you allow yourself to have this wash over you, there are pleasures to be found in Hamaguchi’s latest masterwork, this time about a small Japanese village facing a change in their lifestyle because of encroaching corporatism. Some of the best photography and music in any film this year.

Courtesy Focus Features

Conclave (dir. Edward Berger)

One of the best written, most expertly directed and lavishly mounted films of the year, featuring an extraordinary cast. Director Edward Berger’s thriller, set during a papal conclave, is yet another film in 2024 that features a multitude of questioning about our institutions and power structures.

 

Honorable Mentions (In Alphabetical Order)

All We Imagine As Light (dir. Payal Kapadia)

The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi)

The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello)

Daughters (dir. Natalie Rae & Angela Patton)

His Three Daughters (dir. Azazel Jacobs)

I’m Still Here (dir. Walter Salles)

The Piano Lesson (dir. Malcolm Washington)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof)

Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat (dir. Johan Grimonprez)

Thelma (dir. Josh Margolin)