By most accounts, 2024 as a whole isn’t going to end up on any “Top Ten Year” lists encompassing more than a decade. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t moments of joy, beauty, and surprise to be found if you knew where to look. The same, of course, holds true for 2024’s movies, a fact which becomes more apparent in retrospect. It’s only when sitting down to review what one has seen—in my case, 193 of the 325 or so “eligible” films—that a real appreciation for the cinematic friends we made along the way emerges.

---

2024: A Year in Review

---

Were there trends as well? Yes, there were trends. One is that it was a great year for documentaries about movies and moviemakers. Martin Scorsese expressed his love for the duo who made The Red Shoes in Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, while another classy pair were covered in Merchant Ivory: A Documentary. Italian icons received proper tribute in Dario Argento Panico and Ennio [Morricone]. And director Mark Cousins followed up his epic The Story of Film and its successors with the idiosyncratic My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. If today’s marquees aren’t tempting enough, each of these provides a wealth of options to discover on a streaming platform or (ideally!) on physical media.

Another recurring motif, two years after Roe v. Wade was overruled, as “bro culture” elbowed its way fully into the mainstream and the White House, was the expression of female rage. Anya Taylor-Joy took over for Charlize Theron in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which detailed how the grim, badass heroine of Mad Max: Fury Road got that way. It’s not pretty. Neither was the truth behind the island paradise run by techbro Channing Tatum in Blink Twice. Later in the year, director Coralie Fargeat poked the male gaze in the eye with a sharp stick with The Substance, and Amy Adams played a mom who goes feral in Nightbitch. Even nonagenarian June Squibb contributed scooter-powered acts of vengeance in Thelma. It’s all enough to make those Mean Girls, not to mention the juvenile vampire Abigail, look like rank amateurs. Whether these manifestations of menacing matriarchy will be seen as a transient catharsis or a precursor to broader societal shifts (or even just the film industry’s priorities) remains to be seen.

In what could also be seen as a response to an increasingly reactionary climate, mainstream(ish) movies in 2024 seemed more willing to tackle sexually charged storylines and depict explicit behavior than they have been in a while. It was only last year that surveys touted the stated desire by Gen Z for less skin on screen, but major stars such as Emma Stone (Kinds of Kindness), Demi Moore (The Substance), Margaret Qualley (both of those films), Nicole Kidman (Babygirl), Daniel Craig (Queer) and others embraced characters and stories that not only asked them to bare all (or most) but centered on carnal urges and identities to a notable degree. Moore, Kidman, and Pamela Anderson (The Last Showgirl) each wrestled metafictionally with their legacies as performers defined, over a span of decades, by their physicality. Again, we won’t know whether this represents a move to a braver and more nuanced era for on-screen corporeality or an isolated instance of groupthink without the benefit of hindsight.

It’s certainly not a recent trend that numerous critics’ groups and publications announce their Year’s Best lists around now. (Actually, it feels like it happens earlier every year, but that’s a topic for another day.) What’s relatively new is, in the age of the listicle, the proliferation of these pronouncements. It’s gotten to the point that there’s an entire ecosystem, from the cineastes of “Film Comment” to the philistines of IMDB.com. Except, hold on! Those lists don’t look all that different. Sure, the IMDb users have a weakness for spectacles like Furiosa and Dune 2, but the hoity-toity critics can seem to be in thrall to fashionable indie distributors such as A24 and Neon. But each, perhaps because it’s a collective statement, feels far too predictable if you’re familiar enough with the voting pool.

There’s an inevitable winnowing as the movie year goes on. No one can see everything, of course (I’ve tried!) so even the universe of films that any given critic opts to spend their time on is limited. And as the year comes to a close, critics receive both unsolicited advice from other critics and secure online screening links from each studio or distributor. Given the choice between catching up with an acclaimed Oscar candidate like Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths or a minor reflection of the pop zeitgeist like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the decision often depends on how late it is rather than the expected quality of the film. (Sorry, Mike! I regret my decision.)

All that in mind, here are the ten best new films I saw in 2024.

10. Tuesday (Daina Oniunas-Pusić)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus delivers a career-redefining performance as the mother of a terminally ill young woman in this wrenching drama. Death arrives in the form of a giant macaw to accompany young Tuesday (a great Lola Petticrew) to the other side, but mom’s having none of it. What ensues is a metaphysical, emotional battle that’s superficially absurd but somehow ends up giving honest-to-God pathos. “To say that Tuesday is a revelation is to undersell it,” I wrote back in June. (Available to stream on Max and to rent via various services.)

9. The Apprentice (Ali Abassi)

It’s a troubling indicator of the current era that this highly entertaining, if inevitably incendiary, chronicle of the young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his mentorship by the invidious, merciless attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), has been largely unacknowledged. After the film premiered at Cannes, no major distributor would pick it up for American release, leaving it to small but brave Briarcliff Entertainment to make sure it received any sort of theatrical exposure. Given Trump’s propensity to litigate, that’s not a shock, but it is disappointing, because this is not (just) a hit job exposing the dark origin story of the once and future President. It’s also a psychologically sympathetic portrait of a second son in search of a father figure who will show him the respect he’s been denied. Which is probably even more scandalous to its subject. “[T]he character of Donald J. Trump, as portrayed by Sebastian Stan in the new film The Apprentice, is not someone I would want in the highest office in the land. Frankly, he’s someone who should be behind bars,” I wrote in October. (Available to rent via various online services, and on DVD and Blu-ray)

8. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

One of the odds-on favorites in the Oscar sweepstakes, this epic chronicle from director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux) follows a Polish architect (Adrien Brody) as he emigrates to the United States following World War II and rises through his profession. Shot on the nearly extinct VistaVision format and a truly majestic statement about art, politics, and a lot more, it opens in Portland on January 10th.

7. Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos)

On the night that their collaboration Poor Things won a carload of Oscars, director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone announced that they had secretly shot another feature in New Orleans during 2023 that would be released within the next couple of months. That film turned out to be a typically twisted triptych in which characters played by Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and others bounce off one another in a series of outrageous, darkly hilarious setups. The closest American-made analogue to Lanthimos’s early Greek films, it’s a powerful argument in favor of letting a weird European artist play in the Hollywood sandbox. “Although themes of control, obsession, and ritual feature in each segment, Lanthimos isn’t interested in providing tea leaves for viewers to decipher,” I wrote in June. (Available to stream on Hulu, to rent on various online services, and on DVD and Blu-ray)

6. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)

Who could have predicted that the most uproarious, flat-out gut-busting time at the movies this year would be a dialogue-free, black-and-white live-action cartoon about a hapless fur trapper in the 19th-century Northwoods? Well, the audiences who caught this miraculous independent production during its 2023 festival run, for one. The brainchild of director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (who co-wrote the zany screenplay), it’s about a disgraced applejack merchant who tries to win the hand of his beloved by collecting as many beaver pelts as possible for her gruff, capitalistic father. But that’s really just an excuse on which to hang an endless inventive series of slapstick gags involving our seemingly indestructible protagonist, a multitude of oversized animal costumes, and a connection with real-world physics that Friz Freleng would appreciate. “The energy is Wile E. Coyote versus The Banana Splits, the visuals are a cross between Guy Maddin and the great Czech animator Karel Zeman, and the vibe is tremendous fun,” I wrote back in February. (Available to stream via Amazon Prime, Fandor, and other services; DVD and Blu-ray release scheduled for January 28, 2025)

5. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)

2024 was a landmark year for trans representation in media, despite the efforts of those who would stigmatize and exploit that population for political gain. Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker was a fascinating, free-wheeling rejection and appropriation of cinematic tropes, but even more impressive was writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s second feature. Appropriately, it’s an almost unclassifiable hybrid that examines the ways genre fictions can enlighten and empower the liminal spaces in which teens and young adults exist. “Poetic, surreal, and emotionally honest without being uncritically nostalgic or in any way didactic, I Saw the TV Glow points the way toward an inclusive, progressive, and, crucially, entertaining 21st century cinema,” I wrote in June. (Available to stream on Max and to rent on various services)

4. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi came to global prominence with the Oscar-winning Drive My Car. His follow-up is nearly as beguiling and just as exquisitely crafted. It centers on a bucolic rural community that a large corporation has designated as the future site of a “glamping” operation, which threatens to disturb the area’s environment and overtax its resources. But Hamaguchi isn’t interested in merely delivering a didactic eco-fable—as with Drive My Car. Culminating in unforgettable, almost mystical final moments, the film is as ineffable as the natural world it ponders. “Hamaguchi, not yet 50, is a consummate filmmaker, fully in command of pace, image, and message,” I wrote in May. (Available to stream on The Criterion Channel, to rent via Apple TV and Amazon, and on DVD and Blu-ray.)

3. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)

If there was a Comeback Player of the Year award at the Oscars, (a) it would be named after John Travolta and (b) Demi Moore would be this year’s winner. She’s ferocious as an “aging” Hollywood star who receives access to a mysterious serum that allows a “younger, better” version of herself to (literally) emerge in the form of Margaret Qualley. The rules of the game mandate that each persona must spend alternate weeks active, and when Qualley’s starlet edition starts to hog the spotlight, the consequences are like something from a Cronenbergian body horror. The Substance shines a surreal, horrific light on the entertainment industry’s (and society in general’s) obsession with women’s bodies, and it’s the year’s best first-date litmus-test movie. “This is a justifiably irate parable that pulls no punches in its takedown of the male gaze, even as it mimics that gaze in ways that blur the line between parody and exploitation,” I wrote in September. (Available to stream via MUBI and to rent via Apple TV and Amazon; coming on January 21 on DVD and 4K UHD.)

2. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)

It’s only occurring to me now that four of the films on this ten-film list were made by directors whose previous works also landed on my top ten the year they were released: Holy Spider, Poor Things, Drive My Car, and Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn. I guess I have a type. Romanian auteur Jude’s new film follows Angela, an overworked production assistant in Bucharest, as she shuttles through her day interviewing various injured employees of a multinational corporation for a workplace safety video. The video’s clear intent is to absolve the company of any blame by having the workers explain how their accidents were the result of their own negligence. As Angela deals with traffic and other urban annoyances, she films herself in TikTok videos using a face filter and a racist, sexist persona called Bobito, who brings to mind the offensive shitposting of Andrew Tate. And at several points, Jude splices in scenes from a 1981 Romanian film about a female cab driver, also named Angela, dealing with some of the same indignities under the Ceaușescu regime. The whole megillah is a masterful, darkly hilarious take on late-capitalist dystopia, social media, and 21st-century angst. And it closes out with a static, half-hour shot that’s the most riveting sequence in a movie this year. (Available to stream via MUBI, or to rent via Apple TV and Amazon.)

1. About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

The top three films on this list are all well over two hours long, which proves (to me, at least) that duration isn’t a problem if a filmmaker uses every minute of it wisely. That’s how a master such as Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan crafts a nearly 200-minute drama that’s almost entirely dialogue-driven but never lags. The naturalistic story centers on a grade-school art teacher stuck in a sleepy village in Anatolia. He’s nearly reached the service time needed to request a transfer to Istanbul, but anonymous, false allegations of inappropriate behavior with students threaten to derail that plan. At the same time, he becomes unnerved by the growing closeness between his closest friend and a woman he has designs on. Quietly devastating as a portrait of a flawed man, About Dry Grasses is a movie to sink into like you would a good book. It “feels like a relic from an era when cinema took itself, and the world, seriously, telling stories of novelistic sweep and intimate human truth,” I wrote in March. (Available to stream via The Criterion Channel, to rent via Apple TV and Amazon, and on DVD & Blu-ray.)