2020-2022 spoiled me with a streak of masterpieces that’s yet to be matched, but this year was stronger than the one preceding it. I can’t say I completely fell in love with any of the movies I’ve seen over the past twelve months (except maybe one or two, which is already a lot to be thankful for), but there were plenty of solid efforts that gave me reason to be excited about the medium even when I thought they fell short in some critical way—stuff like Challengers, MaXXXine, The Bikeriders, Blink Twice, Cuckoo, and Saturday Night. And those aren’t even my honorable mentions, which, for what it’s worth, I had difficulty selecting. That’s generally a good sign. While the order of my list changes every few days, the top three spots do not.
Notable titles I missed include Janet Planet, The Beast, Armand, Better Man, The Glassworker, The End, Evil Does Not Exist, Bird, and Girls Will Be Girls.
Honorable Mentions (alphabetical order):
Back to Black – Marisa Abela deserved a real awards campaign. Good on BAFTA for longlisting her.
Dune: Part Two – Whaddaya want? It’s really, really good—too much chanting, face-serving, and fist-pumping, but it’s really good.
Longlegs – Seeing Nicolas Cage’s makeup job for the first time halfway through the year’s most original horror movie after months of an ingenious marketing campaign that promised to show the icon in a radically new way is an experience viewers years from now won’t be able to replicate.
Love Lies Bleeding – Kristen Stewart incredulously saying “whhhaaaaatt” after witnessing a violent act remains one of my favorite moments in any movie this year.
A Real Pain – Couldn’t stand this Sideways riff (“A Real Payne,” my pal likes to joke) when I saw it in January, but after Jesse Eisenberg’s next directorial effort was announced as a musical, everything I’d initially found off-putting started to make sense.
10. The Wild Robot
Though I wish The Wild Robot had taken a pointer from the ending of The Iron Giant—kids can handle a little bit of melancholic uncertainty!—I cried harder during this movie than I have in years. All I wanted to do afterwards was play Kris Bowers’ score on a loop and read my Jack Londons again. A win for nature fakers everywhere!
9. Femme
I wish Steve McQueen and Andrea Arnold were still making movies like Femme. The shifting power dynamic between a drag performer and the closeted bully who one night viciously assaults him makes for the grittiest and most complex thriller I’ve seen in a long time. Despite two incredible performances and an immediately arresting hook, Femme hasn’t received much attention, but future retrospectives of the new genre known as “queer noir” will ensure its reappraisal. The film has held up nicely for me in the year since I first saw it at a local festival. In 2023, I would’ve probably listed it closer to my No. 5 slot.
8. The Apprentice
The version of this film made by Adam McKay or Craig Gillespie is easy to envision and far less interesting. Like Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (the best film of 2016), The Apprentice is advantaged by its non-American perspective. Will Ali Abbasi’s snuff pic retain any edge upon review a decade from now? Hard to say, but there’s no doubt that in 2024 it’s a hella ballsy film. What will forever remain undeniably brilliant about it are Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong’s performances. As another film on this list demonstrates, Stan is unusually gifted at embodying the arcs of the characters he plays. His gradual transformation from an insecure slumlord into today’s most controversial figure is a masterclass in fine-tuned vocal and physical modulation. An urgent, entertaining, and fearless swing (by a director of Iranian descent, coincidentally) in the face of extreme opposition, The Apprentice is an oddly appropriate pairing with my next pick.
7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
You’d think a movie made with the sort of risk Mohammad Rasoulof has taken is an Important™ piece of political filmmaking, but underneath its significance as a bona fide act of rebellion in an era of self-righteous grandstands, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a plain old banger of a thriller. For all the talk this year of independent artists who’ve turned water into wine, there hasn’t been enough about Rasoulof making out of what is essentially a guerilla production a film that has the look and feel of a mid-aughts Soderbergh or Iñárritu studio release. The third act’s redirection hasn’t paid off for everyone, but thanks to a lean script constructed with the razor focus of a man’s mind on the eve of his execution, I was fully invested by the time this paranoid domestic potboiler literally veered off the road. Soheila Golestani is terrific.
6. Conclave
A use of Volker Bertelmann’s score early into Edward Berger’s deadly serious, irresistibly fun papal thriller reminded me of May December’s hotdog line, and that’s when I knew what sort of ride I was in for. Between its high camp, stellar ensemble work, and fantastic photography, Conclave served me the best time I’ve had at the movies this year (with a matching curial vape-and-robe set on top).
5. Anora
At least one movie every year enthralls and frustrates me in equal measure and I end up, after an ungodly number of rewatches, loving it despite its flaws. This year, that movie’s probably Anora. The lead character is thinly drawn, and just as I thought the film’s rhythm should’ve escalated, things flatlined and grew repetitive. But the arrival of Vanya’s parents in the third act (Darya Ekamasova is better than nearly every actor currently contending for an Oscar nomination) delivers the highly specific type of dark humor I want from Sean Baker. My feelings about this one are all over the place, but Anora is ultimately a movie I can’t take for granted. To this Jew from Brooklyn with Resting Ruski Face, the madcap adventure through Coney Island that Baker takes us on has a special kinda something.
4. I’m Still Here
I’m Still Here is the only entry on this list that I’ve seen just once, which is possibly why it continues to grow on me. What I first considered a very good movie with an absolutely incredible lead performance I now think might simply be great. A lesser drama would’ve presumed the stakes inherent to its central dilemma are reason enough for us to care, but Walter Salles’ film takes its time introducing the Paiva family and immersing us in their home—making the event upon which the movie pivots all the more heartrending. Finding the distinction between an actor’s contribution to a role and what’s on the page is tricky, but there’s no question from where the intelligence and quiet dignity of I’m Still Here’s lead character resonate: Give Fernanda Torres all the awards.
3. A Different Man
Ari Aster apologists wish he could make a movie as good as A Different Man. This genre-bending exercise in hysterical realism marries theme and technique more successfully than any other movie I saw in 2024, which is perhaps why the months I’d spent after Sundance thinking and writing about it were my most rewarding movie-related experience this year. But before I could understand how A Different Man’s sardonic visual metaphors for cosmic misfortune and allusions to Woody Allen romcoms and Toni Morrison all tied together, I had already become immersed in its De Palma-coded aesthetic. The textures and colors of the urban hellscape director Aaron Schimberg creates with the help of cinematographer Wyatt Garfield and production designer Anna Kathleen would look as stunning on the pages of an underground graphic novel published in the ‘90s and set in the ‘70s as they do on the big screen.
2. Nosferatu
Call me a snob, but labelling Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu a horror movie feels reductive. This nightmare is just too much of a cinephile’s wet dream. Does the narrative lose some steam toward the end? I was too busy marvelling at every intricately detailed composition of this folkloric tragedy to care. Eggers’ films have always played like anthropological discoveries; Nosferatu is his most exquisite artifact yet, as well as the most visually immaculate movie I’ve seen since 2022’s Babylon.
1. Sasquatch Sunset
Nothing during the past twelve months has fully entranced me as much as Sasquat Sunset. As I wrote in my review of the film, the Zellner brothers’ chutzpah alone couldn’t have produced this
miracle without an actor of Riley Keough’s expressivity. How did such a beautifully realized, strikingly original piece of work get written off as scat porn with bigfoots because of a few contextually appropriate examples of humor involving bodily fluid (by the same people, no less, who don’t mind when movies pair unseemly amounts of it with violence)? The Zellners’ masterpiece runs on the stuff of pure moviemaking magic.
