On a recent, appropriately lengthy episode of The Big Picture podcast, host Sean Fennessey was joined by the critic Adam Nayman to discuss Brady Corbet’s new film, The Brutalist. The more skeptical of the two, Nayman nevertheless made note of how the craft of The Brutalist shows that Corbet, his partner and co-writer Mona Fastvold, and the other members of the film’s crew have seen some other movies. Nayman went on to mention that plenty of the films he, Fennessey, and cinema-goers everywhere have sat through this year were “made by people who don’t seem to have seen a movie before in their life… Movies that were greenlit by people who also don’t want people to see movies, or are subsidized by streamers who would prefer that movies were actually just static.” Fennessey agreed, and I found myself thinking about how true this was of my own year at the movies. Had there been that many stinkers, their bellows just barely drowned out by the precious few films that made a two-century-old medium feel like it was being born anew?

Then again, I suppose you could say that this is true of any year. Every single trip around the sun since the dawn of cinema has seen its own hefty share of films that seem to have been made with heart and a (perhaps heftier) share of those that weren’t. But as I look back at our most recent run of 366 days (Leap Year!), something about them stands out, especially as it relates to movies. You could blame my career choice, that of sitting in dark rooms glancing at illuminated screens practically every day – “Our deadly passion, our terrible joy,” as a certain luxury automobile magnate said just 13 months ago. I might credit it to the year I had, one of personal downs and ups aplenty, but quite significantly the first year I actually spent the majority of working in this space. I saw more new movies this year than I have in any one prior; the same can be said for old films fired up for the first time. I wrote more about film this year than ever before, both in reviews of individual offerings and in snapshots of the industry as a whole. For that, I have many editors, writers, friends, and audience members to thank. To not mention the filmmakers behind the works I spent much of my time thinking about among that lot feels wrong, however varied the returns on the inspiration I experienced because of them may have been.
It’s with this in mind that I can confidently say that in 2024, I too watched an unfortunately substantial amount of movies that were made by people who don’t seem to have seen a movie before in their life, as well as many movies that were greenlit by people who don’t want people to see movies, or would rather shuttle them off to streaming services where they can and will be static objects, those not even worthy of serving s background noise. (Or, furthermore, too grating and soulless to even watch on mute; I’m looking at you, whoever ushered Jerry Seinfeld and the folks from the company formerly known as Kellogg’s into the same room.) On the flip side of that deadly, terrible coin, I saw even more films that seem to have been made by people who clearly have an interest in the significance of cinema, new and old, and want to watch it evolve, live on, and outlive all of us. Occasionally, those examples came as pre-packaged franchise-adjacent romps that didn’t reinvent the wheel so much as they aggressively spun them in an interesting fashion (Twisters, The First Omen, Smile 2, even The Fall Guy). Once in a while, they were efforts that shouldn’t have necessarily moved me one way or the other, yet elicited a profound response from me given the passion that was visibly being projected (Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, The Animal Kingdom, Hundreds of Beavers, and Civil War, to name a few). Other times, they came in the form of feature-length debuts about awakening adolescent sexuality (like Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls and Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex); or clever and resonant dramedies about specifically-crafted adults that I recognize because of their nuances, not in spite of them (Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, and Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths come to mind); or a transgender tale that doubles as a systematic takedown of the corporate overlords that govern comic book universes (hats off to you, Vera Drew).
I guess what I’m saying is this: More than any other kind of film that I saw in 2024, I saw a great number of movies that felt human – performed by them, made by them, lived by them. The following 10 were those that stood out above the many.
Writer’s note: Each year since 2019, I’ve put together a video countdown to honor my favorite films of the year – 25 of them, to be exact – not unlike what I’m sure you’ve seen from IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, whose still-annual efforts serve as an initial inspiration for these projects. I’m the proudest of this year’s iteration, which I pray is different enough from the others you might have come across, and perhaps will add a few films to your watchlist. It’s long, but it takes longer to put together than it does to watch. I hope you won’t mind indulging me before scrolling to read some brief thoughts on the top 10. (A big thanks to InSession Film Editor-in-Chief David Giannini for encouraging me to include this here; he’s a good egg.)
10. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)
Léa Seydoux makes a compelling case that she is the best – and if not best, then at least the most versatile – actor on the planet in Bertrand Bonello’s time-hopping mindf*ck, which simultaneously takes place in 1910’s Paris, 2014’s Los Angeles, where a murderous cretin based on Elliot Rodger (George MacKay as one Louis of the three he plays here), and 2044, where “DNA purification” seeks to purge willing participant’s souls of the emotions they may have felt in past lives. Startling, prescient, and wholly original, Bonello’s curiosity with the future has never been so inventively-rendered. (Read my review here.)
9. Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
The most fully-realized work of Robert Eggers’ career, not solely because the tale of Nosferatu has been living in his mind for the better part of four decades, but because of the craftspeople he continues to surround himself with for every project. A stunning, grim tale of obsession that ends on the year’s most elegiacally composed shot, Nosferatu is a crowning achievement in Eggers’ filmography, further proof that he is one of the most inspired filmmakers working today, no matter the genre. That he’s often turning in such stirring work in the horror landscape, a realm continuously peppered by the lazy, persistent regurgitation of old tropes, is perhaps most exhilarating of all. (Read Dave Giannini’s review here.)
8. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Josh O’Connor turns in the best supporting performance of 2024 in a movie that still manages to belong to a scowling Zendaya, who not only convinces the audience that she could compete for a Grand Slam tomorrow, but that marrying Mike Faist would be a glitzy life’s consolation prize. Then again, maybe that credit should go to O’Connor… I’m getting dizzy. The only thing that helps me regain control of my balance is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ rhythmic, synth-heavy score, to which I’m writing at this very second.
(Read Nadine Whitney’s review here.)
7. Anora (Sean Baker)
When I first saw Anora at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, I called Sean Baker’s eighth directorial feature his “magnum opus,” a collection of his go-to thematic devices – sexuality, class, chaos – that was anchored by an all-time performance from Mikey Madison in the same vein of what Baker has gotten in the past from Simon Rex (Red Rocket), Brooklynn Prince (The Florida Project), and the Mya Taylor-Kitana/Kiki Rodriguez tandem of Tangerine. A much-needed rewatch not only reasserted those truths, but solidified Anora as a deeper tonal experiment on top of the electric dramedy it proves to be on its face. Its much-discussed final scene – performed to the nines by Madison and Yura Borisov – is a near-perfect gutter. (Read Hector A. Gonzalez’s review here.)
6. Queer (Luca Guadagnino)
While only one film on this list deploys La Bionda’s “One For You, One For Me” as its closing credits needle drop, it would have been a clever nod at the audience for Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes’ second collaboration of the year to conclude on that note. The duo’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name is a more audacious film than Guadagnino has ever made, an experimental triumph that is most rewarding if you can get on its wavelength and let it transfix you. It’s not hard when Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey are in front of the camera, with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composing what is the cerebral inverse to what they created for Challengers. It pairs beautifully with Queer’s swooning arc, charting what is less the tale of a passionate affair than a rich drama about obsession and yearning in agony. And let’s face it: Is anything more terrifying than unrequited love? (Read Alex Papaioannou’s review here.)
5. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Where Drive My Car had its centerpiece audition scene and its closing performance of the “Uncle Vanya” production that the prior three hours had been building toward, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest meditative masterwork has a town hall meeting and a devastating conclusion that is both too brilliant to spoil and too layered to pin down. Perhaps what has kept the film on my mind since seeing it for the first time at the 2023 New York Film Festival, then twice more in theaters this year. It’s one of a small number of films that I have continued to return to in an effort to further explore its meaning. The most fascinating thing about Evil Does Not Exist, among the many, is how it’s the evolving world itself that pits the film’s characters against one another, not solely their personal desires. (Read Alex Papaioannou’s review here.)
4. No Other Land (Rachel Szor, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, & Hamdan Ballal)
It’s true that the courageous Israeli-Palestinian collective behind the work of activism that is No Other Land have made a movie that hovers above any other documentary I’ve seen this year, and, in many ways, is the best thing I’ve seen all year. But it’s more than great, transcendent, essential, or whatever other distinction one wishes to apply to it in their assessment. It is a series of shattering images and acts that directs a flood light toward the malicious acts one nation’s militia is happy to execute in order to punish another, from soldiers teaming to fill a water well with cement to the film’s final frames, which feature perhaps the most vicious of all crimes committed on screen over 95 minutes. It can be strangely hopeful: Abraham was willing to risk his own life, defying his government in order to aid innocent people in their fight against injustice; Adra, meanwhile, remains in Masafer Yatta, continuing to organize efforts to save his home despite the many attacks it continues to suffer from outside forces. Yet that hope, as it attempts to creep into the frame throughout, is swiftly swept aside, another demolition unfolding down the road, gunfire ringing through the fills from a nearby settlement. “We need people to make a change,” Adra says late in the film. “They watch something, they’re touched. Then what?” Perhaps turning No Other Land into a document that is eternal as it is vital could get the ball rolling. In order for that to happen, it would need a distributor. At the time of this writing, none have been brave enough to step up. (Read my review here.)
3. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)
The very existence of Dune: Part Two is astonishing, a work that has historically been deemed “unadaptable” having been adapted as meticulously as anyone can get to the source material without veering the worm off the side of the sand dune. Not only does Denis Villeneuve’s second installment take the path laid out by his first and elevate it, but it does something few sequels have ever been capable of doing: it elevates its genre to unprecedented heights that all sci-fi films in its wake will be chasing. Timothée Chalamet deserves award consideration for his work as Paul Atreides, but both Zendaya and Javier Bardem steal the movie having been given far more to do here than they were in Dune (2021)’s final 30 minutes. (Read M.N. Miller’s review here.)
2. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Is Brady Corbet cinema’s next Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson? I’m not yet sold. (Though it’s fair to assume he’d be reasonably happy with any of those three careers, as would fans of his first three features.) If The Brutalist, a staggering, grand epic unlike any American film of the recent past, is any indication, such reverence is just the beginning. What Corbet has built with this ever-rich, decades-spanning film about a Hungarian-born architect who survived the Holocaust and later flees post-World War II Europe to take a job in America, one that unexpectedly changes the course of his life, is the cinematic equivalent of the Great American Novel. Despite a runtime of 215 minutes, you never once feel as though Corbet is lengthening the proceedings for sport, as The Brutalist is entirely engrossing, meticulously detailed, and warrants how massive it is, in both scale and scope. At the time of my first viewing, it was without question the best film I’d seen in 2024; even at number two, it’s a true masterpiece in every sense of the distinction. (Read my review here.)
1. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
In a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, the late, great critic Roger Ebert gave what is, for my money, the foremost quote about the cinematic experience. When Rose asked why Ebert believed “no other artform touches life the way movies do,” he replied, “It takes us inside the lives of other people. When a movie is really working, we have an out-of-body experience.” Rose laughed: “You’ve seen too many movies, Roger.” Standing his ground, Ebert countered, challenging his interviewer to recall a time where he found himself so wrapped up in the story unfolding on screen that he wasn’t aware of his surroundings, let alone where his car was parked or what was going to happen the next day. “You only care about what’s going to happen to those people next. When that happens, it gives us an empathy for other people who are there on the screen that is more sharp and more effective and powerful than any other artform.”
RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is a revelation that inspires such a feeling, not solely because of the technical command that lies within, and not even strictly due to the magnetic turns from its breakout star duo and the established supporting players that surround them. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, Ross’ film is uniquely-striking in just how potent and formidable it is, both as a feat of storytelling and as a triumph in emotional hijacking. I am certain that I was out-of-body while watching Nickel Boys, a film that is so sensitive and immense that it is wholly indicative of having a visionary talent at its helm. Much like Ross’ prior film, the Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening, its artistic ambitions are features, not bugs or gimmicks, no matter how many short-sighted viewers wish to reduce them to such empty terms. It’s the rare sort of feature that feels like it is reinventing its format while simultaneously moving the craft forward. Nickel Boys the single best film to be released this year, and as powerful as many others managed to be, the margin isn’t particularly close. (Read my review here.)