The last 12 months offered a wealth of great movies if you knew where to look for them, so many, in fact, that I pulled about 40 titles before whittling them to 10. There were so many that the insanity of year-end and awards-season releases means that I have to write this list before seeing all the major contenders. (Apologies to you, All We Imagine as Light, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, A Complete Unknown, and Dahomey; I’ll be getting to you in the coming weeks, I promise.)
Even with all those caveats, the ten (OK, 11) films listed here all dazzled and thrilled in their own ways, and even if any of them might eventually be displaced in the future, these were all works of art that brought some light to a fraught world:
10. The Room Next Door: Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language feature debut saw the Spanish auteur exploring career-long themes and tropes (female friendships, the inherent drama of hospitals) with more recent ones (the dissolution of the body, raging against impending death) in this powerful examination of the human impulse to steer one’s own course toward the end.
9. (tie) The People’s Joker / I Saw the TV Glow: Because society rarely illuminates or values the queer experience, LGBTQ+ people very often understand themselves through the clues they glean from the media they consume. Both of these audacious and ambitious films saw trans directors using pop culture (comic books and their adaptations in Joker, teen-horror TV in Glow) as a way to communicate and examine queer identities.
8. Blitz: Steve McQueen’s version of a WWII story was thrilling and intense, of course, but also a pointed commentary on British wartime propaganda cinema, centering a character of color (young Elliott Heffernan gives an extraordinary performance) and revealing the racial, religious, and class divides papered over by the nation’s official “we’re all in this together” stance. A sequence showing a glittering London nightclub, contrasted with its bombed-out aftermath, was one of the year’s most gutting narrative pivots.
7. The Brutalist: Director Brady Corbet and his co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold craft an intimate story on an epic scale, throwing their arms around the conflicts between art and commerce, the creative response to trauma, and the general state of the world in the last half of the 20th century. A 70mm extravaganza, including intermission and overture, delivered at indie prices, this film creates a template for the return of the mid-budget adult drama about human concerns.
6. Anora: Writer-director Sean Baker once again takes audiences within a specific subculture with empathy and specificity. Young sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison) is swept off her feet by the hapless son of Russian oligarchs, and the film skillfully jumps from farce to thriller to a tale of a young woman growing into her own power and independence, every seemingly competing narrative and tone has been juggled with precision.
5. Close Your Eyes: Veteran Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice returns to the big screen after decades away from feature filmmaking, and for good measure reteams with actress Ana Torrent (the juvenile lead, 50 years ago, of Erice’s Franco-era classic The Spirit of the Beehive). A haunting contemplation of aging and art, this achingly beautiful new work shows the master to be at the peak of his filmmaking gifts in his 80s.
4. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point: Tyler Taormina’s breathtaking breakthrough is a symphony of mood and memory. It’s the kind of indie film about which the inattentive will complain “nothing happens,” but it’s full to bursting with recognizable moments and wistful recollections, capturing life’s fleeting moments with poignancy and potency.
3. Challengers: Perhaps, with the passage of time, Queer might one day become my preferred Luca Guadagnino film of 2024, but right now, it’s the immediacy and the energy and the eroticism of this love triangle in the tennis world that sticks with me. It’s worth noting that both films were triumphs not only for Guadagnino but also for collaborators like screenwriter Jason Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
2. Babygirl: Nicole Kidman’s trust in writer-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) is evident throughout this provocative exploration of a powerful woman (Kidman) coming to understand her desires and where they fit in her well-ordered professional and personal life. Kidman reaches new level of physical and emotional daring here, in a film that celebrates, and never pathologizes, consensual sexual proclivities.
1. Hundreds of Beavers: This extravaganza from director Mike Cheslik and his co-writer and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews gleefully plunges into both the precision and the anarchy of silent comedy, continually finding new avenues for slapstick choreography and visual wit over the course of its 108 minutes. It’s a film that’s giddy with the possibilities and the opportunities of cinema, and no other film in 2024 offered such delight and exuberance.
Also worth mentioning: Film I would have listed were it not for my longstanding friendship with the director: Big Boys. Film that fell between the cracks of the 2023 awards season and the 2024 distribution calendar that is nonetheless a triumph: Robot Dreams. Standout sequence of the year, even if the rest of the film isn’t at its level: the “Rock DJ” number, Better Man.
