Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.
Among the many problems with movie lists is the lack of a common starting point. No one can watch the hundreds of domestic and international titles released every year. We don’t even try.
I’m suspicious of writers who claim to screen 250+ films a year. Sure, stuff’s playing in the background while you’re cooking, checking email, God forbid writing reviews, but at some point all those films bleed together into an endless montage of repetitive imagery and plot points. Ultimately everything looks and feels the same. Nothing matters.
With access to screenings, festivals, links, etc., critics start from an apparent position of privilege. In reality, that means they see what studios and their publicists want them to see. Or will let them see. There’s a whole other world of film out there that is almost never covered.
In my case, I’m generally limited to watching titles I’ve been assigned. Since I wasn’t writing about Gladiator II, Musafa: The Lion King, Dune: Part Two, Challengers, and other “event” movies, I didn’t attend screenings for them. I’ve had enough time robbed from me this year (looking at you, Red One).
Conflicts kept me from other titles. I’ll catch up eventually, like Dune: Part Two on a backseat monitor on a flight from JFK to Seoul. Or not.
Honorable mentions: Girls Will Be Girls, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Mexico 86, Revolver.
10. Black Dog (Guan Hu)
Ex-con Lang (Eddie Peng) returns home—a dying industrial town in a desolate Chinese wasteland—to confront everything that got him sent to jail in the first place. Guan Hu drops the blockbuster pretensions of films like The Eight Hundred to focus on a redemption story that could go either way. Peng, a reliable figure in action movies, gives a nuanced performance in a film that never settles for the obvious.
9. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
It’s easy to dismiss Love Lies Bleeding as a genre exercise, something beneath the talents of its cast. But I can’t think of another film this year that embraces its sordid settings and sleazy characters so wholeheartedly, yet still offers some form of justification for the violence they commit.
8. The Roundup: Punishment (Heo Myung-haeng)
I’m tired of making excuses for Don Lee (Ma Dong-seok), and if I were totally honest with myself I’d move this higher on the list. No one is doing action with his dedication, and this, the fourth entry in his “Beast Cop” franchise, lifts his work to its highest level yet. It also showcases his excellent comic timing, his willingness to play the fool to land a joke.
7. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke)
Yes, I’ve read the complaints that Jia is making the same movie over and over, but what other filmmaker has a stockpile of footage this incredible? By deleting dialogue and replacing music from previously shot footage, Jia is essentially reworking Lev Kuleshov’s editing exercises, allowing viewers to form new narratives as they wish. One constant is Zhao Tao’s indelible performance as Qiao Qiao, wandering through the underside of Chinese life looking for a meal, her boyfriend, a way out of town.
6. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
While not my favorite Hamaguchi, Evil Does Not Exist makes the list for its community meeting about a proposed glamping site. Staged like a scene from a Wiseman documentary, it’s one of the most harrowing depictions of good vs. evil I’ve seen this year. Plus, Hamaguchi is attuned to nature the way Malick is.
5. No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor)
Racism and bigotry are founded on ignorance. Hatred is abstract. Once you know someone, once you understand backgrounds, motives, wishes, you can no longer hate with the same conviction. No Other Land attacks ignorance and hatred. For that reason alone it deserves to be seen.
4. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
Dumped by Warner Bros. into a handful of theaters, Juror #2 is one of Clint Eastwood’s most confident works. In a testament to the filmmaking style of his mentor Don Siegel, Eastwood presents a story with no flab or fat, nothing but narrative anchored by no-nonsense performances. Its insoluble moral conundrum––what if all the choices you have are bad ones?––places it among the year’s most complex releases.
3. The Breaking Ice (Anthony Chen)
Set in Yanji, a Chinese city near the border with North Korea, during what looks like an endless winter of grim skies and frigid nights, The Breaking Ice is a delicate, beguiling film with superb performances from Qu Chuxiao, Liu Haoran, and especially Zhou Dongyu, to my mind the best performer in Chinese film today. Director Anthony Chen captures the angst and gloom of dissatisfied twenty-somethings navigating a world that hasn’t turned out the way they expected.
2. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia)
You don’t need me to echo the critical consensus about what a tremendously accomplished director Kapadia is, or the ravishing cinematography by Ranabir Das. Or the injustice committed by a disgruntled Indian panel that selected a different film for the Oscars. Instead I’ll single out Kani Kusruti in one of her two remarkable performances this year. As a Mumbai nurse consumed by loneliness and indecision, she conveys emotion without dialogue. Her work evokes the masters of silent cinema.
1. At Averroès & Rosa Parks (Nicolas Philibert)
Philibert won the Golden Bear in 2023 for On the Adamant, a documentary about an adult daycare center in Paris. This film covers two sections of the Esquirol Hospital Center that also deal with troubled adults. Philibert jumps right into the heart of insanity, filming with such empathy that we learn to care about people potentially so terrifying we want to ignore them. As with No Other Land, seeing something with new eyes changes viewers. I will never look at mental illness the same way again.