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.
As the decade crosses its halfway point, I can already sense the hastily assembled lists soon appearing, attempting to provide definitive word on the best in cinema over the last five years. I’d rather heed the wisdom of the great J. Rosenbaum and give some distance, but in the spirit of annual year-end extravaganza, I’ll join the crowd in looking back at least the last twelve months of releases. A peculiar year in I saw almost half the films on my list upon their festival premieres in 2023––and furthermore, my top three picks haven’t shifted since January. The eleven preceding months thankfully brought no shortage of illuminating experiences as detailed in my top 15 picks, including a few of the most noteworthy studio offerings failing to connect with audiences––though we imagine their reputation will grow in time, including a pair of WB releases, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, which barely missed my top 15.
Also nearly making the list was the funniest film of the year: Ryan Martin Brown’s debut Free Time. I also adored Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime, sadly relegated to an NFT release; the dark, moving Memoir of a Snail, the best animation of the year; Brady Corbet’s ambitious epic The Brutalist; Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, which reduced me to tears at its TIFF 2023 premiere; the second-best documentary of the year, the Scorsese-narrated Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger; the glorious, much-needed return of Jaume Collet-Serra, who crafted the finest Netflix release of 2024 with Carry-On.
Without further ado, one can see my favorites of the year below, and if you wade in the list-heavy waters of Letterboxd, here is my ranking of all 2024 films viewed and an early look at 2025.
10 Favorite First-Time Watches of 2024 (full list here): As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, A Moment of Innocence, They All Laughed, Edvard Munch, The Fire Within, Nosferatu the Vampyre, The Roaring Twenties, Manila in the Claws of Light, Moving, and Maine-Ocean Express
Honorable Mentions: All We Imagine as Light, Here (Bas Devos), No Other Land, Good One, Juror #2
10. Here (Robert Zemeckis)
Far and away the most unfairly maligned film of the year, Robert Zemeckis’ Here finds the director in this modern era at the apex of his technological fascinations and storytelling showmanship. Conveying millions of years (but primarily a stretch of a hundred or so) through a single fixed camera angle, the adaptation of Richard McGuire’s astounding graphic novel takes a bittersweet look at both the moving and mundane of everyday life. Breathtaking in how the various time jumps will cause reflection in one’s own ambitions and failures, here’s a film that I imagine will not only become more resonant as time goes on, but will speak greater to one the more time they’ve had on this Earth.
9. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
While I viewed Last Summer, well, last summer in 2023, 2024 was the year of Catherine Breillat for me. Catching up with the majority of the brazenly honest and biting French director’s filmography only helped me further appreciate the tightrope walk of her Queen of Hearts remake, following a lawyer (Léa Drucker, in one of the most complex performances of the year) who embarks on an affair with her stepson (Samuel Kircher). Like last year’s May December, it’s an incredible feat of tonal fine-tuning as Breillat explores power, lust, shame, and desire, further proving there’s no other director with the precise kind of intuition she captures in every glance and touch.
8. Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
While I didn’t fully get on board with the M. Night Shyamalan renaissance until Old, his latest three features have displayed a director in gleeful Hitchock/Twilight Zone mode in which every twist and turn is a conduit for sheer cinematic playfulness. Scolds may say Trap‘s third act strains credulity, but it rather opens up a new door for Josh Hartnett’s career-best performance: a serial killer forced to face his worst fears of coming clean to his family, and the privilege he’s given to say one last goodbye to the person he loves most. The fact we’re on the edge of our seat, even rooting for him to escape one last time, shows what an incredible feat Shyamalan and Hartnett have pulled off. The most fun time I had in a theater this year.
7. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
In his relatively young, already illustrious career, Ryusuke Hamaguchi has exhibited the kind of cinematic rhythm in which I know I’ll find at least something to appreciate in all of his work moving forward. While the world was his oyster after Drive My Car (and, lest we forget his best release of 2021, Wheel of Fortunate and Fantasy), he instead surprised everyone, announcing a secretly-shot feature. Born out of Gift, a film that will only ever be presented with Eiko Ishibashi performing live in person, Evil Does Not Exist takes valuable time to explore the wonders of nature and what will be lost if one doesn’t stand up to preserve the world. Through community meetings, tree chopping, and a truly bewildering finale showing the lurking violence in the most peaceful of surroundings, Hamaguchi shows the balance between man (vs. man) and nature in all of its beauty and ugliness.
6. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
There are only a few films this year that truly feel like they are radically advancing the language of cinema; RaMell Ross’ narrative debut Nickel Boys certainly stands among them. After crafting one of the most remarkable documentaries of the last few years with the Apichatpong Weerasethakul-backed, Sundance-winning, Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross imagines Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel as an examination of what cinema can truly offer when it comes to seeing the world through another’s eyes. With unparalleled cinematography from Jomo Fray, who shot last year’s stunning All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Nickel Boys sees Ross exude stunning formal power once again, telling this story with a unique, empathetic conceit that makes for a radical adaptation and a future classic.
5. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
As a Peterloo appreciator, Mike Leigh never left, but it’s certainly nice to have him return to his smaller-scale character study roots with Hard Truths. Unequivocally giving the performance of the year, Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s weathered, worn, and troubled Pansy is against the world––this includes her husband, son, friends, and any acquaintance and stranger that gets in her path. Rather than sanding down the edges of her personality to potentially win audience sympathies, Leigh goes the opposite route, and in turn makes an even more cathartic portrait of festering anger containing at least a sliver of feeling every human has, particularly relatable when it comes to the seemingly unsolvable frustrations of our present-day world.
4. It’s Not Me (Leos Carax)
Packing more ideas into its 40-minute runtime than almost any feature I’ve seen this year, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is far more than just a facile Jean-Luc Godard homage. While the cine-memoir does indeed honor the late French New Wave legend’s avant-garde essayistic style, Carax uses the format to not only interrogate his own filmography, but candidly contend with the most troubling developments in the last century-worth of humanity. For a work that wouldn’t have existed if not commissioned by a major art institute (France’s Centre Pompidou), there’s no sense Carax was under any sort of directive; it’s one of the most encumbered, expressive films of 2024.
3. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
In synchronicity with the all-consuming loneliness and unnerving terror of this list’s number one entry, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is both an encapsulation of our age of dread and a deeply personal excavation of gender dysphoria, being trapped in a body you don’t desire and having no words to properly express the feeling. Conveyed with encumbered artistic vision, this is an anti-coming-of-age film that has much on its mind: the emotionally transportive power of music, identity-forming bonds with media, the soul-sucking nature of suburbia, the heartache of broken friendships, curdled nostalgia, the horrors of self-denial––those are just scratching the surface. With a decades-jumping finale that digs under the skin and shows the emotional, physical, and mental decay of perpetually lying to one’s self, this is a masterpiece that has reverberated long since its Sundance premiere at the year’s start and will only gain further resonance as new audiences uncover its power in decades to come.
2. Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice)
While I mostly enjoyed bluntly grandiose films from Brady Corbet, Denis Villeneuve, and others this year, they were often accompanied by “they don’t make them like these” praise. For my money, it was the tranquil patience of Víctor Erice’s quietly powerful first feature in 30 years, Close Your Eyes, that most deserves that designation. A meta mystery involving a director whose actor disappears from a shoot only to resurface decades later, it’s a film full of grace notes (a Howard Hawks homage being one of the most affecting scenes of the year), culminating in a transcendent final sequence that instills the power and future of cinema.
1. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)
There are certain films that burrow so deep in your psyche on one viewing that you can’t possibly shake them if you tried. It’s been 15 months since I saw Bertrand Bonello’s magnum opus The Beast at TIFF (on an IMAX screen no less, realizing the format’s true power is seeing Léa Seydoux lead a film on a screen that size), and its harrowing portraits of loneliness, pierced with dread, have reverberated every day since. Conjuring past trauma, confronting modern-day fears, and imagining future anxieties, it is a startlingly tactile experience as we journey through the doomed paths of Seydoux’s Gabrielle and George MacKay’s Louis. It’s tragic, uncomfortable, and chilling––the movie of the year that best exemplifies the mood of the year.