My Top 10 Movies of 2024

A year of pleasure through provocation

Dec 31, 2024

Well, it’s about that time of year when I have to deliver something of a “state of cinema” address. After screening 184 new releases in the year, perhaps that makes me among the most qualified to offer an assessment of the movies at large. 2024 has me at somewhat of a loss to harmonize many discordant threads and trends across the art form.

Let’s start with big-ticket studio filmmaking. Dune: Part Two aside, the tentpoles were as bland and uninspiring as they’ve ever been. Chalk that up to the delayed outputs stemming from 2023’s dual strikes, I suppose, but it could just as easily be a canary in the coal mine.

Documentary filmmaking also felt a bit lackluster in 2024, with no non-fiction title making my year-end best list for the first time in 15 years. Again, maybe this is just bad timing due to COVID choking these films’ longer production timelines.

Best International Feature has consistently become one of the most competitive races on my ballot. This year, I just didn’t feel the same sense of energy and electricity from across the globe (and not for lack of sampling the menu).

And yet! It was a fine year for American and English-language cinema. Many new voices emerging with strong calling cards that should foretell long, exciting careers. And some established names delivered films that added yet another crowning jewel to an already-rich body of work. Though it’s harder than ever to get human-driven stories for adults made, those who persevere against the odds continue to impress.

Whittling my favorite films of the year down to just 10 remains a challenge each year, 2024 being no exception. The titles below are the ones that have lodged themselves in an unshakeable place inside me. Some of them immediately announced themselves as year-end favorites, while others took time to grow on me. (My rule of watching all these films twice for some level of quality control remains in place.)

If any theme tied together 2024’s 10 best films, it was their ability to generate pleasure through their provocations. (The notable exception is Ghostlight, whose unabashed sincerity was simply too overwhelming for me to resist.) These works challenged deeply held ideas and notions that govern everyday life and form mythologies that shape our ambitions. They were complex, knotty, and often subversive guides to a world where the guardrails of traditional delineations seemed to dissolve before our eyes.

By needling me into new frames of mind, these films opened my eyes to different methods of interpreting an often dizzying and disorienting year. I learned to smile through the subversion. Perhaps it’s the armor I need for 2025 and beyond.

#10 — Juror #2 (trailer)

I think you’d learn far more about the character of America by gathering a random sample of citizens for a discussion of Juror #2 than from any political focus group. At 94, director Clint Eastwood is Eastwood perhaps the last filmmaker who can call BS in a bipartisan way, sparing no sacred cow from his withering gaze. Nicholas Hoult wrings exquisite tension from the trials of Justin Kemp, a man who tries to attain absolution without accountability while serving as a juror in a case where he’s responsible for the victim’s death. His operational contradiction is but the tip of the spear for a film that shows how every principle taken as bedrock — fairness, impartiality, honesty — has such damning rot that it damages the overall structural integrity. Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams don’t provide a verdict so much as they suggest a diagnosis: America’s capacity for empathy is atrophying, and the country’s concept of justice has become anemic. And Juror #2’s steadfast refusal to fit into any neat ideological box made its trenchant critique all the stickier in my mind.

Available on Max.

#9 — Nickel Boys (trailer)

I had a feeling that a second watch of Nickel Boys away from the meat-grinder of the New York Film Festival, where I first encountered RaMell Ross’ work, would open the film up even more for me. At first, I felt like it was a “me” problem to not respond to something so audacious and ambitious. But then Ross reassured me in our conversation that the film is meant to be responsive to changes in the viewer. We are needed to complete Nickel Boys because he commits so thoroughly to linking the processes of making and receiving the images through the first-person style of the film. When you can clear any obfuscations that connect the seer and the seeing, it’s not just that Ross can show us new ways of understanding the traumas of America’s pre-Civil Rights racist history. It’s an entirely different method of sight altogether, one that connects the intellectual process of decoding visual information to the gut.

Now playing in select theaters.

Read my interview with filmmaker RaMell Ross.

#8 — Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (trailer)

I have to imagine that encountering Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is like what it felt to experience French New Wave films in the ‘60s. It’s nothing short of invigorating to watch this Romanian rebel needle and nudge the medium into the era of the destabilized and decentered cinematic image. Jude feels as comfortable charging into the uncertain future of social media storytelling through tools like Snapchat as he does interrogating archival images that reinforce the will of authoritarian leaders. In a culture of filmmaking where our best and brightest minds’ gazes seem inexorably fixated on the past, we’re lucky someone as intrepid as Radu Jude is chronicling the uncertain and unsettled present in the roaring 2020s.

Available on MUBI.

Read my interview with filmmaker Radu Jude.

#7 — Babygirl (trailer)

I maintain that reading Babygirl as purely an erotic thriller is to cut yourself off from what makes Halina Reijn’s film so subversive and scintillating. This is not just another piece of yassified hagsploitation that gets its rocks off by romantically pairing older women with much younger men. Reijn avoids traditional trappings of transgression in the relationship, though I’ll confess to letting out some hooting and hollering at Harris Dickinson’s forward flirtations with his company’s head honcho played by Nicole Kidman. Their sensual encounters are not so much salacious as they are surprisingly sweet, as both characters work through the messiness of negotiating consent in real-time. If they made this movie back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Babygirl would be considered a rom-com between Kidman’s Romy and her slightly aloof husband, but I fear we’re not quite ready for that conversation yet. Maybe by the time I re-rank this last in a decade, we will be.

Now playing in theaters.

Read my review.

#6 — A Real Pain (trailer)

No film felt more comfortable at smoothing over the distance between seemingly disparate poles (pun intended) as Jesse Eisenberg’s Holocaust tourism dramedy A Real Pain. His incisive, succinct script gets to the heart of pains both historical and contemporary as two distant cousins explore their ancestral Polish roots together. But it’s a film full of the prickly pleasures of continuing on through whatever traumas ail us, as best embodied by Kieran Culkin’s protean performance as the erratic Benji. Eisenberg knows exactly how to wrangle the fireball at the center of his movie to both mask and accentuate the deep well of emotion stemming from such direct confrontation with the horrors of humanity (both macro and micro). In under 90 minutes, he packs each scene with small details and nuances that make the whole endeavor land with a compounding impact that feels achingly human.

Now playing in select theaters.

#5 — Ghostlight (trailer)

No movie had made me full-body sob like Ghostlight in at least five years, and a rewatch away from Sundance later in 2024 convinced me it wasn’t just the altitude playing tricks on my emotions. Filmmakers Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan have some special magic in conjuring such pure, unironic sentimentality through their work. Everything about this story of a grieving family who learns how to move forward through the power of theater should be a hoary cliché. And yet at each step of the way, Ghostlight earns the feelings it so effortlessly elicits through grounding in rich characterization and truthful storytelling. It’s a warm embrace of a film I wish I could wrap myself in all year long.

Available to rent from various digital platforms.

Read my review.

#4 — The Brutalist (trailer)

Brady Corbet’s epic is as big as the country it dares to take as its very subject. Adjectives fail in the wake of the awe and wonder inspired by The Brutalist, a work that wrestles with the promise and peril of the American century. Corbet collapses and synthesizes a variety of polarities, just as brutalist architecture manages to contain both maximalist and minimalist elements. Corbet makes us wrestle with the simultaneous intimacy and immensity of his story as Adrien Brody’s László Toth as he fights to achieve his vision. This ability to hold two competing scales and narratives proves key to the film’s narrative and thematic concerns, not just its style or structure (though all are about as immaculate as they come).

Now playing in select theaters.

Read my review as well as my interviews with actor Alessandro Nivola and composer Daniel Blumberg.

#3 — A Different Man (trailer)

No film demanded to be dealt with quite like A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg’s dismantling of the usual conversation around beauty and disability. This thorny black comedy (one of the most evocatively textured of post-COVID New York, to boot) denies any easy avenues for sympathy or identification with Sebastian Stan’s abrasive protagonist. Pathways and opportunities open and close with the cruel twists of fate and irony throughout this reflexive, reflective exploration of the collaborative project that is constructing one’s self. And yet the possibilities for conversation and debate only grow wider as A Different Man trudges deeper into the heart of human darkness — all while expanding the archetypes for disfigured individuals. Schimberg’s ideas are not always the most pleasant about our capacity for radical acceptance and the limited triumph of representation. Yet his knack for well-timed gallows humor makes the film’s bitter pill surprisingly palatable.

Available to rent from various digital platforms.

Read my review as well as my interview with stars Sebastian Stan and Adam Person.

#2 — Challengers (trailer)

With time, we’ll see Challengers as the definitive millennial melodrama. Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes dance dangerously on all the generational-defining fault lines of identity, and its balletic, bold movements are bound to trigger some tremor for each viewer. But beneath all the supercharged dynamics set in motion by the dynamo that is Zendaya’s tennis superstar Tashi Duncan, there’s a (potentially?) platonic love story between Josh O’Connor’s Patrick and Mike Faist’s Art. While Kuritzkes challenged my presumption that the difficulties expressing the complicated web of feelings in their relationship were specifically a male problem, Challengers is at its best when it pinpoints the secret language of men to avoid verbalizing emotions. The film sizzles when it becomes obvious how the distant duo work through their prolonged adolescent angst through a shared crush and — most profoundly — achievement in their chosen profession. Maybe I’d feel seen or attacked if I wasn’t so riveted by the volleying action throughout.

Available on Amazon Prime Video.

Read my interview with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes.

#1 — Hit Man (trailer)

I can’t deny my heart: Hit Man was the purest form of popcorn pleasure I had all year. Beyond being a movie I feel that I can recommend to anyone — a nice bonus — Richard Linklater and Glen Powell’s tale of a character who finds his true self by pretending to be personally tailored hit men for desperate people is the essence of cinema. The film offers a wicked paradox as its key proposition: in the willingness to give yourself over to an invented reality, you can make the one you want for yourself. Powell’s Gary Johnson offers a master’s thesis on the art of acting, and it’s made all the richer through its undergirding in Linklater’s “aw shucks” philosophizing. It’s a tribute to the transformative power of storytelling through and through. And in a year where our capacity for openness and change to new ideas and identities felt strained, Hit Man provided a perverse yet pleasurable vision of the type of world I want to live in. (Body count aside.)