On the back of industry-wide strikes, I had low expectations for 2024. Surprisingly, the movies delivered. The year wasn’t rife with five-star bangers, but there was a lot to like. I wholeheartedly recommend 19 movies below.
Take a deep breath, because everything we missed in 2024 is coming in 2025. Tentpole action movies like Mission: Impossible and Superman? Check. Follow-ups to exciting debut films by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Celine Song? You know it. Feature-length films from Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, and Jordan Peele? Yep. Adaptations of new-age novels from Lynne Ramsay and Chloé Zhao? Definitely. New films from South Korean masters Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho? Hell yes.
Before we get to the list, here are nine runners-up (in alphabetical order): Anora; The Brutalist; Dune: Part Two; Good One; His Three Daughters; I Saw the TV Glow; Kneecap; The Promised Land; Thelma.
10. The Substance: Cutting this list down to 10 was brutal this year. There were three or four compelling candidates for the final spot. In the end, I had to reward Coralie Fargeat’s uncompromising vision. The Substance is a high-concept science fiction movie. It’s an impeccably directed schlock film. Its repulsive body horror rivals David Cronenberg’s best. Or worst, depending on your feelings about the genre. Somehow, above all, it’s a feminist piece about beauty standards.
9. Sing Sing: Like Zhao’s The Rider, Sing Sing is part fiction, part documentary retelling. The movie follows Sing Sing prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts drama program. It’s buoyed by phenomenal performances from best-in-the-business actors Colman Domingo and Paul Raci, surrounded by program alumni playing dramatized versions of themselves. The formerly incarcerated men are worth the price of admission alone, bringing gravitas and pathos to a devastating film.
8. The Seed of the Sacred Fig: Director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison due to his work on The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Rasoulof’s film followed years of unrest in Iran after the unexplained death of a young woman in police custody. While the film’s final twist is imperfect, its message is resounding.
7. Rebel Ridge: While 2024 punched above its weight, it lacked a quality summer blockbuster. Unless you count Rebel Ridge. Quietly dropped on Netflix in September, Rebel Ridge is a throwback to brainier action flicks. It channels First Blood, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Dog Day Afternoon. Our protagonist operates outside the law, and he’s right for it. Thrilling and restrained, Rebel Ridge is as good as action gets.
6. Nickel Boys: No movie did more to advance the medium in 2024 than RaMell Ross’s daring Nickel Boys. Adapting a novel for film is often a natural process. Nearly half of the Academy’s Best Picture winners were based on novels. Ross didn’t need to innovate to make an excellent movie of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but his risk paid off. Nickel Boys’s first-person point-of-view is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
5. Dìdi: Writer-director Sean Wang and I are about the same age. Dìdi marked the first time I’ve seen my own childhood nostalgia—flip phones, Myspace, YouTube—presented onscreen. Wang’s coming-of-age immigrant story centered around a mother-son relationship couldn’t have hit me harder. Plus I’m an easy mark for a Paramore reference.
4. Evil Does Not Exist: Drive My Car auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi might be pretty good at this whole movie thing. Hamaguichi’s latest is an environmental parable about a glamping company developing a campsite in a remote mountain town. It boasts a townhall meeting that’s somehow one of the most intense scenes of the year. The ending had me slack-jawed and confused until things clicked into place hours later. It’s uneven work, but it might just be a masterpiece.
3. Nosferatu: Like Fargeat, writer-director Robert Eggers has a singular, exacting vision. Eggers’s work is transportative. His films drag you to dreary 17th-century New England or grungy 10th-century Iceland. Eggers is the undeniable king of atmosphere, but his remake of the vampire classic had unexpected weight to it. I went to see a cool vampire movie and left contemplating pandemics and the way society treats women’s sexual desires.
2. A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature is nuanced, honest work. A character piece about a neurotic overachiever (Eisenberg) and his chaotic, spontaneous cousin (Kieran Culkin) as they explore their family history on a Jewish heritage tour in Poland. A Real Pain raises questions about the right way to connect to people, experience modern life, and the ethics of tourism. It, along with Evil Does Not Exist, was the most thought-provoking film I saw all year.
1. Challengers: Has a book or film ever grown in your estimation from the second you finished it? For me, that was Challengers.
Challengers is a sexy, stylish, and rewatchable movie backed by an electric score from all-time greats Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Lighting and shooting beautiful people should be easy, but if it were, director Luca Guadagnino’s work on Challengers wouldn’t be so notable. Writer Justin Kuritzkes’s script effortlessly volleys the shifting power dynamics between its central throuple—power dynamics that could be applied to any relationship.
Every so often, the best movie of the year is also the most entertaining movie of the year. Challengers is an instant classic.
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