This time of the year is always hard for me as someone who writes about film for a living. Publications all over the country release their Best of the Year lists featuring their top movies and shows they discovered over the past 12 months.
But because I don’t live in L.A., New York, or some larger market like that, I don’t get to see a lot of the big releases before they open wide in theaters. This usually means by the end of the year, a lot of the big awards contenders haven’t opened near me, so I have to build a list without having watched everything that’s been buzzworthy.
Luckily, 2024 was another remarkable year for cinema, so I’m happy with the movies I did see, regardless. Still, by January/February, this list might be completely different, which is OK. How we view art changes constantly, and when we compile these lists, it’s not so much a marker of what movies are objectively better than others, but a look at the people we were at this specific time in history and the art that was shaping our social moment.
It was also another pretty powerful year for television, with the streaming services dominating the landscape once again. Let’s start there.
The Bear, Season Three might have been its weakest season so far, but it was still better than most shows out there. Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is sumptuous and gorgeous, finding the soul of the novel and expanding it in ways both surprising and inevitable.
Shogun was intense and epic, yet also managed to be fun and exciting in ways a lot of shows forget to be. Nothing felt dragged out. Instead it moved like a sword through grass. Black Doves and Slow Horses were both handily the best spy shows on television, proving once again that the United Kingdom has that genre on lock.
The two favorite shows I watched, however, were Max’s The Penguin, which basically set The Sopranos in the world of Batman (more fun than it sounds) and Say Nothing, Hulu’s uncompromising and electric limited series set in Belfast during The Troubles. If Say Nothing were a movie, it would be my favorite film of the year, hands down.
With that segue, here are my Top 15 movies of 2024:
15. Inside Out 2 — Any animated movie that tries to teach children how to deal with low self worth and anxiety is a classic in my book.
14. Strange Darling — A fractured cat-and-mouse chase told non-chronologically featuring an all-time great performance by Willa Fitzgerald and gorgeous, grimy cinematography from Giovanni Ribisi. Insane.
13. The Outrun — Saoirse Ronan has long been an actress of limitless depth and empathy, but her turn as an alcoholic rediscovering herself on the Orkney Islands while searching for a rare bird was an absolutely soaring achievement.
12. Rebel Ridge — With an instant movie star performance from Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge turns what could have been a dull retread of First Blood into an action-packed, blisteringly angry social commentary about police corruption and the power of family.
11. Sing Sing — This prison movie treats the bars like walls to a human soul more than to the outside world. The movie refuses to wallow in po-faced pity and instead fills every frame with hope.
10. Anora — This drama is simultaneously a meet-cute romantic comedy and a deeply humane unpacking of the toll sex work can take on a soul.
9. Challengers — Sexy, fun and genuinely surprising, Challengers is not just the best movie I’ve ever seen about tennis, but it beautifully carries the best love triangle since The Notebook.
8. The Substance — Deliriously disgusting body horror is held in check by a boldly fearless script that acts as a primal scream for a new kind of feminism that protects all women. It’s genuinely stunning.
7. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World — A pitch black Hungarian comedy that takes the piss out of late-stage capitalism while it spits in the face of the corporations that grind the working class to death, it’s both hilarious and devastating.
6. Queer — This film takes the drug-addled loneliness of Naked Lunch and plops it down in 1950s Mexico City, with seminal work from Daniel Craig and a scene-stealing Jason Schwartzman.
5. Ghostlight — This truly exceptional work of humanity ruminates on the healing power of artistic expression with grace, beauty and breathtaking empathy. Remarkable.
4. Conclave — Who knew a bunch of old men voting for a new pope would feel like a glossy Hollywood thriller? Ralph Fiennes gives career-best work here, and that’s saying something.
3. I Saw the TV Glow — Still a movie I think about at least once a day, this dark and dreamlike fairy tale breaks open a young man’s lonely spirit and searches for ways to help him heal. Every viewing changes what I think this film means.
2. The Beast — This three-hour-long French mind-bender only makes sense in your dreams. Bertrand Bonello is a master filmmaker, and this might be his best film yet.
1. His Three Daughters — Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen play three estranged sisters who reconnect in their father’s small New York City apartment to take care of him across his final days. Perfect in every way, it deals with grief so honestly that I found myself crying without really knowing why.
Films I haven’t yet seen that might have made this list include: The Brutalist, A Real Pain, All We Imagine As Light, Nickel Boys, Hard Truths, I’m Still Here, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Green Border, No Other Land, Emilia Pérez, My Old Ass, The Room Next Door, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Close Your Eyes, and Babygirl.
Here are my other awards for 2024:
Scariest Movie of the Year: Chime, a 45-minute short directed by horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Most Underrated Comedy: Hundreds of Beavers for its 120 minutes of pure slapstick imagination.
Most Underrated Drama: Tuesday, for reminding the world that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is an incredible performer, no matter the genre.
Most Overrated: Longlegs really bummed me out because I love Nic Cage and Oz Perkins, but even though the vibe is immaculate, the story felt undercooked and the film was nowhere near as scary as I had hoped.
Best Prequel: The First Omen is a classy, very well-crafted horror film on its own, but it also adds colors and shades to the 1976 original that make it a better movie in retrospect.
Best Martial Arts Movie: Monkey Man, which suggests Dev Patel should be the next James Bond. Period.
The worst movies I saw in 2024 (in no particular order) were The Crow, Kraven: The Hunter, Madame Web, Borderlands, Founders Day, Subservience, Unfrosted, Latency, Pool Man, and Trigger Warning.
Honorable mentions: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Janet Planet, Evil Does Not Exist, Wicked, Flow, Thelma, Tuesday, Memoir of a Snail, National Anthem, La Chimera, Bird, Oddity, Dahomey, A Different Man, Dune Part 2.
That’s a wrap for 2024. I can’t wait for what 2025 brings.
