The Ten Best Movies of 2024
In a previous article I mentioned how we were spoiled last year by the sheer amount of great films released. 2024 was perhaps, by contrast, an unexceptional year, and the movies that compose my best-of list this time around are by and large less impressive. Yet the highlights remain exactly that: highlights, worthy of being propped up and celebrated.
Just missed: “Dune Part Two,” “Evil Does Not Exist,” “Conclave,” “We Live in Time,” “Nosferatu,” “Longlegs”
10. “A Different Man” (dir. Aaron Schimberg)
A man with a facial deformity undergoes a procedure to look exceedingly handsome; when he loses out to a different individual with facial deformities, he goes a little insane. So goes the darkly funny drama from Aaron Schimberg, a showcase for its three talented leads. Sebastian Stan ditches his Marvel stardom to play protagonist Edward, an awkward aspiring actor who undergoes facial reconstruction surgery. Before the procedure, he meets a playwright in his apartment building, who eventually becomes inspired to write about Edward – only, it’s his pre-procedure self she’s interested in, not the new one. What follows are multiple moments of mistaken identity and psychological torment. Schimberg establishes himself as a writer/director with a unique voice, and Adam Pearon shines as the other individual with neurofibromatosis whose charisma shakes up Edward’s world.
9. “La Chimera” (dir. Alice Rohrwacher)
I don’t want to repeat many of my previously written thoughts on this wonderful, strange little fable. What I’ll highlight, though, is that its talented star, Josh O’Connor, continues to cement himself as one of the most exciting young actors in movies, and he has an interesting case for 2024’s movie MVP. (More on him later.)
8. “His Three Daughters” (dir. Azazel Jacobs)
I despise when movies feel like they wish they were plays. When you have a movie set in minimal locations, filled with a tremendous amount of dialogue and capital-A acting, there’s often a real lack of cinematic flair. Not so with “His Three Daughters,” a movie with three leads (Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen) so fleshed out you’d be convinced they’re real people. Three sisters reunite in a New York City apartment to spend time with their father before he passes away. The more or less single location can give way to an overemphasis on theater qualities, but “His Three Daughters” is too well-constructed to appear uncinematic. Lyonne is particularly compelling as Rachel, the sister whose life path isn’t as traditionally accomplished as her sisters. “Daughters” is deeply moving and wonderfully performed.
7. “Nickel Boys” (dir. RaMell Ross)
I had been wrapped up in much of the discourse regarding “Nickel Boys” before I even had a chance to see it. After reading many critics calling it the best movie of the year, I left my theater a little disappointed and a bit overwhelmed; “Nickel Boys” is dense, difficult, and evocative. But in the days and weeks that followed, the transcendent sounds and images, shot by the genius Jomo Fray, dug their way into my brain. Set in a Jim Crow-era abusive boarding school, “Nickel Boys” is infused with transcendent, miraculous beauty. The film, director RaMell Ross’ first narrative feature, challenges the idea of point of view and identification between audience and character. Ross shoots the movie from the first-person perspective of its characters, and the result is empathy incarnated.
6. “Juror #2” (dir. Clint Eastwood)
What do you get when you have a 94-year-old filmmaker work on a thriller about what it means to be guilty in the justice system? The answer is one of the most immediately underrated movies of the year, and a candidate for 2024’s biggest surprise. Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a man selected to jury duty for a murder trial only to realize that he himself may be the killer. “Juror #2” is thoughtful in analyzing the justice system’s meaning and how it should be expected to function, even if it avoids subtext in favor of overt moral questioning. The cast is quietly stacked, and it’s a great example of a sturdy studio adult drama that hardly exists anymore.
5. “Queer” (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Incredibly strange and apparently polarizing, “Queer” is unlike previous Guadagnino efforts like “Call Me By Your Name” or “Challengers.” (More on the latter later.) Lynchian in boldness of vision but characteristically Guadagnino in its tenderness, “Queer” stars Daniel Craig playing against his classical Bond-type as Will Lee, a stand-in for the original novella’s author, William S. Burroughs. Craig has never been better, and the movie’s dips into the avant-garde are as emotionally and visually rewarding as they are formally fascinating.
4. “The Substance” (dir. Coralie Fargeat)
Far and away my best theater experience this year was at a test screening for “The Substance,” my (and many others’) entrypoint to the work of Coralie Fargeat. Throughout this disgusting and hilarious body horror film, the audience was screaming, laughing and gasping in equal measure. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, ostensibly a Demi Moore-type former star who has fallen victim to the worst thing that can happen to an actress: getting older. She can turn into the beautiful 29-year-old Margaret Qualley through a drug, the titular “substance.” Needless to say, it doesn’t go well, and Fargeat is always willing to put the most evocative imagery imaginable on screen.
3. “Challengers” (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Maybe the most addictively rewatchable movie of 2024, “Challengers” has only three characters: Zendaya’s Tashi, Josh O’Connor’s Patrick, and Mike Faist’s Art. All three of them enter and exit one another’s lives in this charged spectacle of passion, which can be taken at face value as a simple sports movie. The electronic score, which sounds like a club or a rave, accents the film’s dominating themes of eroticism and physicality, and O’Connor stands out as a faux-down-on-his-luck, slimy charisma machine. Beads of sweat drop from cheeks, muscular thighs run to make a play: rarely have sports films – or action movies, for that matter – been this interesting in their portrayal of the human body.
2. “Anora” (dir. Sean Baker)
To be excluded from power today is to be excluded from power forever. You’d never assume this is the dire message of Sean Baker’s kinetic dramedy, his Palme D’or winner, until its stunning final act. Mikey Madison is revelatory in the titular role, giving the year’s best performance as a confident Coney Island native thrust into a world of illusory power and flirtations with wealth. “Anora” has the unique argument for being both the funniest and saddest movie of 2024; at once a uproarious comedy of errors and a painfully astute questioning of economic mobility.
1. “The Brutalist” (dir. Brady Corbet)
The last few years have had both masterpieces and movies that mistakenly think that they’re masterpieces. What the film world has been missing, however, are movies that knowingly shoot for greatness and then actually achieve it. When you sit to watch “The Brutalist,” you feel as though you are witnessing a movie actively attempting to insert itself into the grand story film fanatics tell each other about the history of the artform, begging you to remember it in ten, twenty, fifty years. A Holocaust-surviving visionary architect, played by the uniquely talented Adrien Brody, comes to America and finds himself facing the hidden underbelly of WASP-y American power (not entirely unlike, ironically, “Anora”). “The Brutalist” has been likened to a great American epic, to the “The Godfather” and “There Will Be Blood;” nothing about “The Brutalist” tries to be anything else other than a modern filmmaking miracle, and it’s the most staggering movie of the year.
Photo Caption: A movie theater.
Photo Credit: Pixabay
