The Top 10 Films of 2024

Why do you like movies so much? You get to watch. You get to look for something and then try to understand it. And you like that? Very much. If you only watch the top grossing hits of 2024, you probably saw a lot of stuff that looked the same. But if you dig even one layer below that, you'll find the trend towards cinema that is increasingly stylistically diverse. You'll find a lot of directors that are still pushing the artistic boundaries of film, taking risks, or trying something new. And even if not as many of them landed for me this year as in some other recent years, I appreciate all the filmmakers who took a bold swing this year, who chose to explore new territory thematically or stylistically instead of treading over safe familiar ground. As usual, I'll give the caveat that while best is in the title because favorite films don't get any clicks on YouTube, this really is just a loosely ranked list of what I found most interesting this year out of what I had time to see. While some of these might fall into different years for other countries, I count a movie for 2024 based on its public, theatrical release date in the United States. I'll start with a few honorable mentions and then we'll get into my top ten of the year. First up, I want to mention A Different Man. This is a fairly quiet but engrossing drama about self-perception, identity, and appearance. It makes for a good companion piece to The Substance. Though it's stylistically very different, they both explore some similar territory, and the performances from both Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson are very good. I also want to mention Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain, which is a thoughtful and poignant exploration of the different ways we deal with pain and the tension between expressing it and repressing it in our lives. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play off each other nicely here. Queer was one of two very stylish films this year from Luca Guadagnino. It dives straight into the tormented tragedy of William S. Burroughs with a very compelling performance from Daniel Craig. I just love the way Guadagnino moves the camera and edits in this. It's so fresh and has such a beautiful energy. Challengers also gets a nod for similar reasons. I don't think anyone has quite the level of style and flair with a camera that Luca Guadagnino has right now. I was really frustrated by Civil War, but I still feel compelled to mention it because I think it's an incredibly interesting and compelling film. It's some of Alex Garland's best work as a director, and it's an undeniably provocative exploration of division and political tension in the United States, as well as how we perceive conflict differently when it takes place on our local soil. I was riveted throughout, but ultimately kind of disliked what I felt like was the film's final philosophical perspective. This movie really got under my skin in a way nothing else last year did, and it's the only movie I felt compelled to write 5,000 words about immediately after watching. Despite my issues with it, I think it's well-made and very thought-provoking. This is a great one to watch with a group and then discuss afterwards because I can guarantee you everyone's going to have a different take. I Saw the TV Glow was one of the most atmospheric and evocative things I saw last year, and it really seems to stand in a category of its own. With David Lynch's recent passing, there's been a lot of discussion about what Lynchian is and what it means, and Jane Schoenbrun's story about the trans experience and suburban childhood is perhaps the most genuinely Lynchian thing I've seen in a while, and I mean that as a compliment. I can't say The Substance was an enjoyable film to watch, but that's hardly the point. It was undeniably intense and memorable. Director Coralie Fargeau described the movie as a kick and a scream, and that's exactly what it is. An angry, punk, violent expression lashing out against oppressive cultural beauty standards and some of the pressures imposed on women, especially in media. It's anchored by a great performance from Demi Moore, has stylish set design, and unique cinematography. But if you're not into body horror, I'd steer clear of this one. I think How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies also deserves a mention for being one of the most genuine and sincere dramas I watched all year. The Thai film poignantly explores family, tradition, and death. Two other films I want to mention very quickly are Furiosa. While it didn't quite hit the raw, transcendent intensity that Fury Road did for me, I still loved this return to the world of Mad Max and it was some of my favorite action of the year. And I also want to mention Evil Does Not Exist, a meditative exploration of the mundane complexity of evil from Raisuke Hamaguchi. It didn't quite grab me as fully as his masterpiece Drive My Car from a few years ago, but I'm always entranced by his work. Now let's jump into my 10 favorites for the year. Long, slow, sprawling American epic that explores a single character is not dead. A few years ago we got Tar, and now we're seeing The Brutalist from director Brady Corbet. It's a movie which takes its time with its subject at well over three hours, and it is long, but I found it to be very well edited and paced, and the intermission definitely helps in the theatrical setting. It has probably the most beautiful title design I've seen in several years, and really stunning cinematography. It's down at number 10 because while there's a lot to love about it from a filmmaking perspective, thematically I think it kind of loses itself in its own grandiose sprawl by the end of the film. I'm not quite sure what I feel about it yet, but it's one I want to revisit to try to understand a little better. That said, I love what this represents as a continuation of a certain genre and tradition of independent filmmaking, and I think there's enough here to make it one of the more worthwhile watches of the year. While I'm not saying it's on the same level, if The Godfather is a frequent rewatch for you, this is one you should definitely take the time to check out this year. So much of the experience of modern life is made up of certain sounds and images that are almost entirely absent from cinema, because they don't feel cinematic. Whether it's long drives in traffic, watching a video on your phone, the sound of an alarm going off, zoom calls, or tiktok filters. Do not expect too much from the end of the world engages with all of this so freely it almost feels documentarian. The sharply deadpan Romanian satire of contemporary life captures so much of what makes the world feel lost to a certain kind of insanity that in a way I found it immensely comforting to watch. In a cinematic landscape where many films are trying to engage politically with the ills of late-stage capitalism but tend to do so very bluntly, this is a film that truly feels like it captured a certain texture of that reality that I've never seen depicted on screen. If you like darkly dry satire or movies that explore intertextuality, this is a must-watch and is probably the most avant-garde pick on this year's list. I've been thinking a lot about the impact of David Lynch recently and I don't want to directly compare Greek director Georgios Lanthimos to Lynch, except to say that a lot of the features of what I love about some of Lynch's films are occasionally present in Lanthimos's. Mainly, they often dip into an unsettling dream logic and demand that I feel my way through their meaning rather than just come to a logical interpretation. Lanthimos's nightmares in Kinds of Kindness are distorted reflections of the vague horrors that can be found in relationships, power, and abuse. It's like you woke up in an uncanny valley version of reality, an alien world that just looks like our own but where you can no longer understand the rules and expectations for social interaction. While I enjoyed the favorite and last year's Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness feels more like a return to the deadpan chilling absurdity of The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer. This is one that certainly isn't going to be for everyone. If you didn't like The Lobster or Killing of a Sacred Deer, I doubt you'll like this, but if you watched Poor Things and thought, I liked that, but what if it was even more deadpan and made even less sense, then boy do I have the movie for you. There's one beautiful singular shot that keeps lingering in my mind from 2024, and it's this one from Alice Rohrbacher's La Chimera, a lackadaisical film about grave robbers in 1980s Italy. You'll have to see the shot in the context of the film to have a chance at feeling it the way I did, but it's beautifully constructed throughout. It meanders in the best sort of way, and I loved all the performances, especially from Josh O'Connor in the lead. Some of my favorite movies from each year are often ones that deliver a very specific kind of mood, where I don't really care where the plot is going because I'm just enjoying the vibes of the film, and that is definitely the case here. If that sounds like what you want, you enjoy films that meander through European countryside, or you watch The Challengers and just want more Josh O'Connor, I would make sure to give this one a try. I've mentioned before that the best thing about Robert Eggers' filmmaking is how thoroughly he commits to the bit, and that's just as true with his latest period dive into mythic horror with his version of Nosferatu, an adaptation of a German expressionist silent film from the 1920s. I don't just love Eggers' filmmaking for his intense commitment to the design details of a world, though. When he's at his best as a director, I think he also has a command of camera work and editing that makes his movies really fun to watch. The camera isn't just showing you the film, it's a confident hand leading and guiding you through it step by step. Here, that hand is a haunted, shadowy hand. His Nosferatu is equal parts beautiful and dark, bringing the spiritual subtext of the story to the forefront. It's not just about Nosferatu as a character, but about the nature of darkness and myths in our lives. If you like fairytales, myths, or gothic horror, you won't want to skip Nosferatu. The film I saw this year with the most interesting story structure was Onora. It's a movie that starts out as a high energy hedonistic montage that evokes the likes of something like Spring Breakers, and then it slips into being something else entirely, with a persistent, anxious energy, more reminiscent of uncut gems. By the end, it's shifted again into something I never expected it to be, and the sum total of all these three distinct parts is a madcap, Looney Tunes descent into tragedy, captured with a starkly naturalistic sensibility. I think what could be a caricature is made real and vibrant through Mikey Madison's performance. This is possibly director Sean Baker's best work behind the lens. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with this kind of frank depiction of the subject matter, but what makes Baker's work really compelling to me I think is the sensibility he brings to characters that we usually don't see portrayed on screen because their lives and work are treated as a taboo by society. He doesn't just depict class disparity or the alienation created by wealth inequality, but has a real sense of the entangled economic and social forces that are at play for his characters and the direct effect those forces have on relationships, love, and identity. He showcases, as well as anyone, how people from opposite ends of the class spectrum can occupy the same physical space while living in totally different realities. This movie has the kind of ending that forces you to really engage with it as a piece of art rather than just a neat and tidy story you can absorb and then toss aside. My city of Asheville, North Carolina flooded last year. Living through the aftermath, seeing the destruction, grappling with the loss, trying to help, and watching my community come together in ways I didn't think was possible has been a life-changing experience. The film for me that spoke to this experience the most was an 80-minute animated film about a cat that has no dialogue. The movie starts with a flood that pushes the cat and some other animals out of their homes. I found this movie surprisingly moving. Aside from the literal connection to the flooding, I felt like the water in this film was a beautiful metaphor for the way time overtakes the past, how in our life we're forced to leave the comfort of our homes and leave things behind, grapple with loss, and approach uncertain situations with a sense of curiosity and collaboration. We might look back into the past, but we can't go back there. If we do, it will be forever changed. It's not just the subject matter that's beautiful though, but the way this movie came to be. I remember years ago seeing animation software begin to become more accessible, and I remember being excited about what this meant for a future where small, independent teams could make personal and experimental contemporary animation without the larger teams and massive budgets that would have been needed in the past. And those days are here now, and Flow is probably one of the best examples I've seen of what is now possible for small-scale indie digital animation. Made by Latvian filmmaker Ginz Zilbalotus and a small team of collaborators, it's a truly beautiful, delightful film that I'd recommend to anyone, children included. Nobody is making massive blockbusters these days quite like Denis Villeneuve. What sets the Dune films apart for me is not just the size and scale of the story, but the dedication to using the fundamentals of the craft of filmmaking even at this larger scale. His worlds are so immersive, the sound design is so rich and incredible, the cinematography is gorgeous and doesn't play it overly safe. He doesn't cut any artistic corners bringing us a story of this size. But I think one of the standout features of Dune that goes under-acknowledged is just how integral production designer Patrice Vermette's work is to the success of these films. I think the sets they designed and built for Dune 1 and 2 are incredible. The work to shape light and use CGI and practical design together is, for me, unparalleled in modern blockbuster filmmaking. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, for me, Dune sets an aesthetic standard for what big-budget sci-fi action films can be, and it leaves that bar pretty high. Getting to watch this in theaters on a huge screen was one of my favorite cinematic experiences of the year, and I think Dune's story and its commentary on the hero's journey and the corruption of power are more relevant now than ever. How do you construct a story about a feeling, about a way of seeing the world? How do you depict a character in film that keeps to themselves, that feels confined to the fringes? How do you tell a story where anxiety and depression have made it so that even the smallest gesture and act from a character can feel monumental? You do it with the kind of poise and quiet gracefulness of Sometimes I Think About Dying, a film that dropped without too much fanfare but which instantly became one of my favorites when I saw it last year. The story centers around Fran and her life and work at a mundane office job. The fantastic ensemble cast depicts office work in a way that is hilarious but also has a kind of deadpan realism that really captures the cringe that can happen in those environments sometimes. We see these moments, though, not straight on but from the fringes as they're perceived by Fran, whose social anxiety makes just existing in the presence of others difficult for her. Judging by the other reviews I've seen, this seems like the kind of movie where I think you either get it or you'll feel like there's nothing going on. If you're the kind of person for whom going around a table to say your favorite food feels like a kind of hell designed to specifically torment you, this movie is for you. It's melancholic but rich with humanity. I've never seen the pain of too much self-awareness depicted so beautifully and compassionately, and in a world that feels overwhelmingly loud, I love the cinema that makes space for these quieter characters, the kinds of lives that the majority of us live but which aren't usually what we give the honor of the big screen. Many movies this year and that have come out recently that are aspiring to be thoughtful a little more than entertainment examine the ills of our world, whether it's the corrupted American dream that we see in The Brutalist or the alienation of class in Onora, the danger of power that Dune warns about. Anxiety and darkness are difficult themes that cinema often tries to wrestle with, but rarely in the midst of all this, in the midst of the critiques, warnings, satirical examinations, and cautionary tales, do we find something that tries to portray what the alternative to all this might actually look like. Rarely do we find a story that examines a character that lives in quiet rebellion against the allure of ambition, power, endless consumption, and the other forces that fuel so much of the ills of our time, a movie that asks us how we might live if we don't want to give ourselves over to those things. This is the territory explored by Vim Vendor's Perfect Days, a quietly beautiful film about a cleaner in Tokyo. What does life even look like when you exchange unchecked ambition for acceptance, and the simplicity of living the life in front of you with gratitude and grace? It's a nuanced film that doesn't overlook the inevitable hardship and sorrow that comes with life, but which explores what it means to find contentment amid loss, imperfection, and the inability to control what's going on around you. It's not about apathy, but about letting go of the impulses within us that fuel the machines in this world that cause so much of the suffering. It doesn't have all the answers, but serves as a voice for a way of existing that really challenges so many of the cultural assumptions that we have, especially in the United States, about how life has to be lived. For me, Perfect Days came at a time when I really needed it, and it's a beautiful film that I hope helps us engage with a deeper and fuller appreciation of life. That's my list so far for last year. I hope you found some on there that sound interesting to you. There's a bunch of stuff I still haven't been able to see. Notably, I still haven't seen Nickel Boys or Sing Sing, and I suspect either of those might have made the list. A list like this isn't an attempt to define the definitive best movies of the year, but a jumping off point for a group discussion about what we enjoyed, so let me know in the comments below what your favorites were. I mentioned how a lot of movies recently explore suffering. This is a subject that interests me a lot, and it's one I've tried to explore on my channel a little bit, but it's difficult to do. You can imagine how a big in-depth dive into the ethics of depicting suffering in cinema isn't the best fodder for the YouTube algorithm. Thankfully, that's where Nebula comes in. Nebula is an online streaming platform created by creators for creators, and it allows us to create content that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. 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