The 20 Best Movies of 2024

This is a somewhat different list than the one that ran a few weeks ago in The Washington Post. I’ve now included 2024 movies that haven’t played in the D.C area (including my #1 and #3 picks) and have added ten more films for an even 20 titles, plus runners-up and other ephemera.

If I have caveats, it’s that my duties covering new releases for the WaPo this year meant that I missed staying on top of other films, most egregiously international releases – there are a lot of movies from other countries I should have seen but didn’t. I apologize. It was also a year in which my due diligence regarding major studio franchise product waned even further. I didn’t see “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and I don’t really care to. In fact, I saw only four of the year’s box office Top Ten, nine of the top 20 and 14 of the top 30. Do you really need to know what I think about “Moana 2”? Even I don’t need to know what I think about “Moana 2." I’m in my late 60s now. They aren’t making these movies for me.

Otherwise, the introduction to my Washington Post Best Of 2024 list covered everything I had to say about the state of film – and by extension, the world – so I’ll just quote the summary paragraphs:

It’s been a rough year for many of us, and while you have every right to numb yourself with a big, empty studio confection like “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” I found sustenance in tales of human connection, disaster, survival — dramas of getting through the day and comedies of making peace with the flawed people in our lives and our own flawed selves.

There’s this, too: A revolution may be underfoot, tiny mammals with big ambitions to tip over the dinosaurs on their way out. One of the movies in my 2024 Top 20 is a home-brewed slapstick comedy made by a bunch of nobodies in the Upper Midwest; it arrives on Blu-ray this month after knocking them dead at local film festivals across the country. An even more daring outlier, Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it may be the most important, a proudly kitchen-sink repurposing of “Batman” iconography in the service of a freewheeling trans coming-out comedy. (The lawyers over at Warner Bros. are doubtlessly not amused, but Drew has claimed fair use, and the film is available for streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV.)

The mere existence of these movies gives me hope for a new people’s cinema, a cargo culture to plunder corporate IP for a million private, jury-rigged needs. The promise of the digital revolution has always been that anyone can afford to make a movie and get it seen by everyone. The studios, and the conglomerates that own them, still hold the keys to the kingdom, but streaming TV and pandemics have loosened their grip and made them overcautious, doubling down on our need for nostalgia in the face of an uncertain future. You want “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” or “Kung Fu Panda 9”? Don’t worry, you’ll get them. But some nobody in nowhere-land may be making a movie that could rock your world with entertainment — or challenge everything you hold to be true. Let a thousand provocations bloom.

Dear reader, you have my very best wishes for a safe, happy and hopefully not-insane new year. Here are my picks for the best films of 2024.

1.    “Nickel Boys” – In which writer-director RaMell Ross invents a new language of cinema, a new way of bearing witness to history and a new empathy for the 21st century – imagine a selfie turned 180 degrees on its axis to embrace the world. Adapting Colson Whitehead’s best-selling novel – itself a fictionalized response to the horrors of Florida’s Dozier Boy’s Reformatory and the dozens of graves discovered there beginning in 2012 – Ross tells the story through the eyes of two teenage friends, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). Literally: The camera shows us what they’re seeing from beginning to end, a POV approach that transcends gimmickry to achieve a kind of poetic grace in the face of state-sanctioned horror. Ross’s first film, the 2019 documentary “Hale County This Morning This Evening,” hinted at his gift for ennobling marginalized lives with mystery and luminosity and “Nickel Boys” confirms that there’s a rich new talent among us, turning what in other hands might be a drama of documentary miserabilism into one of survival, tenacity, trauma, guilt and redemptive remembrance. In the process, Ross puts us closer to his characters’ inner lives than most filmmakers dream of; the result feels like an X-ray of a Black man’s soul. (In theaters.)

2.    “His Three Daughters” – I caught it at Sundance last January, and it haunted me throughout the year before finally premiering on Netflix in September: An apartment-bound tug of war between three adult sisters as they cope with the fact that their father is dying, unseen, in the back room. A work of observational wit and empathy, it’s a long-awaited breakthrough for writer-director Azazel Jacobs, and it’s rough but familiar territory for anyone who has contended with the passing of a parent or, oh, tried to communicate with the aliens that are one’s siblings. The three leads – uptight Carrie Coon, mellow Elizabeth Olsen, stoner Natasha Lyonne – have never been better, and you’ll find yourself choosing sides and then switching them as the battles and the love rage on. Does this even count as cinema? Sure, it does – “His Three Daughters” is the very definition of a moving picture. (Streaming on Netflix.)

3.    “No Other Land” – How good is this documentary about the contentious friendship and collaboration between an Israeli journalist and a Palestinian activist? Good enough that no US distributor has had the balls to pick it up for stateside release. The journalist, Yuval Abraham, is part of a Tel Aviv-based filmmakers’ collective and gets to go home to a comfortable apartment at the end of each day. The activist, Basel Adra, has to stay and watch his family’s centuries-old village bulldozed by the Israel Defense Forces to make way for a tank-training ground – or so the IDF says. It’s a film to make a viewer rigid with rage while alternately hoping for and despairing of a two-state solution between two men who see the world the same way but from opposite sides of a barbed wire fence. (Awaiting US distribution but currently playing individual dates in NYC.)

4.    “Anora” – No other film this year is as stylishly exuberant; no other film is as aware of the imbalances of sex, power and capital in every aspect of American life. Sean Baker’s latest provocation offers up Mikey Madison on the half-shell of a star-making role: A NYC stripper who marries a Russian oligarch’s son (Mark Eydelshteyn) only to find that her dreams of love and Long Island largesse are short-lived. It’s an antic comedy on one level and a devastating critique not of sex work but of a hypocritical society that both requires and rebukes it. With Yura Borisov as a most surprising wall of Russian muscle, "Anora" contains what may be the year’s most emotionally devastating final scene, which resolves nothing while exposing only our need for happy ever afters. (In theaters; for purchase on Apple TV and Microsoft.)

5.    “Hit Man” – A high-spirited work of highly amoral entertainment from Richard Linklater, who reminds us he can make damn fine commercial enterprises when he has a mind to. Based tenuously on real events, it stars (and then some) Glen Powell as a tweedy professor who cosplays a hired assassin for police sting operations and finds the borders of his own personality dissolving. When Adria Arjona turns up as an abused wife seeking an extremely terminal divorce, “Hit Man” becomes a hot little farce that leads an audience step by step into the water until they’re way in over their heads. Maybe it’s not the first movie to make the viewer an accessory to murder, but it’s probably the most seductive one. (Streaming on Netflix.)

6.    “Flow” – The year’s finest animated film – from Latvia, of all places – is a challenge to all those talking-animal comedies the studios keep churning out. The cat, the dog, the capybara, the lemur and the secretary bird don’t talk in Gints Zilbalodis’s fable of companionship and survival in a vast, mystical landscape ravaged by a flood. On the contrary, they’re just animals, bound together by the exigencies of the situation and an unspoken urge to ride a wooden boat to wherever it will take them. There’s an ecological message buried beneath this movie’s verdant moss, but Zilbalodis is too wise to spell it out; like its furry and feathered protagonists, “Flow” is wordless and much wiser than it lets on. (In theaters.)

7.    “A Complete Unknown” – It cuts a lot of corners and fudges the facts early and often, but I’ve been cheered by how quickly and enthusiastically James Mangold’s version of Bob: The Early Days has been embraced by audiences old and (forever) young. The performances are grand, with Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger and Timothée Chalamet’s Kid Dylan taking the gold and silver respectively. Does it play unfair by the women in the singer’s life? Yes. Does it gloss over the Village folk scene? Yep. Does it convey the pop-culture atom bomb represented by this genius twerp from Minnesota and the heresy of his plugging in at Newport ’65? Absolutely – and just in time for a new era of protest. (In theaters.)

8.    “A Real Pain” – Jesse Eisenberg’s second stab at writing and directing a movie is a keeper: A deeply felt comedy of cousins touring the Holocaust sites of Poland and burrowing deep into their differences and discontents. Eisenberg plays the “good” cousin: Married, a new dad, gainfully employed. Kieran Culkin is heartbreakingly fine as the bleak black sheep, who never met an impulse he didn’t follow and whose empathy meter is off the charts. Among other things, “A Real Pain” testifies to the human truth that it's the family fuck-ups who are most memorable, while the sober, steady, responsible ones get no credit whatsoever. If “Anora” (above) has the year’s most emotional final scene, “A Real Pain” has its most affecting final shot. (In theaters.)

9.    “September 5” – When does the way you're telling the story become the story that gets told? We’re inside the ABC Sports control room at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich and all is going as planned – until gunshots erupt, the Israeli team is taken hostage by terrorists and the TV crew suddenly finds itself at the front lines of a breaking news tragedy. A German production, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, with a largely American cast, “September 5” is less concerned with the politics of the situation than the ethics of people used to spinning commercial narratives about the agony of defeat as they're faced with reporting the agony of human death. Among those making decisions on the fly are ABC Sports head Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro); the events are a half-century old but the issues are as relevant as that New York Times subscription you’ve been thinking about canceling. (In theaters.)

10.“Dahomey” – From “Atlantics” director Mati Diop, a short (68 minutes) but intensely powerful work, perched between documentary and poem, that tracks the repatriation of 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey (1600-1904) from French museums back to the modern-day Republic of Benin. One of the artifacts, a statue of King Ghézo, becomes a character in its own right via the voice of Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, and there’s a marvelous debate sequence among a crowd of Beninese college students that’s like a Frederick Wiseman sequence airlifted to West Africa. A unique and exhilarating movie, full of sorrow and solace. (Streaming on MUBI, for rent on Apple TV.)

11.“All We Imagine as Light” – Two hospital nurses (Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha), roommates in an overcrowded Mumbai, clash and keep secrets before a trip to the country brings about a kind of cosmic reconciliation. Not much plot here, but writer-director Payal Kapedia, making her second feature, locates a quiet but intensely vibrant wavelength of women’s unseen existence, with the planet’s sixth-largest city itself a character that can blind a person to the most valuable possessions we have: Our friendships. (In theaters.)

12.“The Brutalist” – Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet goes for the brass ring with an epic three-and-a-half hour drama about a Polish refugee architect (Adrien Brody) in post-WWII America and his clash with an industrialist patron (Guy Pearce). I’m still not convinced there’s enough story to merit the film’s length, but the performances are superb, Daniel Blumberg’s score is one of the year’s most majestic, and Corbet’s ambition and filmmaking are assured beyond his years. (In theaters.)

13.“Hard Truths” – After a decade away making period films, Mike Leigh returns to the present day to address the mystery of the miserable among us. In Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s brilliantly bristly performance, Pansy is the sour pickle of her family, with never a kind word for anyone and plenty of cruel ones. But through her interactions with an upbeat sister (Michele Austin, wonderful) and strangers in the check-out lines of London, Leigh shows us the loneliness, unshakeable and inexplicable, that can keep some of us forever in the dark. A deeply humane human comedy. (In theaters.)

14.“Hundreds of Beavers” – Okay, so maybe you’ll be worn out after 40 minutes of Mike Cheslik’s live-action, silent, black-and-white  Looney Tune about a hapless fur trapper (the enthusiastically named Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) and his battle with an army of extras in fraudulent animal costumes. But aren’t you just glad it exists? There’s something in the cheddar out there in Wisconsin – regional filmmaking doesn’t get more delightfully unhinged than this. (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Hoopla; for rent on Amazon and Apple TV.)

15. “Queer” – Daniel Craig breaks free of Bond-age and returns to the risks and rewards of his early career as the seedy, guilt-wracked hero of Luca Guadagnino’s acridly funny/sad drama, an adaptation of a long self-suppressed William S. Burrough’s novel. Craig inhabits the skin of a down-and-out gay man in 1950s Mexico City with the shabby grace of a fallen angel, and there’s a lysergic jungle-communion finale that has to be seen to be believed. (The movie also takes the prize for best trailer of the year.) (In theaters.)

16.“Janet Planet” – A serenely confident writing-directing debut from playwright Annie Baker, a fictionalized memoir of growing up in Central Massachusetts in the 1990s with a flaky New Age mom. Zoe Ziegler is a find as the daughter (even if her dialogue sometimes rings overly cute) but Julianne Nicholson is a revelation in a welcome lead role as a woman who’s always leaned on admirers and is learning to stand on her own. (Streaming on Max; for rent on Amazon, Apple TV and Microsoft.)

17.“Daughters” – More daughters, what’s with all the daughters? This documentary by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae is the result of eight years filming a program in which prisoners at a Washington D.C. jail spend time with their growing girls, culminating in a daddy-daughter dance that will lift you up and break your heart. A subtle but unmistakeable cri de coeur against the carceral state. (Streaming on Netflix.)

18. “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” – Come spend some time with Angela (Ilinca Manolache), the riotously rude movie-production go-fer of Radu Jude’s ramshackle farce as she drives around a congested Bucharest and contends with some of the most disillusioned people on the face of the Earth. (I.e., average Romanians). If Angela’s TikTok alter ego Bobita, a parody of a swaggering fascist bro, looks familiar, it may be because we’ve just elected him. (Streaming on MUBI, for rent on Apple TV.)

19.“Conclave” – The old-school treat of the year, self-important in ways that are more fun and funny – those “Law and Order” music stings! – than bothersome. Ralph Fiennes plays it close to the vestments as the Vatican dean overseeing the election of a new Pope, but that’s okay, since Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and others bring the ham. Part of the enjoyment of watching this in a packed theater is seeing an entire audience lose its collective mind when the Big Twist hits. (In theaters; streaming on Peacock.)

 20.“Challengers” – I’m surprised not by the number of critics (myself included) who fell for this stylish three-way about tennis players Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor on and off the court but by plain old moviegoers who pooh-poohed it. (Serious tennis players are allowed their cavils). Luca Guadagnino’s second best movie of the year (see "Queer," above) is a romantic-comic-melodramatic pleasure, nothing more but nothing less in its insistence that the score should always be love-all.

Runners-up (links are to trailers)

“Between the Temples,” “Black Box Diaries,” “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” “Emilia Pérez,” “Evil Does Not Exist,” “The Fall Guy,” “Flipside,” “Good One,” “I’m Still Here,” “Kinds of Kindness,” “Kneecap,” “La Chimera,” “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger,” “The Room Next Door,” “Sasquatch Sunset” (above), “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” “The Sixth,” “Thelma” 

Movies I Didn’t Get to But Probably Should Have

“Civil War,” “Heretic,” “How to Have Sex,” “Io Capitano,” “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” (above), “Last Stop in Yuma County,” “Memoir of a Snail,” “Sugarcane”

Movies My Fellow Critics Loved That Left Me Cold and Feeling Old

“The Beast” (above), “I Saw the TV Glow”

Movies That Were Disappointing, Not All That, or Just Plain Bad

"Argylle," "Drive Away Dolls," "Gladiator II," "Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One," "The Instigators," "Joker: Folie a Deux," "Longlegs," "MaXXXine," "Reagan"

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