Best Films of 2024

Awash in shades of blue and drenched by monsoon rains, Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner—a first for an Indian filmmaker—is a sensual immersion in the transience and yearning of urban life. Extending the lineage of Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda, Kapadia crafts a contemporary portrait of independent South Asian women in the city, navigating work, loneliness, and desire. The three protagonists, from different generations and classes, all work at a Mumbai hospital. Their stories are fluidly told through mundane details that blossom into everyday poetry, and illuminate the strains of migration, gentrification, and Hindu-Muslim tensions, along with the conflicting pulls of tradition and modernity. As it moves from bustling street markets and commuter trains of Mumbai to the peaceful beaches and painted caves of Ratnagiri, All We Imagine as Light weaves a tender and expansive vision of female friendship and solidarity.—Imogen Sara Smith

Radu Jude’s latest provocation, at once high-spirited and devastating in its meditation on the making of images, rides shotgun beside stressed-out gig-worker Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she navigates chaotic Bucharest, interviewing the victims of on-the-job injuries for a promo film on worker safety. Her mission is interwoven with her raucous TikTok parodies of Andrew Tate–type misogynists, and with excerpts from a 1981 Romanian feature (another urban travelogue, this one with a woman cabdriver also named Angela). Crosscutting and cross-referencing are Jude’s organizing principles. Having juggled three distinct “movies” in the course of about two hours, he ends with a single 35-minute shot from a fixed camera, in which a chosen injured worker, partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair, is rehearsed, filmed, and refilmed until his injury is mitigated, any suggestions of hazardous working conditions are dispelled, and the blame is shifted from the employer to the victim. As a filmmaker and socialist satirist, Jude is the heir to Dušan Makavejev and more.—J. Hoberman

There’s something physics-defying about the films of Mati Diop—like monuments made of dust, they conjure visions redolent with history, desire, and political imaginaries out of simple, even slight narratives. Of course, that alchemy is itself something of an anti-imperial gesture, a protest against the industrial-cinematic fetish of size and capital. Take Dahomey, this year’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner. Running all of 68 minutes, it comprises just three strands: the imagined musings of a centuries-old statue—rendered both spectral and futuristic through voice distortion—being transported from France to Benin as part of a repatriation project; documentary scenes of the presidential-palace exhibit where these returned artifacts are displayed in Benin; and glimpses of a town-hall meeting in which Beninese university students debate the politics of repatriation. In the ingenious juxtaposition of three modes—nostalgia-laced fantasy, decorous spectatorship, and critical debate—Diop gets to the dialectical heart of questions of colonial return: there is no recovering the past; we can only make it and remake it in our present.—Devika Girish

Can documentaries change the world? No Other Land puts this question to the test in three different ways. The first involves the friendship between Palestinian journalist Basel Adra and his Israeli comrade, Yuval Abraham: in between harrowing scenes of Israeli soldiers demolishing the West Bank hamlet of Masafer Yatta, co-director/DP Rachel Szor films Adra, Abraham, and Hamdan Ballal (the fourth co-director) as they rebuild homes and come to an uneasy acceptance of Abraham’s allyship. The second is the challenge of making the film without Israeli state support, which the directors managed to do with their powerful merging of archival and vérité footage. The third comes at the film’s close, when we see Israeli settlers escalating their violence in October 2023. How to keep making political art even when it doesn’t have any discernible effect on a deteriorating reality? Here, too, the filmmakers anticipate our despair: when Abraham is disappointed by the low readership of his articles, Adra chides him for acting like he can “solve everything in 10 days and go back home.” It requires patience, he says. “Get used to failing.”—Abby Sun

Rarely has a green screen appeared more menacing than in Bertrand Bonello’s slippery, tripartite epic. The Beast begins with Léa Seydoux being directed to fend off an imaginary foe in front of a chroma-key backdrop, before shifting to the stories of three pairs of doomed lovers in three different eras, each played by Seydoux and George MacKay. There’s a lot to swallow in the French director’s take on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, including an Elliot Rodger–quoting incel and an underwater Paris; a yearning android (Guslagie Malanda) and a gooey black bath that unearths past lives; and the tension between the illusion of infinite possibilities offered by new technologies and the sense that our lives are scripted by greater forces. An uncanny cocktail of horror, humor, and sensuality, The Beast anchors its time-skipping structure in Seydoux’s passionate persona, her perpetually tear-stained visage telegraphing the tragedy of a world in which we are condemned to passivity and endless imitation—a world in which desire must die to make living bearable.—Beatrice Loayza

The first sign of waywardness is the camera, which seems possessed of both a mysterious consciousness, as in the ethereal traveling shots that bookend the film, and an uncanny capacity to inhabit beyond-human perspectives, like that of a wild wasabi plant sprouting from the winter ground. From the start-stop interventions of Eiko Ishibashi’s sinuous music to the sly mindfuck of the title, Evil Does Not Exist is a feat of misdirection. What begins as an eco-parable, setting up a clash between the residents of a bucolic community and the urbanites behind a misbegotten glamping project, evolves into an unanswerable, darkly philosophical riddle on what it means to live on this planet. In Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s work, the everyday realm is always charged with possibility; here, with the natural world as setting, subject, and ambiguous guiding force, the unpredictability is total and inviolable. The film’s fearsome irrationality opens onto the sublime.—Dennis Lim

A movie with one foot planted firmly on the ground and the other shuffling through the dreamscape of a broken heart, this rollicking, melancholy fable of Italian tomb raiders feels both deeply lived-in and out of this world. Much of La chimera’s bewitchment comes from how Alice Rohrwacher situates its narrative and emotional realm at the margins—of landscape, of making a living, of kinship networks, of memory—and allows detail and meaning to accumulate at their own pace. The overarching metaphor of lost love as lost treasure might be too on-the-nose if the movie weren’t so confident in its rhythms, so idiosyncratic in tone, and so marvelously acted. As the sad-sack expat leading a goofball band of thieves, Josh O’Connor is wholly credible and extremely filthy: here’s the second great movie this year where you can smell him through the screen.—Nathan Lee

As Anne, the middle-aged mother who gives herself over to a passionate affair with her wayward teenage stepson in Catherine Breillat’s latest, actress Léa Drucker’s alert, vaguely feral physicality makes legible the unwieldy carnal appetites that drive her character. Yet a nagging question lingers throughout the film: to what extent is Anne’s lust for 17-year-old Théo (Samuel Kircher) merely the high-stakes currency in a game whose only real object is the dissipation of her boredom? As in her earlier excavations of female desire, Breillat’s muscular yet precise command of cinematic language articulates what her characters can’t or won’t say, while raising timeless questions about the nature of power and agency within the bourgeois family unit.—Madeline Whittle

Playwright Annie Baker’s debut film is a deceptively placid period piece about the dramaturgy of family life. The Janet of the title is a single mother (Julianne Nicholson), a middle-aged acupuncturist raising a precociously depressive 11-year-old named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). Baker patiently and lovingly depicts the push and pull of mother and daughter over the course of a summer, in 1991, as Janet and Lacy traverse comically grim romantic and platonic relationships with the granola-tinged residents of their western-Massachusetts enclave. Janet Planet is a rare thing, at once allusive in its delineations of parent-child dynamics and hilariously specific in its skewering of post-hippie boomer types (Elias Koteas’s performance as the chilled-out leader of a trippy local theater troupe is particularly on point). By the film’s baffling and poetic ending, the worldviews of mother and daughter have become artfully blended: just as Janet stage-manages her romantic life, Lacy does so with the toys in her room, her face as serious as a film director’s.—Clinton Krute

Sean Baker’s furiously volatile screwball comedy is a breathtaking balancing act that shifts back and forth between the hilarious and the scary, the scary and the absurd, and the romantic and the profane—and sometimes it contains all at once. Anchoring the chaos are two brilliant performances, by the extraordinary Mikey Madison as the titular stripper heroine and Mark Eydelshteyn as her irresistibly childlike client, then boyfriend, and soon husband. Baker’s deeply humane treatment of sex workers reaches a glorious apotheosis in the character of Ani, a gutsy, resourceful, but messed-up dame whose street smarts are no match for Vanya’s oligarch parents and their menacing emissaries. Amid all the mayhem, one of the hit men (Yura Borisov) sees and admires Ani in a way no one else does, least of all herself. Not yet, anyway. A Hollywood ending? Okay, but Anora is a comedy of remarriage!—Molly Haskell

In Hard Truths, the legendary Mike Leigh reunites with the incomparable Marianne Jean-Baptiste to train his considered gaze on the life of an irascible—and deeply wounded—matriarch in London. Jean-Baptiste, who last collaborated with Leigh on the phenomenal Secrets & Lies (1996), plays Pansy with understated generosity and inspired compassion. Each instance of Pansy’s spiky, even cruel defensiveness—aimed indiscriminately at everyone, from her aloof husband and her mild-mannered son to a fatigued dental assistant and random passersby—reveals the depths of her character’s welled-up grief. The only person spared from Pansy’s ire is her younger sister Chantal (Michele Austin, in excellent form), a congenial hairdresser who, whether chatting up clients at the salon or dancing with her daughters, is a cooling balm to Hard Truths’s scorched tone. Leigh’s film doubles as a striking portrait of sisterhood, a somber reminder of how shared pasts can produce radically different presents.—Lovia Gyarkye

Poetry is everywhere in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. It is carved on stones in a park, scribbled onto index cards, translated on iPhones, recited dutifully on cassette tapes, and embodied in the very way Isabelle Huppert’s Iris walks—feet bent inward like a waddling penguin, head askance in strangely grounded aloofness. A French-language instructor living in a mountainous suburb of Seoul, Iris is someone who, in the words of her aspiring-poet roommate In-guk, “lives sincerely . . . according to real, actual facts.” Hong’s mesmerizing 31st feature seems to take In-guk’s words as a guiding principle, continually finding surprise in simple, concrete sounds and images—a piece of green tape being wrapped around a ballpoint pen, the milky hue of makgeolli swirling in a glass, the stop-start rhythms of an amateur guitar performance. And then there’s the miraculous Huppert, who imbues a film about the ways in which we strain to find the right words with the balletic grace of a silent comedian.—Michael Blair

Elwood meets Turner on page 56 in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys: “The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy’s left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes.” In RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (which forgoes the title’s definite article for a more indeterminate experience), the first thing the viewer notices is always the small detail, the texture of an object, the world seen askance. Looking is everything in a film adapted from a book that’s all about point of view, the unreliability of storytelling, and the psychic split wrought by foundational American racism. Black teenagers whose identities converge (not out of narrative conceit but historical necessity), Elwood and Turner are inmates in the Nickel “Academy,” a juvenile reformatory somewhere in rural Florida that’s more like a prison haunted by decades of Jim Crow South evil. Ross’s vision connects the camera entirely to the eyes and minds of these young men. They become one—with each other, with the past, with American history and horror. It would be sad—if apt for the film’s themes—if moviegoers looked the other way.—Michael Koresky

Eduardo Williams’s formidable second feature is many contradictory things at once. Its title pokes fun at the concept of sequels (there is no Part 2), while affirming the continuity inherent in a filmmaker’s oeuvre. Shooting with a 360-degree camera, Williams embraces VR technology to concoct new images, only to present them in good old 2D. Proudly lo-fi, the result is more awe-inspiring than the spectacles of most cutting-edge CGI blockbusters. The youthful characters’ erratic movements (physical and virtual) between Peru, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan convey the anxious, alienating disorientation of our globalized present, even as the intimacy they share across borders and languages embodies a queer ideal of unfettered community. In short, The Human Surge 3 is both a dialectical tour de force, offering plenty of meat for intellectual dissection, and an experiment in pure cinema that simply invites us to kick back and enjoy the trip.—Giovanni Marchini Camia

Fifteen minutes into Close Your Eyes, we’re vexed to learn that the footage we’ve been watching raptly—the emotional prologue to a quest for a lost loved one—is not the primary story, but mere residue from an abandoned film project (“the remains of the shipwreck,” its now-aged editor sighs). But our chagrin is premature, for what ensues is quite a different missing-person narrative, ever more heartrending and mysterious, led by graying but dauntless filmmaker Miguel (Manolo Solo), who, like Close Your Eyes auteur Víctor Erice, hasn’t proffered a feature in decades. As the director-protagonist’s search for a ghost from his past takes him to unexpected geographic and emotional places, Erice blindsides us with quiet profundities about the self-preserving nature of consciousness (an amnesiac recalls tango songs, but not their significance to his life) and the ability of art to unlock memories that animate the soul. When Ana Torrent, the child star of Erice’s 1973 classic The Spirit of the Beehive, turns up as the vanished man’s adult daughter, the cinematic floodgates open and we see both woman and girl, seeking father figures across a gulf of time.—Steven Mears

In his third feature, Aaron Schimberg transforms a deliberately insensitive setup into something strange and subversive: Edward (Sebastian Stan), a pitiable, struggling actor with a facial deformity, undergoes a miracle cure that makes him conventionally handsome overnight. (Stan literally peels off the prosthetic mask he uses to play Edward, strip by strip.) But he starts to encounter warped reflections of his former self everywhere, chiefly in the form of Oswald (Adam Pearson), a confident and charming actor with neurofibromatosis who is everything Edward isn’t. With the uncanny surrealism of a Kôbô Abe novel and the cosmic irony of a Coen Brothers film, A Different Man plays Edward and Oswald’s dueling personas off each other, skewering abled society’s bugbears and stereotypes. Disability always lies beneath normative ideals of fame, beauty, and success—Schimberg’s film shows that to attempt to fence it in or deny it is to become trapped in a mirrored labyrinth of one’s own making.—Emerson Goo

The history of cinema abounds with “trans film images”—images that, directly or indirectly, purposely or incidentally, capture the life experience of trans people—even as trans creators have remained notably absent behind and in front of the camera. But recent years have seen the emergence of a full-throated trans film movement, of which Jane Schoenbrun is one of the most vital voices. Along with directors like Vera Drew, Alice Maio Mackay, and Isabel Sandoval, Schoenbrun is producing a body of work—including 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—that foregoes the tropes traditionally associated with transness on screen, such as the surprise reveal of a hidden gender identity, instead reinterpreting genres like classic melodrama, comic-book adventure, and body horror through the lived experience of transness. In I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun manipulates the conventions of horror aimed at children and young adults to give disassociation and gender dysphoria an honest cinematic embodiment—with visual grammar rather than direct representation.—Willow Catelyn Maclay

Staying behind the camera and applying his now-patented stylistic economy to a (literal) transference-of-guilt story worthy of Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood reaffirms his status as one of the treasures of American cinema with Juror #2. Unfolding with implacable logic, Eastwood’s 40th film as a director dismisses the standard genre conventions and rhetoric of the courtroom/jury-room drama to reanimate the questions of justice, and the concomitant failings of its institutions, that for a time seemed calcified with Eastwood’s five Dirty Harry outings. If the film is bleak in its depiction of a culpable central character enmeshed in an excruciating moral dilemma, it remains optimistic in its faith in an imperfect system and the integrity of its public servants. Don’t say it’s Eastwood’s final film—even if the ingrate who runs Warner Bros. seems happy to see the back of him and bury this movie.—Gavin Smith

To make a movie is to appropriate—either that which is before the camera or something already filmed. These days, I prefer the latter. Terrific compilation docs shown in festivals this past year include Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris mon amour, and Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President. None, though, pack the wallop of Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve seen a better movie-movie all year. Most simply described, Soundtrack is a case study of decolonization, neo-imperialism, cultural exploitation, and political murder. Centered on the former Belgian Congo circa 1960, albeit ranging afield, it’s told through a dense mix of newsreels, TV broadcasts, home movies, and headlines—an assemblage for which jazz, from both American and African musicians, sets the tempo. An unflinching reminder of America’s cynical, immeasurably destructive Cold War realpolitik, it simultaneously celebrates the greatness of American artists, from Louis Armstrong through Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach to Nina Simone and Ornette Coleman, whose legacies Soundtrack serves to burnish.—J. Hoberman

Perhaps Megalopolis’s greatest flaw is that it is not a silent film, for the dialogue and some of the actors’ inconsistent deliveries are responsible for its shortcomings in executing its vision. But what a vision! Describing (with a heavy hand) the politics of an empire in decline, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic gestures toward the world-building of great architectural feats that merge urban landscape planning with the arts (like Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 or the Japanese “Metabolism” movement) as a remedy for our social ills. The film’s formal aesthetics are overwrought, and even garish at times. Aspect ratios, frames, and cuts are scrambled with little regard to the decorum of linear narrative editing. The costumes appear to have been meticulously crafted until the budget ran out, and then augmented with off-the-rack items (as do the special effects). Megalopolis may not be a “good” film according to most accepted standards, but it is a film that provokes our senses—a necessity in a landscape increasingly populated by movies with mealymouthed politics and monotonous imagery.—Ayanna Dozier