One thing I love about Walter Salles as a filmmaker is his ability to find an eternity in a single moment. That may sound like a backhanded compliment for a filmmaker, but think about those moments in life when you suddenly become keenly aware of your surroundings, of the people around you and your connection to them, those snippets you choose to savor when you know something is coming to an end, when your life seems to stretch out into infinity and everything for a few fleeting seconds appears to be right with the world.

There is something almost unspeakably beguiling about Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist. The filmmaker behind Drive My Car (a 3-hour meditation on loneliness and Chekov that was so stunning even the Academy couldn't help but nominate it for Best Picture) and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is no stranger to thoughtful and introspective dramas.

2024 was a year of contradictions; of an ascendant right-wing that swept Donald Trump to victory in the American presidential election, coupled with a banner year for queer and trans filmmaking. There are not one, but two trans filmmakers in my top 10 list. There’s even a transgender actress making serious Oscar season waves (although in talking about the best films of the year, the less said about Emila Perez the better.).

Yet another retelling of the Dracula story might seem like unusual Christmas Day programming, but Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, with its wintry setting and gothic trappings, might just be a perfect holiday treat for horror fans.

There was a time when the erotic thriller was something of a Hollywood staple. Karina Longworth's "You Must Remember This" podcast recently did a two-season deep-dive into the erotic films of the 1980s and 90s, a series that inspired me to explore the genre myself, focusing mainly on 90s erotic thrillers like Single White Female, Indecent Proposal, and Basic Instinct. It's a genre that is essentially dead; a shifting media landscape and changing social mores have not only sanitized sexuality in movies but have also made erotic thrillers essentially a thing of the past.

Although he's taken something of a detour into large-scale blockbuster filmmaking in recent years with films like Jungle Cruise and Black Adam, Jaume Collet-Serra is primarily known for his moderately budgeted Liam Neeson thrillers from the 2010s such as Non-Stop, The Commuter, and Unknown. In that regard, his latest film, Carry-On, is a return to form for the filmmaker, giving him a high-concept thriller with a crackerjack premise.

Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) gets kidnapped by a vengeful witch (Kiernan Shipka) hellbent on punishing the naughty in Jake Kasdan's Red One, a Christmas-themed action comedy that doesn't seem to be made for anyone. Dwayne Johnson stars as Santa's stalwart bodyguard, a tough-minded soldier who's grown weary of all the naughtiness in the world, who is tasked with tracking Santa down, along with a hacker (Chris Evans) and Level 4 naughty-lister who uses the internet to track people down for a living.

Despite its somewhat provocative title, Marielle Heller's Nightbitch is a strangely straightforward tale of the oft-unseen struggles of motherhood. Amy Adams' unnamed mother is overworked, underseen, and spends her days attending soul-crushing kiddie sing-a-longs at the library when she isn't chasing her paint-covered toddler around the house. She gets little support from her mostly clueless husband and finds herself surrounded by seemingly vapid moms who seem to have turned in their identities the moment their child was born.

There will undoubtedly be a lot of words written about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist that are some variation of "they don't make 'em like this anymore." And it's easy to say such things in a media landscape such as ours, where genuinely epic, prestige pictures, the kind that felt like real events, arriving to great acclaim and solid box office, are increasingly rare.

RaMell Ross' exceptional documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) was the kind of debut that heralded a wholly unique new cinematic voice whose observational style finds something almost magical in the most mundane places and situations. Ross brings that same energy to his narrative feature debut, Nickel Boys, and the results are revelatory, as if we're watching the cinematic language be rewritten before our eyes.

It's not often that you get to watch a star being born in real-time, but that's exactly what it is like to watch William Wyler's Funny Girl. Barbra Streisand would, of course, go on to star in A Star is Born in 1976, but Funny Girl was her star-is-born moment, and what a moment it was. Streisand was already a successful singer and Broadway actress, but it was her performance in Funny Girl and her subsequent Oscar win that helped turn her into an icon.

Based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, Luca Guadagnino's Queer exists in a hazy milieu of dingy gay bars and shady back alleys, hearkening back to a time when being gay wasn't just socially unacceptable but an actual crime.

No matter your family situation, the holidays can often be a time of melancholy as much as they are a time of joy. It's part of their unique magic; that "sentimental feeling" often comes with reflections of those no longer with us, of warm (or perhaps not-so-warm) childhood memories now faded into grown-up responsibilities. Perhaps they've grown into new feelings of warmth as you watch your own children experience that magic you once felt, or perhaps that warmth has turned cold due to family conflicts or personal struggles. Whatever the circumstances, that mixture of sadness and excitement, heightened stress and breathless anticipation, is an emotional concoction unlike any other during the holiday season.

After surviving a devastating flood, a cat finds itself clinging to safety on a boat with a capybara, a crane, a dog, and a lemur. The five of them can't communicate, and each has unique needs as they fight for survival in this watery new world, but they soon realize that through their combined strengths, they can only survive together.

Movies do not exist in a vacuum. They are not just works of art, they exist as a part of the culture that gave birth to them, intrinsically tied to the time and place in which they are made. Some are timeless, resonating beyond the conditions that created them, but it is often impossible to separate them from those conditions, because it not only helps us understand the film, it provides a lens through which to understand the history of their time. What were people thinking, feeling, doing at this moment in time that made this film what it is?

It isn’t easy being transgender. For those of us who live in America, it’s about to get even harder. With the recent election of Donald Trump and the rush by Democrats to blame trans people for their loss (despite running away from our issues at every turn), the future can seem somewhat bleak. It is of some comfort, then, that our stories are still being told. But as shown by two recent Netflix releases, we’re both making strides, and taking steps back.

Based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, Wicked the musical debuted on Broadway in 2003, becoming one of those rare crossover stage hits that reverberated beyond the typical audience of Broadway fans and theatre kids and into the general consciousness. Yet despite its popularity, it's taken over 20 years to bring this Broadway juggernaut to the screen.

Even in a sea of nostalgia-driven legacy sequels, Ridley Scott's 2000 Oscar winner, Gladiator, feels like a strange candidate for the sequel treatment 24 years later. With its story complete and its protagonist dead, there seemed little point in revisiting this world.

On paper, Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl seems like a perfect comeback vehicle for an actress like Pamela Anderson - an elegiac portrait of an aging showgirl facing the end of her career as her long running show on the Las Vegas strip is forced to close for good. Anderson, a model who's primarily known for her time on the TV show Baywatch in the 1990s, has often been used as a punchline, a living caricature of a "dumb blonde bombshell" stereotype, and a self-aware dramatic role like this could have been the perfect way to reclaim that narrative.

There will be others who will write far more eloquently about this film than I will, but I think it might be one of the most essential films of our time. No Other Land is a searing and devastatingly urgent portrait of the plight of Palestinians through the eyes of Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who form an unlikely friendship covering and protesting the Israeli destruction of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.