The Best Films of 2024

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.).

There were venerable masters and exciting newcomers alike creating unique visions and personal passion projects, memories of a world that once was, and dreams of what we could be. They examined old myths and created new ones. The tension between progress and tradition that so often defines politics was alive and well at the cinema this year in films from all over the world. While familiarity and nostalgia continued to drive the American box office, artists have continued to create. They’ve continued to tell the story of who they are and, by extension, who we are. In a time of an increasingly splintered cultural landscape, art still has the power to forge connections, to unite us in a shared experience, to create empathy and illuminate new perspectives. In the words of Nicole Kidman, “we need that, all of us.” As the world feels ever more uncertain, its comforting to know that despite the film industry’s struggles and a box office that favors careful familiarity over boldness, art continues to thrive for those with the courage to seek it out.

1
I SAW THE TV GLOW
(Jane Schoenbrun, USA)

I Saw the TV Glow is just such an overwhelming sensory and emotional experience. Like the television show at its heart, it has become a kind of communal experience amongst trans people that has been incredibly special to watch. To see so many people feel so seen by this has been validating in ways that are almost impossible to articulate. It's as though Schoenbrun has captured the very feeling of what it's like to be transgender, as if someone opened up my heart and saw that TV glow. That little girl whom the world once saw as a boy and wanted so badly to be seen as someone else, to embrace media meant "for girls," to become the woman she idolized on the screen, felt so deeply seen. That I am not the only one to feel this warmth amongst the neon-lit unease of Schoenbrun's haunted, harrowing masterpiece of communal anxiety feels somehow revelatory. 

2
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT
(Payal Kapadia, India)

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light is a film that almost defies words. It feels somehow magical, a modern city symphony whose tale of female friendship and solidarity teems with the kinetic energy of life in the Indian city of Mumbai. At the center are two women, one whose love story is seemingly at its end, the other whose love story is just beginning. Around them - millions of people navigating life in one of the most populous cities in the world, a world of stories colliding and refracting off of one other, creating a prismatic portrait of a city and its people; a rapturous cinematic poem that finds camaraderie in shared experience and emotional connection.

3
INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL
(Phạm Thiên Ân, Vietnam)

A young man suddenly finds himself the caretaker of his little nephew after his sister-in-law is killed in a traffic accident. Tasked with returning the boy to his father, the young man sets off in search of his brother, from whom seemingly no one has heard in years. Phạm Thiên Ân's wistful, remarkable debut feature settles into a kind of meditative rhythm as the young man sets off across Vietnam, traveling from bustling cities to rural villages, meeting locals both helpful and mysterious, bringing him both closer and further away to his missing brother, who begins to seem more like an idea than a flesh-and-blood person. It may seem directionless at times, but so is its protagonist. Life doesn't always make sense. Things don't always add up. What Phạm encourages us to do is to make peace with ourselves. It's a work of quiet introspection that somehow feels as vast as the universe.

4
MEGALOPOLIS
(Frances Ford Coppola, USA)

Say what you will about Coppola the man (and there is plenty that should be said), but his legacy is one that is impossible to ignore, and Megalopolis feels like his attempt to grapple with it on the grandest possible scale. This kind of uncompromising, visionary work is a rare thing; worthy of comparison to Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language in the way it so boldly pushes the cinematic language into new territory. There's a spark of madness at its heart that is at once garish and glorious, a decadent folly that will inevitably draw comparisons to such disparate artists as Fellini and the Wachowski Sisters, and yet it remains resolutely its own unique vision. It isn't difficult to see why people hate this. It's ungainly, often bewildering, and almost doggedly uninterested in its audience. But it is truly one of a kind - a film for the ages from a titan of the craft, a lion in winter both licking his wounds and gazing off into an uncertain future. This is what cinema is all about.

5
NO OTHER LAND
(Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Palestine)

Taking place before the events of October 7th that kicked Israel's historical genocide of the Palestinian people into high gear, No Other Land takes an on-the-ground look at just how we got here. There's only so far you can push people before they fight back, and witnessing such casual cruelty is a sober reminder of the true human toll of the Palestinian genocide. It's a fearless work, a howl of rage in the face of injustice, but what makes it so memorable is its ability to find calm in the storm - as people hold onto hope in the face of almost unfathomable circumstances. This is a stunning film and an incredibly necessary one, a deeply human work that the world needs to see, but as of this writing, the film has no US distributor or release date. As the genocide being committed by Israel rages on with international compliance and American complicity, films like this are even more essential to telling this story. This is what genocide looks like, and No Other Land refuses to let us look away.

6
HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1
(Kevin Costner, USA)

While some may see it as folly, Horizon is truly something to behold: a sprawling Western on an epic scale that feels as vast and mythical as the American West itself. As the states to the east are embroiled in civil war, Horizon weaves together the stories of a disparate group of characters, all converging on the promise of a western town called Horizon. Loners, cattle drivers, settlers, prostitutes, artists, merchants, schemers, thieves, Chinese railroad workers, and Native Americans who seek to stop the incursion of white settlers, and those who seek to make peace with it. With the potential for three more films (Chapter 1 clocks in at three hours long), Costner's ambition is as expansive as the wide-open western vistas he captures. Yet this is no mere vanity project; Horizon is a tremendous piece of work, a gorgeously rough-hewn tapestry of American mythmaking that history will likely be kinder to than its lukewarm box office suggests.

7
THE BRUTALIST
(Brady Corbet, USA)

The Brutalist is not just a towering piece of classical Hollywood cinema; it's also a visionary work of art that feels electrifyingly modern. Is the brutalist structure at its center reflective of a deal with the devil? Or is it emblematic of beauty found amidst great pain and strife? In that regard, the film itself feels like a product of those same contradictions, which makes it not only an exhilarating throwback to the prestige epics of yore but a fundamental product of our time. It's a great American film, the kind of film that one would expect from a master filmmaker far more seasoned than Corbet, a former actor who only has two features under his belt - The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018). With The Brutalist, he asserts himself a staggering talent, not just a keen observer of the human desire to create something bigger than themselves, but a conjurer of indelible images whose work, like his protagonist's, feels almost elemental.

8
PICTURES OF GHOSTS
(Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil)

A lovely and elegiac exploration on the profound effects of Kleber Mendonça Filho's childhood neighborhood and its cinemas on his films, and the endless march of time's effects on them. I often found myself thinking about Agnes Varda's Daguerreotypes and Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn in the way Filho examines the power of cinema to preserve while also using it to document its own death; faded movie palaces now replaced by towering high rises, or by ramshackle churches, the temples of cinema swapping one religion for another. These ghosts, these memories, haunt every frame, inspiring something new and beautiful, the seeds of new trees fertilized by the carcass of the old oak. Filho deftly blends truth and artifice, documentary and magical realism, to create something uniquely beautiful: a memory, a shadow, a sketch, a half-remembered dream, a changing cityscape, and an ever-shifting culture moving ever forward, for the briefest moment frozen in time.

9
THE PEOPLE’S JOKER
(Vera Drew, USA)

It seems like something of a minor miracle that 2024 has given us not one but two deeply personal reflections on the trans experience made by trans filmmakers. While it is more explicitly trans than Jane Schoenbrun's more abstract I Saw the TV Glow, it is no less effective in its unique exploration of transgender awakening. Even more miraculous is that The People’s Joker got released at all, following threats of legal action due to its use of copyrighted characters after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022. In the face of that, the film's reclamation of historically cisgender characters for a transgender narrative feels especially transgressive. It’s not difficult to see why those of us who are queer gravitate toward the villains - the outcasts, the ones shunned to the outskirts of society, but in Drew’s Gotham, we have a chance to reclaim our power. This isn't just sticking it to the man, it's a middle finger to the entire cis-tem with Drew as our puckish master of ceremonies, confidently asserting herself as a thrilling and vital new voice.

10
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST
(Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

There's a lot going on beneath the surface of Evil Does Not Exist; the gorgeous cinematography, coupled with the dreamy score by Eiko Ishibashi, creates an atmosphere that is both beautiful and menacing, an unknowable landscape that harbors both wonders and horrors. We're all just people trying to make it and carve out our own place in a world uninterested in our designs - a dispassionate Eden indifferent to our struggles, desires, and feelings fighting back against our own incursion. If that sounds fatalistic - it isn't really. If anything, Hamaguchi's vision is deeply empathetic; a lyrical tone poem with the heart of a pressure cooker about humanity's innate and sometimes contradictory desire to find somewhere to belong, even in a place that rejects them. Evil Does Not Exist is a film whose sensual pleasures continue to reveal themselves, whose themes reveal deeper layers the more they're peeled away; a small and rapturous wonder that cements Hamaguchi as one of our most compelling contemporary filmmakers.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

HERE (Robert Zemeckis, USA)
LOVE LIES BLEEDING (Rose Glass, USA)
JUROR #2 (Clint Eastwood, USA)
THE SHADOWLESS TOWER (Zhang Lu, China)
CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT (Tyler Taormina, USA)

Justice Smith in I SAW THE TV GLOW. Courtesy of A24.