Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick the Best Films of 2024

Movies continued their difficult post-pandemic recovery in 2024. Hindering that process was a pipeline drastically thinned by the previous year’s protracted writers’ and actors’ strikes; the summer release slate was especially anemic. The outlook got a boost from the bumper crop of early-winter releases led by Wicked, Moana 2 and Gladiator II, but box office nonetheless seems headed for an annual tally around half a billion short of 2023 revenues.

Studio animation came back with guns blazing — Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and Moana 2 all appear certain to land in the top 5. Among critics’ darlings, Flow and The Wild Robot both looked to the animal kingdom to find hope for a planet falling apart, while the latter also provided a comforting balm for A.I. anxiety. And the artisanal magic of stop-motion animation made a comeback in Memoir of a Snail and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

The success of Deadpool & Wolverine demonstrated that reports of the MCU’s twilight may be premature. But a glance at what are likely to be the year’s 10 top-grossing titles points out Hollywood’s aversion to risk-taking original material. All but one entry is a sequel or spinoff — and that exception, Wicked, is based on a Broadway blockbuster that’s been building brand recognition for 21 years.

Horror maintained its theatrical drawing power, led by Longlegs and Smile 2, with the well-reviewed Nosferatu poised to swoop in on Christmas Day. But the specialty box office is still having a tough time, as most older audiences now appear entrenched in their streaming habits.

A notable exception to that downward trend for adult fare was Conclave, which turned a papal election into an unexpectedly juicy political thriller elevated by a superlative ensemble cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini.

A stellar ensemble also distinguished the considerably smaller theatrical release, Sing Sing, led by Colman Domingo in sensational form as a prison theater group member. The profoundly empathetic drama acquires stirring authenticity via the casting of formerly incarcerated alumni of the rehabilitation program, notably Clarence Maclin in what could prove to be a star-making turn.

Another of the year’s outstanding ensembles was Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen in His Three Daughters, Azazel Jacobs’ wry chamber piece about scrappy, semi-estranged sisters brought together by their father’s impending death. Playing three women of entirely different temperaments forced to find common ground in sadness, the cast could not be better, shrugging off the standard clichés of the indie grief drama in a film graced as much by spiky humor as tenderness.

First features continued to augur well for an emerging generation of filmmaking talent. Chief among them was RaMell Ross’ formally inventive, emotionally searing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel, Nickel Boys, about two inmates of an inhumane reformatory in the Jim Crow South.

Other standout debuts included Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker’s luminous rethink of the mother-daughter drama, Janet Planet; India Donaldson’s transfixing micro-portrait of an eye-opening moment in a young woman’s late adolescence, Good One; Sean Wang’s lovely, semi-autobiographical Asian American coming-of-age tale, Didi; cinematographer Rachel Morrison’s knockout boxing drama The Fire Inside; and Vera Drew’s subversive unauthorized queer supervillain parody, The People’s Joker.

Read on for my ranked Top 10, followed by 10 alphabetically listed honorable mentions, and those of my invaluable reviews team colleagues, Lovia Gyarkye and Jon Frosch. — DAVID ROONEY

1. All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia’s transcendent narrative debut shows her roots in documentary as its opening shots survey the metropolitan sprawl of modern-day Mumbai at night. Fragments of conversation establish it as a city of transplants, many of whom think wistfully of the lives they left behind. The writer-director closes in on two nurses who share an apartment. Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti with soulful depths you could drown in, heads the obstetrics ward with brisk efficiency and goes home alone to ponder the worth of her marriage to a long-absent husband. Her younger colleague, Anu (Divya Prabha), takes life less seriously, courting scandal in her clandestine relationship with a Muslim. When an older co-worker (Chhaya Kadam) takes eviction as her cue to leave Mumbai, the two nurses accompany her back to the seaside village where she grew up. In quiet ways, that change of location proves transformative for all three, bringing them peace and a sense of community captured in a closing shot that’s pure poetry.

2. Queer
As a navigator of desire, longing and melancholy sensuality, Luca Guadagnino’s powers are at their peak in this shape-shifting adaptation of the semi-autobiographical William S. Burroughs novel. Molded by writer Justin Kuritzkes into a retroactive ghost story, the movie threads its way from cruise-y cat and mouse games to romantic obsession, from addiction agony to hallucinogenic abstraction, and finally to unraveling as it plunges into the abyss of solitude. For a gay man of a certain age, that could be the Stations of the Cross. In an affecting performance that’s seductive, driven and haunted, a never better Daniel Craig surrenders himself to Burroughs’ alter ego Lee, a junkie in post-WWII Mexico City. He’s an urbane barfly unmoored by his intoxication with a preppy young American beauty, played by Drew Starkey with allure and elusiveness. Shot on sets at Rome’s storied Cinecittà Studios, Queer has the dreamy, not quite real feel of a movie conjured on soundstages and backlots, but its depiction of yearning — for connection, for release, for oblivion — is raw and real.

3. The Brutalist
Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet’s third feature, co-written with his partner Mona Fastvold, is a magnum opus in every sense. Over three and a half hours with a built-in intermission, the symphonic drama follows the rise-and-fall trajectory of brilliant Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody in a gut-wrenching performance that fuses the lacerating pain of a Holocaust survivor with the hubristic recklessness of an uncompromising artist. Guy Pearce also does some of his finest work as the powerful industrialist who gives Tóth his shot at the American Dream, until the architect oversteps, necessitating a harsh reminder that they will never be equals. The epic has a scope, magnitude and thematic heft that seem to belong to a lost age in moviemaking.

4. La Chimera
In The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, Alice Rohrwacher began traveling the corridors of Italy’s past through idiosyncratic pocket communities that miraculously survive in the present. She completes an informal triptych with this lyrical, funny and beguilingly strange story of a band of grave-robbers, “tombaroli” who loot Etruscan antiquities to sell for profit. A superb Josh O’Connor is the sad Englishman to whom they attribute mystical powers of divination. He’s pining for a lost love whose eccentric mother Flora, played with glorious spirit by Isabella Rossellini, still believes her daughter will walk through the door of the crumbling family villa. The mutual fondness of these two characters warms the woozy dream state of a movie steeped in folklore, mythology and superstition, which unspools the delicate thread between life and death.

5. Hard Truths
Almost three decades after their memorable collaboration on Secrets & Lies, Mike Leigh hands the role of a lifetime to Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Her character, Pansy, is a Londoner whose disappointment, depression and trauma have calcified into all-consuming rage. Her husband and 22-year-old son try to stay out of her way in their sterile middle-class home; only her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, perfection), a cheerful hairdresser who’s as warm, patient and compassionate as Pansy is angry, refuses to be deterred by her hostility. Leigh’s famously collaborative process, in which he develops the story and characters with his actors over an extended rehearsal period, pays off in a protagonist whose explosive tirades are fusillades both hilariously squirm-inducing and wearying. The prospect of spending 90-plus minutes with Pansy’s fury is initially daunting. But almost imperceptibly, the director’s humanistic generosity alters the perspective, inviting us to feel the hurt beneath the character’s armor and revealing the film to be a piercing consideration of the value of empathy.

6. Anora
One of the reliable strengths of Sean Baker’s movies is the writer-director’s refusal to judge even his messiest, most rough-edged characters. That holds true for the Brooklyn sex worker who gives this Cannes Palme d’Or winner its title, played in a breakout turn by Mikey Madison with winsome sweetness, transactional pragmatism and ferociousness when cornered. Dropping us into a typically vivid fringe milieu, the cracked Cinderella story spins screwball comedy out of Anora’s impulsive decision to wed Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, a man-child stoner who turns out to be the son of a Russian oligarch. When his folks send muscle to collect Ivan and get the marriage annulled, Anora is disinclined to be compliant. Gradually, the humor makes way for lingering poignancy in her bruising experience and especially in her shifting interactions with the wonderful Yura Borisov’s Igor, one of the Russian thugs sent to subdue her, who shows unexpected kindness.

7. Flow
Gifted Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis crafts artisanal magic out of digital technology in this white-knuckle, experiential survival adventure set in the wake of a cataclysmic flood. Half-submerged ruins hint at the extinction of humankind without going full dystopia in a captivating fable that unfolds entirely without dialogue — just an expressive score and the elemental sounds of a strange new waterworld. At the story’s center is a saucer-eyed cat who hops aboard a beat-up sailboat and finds itself sharing quarters with a supremely chill capybara, an adorably dopey Labrador, a lemur busily collecting shiny objects and an intimidating secretarybird that mostly minds its own business. As the unlikely menagerie discovers the benefits of mutual trust, cooperation and community, this one-of-a-kind film becomes a lesson in shared struggle, a reminder that we all need each other if we’re going to make it through challenging times ahead.

8. I’m Still Here
Walter Salles’ first film in his native Brazil in 16 years brings an intimate, unsentimental gaze to the shattering true story of former congressman Rubens Paiva, taken from his Rio de Janeiro home in 1971 for questioning by the military dictatorship and never seen again. With the junta refusing even to confirm his arrest, his family lives for years with paralyzing uncertainty. But the tragedy galvanizes Rubens’ wife Eunice, imbued with stirring grace, dignity and understated heroism by Fernanda Torres. While raising five children, she puts herself through college and earns a law degree at 48, becoming a tenacious activist whose causes include full acknowledgement by authorities of disappeared people like her husband once democracy is restored. Amplifying the drama’s emotional charge, the elderly, infirm Eunice is played toward the end of her life by Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, the unforgettable star of Salles’ 1998 international breakthrough, Central Station.

9. Nosferatu
Is there still fresh blood to be drawn from the vampire legend that began with Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel, Dracula? Robert Eggers provides a decisive answer with this passion project that swims through the inky shadows of German Expressionist master F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic while forging its own bone-chilling path. Graced by some of the year’s most mesmerizing visuals and sumptuous design elements, not to mention by riveting performances from Bill Skarsgard, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Willem Dafoe, this is a movie possessed. It immerses the audience in suffocating atmosphere, portentous dread and queasy eroticism, while catching us off guard with a sly vein of fiendish camp. The grotesquely beautiful final shot will take your breath away.

10. A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature as director is a blend that really shouldn’t cohere, a very funny odd couple road trip movie that sneaks up and clobbers you — its emotional wallop leaves you reeling. Bringing a deft lightness of touch to situations ranging from awkward humor to monumental sorrow, this is a work of impressive depth and maturity. Eisenberg plays David, a mildly uptight New Yorker in digital ad sales who invites his unemployed, semi-estranged cousin Benji to accompany him on a tour of Poland to see their recently deceased grandmother’s ancestral home. The filter-free Benji, a flake who never met an inappropriate comment he didn’t like, is played by Kieran Culkin with an insouciance that’s simultaneously appealing and maddening. By infinitesimal degrees, the actor reveals his character’s vulnerability, building to the emotional wreckage of a sobering visit to Majdanek concentration camp.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Babygirl, Challengers, Dahomey, Emilia Pérez, Evil Does Not Exist, Green Border, Nickel Boys, No Other Land, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Small Things Like These

Jon Frosch’s Top 10

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Anora, The Beast, Challengers, Last Summer, Nickel Boys, No Other Land, Nosferatu, The Room Next Door, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Zurawski v Texas

Lovia Gyarkye’s Top 10

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Babygirl, The Fire Inside, Flow, The Girl with the Needle, In the Summers, Queer, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, Union, The Wild Robot