2024 - 50 Favorite Films and Reflections on the Year

I had no set date for when I intended to wrap up my early January binge of 2024 releases and compile this list, but a combination of circumstance and burnout has led to a Martin Luther King Jr. day release, which seems like a pretty reasonable date to me - still enough time to catch up on some key titles, but not too late into the year that we’ve already forgotten about 2024. I’m not a film critic or in the film industry, so I don’t get film screeners of any kind, and indeed, there are still several notable titles I haven’t seen (more on that later) that I hope to catch up with in the coming weeks and months, but nobody’s seen everything and I feel happy enough with my list of 50 favorites that I’m ready to call it a wrap for 2024 and move on to bigger and better things here in 2025.

I’ll cite my sources right away and acknowledge that I’m borrowing much of the formatting of this post from Bill Ackerman’s annual list of 40 favorites which you can find here. There’s always some really interesting under-the-radar titles on his list and if I’m going to borrow liberally the least I can do is promote his work as well. Over the past couple of years I’ve grown increasingly less interested in ranking films and have had a much stronger desire to just present a large group of recommendations that vary in size, scope, and style, and hopefully present a good snapshot of the types of titles I was interested in the previous year.

As I’ve been catching up with various critics’ and podcasters’ reflections on the year, it seems to be a mixed bag as to what people thought - I’ve heard some herald 2024 as the best year in film this decade, while others thought it was rather underwhelming. As always, that really comes down to what kinds of titles you are interested in seeking out. I’ll agree that it wasn’t a particularly great year for Hollywood and was underwhelmed by a lot of the blockbuster fare I caught up with (especially in comparison to a much stronger 2023 in that regard). However, there were numerous independent and international films that I found really interesting and creative, and in that regard I think 2024 was as strong a year as we've had in some time.

Looking at cinematic trends of 2024, there’s certainly some ups and downs. I think we can take a break from religious horror movies for a while. I’m personally getting sick and tired of all the sequels and prequels that continue to show up in the theater, but if we need those to help finance smaller titles then I guess that’s the world we live in. It’s getting harder and harder to predict which titles will end up successful - I certainly didn't expect Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to break records, and I’m still stunned that there were fewer people in my theater when I saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (within a week of its opening!) than when I saw Rumours or Sasquatch Sunset. On the positive side, it did feel like a year where we saw some directors take big swings that didn't always land with audiences but I think will remain interesting curios, if nothing else, as the years go on. It also felt like a great year for queer cinema, and specifically trans cinema (though I’m not referring to that one film garnering all the awards attention) and I hope that some of this year’s successes will lead to bigger budgets, more interesting projects, and more up-and-coming filmmakers sharing their stories in the coming years.

From an acting perspective, it certainly felt like there were no shortage of fun and bizarre roles - especially if you really dug beneath the big-budget fare. Looking just at one of my favorite groups of actors - the frequent Hal Hartley collaborators - 2024 was a year where you could see Martin Donovan as Donald Trump’s father, Thomas Jay Ryan in possession of a magical kombucha mother, Elina Löwensohn as a humanoid dog of the underworld, and Parker Posey as… a mom. (Plus, if you count Aubrey Plaza in that group, you could see her as a teenager’s future self or doing whatever the hell she was doing in Megalopolis). Isabelle Adjani's landmark performance in Possession seemed like a major influence on several horror performances, including Nell Tiger Free in The First Omen, Lily Rose-Depp in Nosferatu, and multiple actresses in MadS. It seems like nepo babies keep popping up whether you want them to or not, from William Hurt’s son turning into a werewolf to seeing Spielberg and Scorsese youngsters among the massive ensemble of Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, so let’s hope they continue to choose some interesting projects.

I saw around 200 new releases from the start of 2024, which is a big step up from previous years. Part of that may be due to my AMC A-List subscription, which I finally caved in and got at the start of 2024 and allowed me to take some chances on movies I might not always feel were worth checking out. Part of it may also be due to movies seeming to come to streaming services quicker this year, whether that be free library services Kanopy and Hoopla (great especially for films with extremely limited releases) or the plethora of streaming channels that have deals with all the major studios. I’m not sure if stuff actually showed up quicker this year, but that seemed to be the impression I felt as the year went on.

All of that is to lead up to what is still a massive list of shame - titles I was interested in seeing that I didn't have a chance to catch up with yet. Among the numerous titles on that list are Matt and Mara, Nickel Boys, The Brutalist, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Albany Road, Strange Darling, Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps, La Cocina, Cora Bora, No Other Land, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Oh, Canada, Alien on Stage, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, Will & Harper, The Monk and the Gun, Oddity, Apartment 7A, Memoir of a Snail, Madame Web, Stress Positions, Wicked, A Complete Unknown, Carnage for Christmas, The Becomers, Femme, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Queer, I’m Still Here, Caddo Lake, STEVE! (martin) A Documentary in Two Pieces, All You Need is Blood, Stopmotion, Infested, The Shadow Strays, La Chimera, Parachute, The Last Showgirl, Better Man, Lowlifes, My First Film, Aggro Dr1ft, Vermiglio, Girls Will Be Girls, From Ground Zero, Chime, Starring Jerry as Himself, How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, Your Monster, Orion and the Dark, Nocturnes, In the Summers, Crossing, It Ends with Us, Fitting In, Bird, Sugarcane, Speak No Evil, Rita, Chicken for Linda, About Dry Grasses, Monkey Man, The End, Close Your Eyes, We Live in Time, Eno, Ennio, Exhuma, Black Barbie, The Coffee Table, Out of Darkness, Music, Knox Goes Away, Maria, Pictures of Ghosts, The Girl with the Needle, September 5, Property, The Piano Lesson, Joker: Folie a Deux, Wicked Little Letters, Hoard, The Book of Clarence, Gladiator II, Blitz, Kneecap, Things Will Be Different, Green Border, The Beekeeper, The 4:30 Movie, Wildcat, Lumberjack the Monster, Mother, Couch, Touch, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and both films titled Here (one by Robert Zemeckis, the other from Bas Devos). I hope to catch up with all of these films at some point, and I’m certain several would have made my list had I seen them.

On a personal note, 2024 had some highs and lows. On the positive side, I got to take a very fun vacation to Japan and South Korea - my first time ever in Asia and my first time out of the country since before the pandemic. Unfortunately, 2024 was also the year I lost my grandfather, and much of the second half of the year was spent going back and forth visiting him between the hospital and the rehab center as he tried to fight through numerous diseases before ultimately succumbing to Hodgkins’ lymphoma. I’m not sure how much both of these events impacted my film-watching experiences in the latter half of the year, but there’s definitely some titles on my list that spoke to me in those regards.

Before I get into my list of 2024 favorites, I should probably try to define what exactly a “2024 release” looks like in my opinion. I included films that either a) received an official theatrical/streaming release in 2024, or b) were new works that I saw at a film festival in 2024 (either the Chicago Critics Film Festival or the one film I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival). Hence, there are some titles on here that premiered in 2023 (or even 2022), and there is one title that does not yet open until 2025. These release dates can lead to confusion when categorizing what year films came out - I’ve seen arguments over whether Perfect Days counts as a 2024 release or not - so just know that all of these are new releases that I either saw in 2024 or the first couple weeks of January 2025. (For the record, I considered Perfect Days a 2023 release although I didn't see it until 2024; it may have been on this list had I deemed it eligible, but all that matters is that I got to see the Tokyo toilets when I went to Japan and they looked just as cool as they seemed in the film).

Perhaps it was just the pure volume of movies I saw this year, but I had a hard time whittling my final list down to just 50 titles. Conclave, Sing Sing, The Order, The Last Stop in Yuma County, Heretic, The People’s Joker, Yannick, The Nature of Love, Free Time, Babes, The First Omen, The Apprentice, She is Conann, Kinds of Kindness, Stand Up Solutions, Kiss the Future, Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary, What You Wish For, and Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person are all films I enjoyed that could have appeared on this list on a different day. I didn’t include any short films, but would strongly recommend checking out Jack Dunphy’s Bob's Funeral, Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, and Lori Felker’s Patient.

And with that, I'm done rambling. Let's take a look at my 50 favorite films from 2024, presented in alphabetical order:

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All Happy Families

(dir. Haroula Rose)

All We Imagine as Light

(dir. Payal Kapadia)

Am I OK?

(dir. Stephanie Allynne and Tig Notaro)

Anora

(dir. Sean Baker)

The Beast

(dir. Bertrand Bonello)

Between the Temples

(dir. Nathan Silver)

The Breaking Ice

(dir. Anthony Chen)

Challengers

(dir. Luca Guadagnino)

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

(dir. Tyler Taormina)

Daaaaaalí!

(dir. Quentin Dupieux)

Daughters

(dir. Angela Patton and Natalie Rae)

A Different Man

(dir. Aaron Schimberg)

Eephus

(dir. Carson Lund)

Evil Does Not Exist

(dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)

Exhibiting Forgiveness

(dir. Titus Kaphar)

Flipside

(dir. Chris Wilcha)

Flow

(dir. Gints Zilbalodis)

Fresh Kills

(dir. Jennifer Esposito)

Ghostlight

(dir. Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson)

Good One

(dir. India Donaldson)

Hard Truths

(dir. Mike Leigh)

Hit Man

(dir. Richard Linklater)

How to Have Sex

(dir. Molly Manning Walker)

Hundreds of Beavers

(dir. Mike Cheslik)

I Like Movies

(dir. Chandler Levack)

I Saw the TV Glow

(dir. Jane Schoenbrun)

Juror #2

(dir. Clint Eastwood)

Kill

(dir. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat)

Last Summer

(dir. Catherine Breillat)

Last Things

(dir. Deborah Stratman)

Late Night with the Devil

(dir. Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes)

Local Legends: Bloodbath!

(dir. Matt Farley)

Love Lies Bleeding

(dir. Rose Glass)

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

(dir. David Hinton)

MadS

(dir. David Moreau)

Megalopolis

(dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

National Anthem

(dir. Luke Gilford)

Problemista

(dir. Julio Torres)

A Real Pain

(dir. Jesse Eisenberg)

Red Rooms

(dir. Pascal Plante)

Reform!

(dir. Jon Bois)

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

(dir. Benjamin Ree)

Riddle of Fire

(dir. Weston Razooli)

River

(dir. Junta Yamaguchi)

Robot Dreams

(dir. Pablo Berger)

Sam's World

(dir. Lily Lady)

The Substance

(dir. Coralie Fargeat)

Thelma

(dir. Josh Margolin)

A Traveler's Needs

(dir. Hong Sang-soo)

Witches

(dir. Elizabeth Sankey)