Top 10 Films of 2024

Making a Top 10 Films of 2024 list is challenging after such a great year at the cinema—one of the best in recent memory. I felt overwhelmed while compiling my list of the year’s best films. It’s good to have options. But with too many, you begin to feel like Anxiety from Inside Out 2—one of the many films I wanted to make room for but couldn’t—and slowly unravel from the possibilities. The year offered an array of movie choices, from blockbusters in the multiplex (Dune: Part Two, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) to a wealth of independent and mini-major releases (thank you to A24 and Janus Films for an especially excellent release slate). A few of my favorites of the year barely received US distribution outside of the dwindling arthouse theater sector (Close Your Eyes, Good One). But unlike recent years, I noticed that not one film on my list debuted on streaming—an odd development that doesn’t necessarily signify a meaningful pattern, but it remains curious. 

Regardless, here is my list, along with a Runner Up. The ranking would probably change if I were asked to make the list again in a week or so, but that’s just the reality of listmaking. 

To read my list of the Top 25 Films of 2024 and additional commentary on the year, join DFR’s community on Patreon or purchase access to the complete list for $4.

RUNNER UP: Dune: Part Two
My reason for not including Denis Villeneuve’s masterful second half of Dune in my Top 10 is somewhat arbitrary. When I think of Part Two, it remains inextricable from the 2021 film. Even Villeneuve considers them two halves of one big epic. Part Two cannot help but feel beholden to its predecessor, which sets up everything the sequel pays off. Anchored by a pensive performance from Zendaya and a chilling turn by Timothée Chalamet, Villeneuve’s complex adaptation may be a Hollywood franchise movie, but it’s the best of its kind—full of thought-provoking ideas and wowing visual effects (at a time when it’s painfully apparent that most studios are prioritizing cost over quality CGI). As a longtime fan of Frank Herbert’s book, I was awed and delighted by Villeneuve’s production and how he stuck the landing.

10. (Tie) Challengers & Queer
In a year of great auteurs delivering admirable work, no other filmmaker can claim to have made two fantastic, interlinked films. Luca Guadagnino teamed with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes on both projects, each wildly different from the other, each about voracious desire, and each complemented with hypnotic scores by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Made with an infectious energy and exhilarating momentum, Challengers finds Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor in a love triangle of tennis and competition, but it’s also about teasing the audience in the most satisfying way imaginable. Queer is a different beast. While it features a career-best performance from Daniel Craig, it’s a multi-textual affair, wrapped up in the source novel by William S. Burroughs, details from the author’s life, and drug-fuelled surreality. Shot with Guadagnino’s usual attention to sensuous details, bravado aesthetics, and flaring emotions, both films stayed with me in the weeks and months after watching them.  

9. Love Lies Bleeding
No other film in 2024 was so sweaty, bloody, yet oddly horny as Rose Glass’ second feature, a queer neo-noir about bodybuilding, gun running, and surreal visions of self. A delirious—and deliriously entertaining—ride starring Kristen Stewart and Katy M. O’Brian, this deranged little thriller never entirely goes the way you expect. It also features one of the year’s most memorable scenery-chewing performances by Ed Harris, who plays a longhaired, bug-raising crime lord. While Glass’ work feels akin to the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1986) and the dreamlike impulses of David Lynch, it’s also not referential to or stylistically reminiscent of those influences, resolving instead to take inspiration and create something new and rather sensational. 

8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
How does George Miller keep reinventing himself in the same franchise? The writer-director’s latest post-apocalyptic actioner sets aside the earlier Mad Max modes for something altogether new and mythmaking. Anya Taylor-Joy somehow compliments Charlize Theron’s iconic role from 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, while Chris Hemsworth embodies Dementus, perhaps the most vile yet fun-to-watch villain of 2024. With Dementus, Miller sees his wasteland world as not far off from our own (the opening line: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?”), and he warns us about such wounded, power-mad rulers. Miller tells a sprawling, episodic origin story with mind-blowing set pieces and kinetically staged action. While some complained about the CGI, I saw it as a heightened flourish in a world running on pure adrenaline, gasoline, and mythology. The phrase “pure cinema” gets thrown around a lot. But after Furiosa is over, and I was left ecstatic and invigorated, few other descriptors feel so apt.

7. Good One
This quiet debut by India Donaldson explores the subtle yet shattering relationship between a father and daughter. Lily Collias gives a delicate performance as Sam, whose hiking trip with her dad and his friend (James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy) leads to seemingly minor incidents that reveal the entrenched gender dynamics and tensions among them. With its naturalistic performances, especially from Collias, and a visually poetic style nodding to Kelly Reichardt’s work, the film lingers in the mind, resonating long after the credits roll. Good One is ruminative and understated, and it remains unwilling to resolve its conflicts neatly, all while capturing the quietly devastating moment when you realize how completely a loved one has disappointed you. 

6. Civil War
Among the more divisive films of 2024, Alex Garland’s latest exploits the US’s current culture war to deliver an ode to journalists. Exploitation cinema has seldom felt so multifaceted. Kirsten Dunst gives one of her finest performances as a character drawn from the famous World War II photojournalist Lee Miller. Navigating an America that doesn’t resemble the real thing, she and others undertake an odyssey to record history. Garland commands a uniformly excellent cast and confronting subject matter to present a fictionalized world, and yet, quite bravely, he doesn’t instruct his audience on what to think about it. He invites the viewer to contemplate, organizing the scenario around haunting scenes brought to life by Rob Hardy’s sublime, immersive cinematography. This is a film of incredible, awful imagery that will forever be burned into my mind. It’s also a Rorschach test that invites the viewer to investigate Garland’s choices.

5. Close Your Eyes
The last time Víctor Erice made a dramatic feature was in 1983; the result, El Sur, wasn’t completed to his satisfaction. Back in the director’s chair, this living legend of Spanish cinema returns to once again explore themes of history, filmmaking, and the search for meaning. Manolo Solo gives an exceptionally nuanced performance as a filmmaker who reflects on his past life and work, mining the past to inform his present. Unfolding over nearly three hours, the film is part detective story, part character study, and part self-referential meta-commentary. Erice even gives a small role to Ana Torrent, who was a child when she starred in his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). The result has a quiet, hypnotic quality that leads to a familiar theme for the director—an ode to cinema as the artistic lens through which we can access identity, history, and memory to understand the world around us better.

4. The Brutalist
It’s difficult to believe that The Brutalist is only Brady Corbet’s third feature, yet it has all the hallmarks of a masterpiece of incredible scope and ambition. In telling an immigrant story about a Hungarian architect (an excellent Adrien Brody) making a home in the US after World War II, Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold tackle the relationship between art and commerce, creation and capitalism. It’s a testament to the staying power of art and the fleeting nature of economic prosperity. The filmmakers use those concepts as a metaphor for the immigrant experience. Corbet also turns in one of the most formally daring pictures of the year, with a film that can feel like a multimedia project in fascinating ways. Bolstered Topicby incredible performances and a massive runtime—complete with a forgiving intermission—the film belongs on a shortlist of the great human epics. That it only cost $6 million is proof that most Hollywood movies are doing too little with too much. 

3. A Different Man
Aaron Schimberg’s latest collaboration with actor Adam Pearson—after his fantastic 2018 film Chained for Life—has a simple message: Happiness comes from within. That, along with an indictment of the entertainment industry’s beauty standards for women, was also the central idea driving one of this year’s best-reviewed horror satires, The Substance. But where that film’s oppressive style reiterated the same point ad nauseam, Schimberg’s character study mines its concept for a richer, funnier, more bizarre, and occasionally messed-up mindbender. Sebastian Stan gives one of 2024’s best performances as a man with a facial disfigurement who undergoes a radical corrective procedure. Yet he continues to feel inadequate about his life and selfhood, especially after meeting Pearson’s character, who exudes confidence despite his appearance. Also featuring a remarkable performance by Renate Reinsve as a self-absorbed playwright, the many-layered A Different Man might be a pure comedy if it wasn’t also so tragic.   

2. Evil Does Not Exist
Although I’ve loved several earlier Ryusuke Hamaguchi films—including Happy Hour (2015) and Drive My Car (2021)—his new film is my favorite of his works. It’s a meditative, engrossing story about an isolated mountain town where the possible arrival of a glamping site threatens the pure spring waters and untouched natural surroundings. The local community comes together to voice their concerns, while the company representatives, who must smooth over the plans with the locals, grapple with the harm they know they’re causing. Shot with uncommon beauty and paired with a resonant score by Eiko Ishibashi, the film also has the most finely edited final sequences of the year—the kind of scene where you’ll want to stop, rewind, and watch it again. Both lyrical and haunting, the ending is an unshakable work of precision ambiguity in a film that considers how humanity disrupts Nature’s balance and invented, and is therefore the origin of, evil.

1. The Beast
No other film wormed its way around my brain in 2024 more than Bertrand Bonello’s latest. Using the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle as a launchpad, the French auteur weaves together three stories about how fear prevents one from living, making connections, and falling in love. If that seems simple enough, the film’s reality is a thorny—some might call it disorganized—collage of scenes that, through artistic osmosis, impart a commentary on the complexities of contemporary life. While his stories range from a costume drama in Paris just before the flood of 1910, a thriller set in Los Angeles in 2014, and then back to Paris for some moody science-fiction in 2044, they each grapple with characters (played by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in all three timelines, with the former giving one of her best performances) trying to connect in the face of artificial barriers. They also dread how connection can go wrong. It’s a film of varied formal bravado, with scenes shot on celluloid, personal devices, digital cameras, and laptops, leading to the most memorable credits sequence of the year. At once experimental and referential, Bonello’s film is ultimately about being authentic—something that is all too rare today.