Let’s start with the most obvious thing about this list: Only one is from a traditional Hollywood studio. That’s how bad the product got in 2024, with most big-name directors’ projects punted to 2025 or later. The best films once again came from independently financed features from around the world, movies with a distinct point of view. Appropriately, many of them were bleak as hell.
10. The People’s Joker (dir. Vera Drew)
The year’s best superhero movie is completely unauthorized by DC and Warner Bros. Discovery. Vera Drew’s deeply personal, extremely weird and often hilarious debut covers her coming out journey through Batman’s rogues gallery. She manages to effectively skewer vigilantism, toxic comedy bros, and cultural homogenization. But there’s still time for musical interludes, animated sequences, and abusive relationships within the LGBTQ+ community. It was a long, litigious journey to get this movie out, but one hopes directors who get sucked into the superhero-industrial complex will take some good lessons from this.
9. Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar)
For a long time, it seemed as if Sing Sing would only go surface-level in its exploration of incarcerated men experiencing joy and a taste of freedom on stage. But its second half drills down deeper into the real pain of these performers, pain that feels all the more authentic since much of the cast are former prisoners themselves. Colman Domingo and newcomer Clarence Macklin are the real standouts, but the entire ensemble is astonishing, as I’ll get to in another post. That it missed out on a Best Picture nomination is absolutely a failure of A24’s campaign and not of its value.
8. Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Bigger, bolder, and more accomplished than its predecessor, this is the year’s best blockbuster. Though it also ends somewhat abruptly after a lot of plot and death, the impressive world-building and tremendous performances went to another level. I sat astonished during the harvester attack and the gladiator match, and was mesmerized as Paul (Timothée Chalet) transformed from reluctant warrior to diabolical prophet, unleashing the same destruction he experienced. Though I’m excited for Villeneuve to move onto something else, I can’t wait for Dune Messiah.
7. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (dir. Radu Jude)
Arguably the year’s best comedy, depending on how you categorize my No. 3 film. This darkly comic look at an overworked production assistant (Ilinca Manolache) in Romania has a better grip on life in late capitalism than just about any film I’ve ever seen. The only jobs available offer shitty pay for degrading work. Once sacred sites can be desecrated for luxury condos and golf courses. And even the escapes from reality are harmful. Though I was less enamored with the film’s callbacks to a 1981 slice-of-life film, its brilliant long take showing the real-time annoyances of a questionable production is as good as you might have heard.
6. Evil Does Not Exist (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
That ending is still a head-scratcher, but I haven’t thought about a movie from this year as much as this one. Hamaguchi’s follow-up to Drive My Car is much shorter, but no less powerful. As a close-knit mountain community faces off against a real estate investor’s drive to bring “luxury camping” to their village, regardless of what environmental havoc it might wreak. To see this in light of U.S. federal lands being sold off to the highest bidder is tough. But the film’s breathtaking cinematography and score make it a little easier to take.
