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.
5. Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)
The year’s best animated movie didn’t need any dialogue to communicate its grand adventure. This gorgeous tale of animals joining forces to survive – despite their instincts and differences – is powerful in any language.
4. Print It Black | No Other Land (dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor)
These two documentaries – one about America’s appetite for violence, the other about Israel’s – were practically hidden from view. The former quietly dropped on Hulu after premiering at the Dallas International Film Festival, the latter barely got theatrical distribution in 2025. But both are absolutely essential to understanding society’s capacity for tolerating evil. Because correcting course would be too radical and force people you know to be held accountable. For too many, that’s a higher price than thousands of preventable deaths.
3. Anora (dir. Sean Baker)
A movie of dizzying highs and devastating lows, Anora is Sean Baker’s masterpiece. Mikey Madison announces herself as a true star in the titular role, a gold-hearted sex worker drawn in and cast out of a higher class through no fault of her own. The electric build-up of the first act leads to the thrilling high-wire comedy of the second, and then crashes with the absolutely gut-wrenching finale. That last shot is one for the history books.
2. The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)
And speaking of great shots, there’s no shortage of them in Brady Corbet’s sprawling American epic. Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce are tremendous as the brilliant artist and his malevolent patron, respectively, in a movie that eschews subtlety and is (mostly) all the better for it. Its second half is more challenging than its unassailable first, but it’s absolutely thrilling to have a major awards contender this thorny, this gorgeous, this big a swing.
1. I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Jane Schoenbrun’s pop culture-obsessed coming-of-age story is somehow deeply personal to her experience as a trans woman, but also utterly universal to anyone who tried to escape into their favorite shows, movies and songs during a lonely and alienating adolescence. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a promising micro-budget feature, but this is a true level up in every possible respect. You’ll either be on its wavelength or you won’t, but it hit me directly in the heart.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
All We Imagine as Light (dir. Payal Kapadia)
Between the Temples (dir. Nathan Silver)
Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Conclave (dir. Edward Berger)
A Different Man (dir. Aaron Schimberg)
The First Omen (dir. Arkasha Stevenson)
Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater)
Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood)
Kneecap (dir. Rich Peppiatt)
Late Night with the Devil (dirs. Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes)
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (dir. Guy Ritchie)
Monkey Man (dir. Dev Patel)
Red Rooms (dir. Pascal Plante)
Snack Shack (dir. Adam Carter Rehmeier)
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (dir. Soi Cheang)
DIDN’T WATCH BUT PROBABLY WOULD HAVE LOVED
Close Your Eyes (dir. Victor Erice)
Dìdi (dir. Sean Wang)
Hard Truths (dir. Mike Leigh)
Here (dir. Robert Zemeckis)
My Old Ass (dir. Megan Park)
Nickel Boys (dir. Ramell Ross)
Problemista (dir. Julio Torres)
Rebel Ridge (dir. Jeremy Saulnier)
The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)
Rumours (dirs. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson)
THE WORST MOVIES
Emilia Pérez (dir. Jacques Audiard)
It Ends with Us (dir. Justin Baldoni)
Salem’s Lot (dir. Gary Dauberman)
Unfrosted (dir. Jerry Seinfeld)
Venom: The Last Dance (dir. Kelly Marcel)