If you saw either my 2024 Mini-Review Roundup series or else my 2024 B.A.D.S., you’re probably tired of my end-of-year content. But I have a friend named Mitch* who told me that he and his friends always make Top 10 lists they share on Oscar day. I promised I’d make my own, so here it is, even though I missed the ceremony by a few days.
(* Also known as Mitchell in comments on this site. Here’s his Top 10.)
10. Challengers
Luca Guadignino slashes and burns through a love triangle in which psychosexual neuroses and homoerotic battles of will are rendered in sweaty tennis action. The script by Justin Kuritzkes jumbles itself in a nonlinear timeline that’s a little more complicated than it ought to be, but it all pays off in the best ending of the year that doesn’t involve a firehose spraying fake blood.
9. Didi
In his first feature film, Sean Wang delivers this year’s Eighth Grade, a potent and uncomfortable coming-of-age film where much of the power comes from the psychological specificity of the character and his time and place. The title character, whose name is the subject of much contemplation throughout the film, simultaneously captures the highs and lows of the early social media era and the cultural complexities of being second-generation immigrant. Joan Chen is sensational as his conflicted mother.
8. I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s second theatrically-released feature takes the same approximate structure and themes of their debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and amps up the creepypasta aesthetics into legitimate horror. The quiet, insecure Owen (Justice Smith) develops an obsession with a TV show called The Pink Opaque and a connection with a peculiar older girl, Maddy (Jack Haven). His relationship with Maddy and fascination with The Pink Opaque refract a lost youth and a resentment of conformity (widely read as a trans allegory) that explodes into a searing finale.
7. Dune: Part 2
I was lukewarm on the first Dune, which is tremendously produced but thick with peculiar lore and opaque characterization. Part 2 pays off on the original’s setup with a sequel that’s both a better spectacle and a more emotionally involving story. It features one of the great casts of recent years and about twelve jaw-dropping set pieces. It also has goofy sandwalking.
6. A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg pens, directs, and co-stars in one of the best dramedies of the year about a pair of cousins visiting Poland’s Holocaust sites to honor their grandmother. But the show really belongs to Oscar winner Kieran Culkin, who captures the jagged idiosyncrasies of a big-hearted but abrasive wayward soul.
5. Between the Temples
In its premise and surface level presentation, this is a run-of-the-mill bittersweet indie dramedy; and perhaps it doesn’t completely escape its lot, but it’s also so much more: The grainy, close-up cinematography amplifies the visceral discomfort of every cringe-inducing scenario, the cast toes the line between quirky and incandescent, and the sound design whacks you across the forehead (in a good way). And then there’s that wonderful script, the story of a synagogue cantor mourning his lost wife and preparing his elementary school teacher for a bat mitzvah, packed with odd turns of phrase and incisive observations about grief and connections.
4. Here
Eat your heart out, Megalopolis: Here is the late-career boondoggle of the year. And it’s the good kind of boondoggle: This is a wildly inventive and provocative film, always pushing its tone a little further to the boundaries even when it results in some whiplash and misfires. What holds it together is Zemeckis’s introspection and existential angst: In the cross-section of American humanity across hundreds of years in one little room, he sees moments of connection and beauty, but he also sees a cycle of obsolescence and pain and self-delusion. Near the end of the film, Robin Wright’s Margaret proclaims “I love it here,” and if you can figure out whether that love is justified, or how we even define “here” in context, please let me (and every philosopher in history) know.
3. Nosferatu
One of the first great horror feature films was F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, a German, plague-infested adaptation of Dracula. A century later, Robert Eggers, cinema’s premier period stylist, reinvents the story with repressed sexuality bursting out of its bodiced seams, black comedy distorting every tragic turn, and about a thousand real-ass rats skittering in torchlight. Its story is light on surprises, but Nosferatu is why we go to the cinema.
2. Flow
Its texturing is unpolished and the direction a little too on-rails and video gamey, but Flow is the perfect example of how clarity of vision and purity of execution trumps technical and budget limitations. We follow a cat and a ragtag team of animals on a survival quest through a flood. Flow is an eco-fable without pretext or preaching. Most radically of all, it’s completely dialogue-free, relying on expressive animal noises and character animation to build its deep pools of personality.
1. The Substance
Revenge, Coralie Fargeat’s debut, was a visually audacious mission statement for the director: She reclaims and weaponizes the gaze on the female body with violent, cathartic twists on old stories. We had no way of knowing in 2017 that Fargeat was simply limbering up for the maximalist film of the decade (give or take a Daniels Best Picture), a decadent Jekyll-Hyde satire about how Hollywood (and the culture at large) chews up and spits out women and their bodies. The Substance is a blood-spattered skyscraper of filmmaking, full of grotesque body horror practical effects and skin-crawling sound design and some of the most riveting sensory storytelling you’ll ever experience.
The next ten
(Sorted alphabetically)
- Daughters (my #11)
- Gasoline Rainbow
- Hit Man
- Juror #2
- MaXXXine
- Nickel Boys
- Rebel Ridge
- Snack Shack
- Sweethearts
- Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.
2 replies on “The Top 10 Movies of 2024”
Nice to see Here up so high! As well as The Substance and Nosferatu.
I should probably check out Didi and mayyyyyybe A Real Pain.
Those are two of the movies here less likely to cross over to other viewers (along with Between the Temples), but I expect you’d at least like Didi. If you do give them a shot I’d love to hear what you think