Winter is here. The leaves have fallen, the air is cold. If that weather report isn’t exactly true in L.A., at least you won’t look too absurd in a sweater.
Yet when I survey the cinematic landscape of 2024, all around me I see signs of life. Seven of the movies on my top-10 list come from first- and second-time filmmakers, a supermajority that augurs well for 2025 and beyond. Talent exists and it’s getting seen.
A top-10 list shoulders the weight of representing both the best films of the year and the year itself. These are the stories that resonate now, the innovations that feel fresh, the trial balloons for where the art form is headed. It’s been a bumpy few years for theaters, but I think we’re floating in a fabulous direction, even if a trip to Oz didn’t make it on my list. Climb aboard — we’re off to see some wizardry.
1. ‘Dune: Part Two’
There’s a trick to lassoing a sandworm: Be simple. Be direct. Nothing fancy. That advice comes from Stilgar (Javier Bardem), a free-spirited tribal leader who, over the duration of Denis Villeneuve’s space saga, becomes tragically, disastrously radicalized to embark upon a holy war. But it also applies to Villeneuve himself, who managed to pare Frank Herbert’s so-called unfilmable novel to its essential bones. Herbert feared that even his own fans misinterpreted his heroic-savior myth of Paul Atreides, a boy-messiah played here by Timothée Chalamet. Villeneuve’s adaptation smartly shifts our allegiance to Zendaya’s Chani, who gets elevated from a side character to the film’s beating, conflicted heart. Villeneuve isn’t one for lectures. He lets his images do the talking: the hostility of the desert, the starkness of one figure against the sky, the terror of hundreds of figures crowded in worship around a flawed man. Over the decades, “Dune’s” devotees have called the book prescient. Villeneuve has the advantage of seeing glimpses of that future come true and his film is steeped in modern unease about zealotry, propaganda and environmental destruction. The future exists now — the threat is here — just as it flickers in Paul’s hallucinogenic prophecies. This monumental tragedy about today and tomorrow used its size and awe to burrow bold ideas into the multiplex. I clung tight and adored the ride.
(“Dune: Part Two” is available on multiple platforms.)
2. ‘Anora’
What if Cinderella’s glass slipper sported a 7-inch heel? Sean Baker’s screwball comedy about an exotic dancer who impulsively weds a Russian oligarch’s son has the energy of 12 vodka Red Bulls, plus some illegal substances. Whoever talks loudest wins, at least for a while, and Mikey Madison’s leading lady dares the audience to applaud her agency and grit, plus the brash tactics she uses to limit her own personal exposure. Her body can be bought, her emotional vulnerability is hands-off. Though this is Baker’s most conventional story, he is still the 21st century’s best societal spelunker, with a filmography that plays like an underground study of modern economics. (“When you give me a 401(k), then you can tell me when I work,” Anora snaps) True story: The night I saw “Anora,” the character barged into my dreams. She simply refuses to be contained.
(“Anora” is now playing in theaters.)
3. ‘Love Lies Bleeding’
Director Rose Glass’ kinky noir stars Kristen Stewart as a gym manager named Lou who falls for a muscular drifter, Jackie (Katy O’Brian), hitching her way through New Mexico en route to a body building competition in Las Vegas. Both women are screw-ups, not that you’d guess it at first from Jackie’s strict workout regime or the slogans steeped into the weight room like “Only Losers Quit.” The flesh is willing, the spirit is weak. This bruising love affair takes place in 1989 when super-ripped biceps were ogled with freakish fascination — including by Glass’ camera, which gawks as Lou pokes and licks Jackie in slow-motion. There’s pleasure (and plenty of egg-white scrambles), but no release. Glass isn’t the kind of filmmaker who absolves her characters’ sins. She enjoys stirring more of them into the mix.
(“Love Lies Bleeding” is available on multiple platforms.)
4. ‘A Real Pain’
Jesse Eisenberg made his career playing tightly wound wallflowers. He’s studied anxiety with the intensity of a scholar and now, as a director, he pairs that persona with a blunt oversharer who smashes every social code. Here, these opposites are cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), traveling through Poland on a Holocaust-centered group tour. They’re trying to reconnect with each other and their Jewish heritage. We’re also invested in gauging which one of them the other travelers like best. It’s a painful watch for those who identify with the struggle to turn acquaintances into friends. (Why doesn’t being polite ever seem to work?) Yet even as David’s bewilderment mounts — and as he gets steamrolled into feeling like he’s in the wrong — the script recognizes that liberation doesn’t equal happiness, and that these frustrated family members will remain bonded for life.
(“A Real Pain” is now playing in theaters.)
5. ‘Hundreds of Beavers’
Hundreds might even be an underestimate in this handmade epic that climaxes with a giant mecha-beaver of actors in cheap animal costumes. But it’s hard to overestimate the enterprising spirit of director Mike Cheslik and his co-writer and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who spent years huddled over Adobe After Effects to craft this ultra-low-budget slapstick caper that combines silent comedy, cartoon physics and video-game logic. The story is simple: A 19th century settler (Tews) must hunt to endure the winter and he’s pretty bad at it for a while. Yet the man’s ambition, ingenuity and resilience mirrors the filmmakers’ own hustle to pull off this marvel, and that also happens to be exactly what Hollywood needs right now to survive.
(“Hundreds of Beavers” is available on multiple platforms.)
6. ‘Nickel Boys’
A ticket to the movies can be an act of empathy, a buy-in to experiencing life through a character’s eyes. Director RaMell Ross gets us closer than that. Working from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black friends living in the Jim Crow-era South, Ross shoots this reform-school drama in first person — literally through the points of view of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). In their moments of agony, they disassociate from their own bodies and, arguably, never fully return. Still, the cinematographer Jomo Fray keeps the brutality mostly off-screen in favor of poetic images that capture the boys’ hopes, pleasures and fears. Here, beauty and sensitivity are political acts.
(“Nickel Boys” opens Dec. 20 in theaters.)
7. ‘How to Have Sex’
Greece looks ghastly in Molly Manning Walker’s riveting debut that goes from raucous to hungover and back to raucous faster than a bouncing beer pong. This is not Greece’s fault. Blame the irresponsible British teenagers who’ve arrived in Crete solely to get drunk and screw. (They don’t even eat gyros — they just snarf fries.) Our Kewpie doll heroine, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), churns with desire and alcohol and perils so overwhelming she can’t put them into words, including her holy terror of being a buzzkill. The techno is deafening, but Walker, who went on these trips herself before starting her career as a cinematographer, dances us through the chaos with ruthless resolve.
(“How to Have Sex” is available on multiple platforms.)
8. ‘Universal Language’
There’s a shot in Matthew Rankin’s absurdist comedy of a Tim Hortons sign written in Farsi, a Winnipeg-meets-Tehran mash-up that he views with affection, while anticipating that some in the audience may see it as an affront. Tilted one way, this story is about community; another, it’s about displacement. What holds both halves together is Rankin’s dry humor and playful compositions. (The movie’s storyboards could be repurposed as retro wallpaper). Above all, there’s our own curiosity to discover what Rankin will serve up next: a bingo game, a rampaging wild turkey, a stroll through Quebec’s Beige District, an abandoned mall, a funeral next to a freeway, or two stubborn schoolgirls hellbent on chipping frozen cash from the ice. Devotees of Iranian New Wave cinema will spot scores of Easter eggs.
(“Universal Language” opens Feb. 12, 2025 in theaters.)
9. ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’
Meanwhile, in actual Iran, director Mohammad Rasoulof chose filmmaking over his own freedom. Threatened with multiple prison sentences for telling stories that criticize the country’s theocratic regime, he shot his latest movie in secrecy before being forced into exile. This claustrophobic thriller is mostly set in one family’s apartment, but its backdrop couldn’t be bigger. Outside rage the real-life, youth-driven protests triggered by the arrest of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was seized by the morality police for exposing her hair and died in custody, and the television and cellphones beam that anger directly into the house. Rasoulof sides with the two daughters galvanized by the violence over their morally exhausted father, a judge who comes home from work having sentenced protesters by the hundreds. The film, however, is most drawn to the conservative mother played by Soheila Golestani. (The actor was herself arrested for refusing to wear a head scarf. She’s still in Iran.) Golestani’s matriarch desperately wants the security that comes with obeying the regime. Yet, her need to protect her girls becomes its own seed of outrage. What might happen if her sense of injustice takes root?
(“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is now playing in theaters.)
10. ‘Smile 2’
I’m not scared to stick up for this horror sequel as a perfectly executed delight. Don’t hold back if you’ve yet to see the first “Smile,” released in 2022. Filmmaker Parker Finn’s essentially standalone entry takes off at warp speed with an athletic tracking shot of a bloodbath. Immediately, we know we’re at the mercy of a new genre whiz. The technicals are outstanding, but the film’s masterstroke is that its victim, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), is a self-destructive, micromanaged pop star with several futures hinging on her high-pressure comeback tour. She’d be compelling even if she wasn’t possessed by a contagious demon. From the choreography to the costumes and subversive jump scares, there’s so much moxie in every scene you just have to, well, grin.
(“Smile 2” is available on multiple platforms.)
Of course, there’s too much great stuff to be contained in a mere top 10. Behold! Nine honorable mentions for your viewing delight.
“The Brutalist”
An American epic from an underdog artist’s perspective. I suspect more than a few filmmakers will see themselves in this showdown between creative genius and cold, hard cash.
“The People’s Joker”
An intensely personal vision with crowd-sourced special effects. Director Vera Drew claims Gotham City for herself and leaves it to us (and WB’s lawyers) to decide if she’s a villain or an underground hero.
“Janet Planet”
Watching Annie Baker’s mesmerizing debut, I could have sworn she’d crawled into my brain to smear my own memories on screen. The magic of the film is that so many others felt the same.
“Kill”
A train-bound thriller hurtling from India, this revenge flick lives up to its title and then some.
“Conclave”
Not to shortchange Ralph Fiennes’ tormented performance, but I’m ecstatic that director Edward Berger thought to include shots of him ripping into the papal dormitory’s pre-packaged toiletries.
“Red Rooms”
This one’s for the freaks who want a fresh French Canadian spin on Brian DePalma-style trash. A model-slash-hacker (yes, really) is fixated on a crime so horrible it can’t be shown on screen, but it’s her conspiratorial sidekick, played with bug-eyed zeal by Laurie Babin, whom you just have to see.
“Flow”
A cat, a dog and a capybara walk into a boat and are forced to make do as a society. It’s a wordless wonder about uncertainty and devastation.
“Música”
Howard Hawks claimed a great movie is three good scenes and no bad ones. Well, Rudy Mancuso’s innovative debut has three of the best scenes of the year (and puppets — can’t forget the puppets).
“Caligula: The Ultimate Cut”
The original 1979 porno was a blot on the careers of Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren. This drastic recutting strips away the skin flick and uncovers a masterpiece.