Top 10 Movies of 2024

It’s that time of the year again when critics release our top 10 movies of the year. Some years are easier than others, naturally, but I don’t think I have struggled with a Best Of list as much as I did with this one. I had about 25 movies that I wanted to put into my Top 10 this year. There were simply that many great movies in 2024. From number 5 down, I could comfortably switch out one of 15 other movies and not feel too bad about it. With that, let’s get to our 15 Honorable mentions in list form…

Sing Sing

My Old Ass

Longlegs

Blink Twice

Late Night with the Devil

Heretic

Furiosa A Mad Max Saga

A Real Pain

Dune Part 2

Nickel Boys

Family Portrait

Flow

Better Man

Immaculate

Love Lies Bleeding

On to the Top 10 Movies of 2024

10. Strange Darling - Choosing between this and Love Lies Bleeding for the last spot in my Top was the hardest choice. In the end, Strange Darling is a movie that has lingered in the back of my mind. Willa Fitzgerald’s star making performance plus Kyle Gallner’s dedication to charmingly promoting the film on social media won me over to this unique little movie with its stylish direction and cleverly used, out of order chaptered structure. A scene between Fitzgerald and Gallner in a truck outside of a motel, lit brightly by the neon vacancy sign is among the best scenes in any movie in 2024.

9. The Brutalist - The Brutalist is a powerhouse that wears you down over a period of three and a half hours. As the picture becomes clear at the end and the plot is fully revealed, it’s genuinely breathtaking. Adrian Brody lives his performance, absolutely flawless. And then there is Guy Pearce who hasn’t been this compelling since Memento. Brady Corbet’s direction and the cinematography by Lol Crowley are a testament to cinema as artisanal craft.

8. Queer - It’s hard to make despair compelling on screen. Unrelenting loneliness and longing can be a brutal ask of an audience's patience. And yet, Luca Guadagnino persists in Queer to craft a picture of despairing loneliness and longing unlike any I have seen in a movie before. With the impeccable performance of the former James Bond, Daniel Craig, Guadagnino threads the needle between a sadness that is almost unbearable and a character study that you simply can’t ignore.

7. Nightbitch - Nightbitch makes this list for its raw honesty, humor, and daring. This is a boldly strange film that paints an honest picture of what it is like to be both a loving mother and a woman who resents what she had to give up to be a mother. It’s a conversation that most people don’t want to have. The idea that you might have misgivings about being a parent is a conversation that makes people very uncomfortable. If you are anything other than grateful to be a parent you are treated like some kind of monster. Nightbitch understands that this is a far more nuanced conversation than that. You can be a loving mother and rightfully grieve what you had to give up of yourself to be a mother.

6. Babygirl - Bold, sexy, humorous, Babygirl takes a unique look at having it all and what that looks like. The film posits that Nicole Kidman’s Romy has essentially traded having a satisfying sex life in favor of her high powered job as a CEO and a homelife that is only currently lacking in regular orgasms. But desire sneaks in via a sexy, flirty intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson) and his commanding form of sexuality combines with the kink of risking her otherwise perfect life creates an irresistible force. And that ending, wow. I love that final scene. I love it.

5. Maxxxine - If you had asked me at the start of 2024 what movie I thought had best of 2024 potential, the answer was simple, Ti West’s Maxxxine, the culmination of his three picture partnership with actress Mia Goth. The only reason Maxxxine isn’t at the top of this list is that this was a particularly incredible year for movies. Maxxxine delivers on every promise made by its predecessors, X and Pearl by delivering a sleazy, sexy, and thrilling horror movie chock full of dark humor, blood and guts, and Mia Goth’s wildly charismatic presence.

4. Anora - Aside from my number one movie of 2024, the next few entries are basically interchangeable. You could consider number 2 a tie between these three movies but for the sake of ranking, we will go with Anora first. The magic of Anora comes from Sean Baker’s confident direction. The story is a meandering one but as Baker’s camera moves through this story we can’t help but follow along attentively, desperately curious to see where this ever winding trail is leading. That, combined with Mikey Madison’s revelatory performance makes Anora a uniquely irresistible experience.

3. Challengers - I am not sure if I’ve ever had a director release two movies in the same year that made my Top 10. Nevertheless, here’s Luca Guadagnino again with Challengers, a movie that, on the surface, could not be more different from Queer and yet, they share the same sweaty, sad, desperate longing. Where in Queer the longing is that of an aging gay man desperate for sex and companionship, Challengers is about young sexually fluid young people who long for each other while butting up against societal expectations and the imposed strictures of American decorum. The final scene of Challengers is thus a chaotic, furious catharsis set to a pulse racing score that turns tennis into sex. Where the despair of Queer never lifts, the agonizing longing of Challengers is ended with a climax in more ways than one.

2. I Saw the TV Glow - Director Jane Schoenbrun is no stranger to my best of the year list. Her debut future We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a top 5 movie for me in 2021. That film demonstrated the promise of Schoenbrun’s talent. I Saw the TV Glow is her first true masterpiece. This strange exploration of friendship, sexuality, identity and trauma, all framed through the fractured lens of popular culture, experiments wildly with form and storytelling. Each frame of I Saw the TV Glow is telling a story and that attention to detail is, for me, what separates a good director from a great director. Schoenbrun is a great director because everything she puts on screen matters.

1. The Substance - I’ve never had an experience like The Substance. The awe-inspiring audacity of The Substance would be enough to make this list but it’s the subtext that bubbles over into a boiling cauldron of rage that makes the film so unendingly fascinating. The way Hollywood treats aging is an ugly industry-wide inside joke that has gone on for far too long and The Substance is a rare movie that forces that conversation into the public discourse.

That said, it’s the shocking body horror that left me a quivering mass of humanity by the time The Substance ended. The gory, bloody, sweaty and violent body horror had me shaking in my seat and gasping for air. I immediately left the theater after The Substance with the thought that this is one of the greatest movies I have ever seen and I never want to see it again. I’ve not seen a straightforward horror movie capable of making me feel the way The Substance made me feel and that’s somehow a symbol of how great The Substance truly is. It’s an experience I would never give up and it is also an experience I don’t want to have again.