12: The Substance (Dir; Coralie Fargeat)

Revolutionary satire? No. Even particularly feminist in its outlook? Also no. Some of the most gross-out gonzo fun you could possibly have in a cinema in 2024? Yes. One of the best ‘shared experience’ movies of the year, Coralie Fargeat’s sexy, gory, and explicit body horror was a great gasp-along as it escalated and escalated into that truly insane Grand Guignol finale.

11: The Order (Dir; Justin Kurzel)

After a big misstep early last year with Renfield, Nicholas Hoult, perhaps the most interesting actor of his generation, came back in 2024 all guns blazing with three striking performances in three of the year’s more striking films. The best of these was Justin Kurzel’s The Order, a solidly old-school and just beautifully shot crime thriller that put Hoult, on top form as a neo-Nazi domestic terrorist, up against Jude Law (in pure Gene Hackman mode as an ageing FBI agent) in an object lesson in just how good this genre is when made by competent filmmakers who really care.

10: Hard Truths (Dir; Mike Leigh)

Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives one of the year’s very best performances in Mike Leigh’s best film since, fittingly, Secrets and Lies. Funny, devastating, and shot with a rare clarity and empathy, Hard Truths takes a lead character who should just be deeply unlikeable and instead makes her richly tragic and even, somehow, sympathetic, brought to life by some simply titanic acting that will make you laugh and cringe before turning round to truly haunt you.

9: All We Imagine As Light (Dir; Payal Kapadia)

Slow, loving, and altogether just beautiful, Payal Kapadia’s ode to sisterhood has been topping all sorts of critics’ year-end lists, and with good reason. Here is a film of excellences both obvious and quiet, deeply realistic yet also utterly dreamlike, finding magic both in the endlessly busy streets of Mumbai and the distant isolation of the Indian countryside. It is genuinely absurd that it was not selected as India’s entry for the International Film Oscar, but All We Imagine As Light is not the sort of film that needs award recognition to be remembered – its capacity to enthral speaks for itself.

8: Anora (Dir; Sean Baker)

Probably the single funniest film of 2024, Anora gets on this list of course for its phenomenal lead performance from Mikey Madison and of course for its dizzying pace and frantic story, but mostly for being a movie that really made me laugh in what was a very comedically dry year at the cinema. From the springy physicality of the performances to the chaotic dialogue and screwball plotting and character dynamics, it’s fantastic to see a proper comedy celebrated and garlanded as much as Anora has been from the moment of its premiere at Cannes. Can it take home Oscar gold? Given how much better it is than the other purported front runners, let’s hope so.

7: Dune Part 2 (Dir; Denis Villeneuve)

Given how mediocre (or just outright bad) a lot of 2024’s biggest box-office behemoths were, it feels like a backhanded compliment to call Dune 2 just the best blockbuster of the year. It’s a lot more than that – a genuine epic in a time when expensive movies *feel* smaller and cheaper than ever, thrilling and daring in its handling of its source material, and just sublimely put together in ever corner of its filmmaking. Also, it’s proof beyond any reasonable doubt that Timothee Chalamet is a bonafide *Movie Star*, a Lisan-al-Gaib on- and off-screen, one of very few young actors who really feel like safe hands for the future of Hollywood.

6: I Saw the TV Glow (Dir; Jane Schoenbrun)

The most purely upsetting film of the year, Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature feels like a truly new style of American horror, a kind that leaves you with a gnawing worry and slight nausea that follows you home long after the credits have rolled and the lights have gone up. The lethal misery it inflicts on its characters felt to me less like classic scares and more like that pit-of-your-stomach pity induced by reading a particularly horrible article in the news, where you just wish things could have gone differently. Soundtracked by an exceptional mixtape of original songs and bursting with colour, it finds horror in the bright lights, a film in which a simple scene of someone walking uneventfully through a school’s corridors is as much a jolt as any jump scare murder or explosion.

5: Nickel Boys (Dir; RaMell Ross)

‘What if Peep Show‘s first-person POV camera technique was used for harrowing humanist drama instead of for (also harrowing) comedy?’ is not really a question that you might think would be answered by one of the best films of the year, but RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel does exactly that. The result is something that never feels like a trick or gimmick, but instead a vital new way to convey the sort of deep inner empathy that novels have always been better at than cinema. Unbearably moving, intimately immersive, and boldly experimental, it’s the most astonishingly confident fiction feature debut since Goran Stolevski’s ingenious You Won’t Be Alone back in 2022, giving us, like that film did, a new voice who has both the ambition and the talent to truly push the medium forward.

4 + 3: Challengers + Queer (Dir; Luca Guadagnino)

Luca Guadagnino’s already impressive career hit a new high in 2024, putting out two of the year’s very best films within eight months of one another, with one being pure, pulsing entertainment and the other a deeply spiritual dive into the soul of a man both of his time and out of it. Is one better than the other? If you absolutely made me choose, I think I’d lean Queer‘s way, but the simple fact is that Guadagnino provided us with over four hours of pure, ten-star cinematic sumptiousness across the year, a feat that takes him from already one of my favourite directors into a rarefied modern auteur stratosphere occupied only by the likes of PTA, Nolan, or (to be further discussed) the likes of Alice Rohrwacher and Brady Corbet.

2: La Chimera (Dir; Alice Rohrwacher)

If the back half of the year belonged to Nicholas Hoult, then the first six months were all about Josh O’Connor (and Zendaya, of course). Just two weeks after the head-spinning Challengers arrived in UK cinemas, it was followed up by another exquisite O’Connor-Italian director collaboration in the form of Alice Rohrwacher’s magical realist La Chimera. Woozy and mystical and perfectly designed and shot, it is essentially the platonic ideal of what I like a movie to look like, beauty and tragedy and an ever-shabbier white linen suit illuminated under the Tuscan sun. Add to that a cast that wouldn’t feel out of place in some picaresque medieval tale, a sublimely sad lead performance, and more than a few hints of the supernatural and you’ve got 2024’s most purely immersive film.

1: The Brutalist (Dir; Brady Corbet)

Quite frankly, what else was this number one spot ever going to be? Brady Corbet’s third film is a dictionary-definition masterpiece, the kind of grand Great American Novel On Screen that was revered back in the ’60s and ’70s and feels almost impossible to get new versions of now, let alone for a simply staggering sub-$10 million budget. Every minute of its three-and-a-half hour runtime is gripping – even the intermission is exciting enough as you wait to head back into this world. A clever, probing script that has one central question about the American Dream that it can rework infinite times, right into a profoundly needling coda. A stacked ensemble cast headed by a magnificent Adrien Brody and a career-defining Guy Pearce (giving, for me, the standout performance of the entire year, lead or supporting). And majestic VistaVision visuals that make it feel like you’re looking at something toweringly old yet also somehow new at the same time. Best of the year? Certainly. Best of the decade so far? It’d be hard to argue against it.