I watched over 400 films in 2024. This is an average of 8.3 films per week. I do not know how this happened. It was one of the fullest years in recent memory—I taught overload every semester, and taught summer courses too; my wife, Katie, completed a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh; my eldest son began high school, which meant having three kids in three different schools and all the activities therein; and I entered into the next decade of midlife: my forties. And I suppose I managed to fit 400+ films in the midst of it all. A full year indeed.
Instead of publishing weekly movie reviews, I focused my writing energies on completing two books: Cinematic Transcendence: Theology and the Films of Christopher Nolan (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic) and Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell (Bloomsbury Academic). The latter is a short book in the 33 1/3 series about my favorite album from my favorite musical artist. The former is an academic monograph in the Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture series at Rowman & Littlefield that considers filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s movies—from Following to Oppenheimer—as works of cinematic theology. Both books will be published sometime in 2025 or early 2026. They have been labors of love, and I can’t wait for folks to read them.
Was 2024 a good year for movies? It depends on what you watched. There were a lot of sequels (Dune: Part Two, Gladiator II, Joker: Folie à Deux, Moana 2, Inside Out 2, Smile 2, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Twisters), prequels (A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Transformers One, Mufasa: The Lion King), underwhelming Spider-Man-adjacent films which don’t actually feature Spider-Man (Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter, Venom: The Last Dance), and fourth entries in That Franchise You Thought Was Already Done (Despicable Me 4, Kung Fu Panda 4, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F). In the midst of this cinematic glut of mediocrity, there were independent and international films which developed strong cult followings via creative marketing techniques and worth of mouth (or word of review on Letterboxd). Many of these films are on my list below. Indeed, it was an exceptional year of original, innovative, and groundbreaking cinema—you just had to know where to look.
Thus, I’ve chosen to publish a Top 25 films list this year. In previous years, it’s been a Top 20 or a lower number. But there were just too many wonderful (and underseen) films that I wanted to highlight in the hopes that you might discover a new favorite. My list has expanded to meet this hopeful desire. By “top” films, I don’t necessarily mean the “best” or “greatest” films of the year; these are simply the twenty-five films from 2024 I’d consider my favorite at this moment in time, films that resonated with and affected me on some deeper level. Some critically acclaimed films I haven’t seen yet include: The Beast, The Brutalist, Close Your Eyes, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Hard Truths, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, and A Real Pain. It’s likely that one of these could have ended up on my list if I had watched it in 2024—there’s usually some film that I see in January that I wish I had included on my year-end list (e.g., my top film of 2016 is no longer La La Land; it’s Paterson). If a film you really liked from 2024 year doesn’t appear on my list, it’s because I didn’t see it (e.g., Wicked, Moana 2), I didn’t like it (e.g., Megalopolis, Kinds of Kindness), or I didn’t love it quite as much as the twenty-five films included here (e.g., Dune: Part Two, I Saw the TV Glow, Nosferatu).
Each year, I try to identify a theme from my top films. Last year, it was “dialogue“; previously, it was “a boundary-breaking quest for community” and “death, grief, isolation, and loss.” For 2024, the theme is “maturing.” As I said, I turned 40 this year. I am feeling my age in my body, and am increasingly aware of the limited time I have with my children as they grow up into young adults. I am also more conscious of my own limits, even as I am more comfortable in my own skin. Maturity takes time, patience, and humility; many of the films included on this list are about growing up, growing older, and growing in wisdom. They are about the aging process, approaching death, and accepting (or not) the limits and graces of the embodied human condition.
Following the example of film critic Josh Larsen for his Top 10 of 2024, I’ve chosen to write only one sentence for each film. Here are my Top 25 Films of 2024.
25. Sometimes I Think About Dying (Rachel Lambert)
I am a total sucker for indie movies filmed and set in Oregon, especially those which capture the melancholic misfit ethos of this particular green-and-gray corner of the world.
24. My Old Ass (Megan Park)
I turned 40 this year, and this coming-of-age story about a high school senior (Maisy Stella, in a star-making performance) who encounters her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza, delightful as ever) while on a hallucinogenic mushroom trip wonderfully captures the existential dread of growing up, growing older, and facing death.
23. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)
A haunting enigma from the director of Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist features one of the most opaque endings I’ve ever encountered in a film, accompanied by an extraordinary elegiac musical score from Eiko Ishibashi.
22. Janet Planet (Annie Baker)
A film about seeing and being seen, there’s a real palpable sense of time and place in playwright Annie Baker’s debut, which focuses on a single mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), and her wide-eyed 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), as the latter learns to live in the orbit of the former.
21. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
To coin a new word, this is a yearnful film—the quiet romantic yearning on display in roommates Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) shines through like the bright lights of Mumbai piercing the darkness of the night.
20. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
Even though I want to praise the trio of exceptional performances from Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne, the moment I’ll remember most from this heartbreaking drama about facing a loved one’s death is the late-act ambitious (and emotionally risky!) scene featuring the sisters’ dying father, portrayed by Jay O. Sanders, which left me as a weepy mess.
19. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
A darkly hilarious film about performance, identity, embodiment, and the malleability of the self, A Different Man would make for a great double (!) bill with another doppelgänger film from this year, The Substance.
18. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)
Filmed in stark black-and-white, Green Border is a powerful and urgent political drama made up of extremes—extreme injustices, extreme suffering, extreme despair, but also extreme compassion for and solidarity with those whom God has a preferential option for: the marginalized, the refugee, the outcast, the forgotten.
17. ME (Don Hertzfeldt)
I don’t know what the latest mind-blowing animated masterpiece from Don Hertzfeldt means, but I can’t stop thinking about it.
16. Thelma (Josh Margolin)
A geriatric action flick, this is basically the same plot as The Beekeeper, except instead of Jason Statham, it’s 95-year-old June Squibb on a mission to take down some online scammers, whatever the cost.
15. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier)
Rebel Ridge is a taut crime thriller that this Christian pacifist film critic could genuinely appreciate for both its ethics and aesthetics, as the lead character (Aaron Pierre, in an outstanding performance) continually tries to not get anyone killed and must make creative decisions in order to do so.
14. Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
Generating a horrifying/thrilling experience even though it isn’t really a horror or thriller film, Red Rooms is frighteningly absorbing as it depicts the dangers of obsessions and being online.
13. The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)
A great Danish period piece, The Promised Land is the most dramatic and powerful film I’ve ever seen about potato farming.
12. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
Like the Coen brothers meets David Cronenberg yet with its own embodied neo-noir vision, this is a film with a pulse.
11. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
This film is truly wonderful, as in “full of wonder”—it’s as if someone asked Terrence Malick to direct one of the Madagascar movies.
10. The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders)
A great Mom Movie and another “robot as Christ-figure” in the tradition of The Iron Giant and WALL-E, The Wild Robot might be sentimental and simplistic in its messaging, but it’s a beautiful film nonetheless; the first two acts are near-perfect visual storytelling.
9. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
The Substance is deliberately grotesque—watching it brought me the closest I’ve ever been to throwing up in a movie theater (I mean this as praise).
8. Anora (Sean Baker)
A madcap fairy tale about the economics of sex and love, there are plenty of comparisons to be made—Nights of Cabiria, Uncut Gems, After Hours, Mamma Roma—but I think the film Anora reminds me of the most is the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta.
7. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)
I hope George Miller gets to make as many of these brazenly bonkers Mad Max movies as he wants.
6. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)
Sing Sing is a divine reminder that the arts can set us free and beauty can save the world.
5. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
The first Guadagino film I’ve enjoyed, Challengers immerses us in a tangled trinity of tennis players, their love and lust (and lust for love) bolstered by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ heavy techno musical score as they collectively reach a breaking point.
4. Conclave (Edward Berger)
Sometimes a film comes along and surprises you by renewing your faith in God.
3. Good One (India Donaldson)
With its subtly subversive and engrossing tale of a young woman, Sam (Lily Collias, who gives the best performance of the year), navigating out of the woods of toxic masculinity on a camping trip with her father and his best friend, Good One certainly lives up to its name.
2. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
A major feature film debut from RaMell Ross (director of the doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening) where you can tell that the cinematic form is being expanded right before your eyes, Nickel Boys succeeds in achieving powerfully believable intersubjective realism precisely because the immersive cinematography and expressionistic editing creates a robust sense of embodied space, allowing the viewer to truly inhabit the filmic world.
1. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
My favorite film of the year, Hundreds of Beavers, is not only an indie DIY pastiche of silent slapstick, looney Chuck Jones-esque animation, and Let’s Play video game walkthroughs, it’s also a subversive, quasi-religious parable about the transformative power of pilgrimage—the perfect blend of sagacity and stupidity, its wisdom is found in its foolishness. (I’ve written a forthcoming longform essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room on why this is the best film of 2024.)
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