It's often said that December for film critics is like tax season for accountants. This is our crunch time, when we attempt to take stock of the past 12 months' worth of movies and determine our favorites, individually and collectively.
Earlier this month, the New York Film Critics Circle gave its best picture award to The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's sweeping drama about a Hungarian-born architect's postwar American rebirth. A few days later, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, of which I'm a member, gave its top prize to Anora, Sean Baker's madly entertaining farce about a Brooklyn sex worker.
It says something about the quality of the movies this year that, as much as I like Anora and The Brutalist, both titles landed just outside my own personal list of favorites. Here, then, are the 10 — no, 11 — best movies of 2024.
It's been more than 50 years since the legendary Víctor Erice made one of the greatest of all Spanish films, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Since then, he's directed only three features, the latest of which comes after a roughly three-decade absence from the director's chair.
Both elegiac and quietly rapturous, Close Your Eyes begins as a kind of cinephile detective story, with a streak of meta: The protagonist (played by Manolo Solo) is himself a long-retired filmmaker, trying to solve the mystery of an old friend and former actor who vanished years earlier. By its transcendent final scenes, this absorbing drama has movingly affirmed the power of love, the inevitability of loss and the consoling pleasures of getting lost in the movies.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World and Evil Does Not Exist
In Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, an invigoratingly foul-mouthed dark comedy from the Romanian director Radu Jude, the astonishing Ilinca Manolache plays a production assistant working inhuman hours on a corporate video promoting — wait for it — workplace safety. In Evil Does Not Exist, a quietly haunting drama from the Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), a proposed glamping site threatens the environmental peace of a woodsy Japanese town. The consequences of unchecked corporate greed are in full, awful view; so are the killer instincts of two of the best, most fiercely original filmmakers working today.
Nickel Boys and A Different Man
These are two most daringly inventive American movies of the year, both of which ingeniously upend our usual notions of empathy and identification. In his wrenching adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel, Nickel Boys, the writer-director RaMell Ross employs a first-person camera that puts us inside the heads of his protagonists, two Black boys enduring juvenile incarceration in Jim Crow-era Florida. In Aaron Schimberg's squirmingly original and provocative A Different Man, Sebastian Stan plays a "facially unique" New Yorker who gets a miraculous chance to inhabit someone else's skin — only to find that he still cannot escape his own.
La Chimera and Music
Two enchanting, achingly romantic dramas put a revivifying spin on ancient myth. Josh O'Connor plays a grubbily charismatic modern-day Orpheus in the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera, a tale of lost tombs and grave robbers that might as well have been titled Plunder the Tuscan Sun. Meanwhile, with Music, the German director Angela Schanelec weaves an enigmatic puzzle rooted in the story of Oedipus Rex — a tragedy that, in this sui generis telling, loses nearly all its narrative footholds but none of its shattering power.
No Other Land and Green Border
Two searing films — one nonfiction, one fiction — look unflinchingly into horror. Still without a U.S. distributor, despite having racked up numerous 2024 festival and critics' prizes, the documentary No Other Land is the work of four filmmakers — two Palestinian, two Israeli — who bravely documented the Israeli government's demolition of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank. The intensely harrowing drama Green Border, from the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, embroils us in the chaos at the Polish-Belarusian border, where refugees, soldiers and human-rights activists find themselves locked in an agonizing geopolitical limbo.
All We Imagine as Light and Hard Truths
The Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix at Cannes for All We Imagine as Light, a quietly shimmering drama about three Mumbai women, all of them chafing, in their own way, against gendered expectations. No less attuned to the ties that bind women, and equally rigorous in his pursuit of realism, the veteran English filmmaker Mike Leigh gave us a pared-to-the-bone drama with Hard Truths, featuring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin (both alums of his 1996 triumph, Secrets & Lies) in two of the year's finest performances.
Copyright 2024 NPR
