The top ten
I Saw the TV Glow
Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga
The Zone of Interest
Priscilla
The Beast
The First Omen
Evil Does Not Exist
Juror #2
The Sweet East
Kinds of Kindness
Film of the Year
I Saw the TV Glow
The de facto cult film of the year (you’ll love it or hate it, it seems), but for those who got I Saw the TV Glow it was an immediate, precious and personal triumph from rising star filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, who already scored critical success in 2022 with her viral breakout We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. I Saw the TV Glow deals in transness, in outsiderism, in lonerism, in fundamental dysphoria. It’s an incredibly empathetic portrait of high schoolers turned adults who feel at odds in their own skin, and a creative paean to finding escapism in the wonderful, impossible worlds of genre storytelling. Combined with perhaps the defining curated soundtrack of the decade thus far, Schoenbrun has created a lovingly handmade masterpiece of queerdom and disaffection that will be treasured for decades to come.
Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga
Mad Max has had such a durable legacy and George Miller’s prior iteration – 2015’s adored Fury Road – left such a shadow over action cinema that who knew what to expect from this long-gestated prequel story, fleshing out the history of it’s iconic title character. Working on a more mythic scale – a story spanning decades, not days – Miller reckons with ideas of vengeance in a manner that feels akin to the widescreen ambitions of Sergio Leone. Anya Taylor-Joy is cold fury personified, while Chris Hemsworth – loosed temporarily from the shackles of Marvel’s reductive comic relief – chews Shakespearian dialogue in a manner to make him feel legitimate again. This stirring, episodic saga is a bold, thrumming late-career swing from Miller, and arguable his strongest outing of all. Furious.
The Zone of Interest
Few films in recent years – let alone 2024 – have felt as disquietingly resonant as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Revered on the festival circuit the year prior, it’s pan-Atlantic release in time for awards season ran as a stark and uncomfortable counterpoint to the ongoing horrors in Gaza. This distant yet stifling scrutiny on the compartmentalisation of abject atrocities came to feel like one of the most prescient artistic offerings of our times. Glazer’s fixed eye throughout is daunting, but it’s the sound design that truly makes The Zone of Interest reverberate through the synapses, refusing to dilute what walls can block from vision. A deeply austere piece of work but, when confronted with the thing, it’s power is undeniable.
Priscilla
Sofia Coppola’s miraculous return-to-form Priscilla dropped in the UK way-back-when on Jan 1st 2024, just allowing it eligibility for this end-of-year-list. It is to the film’s immense credit that it hasn’t gotten lost in the shuffle of a bustling year for movies, and retains just as much quiet power and poise now as when it first emerged all those months ago. Beginning a sensational year for it’s star Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla realigns the Elvis mythos from the perspective of his bewitched child bride. Coppola’s pervasive themes of isolation, celebrity and coming-of-age reassert themselves in a deft, poetic study of grooming performed under the most heightened and unusual circumstances. The soundtrack’s absolutely glorious, too. As troubling a movie as it is exquisite.
The Beast
The latest from Bertrand Bonello – a director always worth keeping tabs with regardless of the picture in question – is a provocative, ambitious and singular study in the properties (and intersections) of love and trauma, loosely adapting Henry James’ popular novella into an era-spanning sci-fi triptych in which Léa Seydoux and George McKay are inextricably drawn together in disparate ways. From an essay in romantic flirtation in the 1920s through a lurid extrapolation of incel culture in the 2010s and off into the future, The Beast is a ballsy, uncompromising effort. Even if it’s an overreach, it’s a maverick one. And Seydoux manages to outdo herself yet again. Worth taking the plunge.
The First Omen
2024, it seems, was the year of the overachieving prequel. Even if The First Omen – like Furiosa – wasn’t quite the box office behemoth it deserved to be, Arkshana Stevenson’s studio debut took the limitations of a decades-stagnant IP and served the year’s fiercest, most palpably atmospheric horror experience. Like it’s (n)uncanny sister picture Immaculate (also released within the space of a few weeks), this was another blatant reckoning with the ramifications of the overturning of Roe v Wade two years prior. Along with The Substance, this year’s clear theme in horror has been women losing autonomy over their bodies, birthing entities outside of their control. Riffing on genre greats like Suspiria and Possession, The First Omen nevertheless carves out its own place in the pantheon, anchored by a whirling dervish of a turn from Nell Tiger Free. So good that the inevitable, awkward franchise duty at the end barely registers; you’re still in recovery mode.
Evil Does Not Exist
As quietly observational as the finest of Kelly Reichardt cuts, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s depiction of a rural septic tank dispute might not sound like the most riveting of cinematic detours, but the Japanese auteur slyly provided us one of the year’s most giving onion-like movies, with layers peeling away in the aftermath of watching. Like last year’s masterful Romanian offering R.M.N. it all pivots around an oddly compelling town meeting. With such a philosophical (and ironic) title, the film ends with a seemingly inevitable outburst of violence, born of economic, territorial and environmental frustrations. We’re left suspended in the aftermath, drifting like a ghost through the trees, contemplating what it all means, and what it all means to us.
Juror #2
It’s official, courtroom dramas are so in right now… Pipping one of the year’s most genuinely thrilling and disturbing efforts (Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms), the 40th directorial effort from Clint Eastwood became the improbable underdog worth rooting for when WB foolishly limited it’s stateside release to just 50 cinemas. That they reversed this decision based on flourishing ticket sales felt like one of the year’s small triumphs, backed by the sincere quality of this late-game effort from it’s iconic director. Thematically rich and inquisitive, Eastwood presents us a variant on the 12 Angry Men brand of legalese soap opera, in which our good Samaritan very much has skin in the game. The cast are all-the-way good, but Nicholas Hoult excels as Justin Kemp, the titular juror with everything to hide. A classically-minded modern classic.
The Sweet East
A rancid dirty bomb from the Eastern seaboard. Much-admired cinematographer Sean Price Williams took on directing duties for this paperchain of shaggy dog stories with Talia Ryder’s so-over-it teen Lillian adrift among outcasts, libertarians and – worst of all – filmmakers. The Sweet East thumbs its nose at the need for snooty principles like character arcs or resolution, instead perpetuating a legacy of scuzzy, upstart cinema where a bad attitude is a badge of honor. This has become a particularly irreverent comfort movie in the space of a year. Boasting great guest work from the likes of Simon Rex and Ayo Edeberi, it’s Ryder herself who maintains amid the noise and dissonance of Williams’ American wasteland.
Kinds of Kindness
Kinds of Kindness sort of snuck up on me this year. By which I mean that I saw it, I appreciated it, and I put it aside as an also-ran… only for it to keep coming back from the recesses of my mind. This weird, sprawling, feel-bad anthology of stories on the subject of devotion seemed very much like the indie B-side to Yorgos Lanthimos’ flashier mainstream crossover success Poor Things. Not to diminish Poor Things but, as the dust settled, this darkly comic, often tragic, always uncomfortable trilogy of tales ricocheted longer in the long-run. It’s rare for an anthology piece to feel this consistent (on Letterboxd I half-jokingly called it ‘my Pulp Fiction‘). Strong performances from the recurring cast and the way cinematographer Robbie Ryan captures the New Orleans light helped seal this one a spot in the top ten for the year. Even so, approach with caution.
The best of the rest…
Hoard
Queer
Perfect Days
Poor Things
Longlegs
Fancy Dance
Samsara
Red Rooms
Love Lies Bleeding
A Different Man
Hundreds of Beavers
Megalopolis
In A Violent Nature
La Chimera
Blitz
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World
Civil War
Bird
Drive-Away Dolls
Anora
The Lost Highway Hotel 