Spencer Henderson’s Top 10 Best Movies of 2024

In many ways, 2024 felt like the first year that the industry was mostly out of the effects of the pandemic. While 2023 was the year of Barbenheimer, I still think the early stretches of that year felt impacted by the pandemic. 2024 was an interesting year because it felt kind of like things were beginning to go back to the way they were for the industry: Disney and the MCU reclaimed their places at the top few slots of the box office; franchise films and sequels were the overwhelming success stories of the year; and we might be headed to an extremely polarizing Best Picture winner in the flavor of Green Book or Crash with a film I consider truly terrible, Emilia Perez. It feels like we are back!

This year I broke my record of new releases seen in a year with over 170 films, and even then, I didn’t get to see even close to every single film released this year. With that in mind, the following list is based on an incomplete sampling. While I have likely seen more films than the individual currently reading this, I still haven’t seen every film. Additionally, film is a subjective experience, and my list of favorites might differ wildly from yours. The nature of these things is that different things move people, and we all have diverse tastes and experiences that inform how we connect with a film. If your favorite film isn’t on my list, it doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination mean that it wasn’t a great film. It simply comes down to my list is comprised of the films this year that truly stood above the rest, for me. In some instances, I wanted to take the opportunity with my platform of the amazing MovieBabble to share films that perhaps you haven’t seen or even heard of because that is my job as a critic! How awesome is it to have the opportunity to broaden your horizons and be introduced to something new that could potentially connect deeply with you? Regardless of how you feel about my list, feel free to leave your favorite film(s) of the year in the comments below. I will gladly read them.

I briefly want to mention that in my top 10 of 2023 piece, I mentioned that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see Wim Wender’s Perfect Days to my regret because I thought there was a chance it could make my list. To add a bow to that thought, I saw Perfect Days a few weeks after I wrote the piece, and had I seen it before making the list, it would have been my #1 film of 2023. I think the film is a wonderful poem about the beauty in the small and quiet moments of life that I watched at a time when I needed it. It’s an incredible work by Wenders, and I think it stands shoulder to shoulder with the best films released in 2023.

This year, there is a film I didn’t get to see before making this list that I have a sneaking suspicion would have made my top 10, and it’s because it doesn’t have a distributor. That film is No Other Land. I think it’s quite shameful that a film with as important and timely a topic as this documentary is something that American audiences cannot see. The fact that a documentary that could make a difference by making American citizens aware of the injustices faced by the citizens of Gaza at the hands of the IDF isn’t something we can watch speaks for itself.

I always start my list with a series of categories that make up a sort of list of honorable mentions; films that didn’t quite make it onto my list of top 10 films of the year, but that I think deserve recognition and acclaim nonetheless. I do the same categories every year, so without further ado, let’s get started!

Most Surprising Film – I saw Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn at the end of 2021, and felt quite underwhelmed by the experience. There were things I found to be smart, insightful, and funny about it, but it ultimately failed to connect with me completely. Needless to say, I approached his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World expecting something interesting, but maybe not something that would completely connect with me emotionally. I am so happy to report that this film completely blew me away. This is a long film — almost 3 hours long — and it is certainly not for everyone. It’s a slower-paced film, it’s quite crude: both in technique, and in its sense of humor, and it doesn’t spell out what it is trying to say in the way audiences are accustomed to. I found this to be a profound, hilarious, and deeply angry examination of being alive in the times we are living in. Times when truly despicable figures like Andrew Tate are on the rise, when industries are actively destroying our planet and gaslighting the public about that fact, and when the working class is exploited as they are chewed up and spit out by those in power. All we can do is make dark jokes about how fucked we all are into the void of the internet.

You Just Didn’t Understand It, Man – Last year, this slot went to Skinamarink, which I maintain is a truly fantastic and unique slice of horror. This year, I think the clear choice for this category is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End. This film had what I would describe at best as mixed reactions. While the post-apocalyptic setting is most certainly not fresh, the characters we explore and the ideas at play in this film are incredibly compelling. This is ultimately a film about a group of people in complete denial at the expense of the survival of our species. People completely unwilling to engage or interrogate anything that could threaten the immense level of wealth and power but unaware that they will never reach a level of satisfaction; no matter how great the wealth and status. On top of all this, it’s a musical that adds an extra layer of uniqueness to the entire mix. For my money, this is easily the best musical I saw in 2024.

Most Criminally Underseen – This category is pretty self-explanatory and there is a film I saw clear back in January that has held a spot near the top of my list, that I’ve watched become destined for this slot as no one saw or is talking about it to my great dismay, and that is India Donaldson’s Good One. This film made me think of Kelly Reichardt’s works in it’s scale and intimate examination of its characters. It’s a very funny film, but it’s also very insightful and there is a complexity and tension that sneaks up on you thanks to a great script also by Donaldson. The lead performance by Lily Collias is worthy of being a breakout performance, and I will gladly be there for whatever India Donaldson does next because she clearly has raw talent that I would love to see continue to evolve and grow. I truly cannot recommend this gem of a film enough.

Film(s) I’m Most Upset Didn’t Make the List – Like every year, there are multiple films here: Rebel Ridge saw Jeremy Saulnier deliver an incredible and timely thriller with a truly badass and hopefully star-making lead performance by Aaron Pierre. Chandler Levack’s I Like Movies felt like I was watching myself as a pretentious high schooler obsessed with films, sometimes at the expense of my relationships with others. The Count of Monte Cristo is a wildly entertaining adaptation of one of the greatest revenge tales. RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys almost felt like a reinvention of the cinematic language in its piercingly empathetic portrayal of racial injustice. Rachel Lambert delivered a wonderfully small-scale and quiet examination of loneliness and connection with a career-best Daisy Ridley in Sometimes I Think About Dying. Brady Corbet delivered an epic look at the immigrant experience and the lie known as the “American Dream” in The Brutalist. Payal Kapadia created an emotionally complex study of two Indian women who broke my heart in All We Imagine as Light. Jesse Eisenberg delivered an experience that connected to me on a deeply personal level about loss and family in A Real Pain. Robert Eggers continued dazzling with his truly beautiful, and nightmarish reimagining of Nosferatu. Finally, the singular beauty of community and the power of online connection was examined through a truly tragic, but beautiful real-life story in the best documentary of the year, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

Any of these films could have made my top 10 on a different day, and the number of films here displays what a strong year it was for cinema.

Most Cinematic Experience of 2024 – This category is hard to fill because I’m torn between two choices. Since I’m making the arbitrary rules of this list, I’m going to give this slot to two different pieces of media. The first is Denis Villenueve’s Dune: Part II. This one is pretty self-explanatory: we are fortunate to have filmmaking of this quality and scale. If not for one film in my top 10, this would likely be my favorite big blockbuster of the year. It is everything I could have hoped for in an adaptation of a classic science fiction novel. The second piece of media I am going to award this slot is the truly exceptional series, Shogun. Easily the best TV series of 2024 is this complex, intense, utterly engrossing examination of a feudal Japan facing war, colonization, and a rapidly changing/expanding world. Anna Sawai gives one of the best performances of 2024 in any medium and this show is more than worthy of all of the acclaim it has received. If you haven’t watched it, you should seriously consider correcting it because this is as good and prestigious as TV can get.

Now, without further ado, let’s move on to my Top 10 Favorite Films of 2024:

#10: The Devil’s Bath

Austrian duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala deliver their finest work yet in this genuinely disturbing and harrowing slice of folk horror. This horror film features nothing supernatural. It explores a time in history so dark and oppressive, that it’s understandable for anyone to turn away from the truly upsetting imagery you are subjected to. There’s a really powerful allegory here about the oppressive forces of religion and the resulting feelings of suffocation, depression, and internal collapse, particularly with women. Anja Plaschg’s performance here is in consideration for the best I saw in 2024. This is most certainly not a feel-good film. You will leave it shaken, disgusted, and exhausted, but it’s an important film because it tells the story of common injustice leveled against the vulnerable, and in a country on what seems to be a fast track to Christian Nationalism, I found this film as effective as almost any horror film this year.

#9: How To Have Sex

Molly Manning Walker’s portrait of the disturbing reality of party/drinking culture is a gutting experience in every sense. Mia McKenna-Bruce’s lead performance here isn’t only extraordinary, it’s brave. Sexual consent is a concept that is not easy to portray in such a raw and honest fashion in film, but this film does it in a way that is an essential experience that youth of a certain age and adults in any culture could benefit from experiencing. What makes this film so heartbreaking is how common the events it portrays occur. This is not some rare experience; it is a widespread epidemic that can be addressed through thorough and more frank forms of sex education. The word “important” gets thrown around often with films, but this film most certainly fits that bill. I truly think that if every teenage/adult male watched this film, the world would move towards being a better, safer, and more empathetic place for young women; for the duration of the runtime, you experience the world through the eyes of one.

#8: Hundreds of Beavers

This film is a work of complete and utter genius. It feels as if the DIY spirit of something like The Evil Dead is on full display when genuine creativity and raw talent take center stage. Watching Hundreds of Beavers, I felt assaulted in the best possible way. The energy this film maintains is truly remarkable and the way it is constantly raising the stakes to the most absurd levels imaginable is such a joy to witness. This reminded me of one of my all-time favorite films, Mad Max: Fury Road, because it’s a film that takes a rather simple idea and executes it with such masterful skill, and truly genius technique that it leaves you awestruck. This is an incredibly inspiring example that you can make something truly fantastic for little if you have the will and the talent. This one instantly entered the ranks of the best comedies of the 21st century.

#7: Evil Does Not Exist

How do you follow up a film as profound and affecting as Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s masterpiece, Drive My Car? It seems the answer to him is to explore something completely different, but no less compelling. The scale of Evil Does Not Exist at first feels small: a rural Japanese community whose environmental well-being is threatened by a corporation’s desire to construct a glamping site. However, upon further examination, the community acts as a microcosm for the environmental decay of the world at the hands of unchecked corporate greed. There’s a scene in this film of a town hall meeting that is one of the most riveting scenes I saw all year that is just people talking, but the tension of the scene is so perfectly escalated. I think what sets this film apart is the way that each character is portrayed as people who wants to do the right thing. Even the representatives of the corporation: intelligently portrayed as actors hired by the corporation executives because they couldn’t be bothered to show up to face the heat of opposition from the town, are given depth and empathy. This film also features one of my favorite scores of the year by Eiko Ishibashi, and I’ve returned to it many times throughout the year.

#6: The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Made in secret by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, this film is a brave critique of state-sanctioned oppression and violence. Intercut with real footage of civil unrest surrounding protests regarding women’s rights in Iran is the story of a family who serves as a microcosm of the conflict. This film has so much to say about the generational divides that separate us: an older generation bound to the status quo and comfort of tradition in direct opposition to a younger generation primally screaming out in protest to the injustice and pointless oppressive nature of that tradition. The third act of this film flirts with going off the rails but becomes one of the most intense and troubling stretches of any film of 2024. The cast and crew of this film risked imprisonment and harm to tell this story, and filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has already gone to prison for speaking out against his government through his art. The literal bare minimum the rest of the world can do is listen.

A Note Before the Top 5: Before I continue with the list, I want to say that more than any other year of doing my best-of lists here at MovieBabble, I struggled with where to place things in the top 5. There are versions of this list where each of the next 5 films are my favorite film of the year, and I truly believe that each of these films is completely deserving of that placement and tomorrow, the placement could (and likely will) change. So without further ado, here are my top 5 films of the year, each of which is my favorite in some way.

#5: I Saw the TV Glow

There are times when you walk into a cinema, and you leave feeling like you’ve changed as a person. This is a film that gave me one of those experiences. This is one of the most profoundly depressing films I have ever watched. It reminded me of Charlie Kaufman’s i’m thinking of ending things in that way. Jane Schoenbrun is a filmmaker who, with only their second film, feels like a filmmaker who has arrived fully formed and equipped to tell us stories in a way we have never seen them told before. This horror film is an allegory about being trapped inside of a body you don’t belong in, even as you suffocate from the inside out. It’s about the feeling of screaming for help to a world that refuses to listen to you and will tell you that you don’t exist. It’s likely the best film I’ve seen about the trans experience, and it announces the arrival of a filmmaker whose voice is greatly needed in a culture of unchecked bigotry and state-sanctioned violence against the transgender community.

#4: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Mad Max: Fury Road is my favorite action film ever made, and is a film that I consider to be in the running for best of the 21st century thus far. This made Furiosa easily my most anticipated film of the year. What makes Furiosa such an incredible film is that it doesn’t just attempt to recreate what made Mad Max: Fury Road such a cinematic shot of adrenaline. This film is much larger in scope, with a much wider cast of characters and locations. It takes place over a very long period, and it is patient and precise with its pacing. Like the first Mad Max film, this is a revenge film, but it’s told with the tools George Miller has spent his life developing and refining. It also benefits from having truly excellent performances from Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, and Tom Burke. I also find this film to feel incredibly timely as it’s about a loud, buffoonish, and cruel moron who lies and cheats his way into power but is revealed to be pathetically incompetent. The third chapter of this film titled, “The Stowaway”, is far and away the best piece of action filmmaking of the 2020s thus far as it displays craftsmanship that truly boggles the mind. Furiosa deserved so much more than the underwhelming box office numbers that it received, and I will weep for the third Furiosa film George Miller wanted to make that I will likely never get to see.

#3: Challengers

I’m a sucker for a good sports film, and Challengers is so much more than just that which makes it likely my new favorite of the genre. This is a massively entertaining film about both what it takes, and what it means, to be “great”. The three lead performances are outstanding, but I want to particularly shout out Josh O’Connor who gives the best supporting performance I saw in 2024. He walks an incredibly fine line with this performance as he plays a character who you manage to be charmed by one scene, hate with a passion the next, and then feel genuine sympathy for the scene after that. Not since Paul Mescal’s performance in Aftersun have I felt so completely sold on an actor after one film.

Meeting these three truly fantastic performances is filmmaking of the highest order. Challengers some of the most inventive shot compositions I have seen by a major studio. It has the best editing I saw in a film in 2024, and it has a propulsive score that makes the film exhilarating to watch. I love Luca Guadagnino as a filmmaker, and I’ve even had films of his in my top 10 lists here previously, but this is easily my favorite of his films.

#2: Anora

I’m so grateful to be alive at a time when Sean Baker is making movies. For the first third of this film, I was having fun, but I also wasn’t sure if this was going to rank among Baker’s other works. As someone who avoids trailers, I didn’t know what this film was about and it felt like to me Sean Baker had made a romantic comedy in the flavor of Pretty Woman. Being a Sean Baker film, this meant it was better than any romantic comedy I had seen in years, but I worried that I was going to walk away disappointed. Needless to say, the film was way ahead of me because Sean Baker is one of the most intelligent and genuinely thoughtful writers working today. This film evolves into something so much more interesting, complex, and tragic than just a romantic comedy. It’s a film about how the ultra-wealthy view the working class as a means to an end. A rich person can have what they chalk up to a “bad weekend” that completely uproots and destroys the lives of the less powerful in their wake. The ending scene of this film is so mature and shattering, and I love how Baker doesn’t spell it out for you. He relies on the truly EXTRAORDINARY performance of Mikey Madison and the raw and gritty sound design of the final scene to bring the viewer back to reality.

#1: The Substance

I’ve seen some criticisms about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance lacking subtlety, and all I have to say is take a look at the world around you: we have entered a second term of Donald Trump, women’s rights are being stripped away by the Supreme Court, and powerful men in the entertainment industry such as Diddy and Weinstein reveal a hostile environment run by monstrous men. We don’t exactly live in subtle times, and sometimes we need a filmmaker to come in with a sledgehammer to hammer the point home, and that filmmaker is Coralie Fargeat. When I think of film experiences of 2024, this is the first film I think of due to how shocking, disgusting, hilarious, and truly bonkers this satire is about the cesspool that is the film industry. I’m a massive fan of the work of David Cronenberg, and with Fargeat, we appear to have a filmmaker who will take the grotesque body horror of Cronenberg and bring it into the new age of filmmaking.

To match the truly horrifying visuals are two seriously committed performances from a career-best Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. It’s easy to talk about the scenes with all the blood and guts, but almost more impressive are the moments with no gore: a truly repulsive moment involving Dennis Quaid and shrimp, or a gutting scene of Demi Moore getting ready for a date. This is a truly unforgettable film that puts Coralie Fargeat in the realm of best horror filmmakers. It is so awesome to see a film as gnarly as this one getting awards nominations.

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Thank you for reading! What are your thoughts on my best movies of 2024? Comment down below!