2024 Recap – Best of the Rest (Part One)

by Sara Michelle Fetters - January 1st, 2025 - Features

THIRTY MORE – Because I can (Part One)

11. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

A propulsive tour de force of orgiastic cinematic excess that’s somehow still grounded in naked emotional truths so razor-sharp that they leave a purifying scar.

12. Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)

In a reality where everything and everyone seems to be perpetually online, how do we truly know who is watching whom?

13. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)

The natural world has rarely been so beautiful, humanity so clueless, and the emotional truths of living in the moment for the moment so hauntingly cathartic.

14. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

Marianne Jean-Baptiste doesn’t just give the performance of her career, but the best one of 2024. Astonishing.

15. My Old Ass (Megan Park)

Do mushrooms, meet your future self, learn profound life lessons that will shatter every concept of reality you ever previously had. Sounds like a summer to remember to me!

16. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Wes Ball)

Apes. Strong. Together.

17. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

The arts change lives. The arts save lives.

18. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

An unforgettable trip to Poland to honor a beloved relative and learn first-hand what she and millions of other Jews experienced during the Holocaust. Hysterical. Heartbreaking. Haunting. Life-affirming. Wonderful.

19. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

Leave it to an animated cat to make surviving a catastrophic flood so exciting, moving, and most of all profound.

20. Crossing (Levan Akin)

Three lives are forever intertwined as a retired schoolteacher searches through the back alleys and rundown apartment buildings of Istanbul for her missing Trans niece.

21. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

Two boys valiantly fight for survival at a Florida reform school in this stunning adaptation of Colson Whitehead‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The best shot film of 2024.

22. The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders)

A stranded sentient robot and an orphaned baby goose form a found family in this animated marvel. Many tears were shed, and all of them were justified.

23. Strange Darling (JT Mollner)

A Lady and a Demon meet for a one night stand and nothing goes as originally planned for either of them.

24. The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar)

Middle of the road Almodóvar is still better than 95% of every other filmmaker’s crowning achievements, and this English language euthanasia melodrama is no exception. Shattering in the best possible way.

25. Immaculate (Michael Mohan)