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The 40 Best Movies of 2024

From Anora and The Brutalist to No Other Land and Dahomey, these are the 40 most acclaimed and significant movies released for audiences in 2024.
Opened Runtime10 min Written byDocumentaryTube Team
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There was no single definition of a “2024 movie” this year. Some films premiered at festivals in 2023 before receiving a U.S. release in 2024; others arrived first in cinemas, on streaming services, or through video on demand. This list uses a combination of critics’ consensus and the strengths of the films themselves, drawing on the IndieWire critics’ poll, the Sight and Sound international critics’ poll, and Metacritic’s year-end rankings.

For DocumentaryTube readers, the selection gives particular attention to nonfiction cinema, international filmmaking, political subjects, and movies that use form to make familiar stories feel new. The result is not a claim that these are the only great films of the year, but a practical guide to the 40 most significant and rewarding releases.

The 40 best movies of 2024

  1. Anora

    Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner begins as a fast, funny romance between a Brooklyn sex worker and the son of a Russian oligarch before turning into a bruising class drama. Mikey Madison gives the film its unstable, magnetic center. It topped the IndieWire critics’ poll and placed second in the Sight and Sound poll.

  2. The Brutalist

    Brady Corbet’s imposing postwar epic follows a Hungarian-Jewish architect rebuilding his life and career in the United States. Its formal ambition, historical sweep, and Adrien Brody’s commanding performance make it one of the year’s defining dramas.

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    #1 Best Overall
  3. All We Imagine as Light

    Payal Kapadia’s lyrical film follows three women negotiating work, friendship, migration, and loneliness in Mumbai. Its intimate view of urban life earned it the Grand Prix at Cannes and the top position in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll.

  4. Nickel Boys

    RaMell Ross adapts Colson Whitehead’s novel through a striking first-person visual perspective. The subjective camerawork makes institutional racism feel immediate and disorienting, turning a historical story into an intensely personal experience.

  5. The Substance

    Coralie Fargeat’s savage body-horror satire attacks ageism, beauty culture, and the entertainment industry through grotesque transformation. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley commit fully to the film’s outrageous physicality.

  6. Challengers

    Luca Guadagnino’s tennis drama is really a study of desire, competition, and control. Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist turn a decades-long triangle into a tense psychological match, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score supplies its relentless pulse.

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  7. Dune: Part Two

    Denis Villeneuve completes his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel with vast landscapes, intricate political tensions, and exceptional large-format filmmaking. It delivers spectacle without abandoning the story’s questions about power, religion, and messianic leadership.

  8. I Saw the TV Glow

    Jane Schoenbrun’s eerie coming-of-age film uses a fictional television program to explore repression, identity, alienation, and the fear of watching life pass by. Its dreamlike atmosphere makes it one of the year’s most distinctive horror films.

  9. Conclave

    Edward Berger turns the election of a new pope into a tightly engineered thriller about institutional power, secrecy, and faith. Ralph Fiennes leads a strong ensemble of cardinals whose private ambitions complicate the public ritual.

  10. A Real Pain

    Jesse Eisenberg writes, directs, and stars opposite Kieran Culkin in a darkly funny road movie about cousins visiting Poland to understand their family history. Its treatment of Holocaust memory is uncomfortable, humane, and resistant to easy sentiment.

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  11. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

    Mohammad Rasoulof’s political thriller follows an Iranian family whose domestic tensions intensify alongside the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Shot secretly, the film carries the pressure of its own production history; Rasoulof left Iran before its Cannes premiere, where it won the Special Jury Prize.

  12. Flow

    Gints Zilbalodis’s dialogue-free animated adventure follows a cat and several other animals surviving a catastrophic flood. Expressive movement, inventive world-building, and ecological themes make it an unusually affecting film for children and adults alike.

  13. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

    Radu Jude’s abrasive satire follows an overworked production assistant driving around Bucharest while making corporate safety videos. Its jokes about precarious labor and late capitalism are as formally inventive as they are angry.

  14. Hard Truths

    Mike Leigh reunites with Marianne Jean-Baptiste for a painful character study of grief, depression, resentment, and family obligation. It is not an easy watch, but its emotional precision and refusal to simplify suffering are extraordinary.

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  15. The Beast

    Bertrand Bonello adapts a Henry James story into a time-spanning meditation on artificial intelligence, romantic anxiety, and the fear of becoming emotionally irrelevant. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay play shifting versions of the same relationship across different eras.

  16. A Different Man

    Aaron Schimberg’s dark comedy follows an aspiring actor whose face changes after an experimental treatment. Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, and Renate Reinsve anchor a strange, self-aware examination of appearance, performance, and the desire to control how others see us.

  17. No Other Land

    This essential documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, records the destruction of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank. The relationship between Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham gives the film both political urgency and a deeply human point of connection.

  18. Sing Sing

    Greg Kwedar’s prison drama centers on incarcerated men who form a theater troupe through the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. The presence of formerly incarcerated performers gives its story of creativity, friendship, and dignity unusual authenticity.

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  19. Evil Does Not Exist

    Ryûsuke Hamaguchi begins with a proposed glamping development near a rural Japanese village and gradually moves toward something more mysterious. Its quiet ecological conflict refuses simple heroes and villains, making the final turn especially unsettling.

  20. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

    George Miller expands the Mad Max mythology with Furiosa’s backstory, played at different ages by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy. Beneath the elaborate action sequences is a mythic story about enslavement, survival, revenge, and the construction of a legend.

  21. Janet Planet

    Annie Baker’s understated debut observes a mother and daughter during one formative summer in rural Massachusetts. Its stillness gradually reveals a precise portrait of childhood, dependency, and the ways adults reinvent themselves.

  22. The Wild Robot

    Chris Sanders adapts Peter Brown’s children’s novel about a shipwrecked robot learning to care for an orphaned gosling. The animation is visually rich, but the film’s strongest idea is its belief that adaptation and compassion can matter more than programming or instinct.

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  23. Close Your Eyes

    Víctor Erice’s first feature in more than three decades follows a filmmaker investigating an actor’s disappearance during a film shoot. It is a patient, moving mystery about memory, aging, loss, and cinema’s power to preserve what life cannot.

  24. Dahomey

    Mati Diop’s documentary follows the return of 26 royal artifacts from France to Benin. Alongside the political history, it gives space to student debate and even imagines a voice for one of the returned objects. The film won the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival.

  25. The Room Next Door

    Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as old friends confronting illness, mortality, and the right to choose one’s death. Its polished melodrama is restrained by Almodóvar’s direct engagement with difficult moral questions.

  26. Nosferatu

    Robert Eggers revisits the classic vampire story with a richly atmospheric film centered on Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård. It favors dread, erotic obsession, and period detail over disposable jump scares.

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  27. Hit Man

    Richard Linklater and Glen Powell transform a real-life undercover operation into a playful romantic comedy about identity and performance. Powell’s succession of invented personas gives the film its comic energy while keeping its interest in fantasy surprisingly sharp.

  28. Queer

    Luca Guadagnino adapts William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novella with Daniel Craig as an American expatriate searching for connection in 1950s Mexico City. Sensual and melancholy, it emphasizes the story’s romantic longing as much as its dislocation.

  29. Good One

    India Donaldson’s debut follows a 17-year-old girl on a camping trip with her father and his friend. Small changes in conversation and power make an ordinary weekend increasingly uncomfortable, demonstrating how much tension can be built without overt melodrama.

  30. Love Lies Bleeding

    Rose Glass’s muscular romantic thriller places a lonely gym manager and an ambitious bodybuilder inside a violent 1980s-set crime story. Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian give the film its bruised, feverish energy.

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  31. The People’s Joker

    Vera Drew’s formally inventive autobiographical parody uses Joker mythology to address gender identity, addiction, family conflict, and artistic self-creation. Its fan-made relationship to existing comic-book characters is part of what makes its production and style so unusual.

  32. Red Rooms

    Pascal Plante’s cold psychological thriller follows a fashion model attending the trial of an accused serial killer. Rather than turning violence into entertainment, it examines obsession, spectatorship, and the online culture surrounding true crime.

  33. The Apprentice

    Ali Abbasi’s fictionalized account of Donald Trump’s early career focuses on his relationship with attorney Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong build the film around ambition, imitation, and the gradual corrosion of moral boundaries.

  34. The Bikeriders

    Jeff Nichols adapts Danny Lyon’s photography book into a period crime drama about a Chicago motorcycle club. The film charts how a loose social community changes as violence, hierarchy, and criminal ambition take over.

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  35. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

    Benjamin Ree’s documentary reconstructs the hidden social life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who died young. Through archival material and animation, it reveals the friendships he built inside World of Warcraft and challenges assumptions about what constitutes a full social life.

  36. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

    Johan Grimonprez connects the 1961 assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba to the international politics of jazz. Its archival montage treats music not as background decoration but as historical evidence and political force.

  37. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

    Rungano Nyoni’s darkly comic drama begins when a woman discovers her uncle’s body on a deserted road. Mourning rituals expose buried abuse, social silence, and generational conflict in Zambia.

  38. Crossing

    Levan Akin follows a Georgian woman searching for her estranged transgender niece in Istanbul. The journey becomes a compassionate portrait of migration, family rupture, and trans life, with the city functioning as both obstacle and refuge.

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  39. Universal Language

    Matthew Rankin’s surreal comedy imagines an alternate Canada where French and Farsi are official languages. Its deadpan absurdity and handmade visual style turn cultural dislocation into a playful cinematic language.

  40. Kneecap

    Rich Peppiatt’s energetic biographical comedy dramatizes the origins of the Belfast hip-hop group Kneecap and its campaign to defend the Irish language. Profane, political, and exuberant, it understands how music can become a form of national and personal identity.

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How the ranking was selected

The order combines three signals rather than treating one poll as an objective verdict:

Source What it contributes
IndieWire critics’ poll A 177-critic view of the year’s most acclaimed films.
Sight and Sound poll An international critics’ perspective, particularly useful for independent, international, and documentary cinema.
Metacritic year-end ranking A review-aggregation signal covering films with at least seven professional reviews and a 2024 U.S. theatrical, streaming, or VOD release.

Critical consensus is only a starting point. The final selection also considers originality, filmmaking craft, cultural importance, performances, and the films’ likely long-term value. Documentary titles such as No Other Land, Dahomey, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat are especially notable because they connect intimate stories to larger questions about history, technology, colonialism, war, and political power.

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A note about the 2024 release label

Release years vary by country and by source. A film may have premiered at a festival in 2023 but become available to U.S. audiences in 2024. Metacritic’s definition is specific: a film qualifies if it was released in at least one U.S. theater or through U.S. streaming or VOD between January 1 and December 31, 2024. That approach accounts for titles such as Close Your Eyes and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, whose festival histories began earlier than their U.S. availability.

FAQ

Which documentaries are included among the best movies of 2024?

The documentary selections are No Other Land, Dahomey, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Each uses nonfiction filmmaking to examine a broader subject, from occupation and colonial restitution to online community and Cold War politics.

What is the best movie of 2024?

Anora is the top choice in this ranking. It won the Palme d’Or and topped the IndieWire critics’ poll, while placing second in the Sight and Sound poll. The selection remains subjective rather than definitive.

Why do some 2024 movies have earlier festival premiere dates?

Festival premieres, national releases, U.S. theatrical releases, streaming debuts, and VOD availability can occur in different years. This list follows the films’ significant 2024 release presence for U.S. audiences while noting their earlier festival histories where relevant.

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Which 2024 films are good starting points for documentary fans?

Start with No Other Land for urgent political nonfiction, Dahomey for an inventive look at cultural restitution, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin for a moving technology-and-community story, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat for dense archival history shaped through music.

The Bottom Line

The strongest movies of 2024 were not confined to one genre or country. Alongside major dramas, horror films, animations, and studio spectacles, documentaries and documentary-influenced films brought history, politics, identity, and lived experience into unusually inventive forms. For nonfiction viewers, No Other Land, Dahomey, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat are the essential starting points.

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