Anora is the best movie of 2024: a nervy, hilarious, class-conscious romantic comedy that gradually reveals an emotional depth few films matched. Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner also took Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing at the 97th Academy Awards, giving it the strongest combination of critical consensus, artistic distinction, and major industry recognition.
This is a curated ranking rather than an objective measurement. It brings together the international critics’ perspective of Sight and Sound, Metacritic’s best-reviewed eligible releases, year-end lists from The Guardian and RogerEbert.com, Rotten Tomatoes’ editorial selections, major festival prizes, critics’ awards, and the 97th Oscars. The list also makes room for animation, documentaries, horror, action, and popular filmmaking—not only conventional prestige drama.
Release years are not identical everywhere. Several films premiered at festivals in 2023 but reached their principal U.S. or U.K. audiences, awards cycle, or wider public release in 2024. They are included here under the 2024 label when that 2024 release or awards context is the relevant one.
The 50 best movies of 2024
The ordering favors films that repeatedly appeared in major critics’ lists or won meaningful festival, critics’ association, or Academy recognition. It also reflects achievement: originality of form, strength of performances, visual and sound design, emotional force, and the ability to say something distinctive about the moment. The final list has been corrected so that every title appears only once.
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Anora — Sean Baker
The year’s most complete collision of comedy, romance, class critique, physical performance, and emotional devastation. Mikey Madison’s ferocious central performance gives the film its kinetic surface, while Baker gradually changes the emotional register beneath it. Its Palme d’Or, broad critics’ support, and Best Picture, Director, and Editing Oscars make it the clearest choice for number one.
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The Brutalist — Brady Corbet
A formally ambitious immigrant epic about architecture, power, trauma, and the American myth. Its imposing scale is matched by a careful interest in labor, patronage, compromise, and the cost of being seen as a genius. It won the directing prize at Venice and three Oscars, including Lead Actor, Cinematography, and Original Score.
Home viewing: Readers who want a permanent edition rather than a temporary rental can look for the The Brutalist 4K UHD Blu-ray. A24 lists both standard Blu-ray and 4K UHD editions, with a 215-minute presentation and extras including commentary, a making-of featurette, and collectible postcards. Price, stock, and region compatibility should be checked for the reader’s location before purchase.
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All We Imagine as Light — Payal Kapadia
A tender, politically alert Mumbai drama that turns friendship, work, desire, and urban life into luminous cinema. Its interwoven stories are intimate without becoming small: the city’s pressures are present in every relationship. The film won Cannes’ Grand Prix and topped the international critics’ poll conducted by Sight and Sound.
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Nickel Boys — RaMell Ross
RaMell Ross adapts Colson Whitehead’s novel through a daring subjective visual language, placing viewers inside the experience of institutional racism rather than treating history as distant illustration. Its first-person perspective can be demanding, but the formal risk is inseparable from the film’s argument about memory, testimony, and whose viewpoint gets preserved. The National Society of Film Critics named it Best Picture, and it received a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
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The Substance — Coralie Fargeat
A ferocious body-horror satire about beauty culture, aging, celebrity, and self-erasure. Coralie Fargeat’s film is deliberately excessive—its transformations, colors, sound, and gore all operate at maximum intensity—but the extremity gives its critique unusual force. Demi Moore’s performance anchors the spectacle, and the film won the Oscar for Makeup and Hairstyling.
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Dune: Part Two — Denis Villeneuve
A rare blockbuster that combines enormous scale with coherent world-building, political allegory, action choreography, and audiovisual precision. Denis Villeneuve makes the machinery of empire comprehensible while still delivering sequences designed for the largest screen available. Its awards run included Oscars for Sound and Visual Effects.
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig — Mohammad Rasoulof
What begins as a tense family thriller expands into a courageous political drama about Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement and the pressure of authoritarian institutions. The family’s domestic unease and the country’s public unrest increasingly mirror each other. It was a major Cannes title and appeared repeatedly in critics’ year-end selections.
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A Real Pain — Jesse Eisenberg
Two cousins travel through Poland while carrying sharply different relationships to Jewish identity, family memory, and grief. Jesse Eisenberg’s screenplay finds comedy in awkward logistics and social friction without turning historical trauma into a punchline. Kieran Culkin’s volatile, wounded supporting performance won the Oscar, but the film’s achievement is its balance of humor, irritation, affection, and moral discomfort.
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Challengers — Luca Guadagnino
This propulsive erotic sports drama turns tennis into a language for desire, status, control, and competition. Luca Guadagnino’s nonlinear structure, the editing, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s driving score, and the triangular performances all work toward the same pulse. It is one of 2024’s most accessible examples of ambitious mainstream filmmaking.
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I Saw the TV Glow — Jane Schoenbrun
A haunting, formally inventive film about identity, repression, nostalgia, and the danger of mistaking survival for living. Jane Schoenbrun refuses to explain every emotional or supernatural shift, allowing atmosphere and implication to do the work of conventional plot. Its unconventional horror-drama form made it one of the year’s most distinctive critical favorites.
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The Room Next Door — Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature is an elegant, philosophical drama about friendship, illness, autonomy, and death. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore give the film an austere but intimate center, while Almodóvar’s color and composition keep the subject from becoming visually dreary. It won Venice’s Golden Lion.
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I’m Still Here — Walter Salles
Walter Salles recounts Eunice Paiva’s decades-long search for truth after Brazil’s military dictatorship disappeared her husband. Rather than reducing political repression to a single traumatic event, the film follows its effects through family routine, silence, legal uncertainty, and the persistence of memory. Its restrained focus and Fernanda Torres’s performance earned major international and Oscar recognition.
Rank #2
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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World — Radu Jude
A caustic, formally restless satire of precarious labor, corporate language, digital culture, and post-socialist Romania. Radu Jude mixes incompatible-looking cinematic forms until the contradictions become the point: work is both absurd and materially punishing, and modern media can make exploitation feel like entertainment. It became a major international critics’ favorite.
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The Wild Robot — Chris Sanders
This visually sumptuous animated adventure follows a piece of technology learning adaptation, parenthood, and interdependence in the natural world. It offers family accessibility without flattening its ecological and emotional ideas. The result is warmer and more sophisticated than its simple premise might suggest, and it received an Academy Award nomination.
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Flow — Gints Zilbalodis
A nearly dialogue-free animated fable about animals cooperating after a flood. Gints Zilbalodis builds character through movement, framing, rhythm, and small acts of trust rather than explanatory speech. Its atmosphere and international originality culminated in the Oscar for Animated Feature.
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Conclave — Edward Berger
A polished political thriller set inside a papal election, powered by Ralph Fiennes’s controlled performance and an institution under pressure to preserve its secrets. Edward Berger keeps the visual style precise and the suspense cumulative, making procedural debate feel as tense as physical danger. It received a Best Picture nomination and won the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay.
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A Different Man — Aaron Schimberg
A darkly comic identity drama about an actor whose facial difference changes, but whose self-conception does not. Aaron Schimberg keeps shifting the viewer’s assumptions about appearance, performance, and empathy. Sebastian Stan’s uneasy lead performance supports a film that moves between satire, horror, discomfort, and genuine compassion.
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Evil Does Not Exist — Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
A deceptively quiet ecological drama in which a rural community confronts a proposed glamping development. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is less interested in delivering a simple environmental message than in showing how competing needs, incomplete information, and unintended consequences shape moral decisions. Its tonal shift is unsettling precisely because the film has first trained viewers to observe patiently.
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga — George Miller
George Miller’s prequel expands the Mad Max universe through myth, revenge, labor, and survival. It is less immediately propulsive than Fury Road, but its vehicles, landscapes, production design, stunt work, and world-building remain extraordinary. The film stands as one of 2024’s strongest large-scale action achievements despite box-office results that did not match its craft.
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Love Lies Bleeding — Rose Glass
A muscular, surreal crime romance about desire, violence, family control, and bodily transformation. Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian anchor a film that pushes the erotic thriller toward comic-book extremity without losing its emotional stakes. Its strange mixture of tenderness and brutality is precisely what makes it memorable.
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The Girl with the Needle — Magnus von Horn
This stark black-and-white historical drama examines poverty, motherhood, exploitation, and the social conditions that make cruelty possible. Its disturbing moral seriousness resists easy catharsis: individual wrongdoing is inseparable from a society that leaves vulnerable people with almost no safe choices. The film earned international critics’ and awards attention.
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The Apprentice — Ali Abbasi
Ali Abbasi’s deliberately abrasive portrait of Donald Trump’s early career and relationship with Roy Cohn is less conventional biography than a study of power, image-making, corruption, and transactional ambition. It dramatizes the construction of a public persona while leaving viewers to consider how much of the method belongs to one man and how much belongs to the system around him.
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The Last Stop in Yuma County — Francis Galluppi
A lean, darkly funny desert crime thriller built from escalating tension, bad decisions, and sharp genre mechanics. Francis Galluppi understands that suspense often comes from waiting: a diner, a stranded traveler, and a robbery become the components of an increasingly unstable trap. It is an ideal recommendation for viewers seeking a compact, under-seen thriller.
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Hundreds of Beavers — Mike Cheslik
An ingenious, almost wordless slapstick survival comedy that turns primitive game logic into elaborate physical filmmaking. Its black-and-white world, escalating tasks, homemade effects, and relentless visual jokes make it feel like a lost silent comedy designed by someone who plays too many games. The handmade inventiveness gives it genuine cult appeal.
Rank #3
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His Three Daughters — Azazel Jacobs
Three estranged sisters confront their father’s final days in a finely acted family chamber drama. Grief appears here as argument, logistics, resentment, humor, and love rather than as a single solemn emotion. Azazel Jacobs gives each sister a defensible point of view and lets emotional specificity carry the film.
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Sing Sing — Greg Kwedar
A moving drama about incarcerated men finding dignity and agency through theater. The presence of formerly incarcerated performers gives the film’s emphasis on creative community unusual weight, while its storytelling avoids treating rehabilitation as a sentimental shortcut. Its central idea is simple but powerful: performance can create a space in which people are seen as more than the worst thing they have done.
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The Beast — Bertrand Bonello
An ambitious, eerie triptych about love, fear, performance, and artificial intelligence across different historical eras. Léa Seydoux’s central performance gives the film continuity as it moves between melodrama, science fiction, and psychological horror. Bertrand Bonello’s adaptation of a Henry James story is deliberately elusive, asking whether the removal of fear would also remove the intensity of desire.
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La Chimera — Alice Rohrwacher
A lyrical, grave-robbing romance about lost love, community, and the porous boundary between the living and the dead. Alice Rohrwacher’s film treats archaeology as both criminal enterprise and emotional metaphor: the characters dig for objects because they are also digging for a past they cannot release. Its main release geography creates a year-label caveat, but its 2024 U.S. visibility and persistent critical presence justify inclusion.
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Thelma — Josh Margolin
A warm, nimble action comedy about an older woman reclaiming agency after being conned. June Squibb gives the film comic momentum without making aging itself the joke. The result is an affectionate account of independence, friendship, family overprotection, and the right to remain adventurous at any age.
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The Fall Guy — David Leitch
A buoyant stunt-driven romantic comedy that celebrates the craft of physical filmmaking while delivering genuine chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Its best moments understand that stunts are not merely spectacle: they are choreography, character, risk, and invisible labor. It makes a persuasive case for including expertly made crowd-pleasers in a best-of-year list.
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — Wes Ball
A visually accomplished continuation of the modern Planet of the Apes saga, notable for its effects work, world-building, and generational themes. Wes Ball establishes a new historical phase without discarding the moral questions that defined the earlier films. Its Academy Award nomination for Visual Effects reflects the film’s considerable technical achievement.
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The Remarkable Life of Ibelin — Benjamin Ree documentary
This emotionally powerful documentary reconstructs the hidden social life of a Norwegian gamer whose online relationships revealed a world his family had not fully understood. Animation and archival material do more than illustrate his digital existence; they make an invisible community experientially present. It is a moving challenge to assumptions about where friendship and care can happen.
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Dahomey — Mati Diop documentary
A concise, formally inventive documentary about the return of royal artifacts to Benin and the cultural, political, and psychological meaning of restitution. Mati Diop gives the objects a presence that is both material and haunted, then opens the question outward to students, citizens, museums, and the colonial history behind the collection. It won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear.
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No Other Land — Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, and Yuval Abraham documentary
A collaborative documentary about Palestinian displacement and activism in the West Bank. Its political urgency comes through direct testimony and sustained observation, but its collaborative authorship is equally important: the film is also about the difficult relationships required to document injustice across unequal circumstances. It became one of the year’s most consequential nonfiction films and won the Oscar for Documentary Feature.
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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat — Johan Grimonprez documentary
A formally exuberant documentary linking jazz, the Congo crisis, colonialism, and Cold War power. Johan Grimonprez uses music history as an investigative route into geopolitical violence, showing how culture can be treated as both a weapon and a form of resistance. Its density rewards viewers willing to follow connections across performance, diplomacy, and empire.
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Sugarcane — Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie documentary
An investigative documentary about abuse at an Indigenous residential school and the institutional structures surrounding it. Reporting, testimony, and community perspective are held together with sustained moral seriousness. The film’s strength is not simply that it exposes wrongdoing, but that it attends to the long aftermath carried by survivors, families, and a community confronting an imposed history.
Rank #4
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Black Box Diaries — Shiori Ito documentary
Shiori Ito’s personal investigation into sexual violence, institutional obstruction, and the difficulty of seeking justice in Japan turns private testimony into a sustained journalistic and cinematic record. The film’s first-person urgency is inseparable from its examination of systems that make reporting abuse exhausting, dangerous, and uncertain.
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Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger — David Hinton documentary
An affectionate, highly accessible documentary about the influential partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It is a particularly good gateway into film history because enthusiasm and criticism coexist: the film celebrates the duo’s imagination while giving viewers a framework for understanding their visual, thematic, and industrial importance.
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Grand Theft Hamlet — Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane documentary
A funny and unexpectedly poignant documentary about staging Shakespeare inside Grand Theft Auto during lockdown. Its unusual production circumstances become a way to explore performance, friendship, precarity, and virtual community. The film is inventive without treating its digital setting as a gimmick; the game becomes a real social and theatrical space.
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Robot Dreams — Pablo Berger
A melancholy, largely wordless animated story about friendship, separation, and memory in 1980s New York. Pablo Berger trusts gesture, music, repetition, and the emotional meaning of ordinary places. Its sadness is direct but not manipulative, which helps explain its Academy Award nomination for Animated Feature.
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Memoir of a Snail — Adam Elliot
A handcrafted stop-motion drama about loneliness, grief, collecting, and resilience. Adam Elliot’s film is made for adults without abandoning the tactile wonder of animation, and its eccentric visual details deepen rather than soften the pain in the story. It is one of the year’s strongest arguments for taking animated drama seriously as a medium for difficult emotion.
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl — Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham
A polished return for the beloved stop-motion duo, combining inventive physical comedy with a satisfying story about automation and unintended consequences. The film respects the characters’ familiar rhythms while giving the technology theme enough bite to feel contemporary. It was an Academy Award nominee for Animated Feature.
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Vermiglio — Maura Delpero
A measured, intimate rural drama about family, gender, religion, and wartime change in an Alpine village. Maura Delpero finds historical pressure in domestic details—marriage, childbirth, schooling, work, and rules of respectability—rather than relying on battlefield spectacle. Its Venice Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and strong international critical reception support its place among the year’s finest ensemble films.
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April — Dea Kulumbegashvili
An unflinching Georgian drama about an obstetrician who provides abortions in a hostile social environment. Dea Kulumbegashvili’s austere visual language creates ethical pressure rather than easy answers, placing professional duty, social judgment, and personal risk in constant tension. It earned Venice’s Special Jury Prize and a place in the Sight and Sound poll.
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The New Year That Never Came — Bogdan Mureșanu
A multi-strand Romanian tragicomedy set around the final days of Ceaușescu’s regime. Its interlocking stories show how political systems enter ordinary lives through fear, performance, bureaucracy, and private hope. The film’s changes in tone are carefully calibrated: absurdity and danger coexist because that is how people often experience political collapse from the ground.
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Kneecap — Rich Peppiatt
A brash, politically charged music comedy about language, identity, and youth culture in Belfast. Its anarchic energy is matched by a clear argument for cultural self-determination: language is not decorative, but a way of claiming history and public space. The film was also a major Sundance audience title.
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Dìdi — Sean Wang
A warm coming-of-age film about a Taiwanese American teenager navigating friendship, family, online identity, and the awkwardness of adolescence in 2008. Sean Wang understands how quickly a teenager can switch between bravado and embarrassment, especially when the internet is becoming part of everyday self-invention. It won Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Audience Award.
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The End We Start From — Mahalia Belo
A restrained climate-displacement drama following a new mother forced to navigate an unstable, flooded Britain. Its emphasis is less on disaster spectacle than on fragmented travel, care, exhaustion, and the practical vulnerability of people moving through a crisis. This is a lower-consensus inclusion than most of the films above, retained to complete a unique 50-title selection without repeating a stronger-ranked film.
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Civil War — Alex Garland
Alex Garland’s speculative road movie turns a fractured United States into a study of journalism, spectacle, political exhaustion, and the mechanics of witnessing violence. Its deliberately unresolved politics have divided viewers, but its images of reporters moving through a collapsing country give the film a durable argument about how atrocity becomes both evidence and content.
Editorial note: This is a lower-consensus addition than the major critics’ and festival selections near the top of the ranking. Its inclusion recognizes the year’s substantial mainstream conversation around ambitious genre filmmaking, not a comparable awards record.
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The Bikeriders — Jeff Nichols
Jeff Nichols’s period crime drama studies the transformation of a motorcycle club from a loose community into a more violent and hierarchical organization. Its strength lies in the tension between romanticized memory and lived consequences: belonging can offer freedom, but it can also demand obedience. The film is included as a final lower-consensus selection for its performances, atmosphere, and attention to subculture.
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Best 2024 movies by audience pathway
A ranking tells you what the editors value; a viewing pathway helps you decide what to watch first.
- For the best accessible double feature: Anora and A Real Pain. Both are sharply funny, actor-led films that open into more painful questions about class, memory, family, and identity.
- For large-format spectacle: Dune: Part Two and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The former emphasizes political world-building and monumental sound; the latter favors kinetic invention, vehicles, stunts, and myth.
- For horror and body politics: The Substance, I Saw the TV Glow, and Love Lies Bleeding. They are very different films, but each uses genre to examine identity, repression, desire, or the body under social pressure.
- For animation: Flow, The Wild Robot, Robot Dreams, and Memoir of a Snail. Together they show the range of the medium, from near-silent animal fable to family adventure, melancholy romance, and adult stop-motion drama.
- For documentaries: No Other Land, Dahomey, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Sugarcane, Black Box Diaries, Made in England, Grand Theft Hamlet, and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. These films cover displacement, restitution, colonialism, institutional abuse, justice, film history, virtual community, and hidden social lives.
- For international cinema: All We Imagine as Light, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Evil Does Not Exist, Vermiglio, April, and The New Year That Never Came.
Why these films rank where they do
The strongest consensus is concentrated near the top, but consensus is not the same as quality and a list like this should not pretend otherwise. Anora has the clearest all-around case because it combines the Palme d’Or, the Best Picture Oscar, the directing Oscar, and the editing Oscar with repeated critics’ recognition. The Brutalist follows because its formal ambition is supported by major awards recognition. All We Imagine as Light is the strongest international-critical consensus title, with both Cannes’ Grand Prix and the Sight and Sound poll at its back.
Nickel Boys represents the year’s strongest case for a formally radical American literary adaptation, while The Substance, Dune: Part Two, Flow, and The Wild Robot demonstrate that 2024’s major achievements were not confined to conventional prestige drama. The documentaries are ranked alongside fiction because nonfiction filmmaking can be equally constructed, visually daring, emotionally complex, and artistically consequential.
How the 2024 label was handled
Festival premiere dates, theatrical dates, streaming launches, and awards eligibility do not always line up. Metacritic’s list used a specific U.S. eligibility window covering theatrical, streaming, video-on-demand, and digital releases from January 1 through December 31, 2024. Sight and Sound reflects contributors’ local release calendars, while the Guardian’s list is oriented toward U.S. releases. This article therefore uses the 2024 label when a film’s relevant public release, visibility, or awards cycle belongs to 2024, rather than claiming that every title opened theatrically in the United States during that calendar year.
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Sources and recognition used
The ranking synthesizes the BFI and Sight and Sound international critics’ poll; Metacritic’s best-reviewed 2024 list; The Guardian’s U.S. top 50; RogerEbert.com’s blended critics’ list; Rotten Tomatoes’ 2024 editorial guide; official Cannes laureate materials; the 97th Academy Awards; the 81st Venice Film Festival awards; the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Picture selection; and AFI Awards 2024. These sources do not produce one universally agreed order, which is why the result should be read as a critical-consensus-informed editorial ranking rather than a mathematical verdict.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a definitive ranking of the best movies of 2024?
No. It is a curated, consensus-informed editorial ranking. It gives extra weight to repeated critics’ recognition, festival prizes, critics’ awards, and Academy recognition, while deliberately including important animation, documentary, genre, and popular films that a narrow prestige-only list might omit.
Why are some 2024 films associated with earlier festival premieres?
Release calendars differ by territory. A film may premiere at a festival in 2023 but receive its principal U.S. or U.K. release, awards eligibility, or wider public visibility in 2024. The ranking uses the relevant 2024 release or awards context rather than suggesting that every title first appeared everywhere in 2024.
Which documentaries from 2024 should I watch first?
Start with No Other Land for political urgency, Dahomey for a formally inventive examination of restitution, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat for music-led geopolitical history, Sugarcane for investigative reporting and testimony, Black Box Diaries for first-person accountability journalism, Made in England for film history, Grand Theft Hamlet for virtual performance and community, or The Remarkable Life of Ibelin for its moving account of online friendship.
Where can I watch these films?
Availability changes by country, date, and format, so a reliable where-to-watch answer requires a fresh territory-specific check. Do not assume that a film’s festival, theatrical, streaming, or digital availability is the same everywhere. For physical-media collectors, A24 lists standard Blu-ray and 4K UHD editions of The Brutalist; check current price, stock, and region compatibility before ordering.
The Bottom Line
Bottom line: Start with Anora for the year’s strongest all-around film, All We Imagine as Light for international critical consensus, The Substance for boundary-pushing genre cinema, Flow for animation, or No Other Land for documentary filmmaking with immediate political force. The ranking is selective rather than definitive, but every title offers a distinct reason to be part of the 2024 conversation.
Quick Recap
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