|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
There’s a credible philosophical standpoint that there is no objective truth. It’s an idea that always feels most acute to me when I sit down at the keyboard to proclaim “the best in film,” which is, of course, an exercise in futility and narcissism. Taste is as subjective as it gets, dear reader. Top 10 Lists are messy and personal and arbitrary. Watching around 300 films a year makes me no more qualified to tell you what you’ll like than anyone else. More than anything, a Top 10 list is simply telling on oneself.
But before you wrap fish in these pages, the case for making my case. As an enthusiast of the art form and its power to move us, enlighten us, provoke us or provide us with comfort, I don’t just want to watch films but to share them with others, shine a light in the more shadowy spots of the cinematic year, and give a boost to films that, at least for me, offered something special.
No matter how clear the mission statement, I always find the process of weighing dramatic apples against comedic oranges, documentaries against narrative features, puts me back at the bottom of a Sisyphean hill, wondering if there’s a better way to get this boulder to the top. So rather than trying to convince you why you should trust this list, I’ll tell where it’s coming from so you can make your decision—on whether to let the list guide you somewhere or to let it sleep with the fishes—a little easier.
The guiding principles here include recognizing films that took big swings creatively and thematically. While looking to represent some diversity of styles and content and social perspectives, I tend to favor films that made conversation with audiences about the biggest social challenges we face as individuals, as Americans, as global citizens. Old-fashioned excellence of craft never goes out of style, but I like a distinctive vision and, better yet, an envelope pusher.
The film industry didn’t change much this year. It’s still struggling, especially when it comes to theatrical distribution and butts in theater seats. Revenue continues to drop: even the streaming balloons are beginning to lose their helium, and the party has gone from champagne dreaming to fizzling out. Film and TV production is in a shrinking phase, and belts are tightening. Since voting with our discretionary entertainment dollars has never been more important to the people responsible for transporting us with the moving image, maybe let’s give the folks behind the films listed below some love.
The top 10 films of 2024
10. “The Substance” (Digital, MUBI)
If Rod Serling did Cronenbergian body-horror (and he kind of did, but that’s another story), you’d get this wicked, frightfully clever satire of our misbegotten, self-destructive obsession with trying to cheat the aging process at any cost. In writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s potently visceral film, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley share the protagonist role by way of the titular fountain-of-youth potion. Naturally, there’s a Faustian price to be paid, and the way matters backfire serves as an allegory for the unhealthy practices (from Botox to Ozempic to plastic surgery) to which women subject themselves to sustain a career in the pitiless entertainment industry.
9. “I Saw the TV Glow” (Digital, Max, Blu-ray)
When Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore narrative feature works, which is most of the time, its characters’ devastating lows bring the film to creative heights. The stealth subject is gender dysphoria, the trans experience, as filtered through a haunting coming-of-age allegory of repression and slippery nostalgia disrupting self-actualization. The choice to live one’s truth—or not—is a matter of life and death, and while the film has been categorized as psychological horror, it’s very much of the spooky, haunting, surrealist Lynchian variety. A flawed masterpiece, perhaps, but a deeply felt one.
8. “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” (Digital, Blu-ray)
Prioritizing substance over style, this Thai comedy-drama made it into American multiplexes before settling into its digital afterlife. A little movie that could, it’s only garnered 22 critical reviews to date on Rotten Tomatoes, but enough for a 100% Tomatometer rating. In Pat Boonnitipat’s charming sleeper, a teenage boy decides to dedicate time and care to his dying grandmother in hopes of making his way into her will. Despite a dramatic trajectory that’s easy to guess, there’s nothing saccharine and everything relatable about how a family copes with the impending death of an elder.
7. “The End” (In Bay Area theaters soon)
Long popular, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories have begun noticeably to proliferate as artists project our shared fears over the probable extinction of the human race. Which brings us to “The End,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s elegy about the stragglers meting out what’s left of human existence in a salt-mine bunker. Did I mention that it’s a Jacques Demy-style musical starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon? “The End” might as well be the poster child for the notion “Not for Everyone,” but to put it simply, we need art like this right about now to help us fathom the unfathomable.
6. “A Different Man” (Digital)
Aaron Schimberg’s cosmic-joke black comedy refines his previous “Chained for Life,” which also starred Adam Pearson and explored how people with facial disfigurements are often viewed and treated and, as a result, how they often view and treat themselves (Schimberg has a cleft palate; Pearson has neurofibromatosis). This time, Sebastian Stan plays an actor with a genetic condition similar to Pearson’s: when medicine offers to turn his face “normal,” life doesn’t necessarily improve, resulting in something like the deadpan comedy version of “The Substance.”
5. “Hard Truths” (in Bay Area theaters Jan. 10)
Just by being true to himself, Mike Leigh has made a film that feels almost defiantly old-fashioned. Reminiscent of his early kitchen-sink comedy-dramas, the London-set “Hard Truths” is a character study of a woman who might be described as “impossible.” Her disagreeable nature springs from anhedonia, which tortures her as much as it does her nevertheless devoted loved ones. With a brilliant ensemble led by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, this slow burner gets more and more absorbing as it goes along, its biting humor the kindling for an existential trial by fire.
4. “All We Imagine as Light” (now playing in Bay Area theaters)
Payal Kapadia’s unshowy drama about three female nurses in Mumbai gradually evolves from a slow-cinema verité account of urban life’s mundane paces and romantic frustrations into something yet more complex: a reminder and consideration of rural alternatives to the rat race. Soulful and poetic, with beautiful photography and gently rendered performances. Not for nothing, it’s also the winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and topped “Sight & Sound” magazine’s annual critics poll.
3. “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (Digital, MUBI)
Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude made something of a splash three years ago with “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.” His latest ups the ante with nearly three hours of cultural stimulation: extensive excerpts from a 1981 Romanian film which Jude sequelizes in his new footage, a young female firebrand (Ilinca Manolache) making profane TikToks with an Andrew Tate filter, and enough literate references for two dozen films. It’s all in service of decrying the increasingly unlivable worldwide income gap as empires fall and billionaires tighten their grips of exploitation.
2. “No Other Land” (in theaters & on VOD, 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD & Digital)
That the situation in the Middle East is complicated is self-evident. But that doesn’t mean a genocide isn’t currently taking place in Gaza. Made by a Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective, this documentary film rose above the pack with the urgency of its subject matter: the Israeli army’s clearing of West Bank families (with “no other land” to their name) from their humble homes, which are reduced to rubble. Activism in the face of displacement with impunity climaxes — after five years of filming — in 2023, with the brutal retaliation on innocents following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israeli territory.
And the best film of 2024 goes to:
1. “Nickel Boys” (in theaters today)
In adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross gives each of his teenage black protagonists a first-person P.O.V. and edits between them. The form is more than a gimmick; it’s a thoughtful choice of adaptation that expands the audience’s capacity for empathy. Ross spins a righteously angry yet lyrical, decades-spanning narrative about the abuses at a reform school (based on a real Florida institution), the ways its injustice sits nestled within an already unjust society, and the ripple effects on the survivors and Black America at large.
Runners-up:
“Anora” (theaters, digital); “Sugarcane” (Hulu, Disney+, digital); “Dune: Part 2” (Max, digital, 4K & Blu-ray); “Challengers” (Prime Video, MGM+, digital, Blu-ray), “Eureka” (digital); “The Beast” (digital, Blu-ray); “Rumours” (digital); “Lee” (Hulu, digital); “Civil War” (Max, digital, 4K & Blu-ray); “The Brutalist” (in Bay Area theaters); “Queer” (in Bay Area theaters), “Memoir of a Snail” (digital); “Sing Sing” (not currently available), “The Outrun” (digital), and “Wicked: Part I” (theaters).
The bottom five films of 2024
“Poolman”
I take no pleasure in reporting that fine actor Chris Pine made a not-so-fine directorial debut with this “The Big Lebowski” meets “Chinatown” L.A. story. Better luck next time … if there is a next time.
“How to Date Billy Walsh”
This sad excuse for a teen movie awkwardly transplants American “Cobra Kai” star Tanner Buchanan to an English high school to awkwardly form the point of an awkward love triangle. These kids got no rizz.
“The Beekeeper”
It’s already become a cliché to criticize films as if they were written by A.I., but it’s the best descriptor for this generic, revenge-themed actioner starring range-free Jason Statham in “the Jason Statham role.”
“Night Swim”
A 4-minute short film about a haunted swimming pool in the ’burbs gets expanded into a 99-minute feature film. Only one problem: the filmmakers forgot to come up with any ideas for the additional 95 minutes.
“Harold and the Purple Crayon”
Zachary Levi acts like he’s on coke and Zooey Deschanel acts like she’s on Valium in this meandering live-action version of the classic children’s storybook that culminates in a tacked-on, generic message.
The best heroes
Angela (Ilinca Manolache) in “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (digital, MUBI)
Elwood (Ethan Herisse, et al) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) in “Nickel Boys” (theaters)
Gromit in “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” (Netflix)
Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (Ryan Destiny) in “The Fire Inside” (theaters)
George Hanway (Elliott Heffernan) in “Blitz” (AppleTV+)
The worst villains
Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) in “Longlegs” (digital, Blu-ray)
Nosferatu (Bill Skarsgård) in “Nosferatu” (theaters)
Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) in “The Brutalist” (theaters)
Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) in “Heretic” (theaters, digital)
The G7 world leaders (Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira) in “Rumours” (digital) & Donald Trump & Roy Cohn (Sebastian Stan & Jeremy Strong) in “The Apprentice” (digital) (TIE)
More top documentaries
“Sugarcane” (Hulu, Disney+, digital)
“Hollywoodgate” (streaming at jolt.film)
“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” (Netflix)
“The Greatest Night in Pop” (Netflix)
“The World According to Allee Willis” (digital) & “Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story” (digital) (TIE)
The animated winners
“Memoir of a Snail” (digital)
“Flow” (theaters)
“Inside Out 2” (Netflix)
“Robot Dreams” (Hulu, digital)
“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” (Netflix) / “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” (local theaters next year) (TIE)
Draeger’s Market closing store in Blackhawk, cites ‘declining condition’ at plazaJanuary 9, 2026 4:37 pm
Startup founder jailed in ‘wild scene’ at winery allowed to exercise $1M in stock optionsJanuary 6, 2026 10:53 am