Top 10 Movies of 2024
By Cinema Sugar
Whether from post-apocalyptic wastelands or tension-filled tennis courts or ‘70s-era Rockefeller Center, our Top 10 Movies of 2024 showcase what we think are the most compelling people, places, and themes of the movie year.
10. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
This personal and emotional documentary shows that the legacy of Mats Steen goes beyond what even his family understood it to be—and that the only way to tell the story of a gamer’s life is to enter that secret world.
9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
If Fury Road was the New Testament of George Miller’s Mad Max saga, bringing redemption to both the story’s characters and the action genre itself, then Furiosa is its Old Testament: brutal, beguiling, mercurial, and thrillingly epic.
8. In A Violent Nature
Equal parts serene and savage, director Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature offers a fresh yet loving homage to the slasher genre that’ll have you thinking twice before signing up for that yoga retreat. [Read our interview with the film’s star Andrea Pavlovic]
7. The Beast
A haunting sci-fi love story that explores the fears and fates of two people over the course of centuries—as if David Lynch and Kryzstof Kieslowski made a period piece and Léa Seydoux pushed it to transcendence.
6. Anora
This story of a Brooklyn sex worker’s adventures with a Russian oligarch’s son is a ride, turning from a high-flying Cinderella story to a shambolic chase movie to a gut-wrenching character study as only filmmaker Sean Baker could pull off.
5. A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg’s hilarious and deeply moving tale of two cousins lovingly zooms in and out on their family’s complicated history, while also delighting this ‘90s kid with the fact that Fuller McCallister (Kieran Culkin) gives the best performance of the year.
4. Saturday Night
Chronicling the hours leading up to the first episode of Saturday Night Live, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is supercharged by charisma, heart, and laughs, making it perhaps the funnest and most watchable movie of 2024.
3. I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s second feature film is a full-circle snapshot of restless ambience, a visceral panorama shot with the fanatically vibrant, gauzy detachment of a lingering dream, and a total fucking face-melter about how the things people watch can have the capacity to recognize them in return.
2. Challengers
A sports movie featuring a throuple of smirking scumbags swirling into a sweaty, psychosexual spiral? Game, set, match.
1. Nickel Boys
A modern masterwork told through visual and auditory puzzle pieces, RaMell Ross’s auteurist vision clings to your heart and brings you along to discover—through its unique design—an innovative and astonishing love letter to the medium, the Colson Whitehead novel it was adapted from, and the characters it so warmly embraces. [Read our interview with RaMell Ross]