Best of 2024: Film

Saskia Baron

Anora

Between the Temples

Io Capitano

Dahomey

Emilia Perez

Green Border

Io Capitano

Monster

A Normal Man

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

The usual perverse list unfolds. Two beautifully made and thought-provoking films about emigration, an intermittently brilliant exploration of attitudes to disfigurement, a helter-skelter drama about a sex worker, a Jewish romance that everyone I recommended it to hated, two post-colonial documentaries made with extraordinary skill, a heart-stopping childhood drama. and the first opera to be made about a trans drug baron. Sorry to leave out Hit Man, Kneecap, and American Fiction, but apparently 13 is unlucky… . 

Justine Elias

All Of Us Strangers

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

Oddity

Love Lies Bleeding

Timestalker

I Saw The TV Glow

The Promised Land

Evil Does Not Exist

Notes from Sheepland

British and Irish filmmakers, inspired (or scarred) by 1970s folk horror, are at the forefront of the genre’s revival. For straight-up terror, though, look to Oddity, the outstanding second film directed by Damian McCarthy. It delivers creeping dread, genuine shocks, and a devious double performance by Carolyn Bracken as identical twins with starkly different personas. When one dies, the other – an arts-and-crafts curio collector with second sight – summons a supernatural weapon. This is handmade horror at its best. (Pictured above: Oddity)

Graham Fuller 

About Dry Grasses

All We Imagine as Light

Anora

La Chimera

Close Your Eyes

Green Border

I Saw the TV Glow

No Other Land

The Settlers

The Zone of Interest

Though radically different, The Settlers, The Zone of Interest, Green Border, and No Other Land stare into the abyss – collectively, they’re a storm warning for our times. Silver Haze, Hoard, Chuck Chuck Baby, and Bird didn’t make my list, but they show that scrappy stories of working-class women are the beating heart of current British cinema. Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera is film poetry for the lovelorn. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light – the Mumbai city symphony that zeroes in on the circumscribed lives and dawning solidarity of three women hospital workers – feels like the work of a visionary director. (Pictured above: La Chimera)

Nick Hasted

All Of Us Strangers

Perfect Days

About Dry Grasses

Evil Does Not Exist

The Zone of Interest

There’s Still Tomorrow

La Chimera

Queer

The Dead Don’t Hurt

All You Need Is Death

Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers confirmed his capacity to turn cinemagoing into an emotionally ravishing, purging experience, equivalent to the magic spell cast on a brief encounter between Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, which bleeds into a blessed haunting. Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days adopted its Tokyo toilet cleaner’s Zen humanity, while my other favourites found their own immersive senses of time and so reality, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses most of all, or offered rich genre surprise, from Paola Cortellesi’s musical subversion of Italian misogyny There’s Still Tomorrow to Viggo Mortensen’s elegant Western The Dead Don’t Hurt. (Pictured above: All of Us Strangers)

Helen Hawkins

All of Us Strangers

All We Imagine as Light

Anora

Crossing

Emilia Perez

Janet Planet

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

The Holdovers

The Outrun

The Zone of Interest

It hasn’t been a year full of outright masterpieces for me, among the films I saw, except for The Zone of Interest and All We Imagine as Light, but the other eight could have been joined by another handful of titles I’d class as "seriously good”. Those include La Chimera, About Dry Grasses, The Taste of Things, The Goldman Case and Evil Does Not Exist. Four of my top 10, I realised after choosing them, are directed by women. (Pictured above: All We Imagine as Light)

Markie Robson-Scott

All of Us Strangers

Anora

Blitz

Conclave

Kinds of Kindness

Memory

Reawakening

That They May Face the Rising Sun

Woman of the Hour

The Zone of Interest

An exploration of the banality of evil seems more necessary than ever these days, and once again, Sandra Hüller, star of last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, delivers a brilliant, nuanced performance as the wife of an Auschwitz commandant in Jonathan Glazer’s chilling The Zone of Interest. At the other end of the spectrum, That They May Face the Rising Sun, Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, is a peaceful antidote to the world and its horrors: a rural Irish community in the Seventies where the silences, and the trees and hills, are as important as the dialogue. (Pictured above: The Zone of Interest)
 

James Saynor

All We Imagine as Light

American Fiction

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Green Border

Io Capitano

Kneecap

La Chimera

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

There’s Still Tomorrow

The Zone of Interest

People say writers should write what they know and filmmakers should film what they know, but that may be less than ideal when all the writers and filmmakers are men. Fortunately, women are now providing many of the most interesting movies, and it feels as though the cinema world is shifting on its axis a little. Perhaps I should have been more generous to the famous male auteurs, Yorgos Lanthimos and Luca Guadagnino, who delivered two pictures each this year, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to be so. (Pictured above: American Fiction)

Adam Sweeting

Argylle

Carry-On

Civil War

Conclave

Fly Me to the Moon

Poor Things

Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple

Twisters

Wilding

The Zone of Interest

In a year when great expectations fell flat (Blitz, Gladiator 2), there were some unexpected delights. Wilding was an inspiring account of nature being reborn at a West Sussex farm, while Carry-On (starring not Sid James, but Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman) was an exhilaratingly taut thriller which became an instant hit for Netflix. Sky’s Stevie Van Zandt documentary was a reminder that there was more to Asbury Park than just Bruce Springsteen, while the Emma Stone/ Yorgos Lanthimos pairing delivered the fantastical Poor Things. And Edward Berger’s Conclave blended screenplay, location and cast to symphonic effect. (Pictured above: Civil War)

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