Review: The 10 best movies of 2024
Guess what? Despite exaggerated reports of its death, Hollywood survived and prospered in 2024.
Let's pause for a huge sigh of relief since strikes from actors and screenwriters lasted nearly four months and brought film production to a standstill last year, while unions fought to stem threats from streaming services and artificial intelligence.
This year, there was no "Barbenheimer" (a merging of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer") to break box-office records, but we did come close with "Glicked," a combo of "Gladiator II" and "Wicked."
And the best in drama ("The Brutalist"), comedy ("Anora"), suspense ("Conclave"), horror ("The Substance") and song-and-dance ("Emilia Pérez" is right up there with "Wicked") are sure to join a super competitive Oscar race.
I wish I had room for "Challengers," "Civil War," "September 5," newbie Jane Schoenbrun ("I Saw the TV Glow") and old master Clint Eastwood ("Juror #2"), but it's a tight squeeze. You try reducing your favorites to 10 and let me know what agonies you suffer.
So here, starting with No. 10 and working up to the top spot, are my picks for the 10 best movies of 2024.
10. 'Dune: Part Two'
I try not to include sequels on this list since originality is my first concern. But Denis Villeneuve's blockbuster follow-up to "Dune" actually improves on the 2021 original set on the desert planet of Arrakis. It's epic in every sense of the word and intimate in its love story between Timothée Chalamet as the new messiah and Zendaya as his chief soldier. Both set the screen on fire this year elsewhere -- he as Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown" and she as the apex of an erotic tennis triangle in "Challengers" -- but "Dune: Part Two" cements them as a screen couple for the ages.
There's nothing epic about writer-director-actor Jesse Eisenberg's small-scale rendering of big feelings in this semi-autographical tale about a married Manhattan workaholic with a young son, who decides to take a weeklong road trip to Poland with his screwup cousin Benji (an off-the-charts great Kieran Culkin). The trip is in honor of their beloved, recently deceased grandmother, who escaped a Nazi death camp, which they visit.
You'll laugh till it hurts. And it will hurt if Eisenberg's script and Culkin's all-in acting don't take home the Oscars they deserve.
8. 'Sing Sing'
Released this summer when it barely caused a ripple, this prison drama has risen from studio neglect to become an bonafide awards player. That's justice for you.
Based on an actual Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at New York's Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison, the movie toplines a magnificent Colman Domingo, who joins forces with former actual inmates, notably an award-caliber Clarence Maclin, who seek to reform by performing in plays that restore their humanity. If you're looking for a movie that truly inspires, "Sing Sing" is it.
Filmmaker RaMell Ross breaks every stuffy rule about how to adapt a Pulitzer-winning novel, in this case Colson Whitehead's wrenching look at a Florida reform school in the Jim Crow South, where Black teens are abused and even murdered by the white folks in charge. Ross uses a first-person point of view by only letting us see and hear what the boys do, having other characters talk directly to the camera and erasing the typical safe distance.
There's nothing safe about this groundbreaker that gives audiences a new way to perceive beauty and terror.
Note to the academy: Look past your aversion to horror and shower awards on this brilliantly bloody satire of a Hollywood that sees aging as a mortal sin.
Demi Moore delivers her best-ever performance as a washed-up star who signs up for a program that can restore her youth by cracking her body open to birth a fresher, "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself, sharply parodied by Margaret Qualley.
Coralie Fargeat -- a stunning new talent -- writes and directs in a fever to expose and explode everything toxic about the male gaze. Mission blazingly accomplished.
5. 'Conclave'
No rules are broken in Edward Berger's expert take on the bestselling Robert Harris mystery about, of all things, the election of a new pope. This old-school Hollywood comfort food, featuring sublime acting from an ensemble cast led by a beautifully nuanced Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini, soothes audiences polarized by the bold moves of "Nickel Boys," "The Substance" and the film at the top of my list.
Except for an ending that ruffled a few religious feathers, "Conclave" knows about popular, and that can take it all the way at the Oscars.
No movie this year has sparked more love/hate reactions than this wild thing from French director Jacques Audiard that blasts off with an up-for-anything cast, including Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, transfixing trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón and Adriana Paz, who all deservedly shared the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Each is so indelible you can't imagine the film without them.
They act in Spanish, singing and dancing when their emotions grow full to bursting, which happens often in a violent crime drama that involves everything from hot romance to homicide.
Some call it a hot mess. For the record, I couldn't have liked it more.
3. 'Anora'
Is this rowdy raunchfest about a sex worker who's kidnapped by a clown car of Russian gangsters (all acted to perfection) really the comedy event of the year? You bet, thanks to writer-director Sean Baker, the indie icon rocketing into Oscar territory, along with Mikey Madison in the title role. There she is, dropping F-bombs like bullets and selling fantasies until she buys into a fantasy herself by marrying an oligarch's son (Mark Eydelshteyn). It takes one of her captors (the amazing Yura Borisov) to open her eyes to reality in an ending that brings on tears. That's "Anora" for you: It's some kind of miracle.
2. 'Wicked'
I've been getting some shade for losing my heart to this crowd-pleasing musical. But the heart wants what it wants. And I want Jon M. Chu's splendiferous adaptation of the Broadway musical smash to gets its flowers -- not just for the glory of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as frenemy witches, but for setting a new gold standard for showing the right way musicals should be done on screen. (See "Joker: Folie à Deux" for the wrong way to do it.)
So hold space for the Oscar-bound "Wicked" on any list of the year's best movies. There's magic in it.
In the last days of 2024, Brady Corbet's epic tale of the immigrant experience comes roaring out of the gate to catch the title of best movie of the year.
It's a film of staggering ambition, taking in 30 years in the life of László Toth (an impressive Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born architect and Holocaust survivor who is hired by an American tycoon (a revelatory Guy Pearce) on a building project that will damn near kill him.
"The Brutalist" runs three and a half hours, and Corbet, only 36 and making only his third film, makes it look like a 100 million bucks, though it only cost a tenth of that, chump change by Hollywood standards.
"The Brutalist" announces Corbet as a new giant in cinema, who has just created a new American classic.
