The Top 20 Films of 2024 (According to Jack's Memory Warehouse)
Do not consider this list to be definitive, nor set in stone, but merely a subjective snapshot of a moment in time.
The films included herein go by their UK releases, which may differ from other territories.
Opinions are purely subjective; there’s loads of films I will have missed; additions, subtractions, and other such amendments may occur; etcetera, etcetera, end of disclaimer.
Films I Haven’t Seen Yet (As of the Time of Writing), But Which I May or May Not Think Will Be Worth Adding to the Top 20 Retroactively:
The Holdovers
(dir. Alexander Payne)All Of Us Strangers
(dir. Andrew Haigh)American Fiction
(dir. Cord Jefferson)The Taste of Things
(dir. Trần Anh Hùng)Perfect Days
(dir. Wim Wenders)Robot Dreams
(dir. Pablo Berger)Monkey Man
(dir. Dev Patel)Civil War
(dir. Alex Garland)The Beast
(dir. Bertrand Bonello)I Saw The TV Glow
(dir. Jane Schoenbrun)A Different Man
(dir. Aaron Schimberg)The Wild Robot
(dir. Chris Sanders)The Apprentice
(dir. Ali Abbasi)Small Things Like These
(dir. Tim Mielants)Juror #2
(dir. Clint Eastwood)No Other Land
(dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor)
MY TOP 20:
20.
PRISCILLA
★★★★
Even though I wish the film had a bit more extra bite and emotional oomph to it, which it feels a little lacking in on a gut level, Priscilla nonetheless gave me a lot to think about, and a lot of feelings to feel about them, and that’s the mark of a pretty great film by my estimation.
Sofia [Coppola], you’ve done it again!
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19.
LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL
★★★★
Ghostwatch meets Ghost Stories meets generative A.I. “art” (yes, a low blow, I know, but still worth noting), in Late Night with the Devil's deliciously spooky, fabulously atmospheric, richly period-detailed, slyly satirical, lovingly made, mind- and format-bending horror crowd-pleaser.
David Dastmalchian has come a long way since the days of being creepy and getting threatened at gunpoint by Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, and it's nicely gratifying to see him crush it in a leading role as meaty as this.
Can't wait to watch it again with the foreknowledge of what's to come, and also to better catch those blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments of encroaching horrors briefly glimpsed on the peripheries of nearly every scene, embedded in every glitch, visible for only a handful of frames at most, before each devilish cut disavows us of clearly comprehending what we thought we just saw...
18.
LONGLEGS
★★★★
Longlegs […] is another excellent display of writer/director Osgood Perkins’ knack for making horror movies drenched in his own brand of claustrophobic dread, always suffocating and threatening to drown you, even in the most desolate, wide open spaces engulfing and entrapping his characters everywhere they go.
And much like with his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter - a film that has unexpectedly continually clung to relevance in my memory for years on end, like a dark stain that can never be scrubbed clean - Perkins has crafted a story in Longlegs that is, superficially, relatively straightforward, yet somehow also subtly deceptive in its simplicity because of how he hides a horrible truth in plain sight all along, haunting you with the necessary need to go back and watch it through again from the perspective of the newfound context you were previously missing.
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17.
STRANGE DARLING
★★★★
…after seeing Strange Darling, you better believe this is the real-deal star-making role that ought to firmly put [Willa Fitzgerald] on everybody’s radar with a quickness, because Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Sarah Christ! This is one of the greatest performances of the year, and yet you just know it’s going to go criminally underrated and under-seen by the wider moviegoing public, by virtue of the film’s niche cult appeal, queasy-bordering-on-taboo subject matter, and the fact you can’t talk about any part of the film’s plot - neither in specifics or allusions - without inadvertently giving away the various surprises that going in blind would yield.
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16.
CONCLAVE
★★★★
Awards season is undoubtedly going to make this film seem incredibly overrated and unapproachable, but before we reach that point of over-saturation, let's enjoy Conclave for what it is on its own terms: an engrossing quasi-mystery-thriller of papal political intrigue and skullduggery, like Angels & Demons without the code-breaking, or Succession with zucchettos and vestments.
Beautifully photographed with exquisite compositional symmetry, memorably scored with a foreboding strings-heavy soundtrack by Volker “Hauschka” Bertelmann that's been embedded in my head ever since, and filled with universally phenomenal performances from its star-studded cast, Conclave may not conclude in a way that feels entirely satisfyingly earned by the buildup of the first two acts, but on a holistic level, the experience of the film is wholly worth it for its richly atmospheric, claustrophobic, immersively detailed depiction of the Vatican's inner world that we so rarely get to see.
15.
CHALLENGERS
★★★★
An old friend of mine, who happens to be gay, asked the following question on Twitter around the time of Challengers’ release, and the resulting exchange from when I answered him served too good to pass up as a succinct encapsulation of the film, so here goes:
Him: “How gay is Challengers, and do I need to see it?”
Me: “Answers: Quite, and yes. 😁”
Him: “Perfect.”
For real, though: the lead trio of Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor are uniformly superlative, the direction from Luca Guadagnino is kinetically inventive, and the propulsively groovy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, while hardly reinventing the wheel of their usual electronic sound, nonetheless got stuck in my head for the rest of the year, with the soundtrack appearing in the top 5 of my most replayed albums of 2024.
14.
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE
★★★★
While it may slightly lack in the same sphincter-tightening, hold-your-breath level of tension spun in the first two films in the series, A Quiet Place: Day One more than makes up for it with a welcome focus on richer characterisation, visceral emotional poignancy from the deeply moving performances by Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn, and one of the bestest goodest boys in all of cinema, in the feline form of Frodo the cat. (He’s really more of a Samwise than a Frodo in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Beyond Day One’s status as an essentially standalone prequel to A Quiet Place, it also acts as an adroit companion piece to writer/director Michael Sarnoski’s previous film, the excellent Nicolas Cage-starring Pig. Both of Sarnoski’s features concern themselves with protagonists who have gone through such immense personal pain that they’ve withdrawn into themselves, with their only constant companion being a beloved animal they would do anything to protect. But crucially, both films are about exploring how our sensory perception of the world is inextricably tied to our memories, our grief, and our humanity; how prolonged absence from the simplest sensations and pleasures of living can make us lose our sense of self; and how specific places and music and food can be powerful gateways to our past that we would do anything to recapture, just for one more moment.
Maybe it’s a matter of taste (how appropriate), but for me, this intensely character-driven, subtly philosophical, and profoundly life-affirming little tale in the corner of the Quiet Place universe moved me more than anything from either of the erstwhile entries in this burgeoning franchise have yet done. Lupita Nyong’o is as much of an acting powerhouse as you’d expect from her, but props must be given Joseph Quinn as well, exhibiting the kind of ego-less vulnerability that takes a lot of courage to open oneself up to displaying in a way that’s this empathetically raw. One particular pivotal interaction the two share in the finale nearly had me in tears, due to just how fantastic they both were, and how well-written they were, even in spite of the naturally minimal dialogue they had to work with. It’s all in the eyes, and their eyes works wonders.
If there is to be a third Quiet Place after this that returns to the timeline of parts 1 and 2, then John Krasinski might very well have his work cut out for him in topping what Sarnoski has achieved with Day One. I certainly don’t envy him the uphill task there, that’s for sure…
13.
SMILE 2
★★★★
As any sequel worth its salt should be, Smile 2 is more more more in every department, in all the best ways, delivering a follow-up that shows [Parker] Finn is no one-trick pony, and that the Smile universe still has new corners to reach. Especially with that jaw-droppingly awesome ending, which counteracts the sour taste that could've been left behind by the narrative cheats it took to get there, by then giving us the kind of electrifying conclusion that makes the prospect of a Smile 3 terrifically tantalising to imagine.
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12.
TERRIFIER 3
★★★★
In November of 2016, I visited the cinema to see Mike Flanagan’s Ouija: Origin of Evil.
In November of 2024, I visited the cinema to see Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3.
What do these two events have in common?
They were horror films I chose to see as a means to temporarily escape the horror of our categorically insane world electing Donald Trump as President, by way of using the horrors in both films as a benchmark reminder of how the horrors we face in life could be so much worse.
Neither attempts really worked to assuage my fears, or banish my momentary self-delusions - especially in Terrifier 3’s case, where Art the Clown’s indiscriminate and creatively cruel acts of bloody mayhem suddenly took on a pall that made me think he and his actions could be read as analogous to the violence of state-sanctioned war crimes, which just goes to show how much the horrors of reality have bled into and superseded my view of whatever horrors could be imagined in the realms of fiction - but I appreciate both films at both times for existing as outlets for my contemporaneous feelings of abject despair.
Despite all that, I enjoyed the Terrifier 3 immensely, and it’s a wonderful life we have where we get to witness a low-budget unrated independent extreme splatter-horror flick become a bonafide mega-hit by every metric. And what with Art desecrating the Christmas season with his gore-drenched antics, I look forward to Terrifier 3 rightfully joining the pantheon of past perennial holiday horror staples like Black Christmas (1974 and 2006), The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Silent Night, Deadly Night.
(Oh, what I wouldn’t give for Art the Clown to climb down Trump’s chimney to pay him a long-deserved visit right about now…)
11.
THE IRON CLAW
★★★★
You know that feeling you get from a film like, say, Dear Zachary, where you can barely believe that so much unbearable, unspeakable, unending tragedy could befall a single family to such a farcically cyclical degree, that it feels as though the universe is sadistically singling these people out for wholly undeserved torment?
That's The Iron Claw - a true story whose events were so enveloped by a dirge of despairing sorrow and terrible loss, that the only way writer/director Sean Durkin (of the excellent Martha Marcy May Marlene, and the underrated miniseries Southcliffe) could fathomably dramatise it was by literally omitting members of the Von Erich family tree from the story, because there were just too many deaths of too many relatives for the film to handle the dramatic weight of.
On the one hand, I understand the reasoning for this decision, what with the large ensemble of characters/real people the film's abridged version of history has to juggle - the brothers Kevin, Kerry, David and Mike, and their parents Fritz and Doris - in order for everyone to feel as three-dimensional as possible within the limited runtime, so that you can care for them when life's mercilessly unfair cruelties befall their clan. But on the other hand, I feel like there had to be some way that perhaps a different writer could've figured out to keep in the stories of Chris Von Erich, and David's daughter Natosha, so that a fuller scope of the family's all-consuming “curse” could be comprehended by the audience for its sheer unsparing, bizarre, horrifying frequency.
I can't say for sure. Maybe this is the only way you can tackle the true story in dramatised form, with a talented well-known cast who'll help bring more widespread public attention to what happened to the Von Erichs, without making a film so overwhelmed with sadness and tragic circumstance that it tips over into stolid misery porn, which is certainly not a feeling any filmmaker with a jot of empathy in their hearts would want audiences to come away feeling for the Von Erich family's story.
So, if you wonder why the film opens with a title card saying “inspired by a true story”, rather than “based on a true story”, now you know: because the “inspired by” moniker grants it further leeway with its representation of historical fact. And what more leeway could you require than the omission of multiple real people from the story to make it more palatable, no matter how cynical that sounds?
Still, I can't lie - the line “so you must be my older brother Jack” hit me square in the heart with the force of a battering ram, and I defy anyone not to be moved by Zac Efron's revelatory, viscerally heartbreaking performance.
(I couldn't help thinking that The Iron Claw does for Efron what Foxcatcher did for Channing Tatum. I leave you to draw the parallels.)
To end on a different note:
It's one thing for the Academy Awards not to nominate anyone in the cast for their performances - (surely Zac Efron, Holt McCallany, and Maura Tierney should've been shoo-ins for various acting Oscars, right?) - but for Richard Reed Parry and Laurel Sprengelmeyer to not even get a Best Original Song nomination for ‘Live That Way Forever’?!
That is a goddamn travesty.
10.
LOVE LIES BLEEDING
★★★★½
Rose Glass has got the juice (i.e. exceptional directorial mastery) just as much as Katy O’Brian’s character of Jackie has got the juice (i.e. dodgy steroids like from that one episode of The Simpsons when Marge starts bodybuilding, and gets the steroid madness).
I really wish I had managed to catch Love Lies Bleeding while it was still in cinemas earlier in the year, because the sound and visuals and music (hello, Clint Mansell!) of this magnificent beast would have been a feast for the senses on the big screen. Were it not for Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance taking the crown for the indisputably best body-horror of 2024, this might have been the gnarliest movie I’d seen this year to feature visceral moments of body-horror freakiness caused by injections of drugs that make the bodies of their users contort and pulsate in ways that are queasily wrong. (Between these two examples, and Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, 2024 was an insanely excellent year for body-horror-filled movies directed by women, I must say.)
Then again, Glass’ film isn’t fully an exercise in horror - though many parts of it are horrific, with her Saint Maud bonafides coming in quite handy indeed - but rather a pulpy twisty crime-thriller/lesbian love story, in the vein of the Wachowski Sisters’ Bound, with the frantic escalation of bad decisions and their compounding consequences feeling of a piece with any of the Coen Brothers’ various crime dramas, and the mullet-filled 80’s period setting of something like Jim Mickle’s Cold In July.
All of which means that Love Lies Bleeding is entirely my jam, and it therefore entirely rocks.
9.
ANORA
★★★★½
One of the biggest surprises a film in 2024 has sprung on me is Sean Baker’s Anora randomly using a club remix of Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’ as its recurring unofficial anthem. Never in my most outrageous imaginings could I have predicted that, of all people, I’d be hearing Gary Barlow’s voice appear so many times as the go-to needle drop that Baker chose to soundtrack his latest slice-of-life screwball tragicomedy of errors, involving downtrodden and desperate people trying to make better lives for themselves under the unforgiving capitalist system of American society… and yet, here we are!
‘Tis a shame that Anora got a bit too overhyped for me in advance, elevating its alleged esteem to a standard it was unlikely ever to meet, let alone surpass. But even if it’s not my favourite film of the year or anything, I did still enjoy the absurd escalations of chaos that ensued thanks to the bumbling efforts of the sublimely stupid Coen-Brothers-esque henchmen, plus the lush beauty of the 35mm cinematography, and, of course, the brassy, commanding, undeniably star-making lead performance from Mikey Madison (thankfully not getting lit on fire in a film for once, but instead lighting the screen itself on fire with her sheer hotness and ferocity).
Out of everyone, however, I reckon that Yura Borisov’s stoic hired goon, Igor, may have instantly become one of my favourite characters in any movie this year. In a story chock full of despicable self-serving assholes, his quiet kindness, and calm demeanour holding strong in the eye of the storm of unruly mayhem everyone gets swept up in, makes you root for him just as much as you do for Ani.
Like a waiter recommending fine wines, might I suggest pairing Anora with Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers to make for an outstanding and highly thematically compatible double-bill…?
8.
IN A VIOLENT NATURE
★★★★½
Naturally, In A Violent Nature won’t be for everyone […] as some will find it pretentious, boring, pointless, and worthless. But for those whom it does work for equally as well as it did for me, if not more so, then In A Violent Nature may be one of the most fascinating, unique, subversive, and entertaining horror movies in recent memory.
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7.
THE FIRST OMEN
★★★★½
Against all reasonable expected odds to the contrary, Arkasha Stevenson has miraculously managed to make The First Omen the Omen franchise’s equivalent to the likes of something like Ouija: Origin of Evil — i.e. a wholly unasked-for horror prequel that somehow defies the middling expectations anyone had for it, and comes out on top by actually surpassing the original film that spawned it.
Even then, the comparison isn’t perfect, because with Origin of Evil, it’s not as if the preceding Ouija was any good to begin with, so the already estimable Mike Flanagan almost couldn’t help but improve upon it. Whereas here, we’re talking about Richard Donner’s The Omen, a 70’s horror classic it would surely seem impossible, not to mention certainly unnecessary, to make a prequel to, let alone make it any good.
But amazingly, Stevenson and company pulled it off! And if anything, they’ve even retroactively improved the original film with the ingenious new twists on established lore that they’ve invented to fit this prequel into place.
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6.
SING SING
★★★★½
It would have been so easy for Sing Sing to tip over into faux-inspirational melodrama, heavy-handedly falling victim to becoming too maudlin, or too saccharine. But just like in Sound of Metal - that other excellent, carefully crafted drama featuring Paul Raci as a wise, no-nonsense mentor figure - the filmmakers and actors are such collectively astute and empathetic observers of the nuances of the human condition, and they exhibit such subtle restraint at every point when lazy dramatic conflict would erupt in a more conventional narrative, that one of the film’s greatest achievements is in how it feels as poignantly true to life as it actually is.
Colman Domingo's performance is so good, he's gonna be nominated for an Oscar in 2025, then get inexplicably snubbed in favour of another guy's performance that people are going to be livid about for years to come, while Domingo is lauded long after the other guy's win either leaves a legacy of mockery, or simply fades from memory. (Think 2016, and Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies winning over pre-Trump-supporting Sylvester Stallone in Creed, or think 2019, and Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody winning over Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born.)
But on the off chance he does get nominated and wins, Domingo will have totally deserved it. So too would Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, and really any of the other cast members among Sing Sing’s ensemble of formerly incarcerated actors portraying themselves.
What a delicate, powerful, beautiful film.
5.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
★★★★½
The Zone of Interest may not be an enjoyable viewing experience, nor is it one you’d necessarily wish to revisit. But it is an important film worthy of your time, and the points it makes so uncompromisingly and masterfully through Jonathan Glazer’s painstakingly calculated filmmaking, all makes it so that you almost need not rewatch it, because the film’s hauntingly lingering impact will stay embedded in your psyche no matter what.
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4.
POOR THINGS
★★★★★
Yet for as dark as the film gets in exploring these uncomfortable facets of the human condition, there is so much more light and hope to be found here than in any other of Yorgos’ past works, which are often just as mordantly funny, but usually end up leaving you wallowing in hopeless darkness and quiet despair.
Poor Things finally, fabulously, bucks that trend, resulting in this being Yorgos Lanthimos’ most accessible, joyous, warm, and abundantly satisfying movie to date, all without ever losing his stylistic or morbidly witty edge.
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3.
FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA
★★★★★
If I had a nickel for every time a Warner Bros. film came out in 2024 that was a grand future-set epic action spectacle, predominantly set amidst vast sandy desert landscapes, where the story involves getting revenge on a villain who killed a parent of the protagonist; fierce battles waged over control of resources, with water as one of the most precious; false messiahs using their power to influence hordes of the desperate into doing their bidding; characters who have writing inscribed on their faces; surreal prophetic visions; a matriarchal secret society of women trying to ensure a future by any means necessary; a ruthless antagonist played by someone who appeared in the Thor movies; a bombastic score from someone among the Hans Zimmer circle, prominently showcasing a duduk on the soundtrack for Middle Eastern musical flavour; and a minimal-dialogue performance from the stunning Anya Taylor-Joy...
...I would have two nickels.
Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, and that I saw both films in 4DX for extra thrill-seeking viscerality, AND that they were both flat-out 5-star masterpieces sitting back-to-back in my top 5 films of the entire year.
Pity that audiences at large failed Furiosa at the box office, when George Miller so graciously gifted us another apocalyptic action masterpiece to complement his previous masterpiece of Mad Max: Fury Road. But even so, I’m glad that at least I got to WITNESS IT!! on the big screen.
2.
DUNE: PART TWO
★★★★★
If there had been a snowball's chance in Arrakis that I could’ve found a way to afford the train ticket to London, and the BFI IMAX ticket to see Dune: Part Two in full 70mm, I would have gone in a heartbeat. After all, with my experience seeing Oppenheimer at that venue in 2023, I now know firsthand just how much of the IMAX-sized image had to have been cropped out to fit on regular-sized cinema screens, and that's a damnable disservice to what is some of the most monumental, jaw-dropping, grand-scale imagery Denis Villeneuve and his crew have ever conjured. (Cinematographer extraordinaire Greig Fraser is practically on god (emperor) mode with his work on this film, it's insane.)
So instead of IMAX, I opted for the alternate avenue of immersion in the form of 4DX to sweep me up into the film's action, and boy oh boy, let me tell you... experiencing the sandworm-riding scene, with the exhilaration afforded by those rollercoaster-type seats transporting you into feeling every twist and turn and bump along the way, is an all-time cinema-going highlight I will never forget.
Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune Messiah cannot arrive soon enough.
1.
THE SUBSTANCE
★★★★★
I can scarcely believe that in the year of our lord 2024, a movie such as this has been made, unleashed like a live grenade thrown into cinemas, and left to explode the minds of everyone who beholds its blood-drenched beastly beauty. To think that the film industry can still produce a film that is this brash, this punk, this outrageous, this righteously angry, this unapologetically disgusting, this fabulously farcical, this deliriously demented, this viscerally squelchy, and this monstrously entertaining, renews one’s faith in the future of modern cinema to perhaps avoid the fate of complete corporate mainstream sanitisation, homogenisation, and infantilisation. For if the extremely adults-only, 80’s-style splatterpunk gorefests of Terrifier 3 and The Substance can not only both be in cinemas at the same time, but can also both actually thrive and succeed, then maybe the road ahead on the cinematic landscape will be a little brighter after all.
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Nice list, check out Red Rooms if you havent