Rob's Favorite Movies of 2024

 by Rob DiCristino

It was a good year! No, really!

It’s no secret that I had a special year at the movies. It’s the first time I can credibly argue that I saw just about every major and minor title both in and out of awards discussion. I saw mainstream blockbusters and festival darlings. I saw critics’ picks and international breakthroughs. I even saw Madame Web! Most importantly, I saw these movies earlier in the season than usual and often more than once, which means I’ve been able to digest and reflect on them in ways that I’ve rarely had the time to do before. Therefore, this year’s list is easily my most autobiographical, the one that most speaks to my authentic values and interests as a critic and moviegoer. In short: These might not be the consensus top ten, but these are the films that touched me — the person I am right now, this year — the most.

10. Juror #2 (Dir. Clint Eastwood)

Listen, could you argue that there are at least half a dozen other thoughtful, layered, and subversive movies that might be more deserving of a spot on this list than Clint Eastwood’s latest meat-and-potatoes morality play? Absolutely. But to break the rules, you have to understand them, and no one understands the rules like Clint. Juror #2 is granddad cinema in a major key, a pulpy airport paperback with just enough on its mind to keep even the most seasoned cinephiles engaged. Nicholas Hoult caps off another year playing awkward weirdos as a man torn between duties to his family, his community, and himself, while all-star character players like Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, and Chris Messina bring writer Jonathan Abrams’ twelve(ish) angry men and women to life. For what could very well be his swan song, Eastwood urges us to remember the essential human decencies that connect us, the rights, responsibilities, and — most of all — consequences that we often find so easy to ignore. Juror #2 may paint in broad strokes, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

9. Evil Does Not Exist (Dir. Ryūske Hamaguchi)

The latest drama from Drive My Car director Ryūske Hamaguchi might be a hair less crowd-pleasing than Juror #2, but the quiet and enigmatic Evil Does Not Exist is no less preoccupied by the threat that institutions pose to our moral identities. Lyrical even when it’s at its most banal — its big centerpiece is an argument about a septic tank’s placement near a local water supply, after all — the film seduces us with the delicate beauty of its mountain setting before dropping a devastating final act that warns us not to underestimate that setting’s brutality, the killer instinct that lives inside even the most docile members of its community. But what do we make of its title? How do we reconcile the conflicts between handyman Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and PR agents Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani)? What about Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), Takumi’s daughter? Is she complicit? An innocent? Hamaguchi is maddeningly short on answers, but — like Juror #2, actually — that ambiguity is a challenge. An invitation. A risk worth taking.

8. Hundreds of Beavers (Dir. Mike Cheslik)

2022’s Little Festival Movie That Could is finally available for public consumption, which means Mike Cheslik and Ryan Brickson Cole Tews’ epic homage to the madcap silent comedies of yore needs to be recognized on this list. An ingenious blend of raucous slapstick and unexpected pathos, Hundreds of Beavers is a homemade marvel boasting more jokes per frame than any mainstream comedy of the last two decades. When 19th century applejack proprietor Jean Kayak’s (Tews) livelihood is threatened by a team of industrious and diabolical beavers (otherwise known as “several grown men in human-sized beaver costumes”), it’ll take every trick in his book to defeat all hundreds and hundreds of them and win the hand of the Fur Trapper’s (Wes Tank) beautiful daughter (Olivia Graves). It’s a story of wit and resolve, of heroism and spectacle. It’s a big, irreverent Looney Tune, frankly, a goofball opera for the young and young at heart. It’s the kind of movie made by hungry artists who know how to make every second count. They can, and believe me, they do.

7. A Different Man (Dir. Aaron Schimberg)

Let’s all just be honest with each other for a second: Adam Schimberg’s Coenesque black comedy A Different Man caught a bright orange load of bad luck this year. Sebastian Stan earned himself a Golden Globe nomination, sure, and he’d be an incredibly deserving winner (assuming A24 left sufficient room in the promotional budget to buy it for him; ya burnt, Globes), but you and I both know that Stan’s campaign was dead in the water the minute he also took on Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice. Schimberg’s hysterically bleak tale of a struggling actor who slowly realizes that his woes have less to do with his neurofibromatosis than they do his spectacularly shitty personality never stood a chance in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, a contest that saw — I am not kidding — reality television star and multiple felon Trump re-elected to the nation’s highest office. No matter: I’m confident that A Different Man will be properly rediscovered in a year or two, at which time — if the world still exists — we’ll all reconvene to celebrate its excellence.

6. Dune: Part Two (Dir. Denis Villenueve)

Another victim of industry politicking was Denis Villenueve’s Dune: Part II, a film delayed — worthily — from last year’s award season by the SAG/WGA strikes and repositioned for the spring with the hope that it would have legs enough to stay in the conversation through winter. Thankful as I was that it got out of Oppenheimer’s way, the film has certainly faded in cultural esteem over the last few months, and it’s hard not to feel like Villenueve got the shit end of both sticks. Regardless, Part II is everything it needs to be and more, a grand exercise in myth(un)making that finds the emotional center in Zendaya’s doubting Chani that Frank Herbert’s source novel is just too obtuse to bother with. I know these movies put a lot of you to sleep, and I understand why, but they remain staggering works of philosophical craft and pageantry that reverberate just as truly as Star Wars or The Matrix. The difference is that Dune’s truths are meant to frighten rather than embolden us, to caution us against hero worship and idolatry. That obviously worked out, and we’re all fine, so let’s just move on!

5. Flow (Dir. Gints Zilbalodis)

That darn cat! Who’d have thought that the best post-apocalyptic epic of the year — especially a year that saw George Miller release another Mad Max movie — would be an eighty-five-minute-long, dialogue-free jaunt through nature that looks like an Xbox 360 cutscene? Nevertheless, Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow is it, a gorgeous little nugget of cinema that recalls the golden age of Disney animated classics like Bambi and Dumbo and draws a sharp contrast with the soulless “photorealistic CGI” effects that built The Little Mermaid (2023) and Mufasa: The Lion King. It’s no good having these creatures look natural if they don’t feel natural, folks, which is where Flow excels. Set in a flooded, overgrown, and decidedly post-human world, the film follows an intrepid group of mismatched animals who find collaboration and harmony amongst the ruins. Many critics have noted how subtly terrifying Flow actually is — again, it’s the apocalypse — but there’s a reassuring warmth to its message, a reminder that what is broken can always be made whole again.

4. Nosferatu (Dir. Robert Eggers)

It’s been interesting to see the reactions to Nosferatu evolve in the weeks between the first critics’ screenings and its theatrical release. Some feel that Robert Eggers’ adaptation is too reckless and temperamental to capture the austere beauty of Murnau’s silent masterpiece, while others maintain that it doesn’t go far enough to replicate the gaudy romance of Coppola’s Dracula. Having seen Eggers’ film three times now — and having spent the week re-reading Bram Stoker’s novel — I still maintain that both camps are missing the mark. Issues of intellectual property theft aside, Dracula and Nosferatu are distinct texts, and Eggers’ film is explicitly a reinterpretation of the latter that shifts focus away from masculine prick-waving and toward the complex relationship between a woman, her body, and the societal norms that seek to control both. There’s actually a lot of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut in Nosferatu, now that I think of it, as both are about the mystery of sexuality and the complications of intimacy. They’re about the darkness we hold inside ourselves and the chaos that ensues when we finally let it free.

3. The Substance (Dir. Coralie Fargeat)

Which brings us, coincidentally enough, to The Substance! Coralie Fargeat’s gruesome fairy tale has inspired its own share of contrarian snark and scorn over the last few months, with some writers dismissing Elisabeth Sparkle’s (Demi Moore) saga of self-destruction as a loud, gauche, and aggressively unsubtle allegory lacking the grace and depth of The Fly, Possession, or other classics of the body horror genre. And I’m here to tell you this: It is! It’s loud and aggressive and angry and over-the-fucking-top because it’s 2025 and we’re still talking about this shit! Women are still made to feel disposable after forty! We still fetishize youth and hold each other to unreasonable standards of perfection! The idea that Fargeat should require permission from the cinematic intelligentsia to comment on it, and that said commentary should be delivered only in an aesthetically pleasing and thematically sophisticated format is exactly why it needs to be neither of those things! It needs to be all fish-eye lenses and horny jazzercise because nothing else seems to be working!

2. The Brutalist (Dir. Brady Corbet)

There’s a great moment in The Brutalist where László Tóth (Adrien Brody) finds his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) thumbing through the blueprints for his latest project. The two had just been reunited after a long separation, a stretch of years in which László fled the horrors of the Holocaust and laid the foundations for their new life in America. Finally alongside her husband again, Erzsébet takes stock of his work: “I’m just looking at you,” she says. And she is. László’s architectural designs are deeply autobiographical reflections of his hopes and dreams, his fears and pains. Erzsébet knows that her husband won’t be as forthcoming about his experiences as she needs him to be, so she reads those details in his work. These designs will tell her what he’s thinking, what he’s going through, and what he wants to do from here. And for all its bombast and verticality, most of The Brutalist’s texture is found in little margins like these, the spaces between what characters are saying and how they’re saying it. It’s that, and not the giant slabs of concrete, that makes it a mighty masterpiece.

1. Anora (Dir. Sean Baker)

People have been asking me to synopsize my favorite film of the year for a while now, and I’ve done it a few different ways: I tell some people that it’s about a sex worker (Mikey Madison) who embarks on an impetuous romance with the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). I tell others that it’s a wild comedy that smashes Pretty Woman and After Hours together in one of those high-speed particle accelerators. I told my grandma that it’s a dirty movie full of cursing and nudity. But the only whole truth is this: Anora is about work. It’s about the way we commodify ourselves for economic utility, the way we sacrifice bodily agency and emotional boundaries in service of capitalism. Ani is powerful, yes. She’s smart and savvy and knows exactly how to get what she wants from those who can give it to her. But as Anora’s devastating ending argues, that power has cost her. It’s left her bruised and bloodied. Broken. Her only hope is to remember that agency and rebuild those boundaries. Ani will be okay, I think, and if we take the right lessons from Sean Baker’s film, so will we.