Hope and despair. Those are the two words I keep coming back to as I ponder how to sum up a year in film. As I look at my top 10, it occurs to me that the ending of just about any narrative film – and we can safely throw a lot of documentaries in there, as well – falls into one of those two categories. A third category might be that a despairing ending could offer a glimmer of hope. It is Hollywood after all, and as Navin R. Johnson might say, it’s a profit deal.
It makes a certain amount of sense that films largely can be boiled down to these two core concepts. They are essentially the two fundamental ways of being, of seeing the world. So, with 2024 in the rear view and 2025 off to an inauspicious start, how are we feeling about the world? Are we filled with hope or burdened by despair, and how do the standout films of the year reflect that general mood?
Largely, the films that stood out over the past year confronted the ills of the world and reflected the battle between light and dark that we see playing out in the society that surrounds us. Some of them offered a way forward, while others provided a lens to a past we seem doomed to repeat. The best managed to do both at the same time, unafraid to engage with real pain as a means of demonstrating the ways we can heal.
For better or worse, the 10 films below – as well as some honorable mentions that we will get to in a moment – lay bare the battle we all find ourselves waging between optimism and pessimism, joy and sorrow … hope and despair. Art is a way of exploring the deepest, most hidden corners of our hearts, and nothing this year got to the heart of the matter more directly than these films.
Before we get to the top 10, a caveat, a few honorable mentions, and two special awards of merit.
The caveat: Eligibility windows are a personal and specific thing. This being my site, I have to do what feels right in my heart and determine a strategy that I can adhere to at least somewhat consistently. Because so much of this site is dedicated to chronicling the Academy Awards, I use the Academy’s eligibility window, meaning if a film qualified for the Oscars in a given year, that’s the year it’s eligible for my list. This has led to some unfortunate wonkiness over the years, and some great films have missed the cut based on nothing more than release schedules. A couple that come to mind from recent years: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Land of Mine, and Collective.
This year, there are three films I want to call out that fall into a weird, in-between space because of last year’s Oscars. First, there’s Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which made a lot of critics’ top 10 lists this year due to its late spring 2024 release. I saw it at the AFI Festival in fall 2023, and it was the Romanian submission for Best International Feature. It made my top 10 last year. Great film, but for me, eligible last year.
Ava DuVernay’s Origin is a powerful examination of the caste system and its continued historical consequences. It received an Oscar-qualifying run last year before a January wide release. Similarly, Robot Dreams is a wonderful animated film about the enduring power of love. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at last year’s Oscars. I saw it at a special screening in February before its wide release in March. A lovely movie seen too late for last year’s top 10 and not eligible for this year’s. All three of these, however, deserve a shout out among the best of any year.
The honorable mentions, five films, alphabetically, that offered something truly valuable this year: A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold finding new life in a genre thought long dead, largely thanks to a classic movie star turn by Timothée Chalamet; Civil War, Alex Garland’s prescient near-future thriller about a divided world that is no so unlike our own; Fancy Dance, Erica Tremblay’s stirring condemnation of the government’s indifference to the lives of Indigenous women, featuring a leading performance that proves Lily Gladstone is here to stay; Juror #2, a deceptively simple morality play that proves Clint Eastwood can still throw a fastball down the middle better than anyone; and Red Rooms, French-Canadian director Pascal Plante’s dark, disturbing investigation of our culture’s obsession with death and violence.
Finally, the top 10 is the top 10. It’s a nice, round number and a good organizing principle for a list. Traditionally, I offer my alphabetical honorable mentions, and that is that. But, determining the No. 10 slot on my list this year required the most thought and reflection I have ever given to the task. It truly pained me to leave these two films out, so if you want to call them Nos. 11 and 12, in whichever order suits you, here they are:
Conclave, directed by Edward Berger – A film about the burden of faith, the lure of tradition, and the weight of history, Berger’s followup to All Quiet on the Western Front takes a pulpy airport novel and elevates it to high art. Ralph Fiennes delivers a career-best performance in a movie that ostensibly is about electing a new pope but that actually concerns the need for each of us to examine our own conscience and to confront whatever we find there.
Kneecap, directed by Rich Peppiatt – I had never heard of the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap before seeing this film, but rest assured, they have found their way into steady rotation on my preferred music platforms. This is a fictionalized account of the group’s rise but features the very real political ramifications of their protest movement – namely, the right of the Irish people to speak their native language in their homeland. Energetic, funny, and thrilling, Kneecap is an ode to the importance of self-determination and the power of art to spark radical change.
Last Cinema Standing’s Top 10 Films of 2024:
10. Anora, directed by Sean Baker
Anora is one helluva ride, playing fast and loose with genre conventions and defying audience expectations in every wild twist and turn. Yet if it were just a ride, at some point, the thrill would wear off. That is not the film Baker has made. The filmmaker behind indie hits like Tangerine and The Florida Project, here making his leap into the upper echelon of modern directors, knows how to balance humor, tragedy, and pure WTF’ism in ways few others would even attempt.
The film follows Ani (Mikey Madison, giving the performance of the year), a Brooklyn sex worker whose contract with a wealthy client sure looks a lot like love. So much so that they get married, a step too far for the client’s Russian oligarch family, who sick their goons on Ani to force an annulment. There are a dozen ways this story could go, but Baker always chooses the most surprising, inventive, and emotionally resonant direction to take it.
On the surface, Anora is about the rotten core at the center of the American dream. The working classes are little more than pawns and playthings for the wealthy. We can thrash and scream and rail against the system, and it is invigorating to watch Ani do just that. But at the end of the day, this ain’t Fantasyland and this ain’t no ride. The system remains in place, benefiting only those who built it, and all we have left is each other.
9. Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop
If you saw Gina Prince-Bythewood’s exhilarating 2022 film The Woman King, you might be passingly familiar with the African kingdom of Dahomey. That picture was more than a little fictionalized, but for westerners coming into this magnificent documentary, it is enough to know that once there was a nation of Africans who had a history, a culture, and a society all their own. As happened all too often, much of that was decimated and stolen by European colonialists, in this case, the French.
Seven thousand pieces of art – the very history of the kingdom itself – were taken to Paris. Diop’s film is about the return of just 26 artifacts to the modern day nation of Benin. Diop gives voice to the citizens who debate the merit of such repatriation efforts. On the pro side, these artifacts represent an important piece of cultural history and they belong to the people of Benin. On the con side, aren’t there more important things the government can be doing to help real people in their everyday lives? On the other con side, why are we celebrating the return of just 26 of 7,000 items?
The tenor of the various debates will be familiar to anyone who has been to a college campus anywhere in the world, and Diop is smart to let the citizens speak for themselves. She then also gives voice to the artifacts in a surreal series of voiceovers that imagine the artwork reflecting on having been stolen more than a century ago and now returning to a nation it no longer recognizes. Diop asks daring questions about what makes a nation – its history, its culture, its people? – and who gets to decide. She then trusts the audience enough to come to its own conclusions. And, as I watch a school-age boy stare through the museum glass at the cultural legacy of his people – one of the film’s many beautiful images – I know my answer.
8. The Piano Lesson, directed by Malcolm Washington
From the history of an entire nation to the legacy of a single family whose personal history is deeply tied to that of the nation, The Piano Lesson invites us to look at where we come from and ask whether that must necessarily dictate where we are going. This is the latest film to come out of producer Denzel Washington’s quest to bring all of August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays to the big screen. At its most basic level, the story portrays the debate between a brother (Boy Willie, played by John David Washington) and a sister (Berniece, played by Danielle Deadwyler) over what to do with a family heirloom: the piano of the title.
To Berniece, the piano is a critical piece of family history to be cherished in tribute to the ancestors immortalized in the carvings that adorn it. To Boy Willie, it represents an opportunity to build a future those ancestors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. Because Wilson is a brilliant mind and possibly the finest playwright of the 20th century, both characters are right. As such, it is up to the audience to wrestle with the moral and philosophical questions posed in the debate.
Director Malcolm Washington does a tremendous job bringing the stageplay to life in a way that insists upon this updated medium. The cinematography, editing, and sound design come together beautifully to craft a haunting, fully lived-in world. The performances are universally excellent, portraying a family that must grapple with the trauma of the past in order to pursue the possibilities of the future. Like Dahomey, the film asks whether we are our pasts or if we are the ways we move on from that past. Though The Piano Lesson offers no easy answers, it seems that asking the question is as good a first step as any.
7. Sing Sing, directed by Greg Kwedar
The prison system exists to dehumanize. If you have committed a crime – or in some cases, even if you haven’t – you are instantly treated as lesser. You are no longer entitled the basic rights each of us is afforded. You are no longer worthy of sympathy or empathy. You are not one of us. You are one of them, and because you are one of them, whatever happens to you is justifiable and deserved. Of course, you and I both know that’s all bull shit.
Enter the Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater program at Sing Sing, the maximum security prison that gives this film its title and serves as the setting for a stirring tribute to the healing power of art and the humanity that exists in all of us. Kwedar casts many of the formerly incarcerated men who participated in the program to play versions of themselves, including Clarence Maclin, who is an absolute revelation. Colman Domingo stars as Divine G, whose passion for the program provides his only solace as he fights to end his incarceration for a crime he did not commit.
Light on plot but heavy on mood and atmosphere, this is mostly a hangout movie, which is where its power lies. We get to know these men, we get to understand them, and eventually, we get to a place where we can see through the inhumanity of the system that has trapped them. For the duration of their performance, they are free, and in that freedom, there is hope for a new way to view the world.
6. A Different Man, directed by Aaron Schimberg
He is a lucky person who embraces himself fully. We live in a world that often seems built solely to judge us – how we look, what we do, who we are – and it is only natural that we internalize that judgment. We end up seeing ourselves how the world sees us, and that perception becomes a box in which we are trapped. We meet the world’s expectations of us, wrongly believing those expectations are limitations. At a certain point, living this way must curdle the soul.
Edward (Sebastian Stan), the main character of A Different Man, has lived this way too long, believing that his facial deformity is the cause of whatever misery he experiences. If he could just look like someone else, it would all change. Then, miraculously, he gets his wish, and things really do change. So, why doesn’t he feel any better? Schimberg and Stan take us fully into the world of a man who has spent his whole life dreaming of something else, only to wake up and find himself caught in a nightmare.
The director weaves deftly from horror to comedy to psychological thriller and back again, leaving the audience unsettled and adrift, precisely the experience of the Edward character. He watches his life disintegrate, and not only is he powerless to stop it, but he cannot stop himself from throwing fuel on the flames. The film’s final line – “You haven’t changed a bit” – is one last emotional gut punch, a blackly comic twist of the knife. No matter how far we run, we are stuck with ourselves, and if we can’t be happy with that person, it is one long, dark road ahead indeed.
5. A Real Pain, directed by Jesse Eisenberg
A Real Pain is a buddy road trip comedy in the direct lineage of the Hope-Crosby Road to … films of the 1940s. It is also a richly textured Holocaust drama. These two things should not work together, but they do for two reasons: 1) Eisenberg’s incredibly sensitive and perceptive script, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance; and 2) the performances of a game, committed cast largely doing the finest work of their respective careers.
Eisenberg has spoken at length about his desire to explore the difference between our very personal, modern pain and the pain of grander tragedies like the Holocaust. Is all pain valid or should we just be grateful things aren’t much worse? I won’t speak for the writer-director, but what I took from the film is that not only is all pain valid, but at least as it regards these characters, one is inextricable from the other. The trauma of one of the 20th century’s worst atrocities will infect subsequent generations, imbuing each with its own specific horrors. The way Eisenberg explores these deeper themes through an Odd Couple-esque tale of two cousins is simply masterful.
Kieran Culkin has gotten the lion’s share of plaudits for his performance as the more outgoing of the two cousins, and he is likely to win a well deserved Oscar, category fraud aside. But, it should not go unremarked upon that this is a career-best performance by Eisenberg, taking a familiar character type to places that type has rarely if ever been. The entire ensemble is similarly excellent, with standout performances from Will Sharpe as a well meaning but overmatched tour guide and Jennifer Grey as a kind but weary soul along for the ride.
The dinner table scene, when Eisenberg reveals to the rest of the tour group his true feelings about his life, his cousin, and their shared past, is a masterclass in bringing all of the film’s themes together. “I know that my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it,” he says. Culkin’s character takes the polar opposite of that approach, and somewhere between the two extremes, there exists a world where people are free to share their pain with each other. And in this world, it is no longer a burden but a load we all carry together.
4. Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis
It is rare to be dazzled by a film. Films quite frequently are impressive, inspiring, or thought-provoking, but few are truly dazzling in the Powell-Pressburger sense of the word. Flow is dazzling, and not strictly because it is perhaps the most beautifully animated film I have ever seen, though that is no small part of it. Zilbalodis draws you into his world so fully that you forget the world could look like anything else. It is an immersive experience that strikes at the core of what it is to be alive and sharing this pale blue rock with all the other living beings.
The technical wizardry on display here is jaw-dropping, and there are sequences where I could hardly conceive of how Zilbalodis and Co. executed them. This is the director’s first film working with a budget and a team, his previous efforts having been largely solo affairs. He makes complete use of the added resources, establishing a wholly unique style that is at once hyper-detailed and yet painterly and impressionistic. There is never a moment when those two approaches feel at odds with each other, rather they are complementary. You cannot imagine it another way.
If this were solely a marvel of computer animation and expert craftsmanship, that would be one thing. But, it is also a deeply felt tale of compassion, cooperation, and determination that speaks volumes without a single word ever being uttered. The story concerns a cat at the end of the world, caught in a cycle of destruction and rebirth that feels true enough to the natural way of things but runs contrary to the innate desire of all living things to survive and thrive. It is a struggle we cannot win, only endure, but Flow is a testament to the fact that we do not have to endure alone.
3. All We Imagine As Light, directed by Payal Kapadia
Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) are three women at very different stages of their lives who come together to find a way to move forward. Kapadia’s film is a slow cinema masterpiece, attuned to the rhythms of life in a big city, in this case Mumbai. In ways both big and small, these women are confined by these rhythms, crushed by the grinding monotony.
Prabha is a nurse whose husband lives in Germany and seems to be living a life without her, leaving her stuck in the liminal state of being married but alone. Anu’s lover is Muslim, which her Hindu family would not approve of, so they must conduct their affair in secret. Parvaty’s husband has died, leaving her with no legal claim to her home, which has been targeted for demolition by developers. Each woman is experiencing a private oppression magnified by the cacophony of the city around them. “They think if they build their skyscrapers tall enough, they can replace god,” Parvaty tells Prabha.
Kapadia takes her time, building the claustrophobia to almost unbearable levels, then finally, in the third act, we escape. Parvaty chooses (is forced) to move back to her familial village by the beach, and Prabha and Anu help with the transition. Here, they are finally free. Their world expands. Anu meets with her lover in the open. Prabha stares out at the ocean, the vastness of which suggests endless possibilities, as opposed to the city and all its walls. For the first time, these women can imagine another life.
Such respite is only temporary, their lives on pause, not stopped. But, Kapadia does not take us back to the city again. Instead, she closes the film at a small beachside cafe at night in the most gorgeous final shot of any film in recent memory. In this place, her characters find acceptance. They find peace. They smile. They dance. They live.
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof
If The Seed of the Sacred Fig were merely an average movie, its creation still would qualify as a grand achievement. That it is one of the finest films of the year – a timely, harrowing cri de coeur on the dangers of fascism in all its forms – is an outright miracle. Shot in secret as Rasoulof is banned from filmmaking in Iran, then smuggled to Germany to be completed by editor Andrew Bird (Fatih Akin’s preferred cutter), it is difficult and ultimately unnecessary to separate the story of the film from the story of the film’s existence.
Rasoulof imbues his story with the view that “the personal is political,” that common rallying cry of second-wave feminism, subsequently adopted by many a radical protest movement. To live under a regime as hostile as that of the one in Iran is to be oppressed in every facet of your life, both in public and in private. Here, the filmmaker takes that truth and literalizes it.
We follow a regime functionary, Iman (Misagh Zare), who is “just following orders” as the government cracks down on the very real feminist protests that took place in Iran in 2022 and 2023. In this case, following orders means sentencing people to death for the crime of speaking out against the oppressors. In one of the film’s boldest masterstrokes, Rasoulof and Bird intersperse true-life cell phone footage from the demonstrations throughout the film.
At home, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), Iman’s wife, revels in her husband’s newfound power and the status it grants their family, all the while taking in state-run media and the narratives they spin. Their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), however, are not so blind that they cannot see what is happening directly in front of them. “They made a legend out of a massacre,” as James Baldwin once remarked.
Every frame of this film is suffused with the paranoid energy of a 1970s political thriller, and the story’s many twists and turns are absolutely riveting, meaning the nearly three-hour runtime flies by. Rasoulof turns the limitations of filming in secret to his advantage, making each of the film’s few locations feel like a prison, each room a cell. In a society where free expression is punishable by death, each citizen lives in a jail of his own mind.
As of this writing, Rasoulof is in exile from his home country. The same is true of many of his cast and crew. Golestani, herself a protestor during the Mahsa Amini demonstrations, and Zare were unable to make it out of Iran and surely face penalties for their participation in this project. If Rasoulof returns home, an eight-year prison sentence and a public flogging await him. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an act of unfathomable courage. It is one of the most important films of the decade. It is also one of the best.
1. Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross
Where to begin? Nickel Boys is a profoundly moving cinematic experience unmatched by just about any in recent memory. Told in the first-person point of view, Ross guides us through the trials and tragedies inherent to growing up Black in America. If we have not lived it, we can never truly know all it entails, but Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray bring us as close to understanding as we could ever get.
Having committed no crime, high schooler Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Broadly speaking, that place is the American South, and that time is the early 1960s. He is sent to a segregated “reform school” that is little more than a glorified prison. He befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the two boys join together to survive the cruelties and indignities of their circumstances. They are beaten, abused, and exploited. Their friends are murdered. They have little hope and no recourse. All they have is each other.
Nickel Boys is not the first movie to depict the harshness of the Jim Crow South, and it will not be the last. It is, however, the most formally daring, consistently inventive, and engagingly urgent of its type. It is unlike anything I have ever seen, with impeccable crafts, a stellar cast, and a first-time fiction feature director with a true vision. (Ross previously directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.) It is unequivocally brilliant, and yet I find myself conflicted in my love for it.
On a larger cultural level, it is worth interrogating the widespread acclaim for films that wallow in the struggle of Black Americans. There seems to be an innate pull in certain critical and artistic communities to stories of Black pain, Black suffering, and Black trauma. Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction last year was an interesting, if not wholly successful, investigation of this cultural obsession. I, myself, named 12 Years a Slave the best film of the 2010s for its brutally honest depiction of slavery in the US. Few films ever have more graphically depicted the pain, suffering, and trauma of Black people in America.
There are Black critics and thinkers I respect who have called out this trope and identified the problems inherent in it. I appreciate these critiques and fundamentally agree with them. It is worth noting that Ross specifically avoids showing violence against Black bodies on screen in an attempt to avoid falling into this exact trap. It is the right call, and the film is better for it.
Ultimately, I can only speak for what speaks to me. I would like for there to be films of all types representing all cultures. A similar discussion was had around Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon last year and its depictions of Indigenous suffering and death. The answer now, as it was then, is that we need more films by and about Indigenous people and more films by and about Black people. No culture is served when it is represented by just one narrow type of movie. But, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater either.
We need these films. They tell us who we are, where we come from, and what we should strive never to be again. It is incumbent upon artists to hit us over the head with this message, with the bluntness of a baseball bat if necessary. Because we live in a country founded on brutality and hate that would seek to erase its history of brutality and hatred. Because we live in a country where a not insignificant percentage of people believe the Holocaust never happened, that slavery wasn’t that bad, and that immigrants are responsible for all of our ills.
Responsible artists must hold up a mirror to society and reflect back at us the truth of who we are. Right now, who we are is a nation of people dangerously swerving toward fascism, openly embracing counter-factual narratives of our own origin, and steadfastly refusing to change course. Nickel Boys cannot fix the nation – no film can – but it reminds us where we have failed and where we must do better. And, crucially, it shows us the consequences of remaining on this course.
This is all heady stuff for a movie, but Ross has crafted a work of art that can bear the weight of this kind of discourse. It practically demands it as a function of its storytelling. There is not a more beautifully made film this year. There is not a more thoughtfully told story this year. These are qualities that make Nickel Boys a great film. However, it is a masterpiece because of the uncomfortable questions it forces us to ask and the terrifying answers it suggests we will find.
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